by Russ Baker
BECAUSE OF THEIR contempt for government, Bush and Cheney ended up flubbing the most essential function of government from a conservative standpoint: security and defense.
The tendentious justification for the invasion of Iraq was only one obvious example. In some ways, an even more striking one was the fiasco of the response to Hurricane Katrina.
The botched handling of Katrina cut deep; and the reason for it was the same as for the other derelictions and misdeeds. Government was to be a honeypot for cronies and supporters, and a grindstone for ideological axes. It did not exist to solve problems—and therefore under Bush it ended up creating more of them.
Partners in Disaster
In late August 2005, what would become one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history—and certainly the most costly—was bearing down on the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans. The warnings from the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center grew increasingly ominous. In charge of preparing a response to this mounting threat was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was run by a little-known figure named Michael D. Brown.
As a forewarned nation braced for the worst, and Gulf Coast residents frantically prepared to weather the storm, George Bush and his top aides showed little concern. The president opted not to cut his vacation short. He had finished the photo ops of himself clearing brush in Crawford, Texas, and by then was in California. A day after the hurricane made its second landfall, the news carried another photo op, of the president strumming a guitar. Vice president Dick Cheney had emerged from his often-bunkered lifestyle to enjoy some fly-fishing in Wyoming. As for the country’s disaster-management agency, the only FEMA official actually in New Orleans— Marty J. Bahamonde—was there by accident. He had been visiting on business and had tried to leave but could not because of the clogged roads.
FEMA chief Michael Brown made it to Baton Rouge, a city seventy-five miles from New Orleans, but he seemed out of reach. As Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf states and wiped out one of America’s signature cities, stories of incompetence and disorganization began trickling out. FEMA staff couldn’t find Brown. Brown wasn’t aware of developments familiar to anyone with a television. By the time he was, he couldn’t get through to the governor of Louisiana; he couldn’t get the president of the United States to pay attention.
Worst of all, there was no evidence of advance planning for a disaster of this magnitude, even though such planning was Brown’s primary job. At the peak of the crisis, he was seen working on an organizational chart. As a critical levee collapsed and one of the country’s largest port cities started to slip beneath the water, Bahamonde fired off a series of increasingly desperate e-mails. On August 31, he e-mailed Brown directly: “I know you know, the situation is past critical . . . Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water.” The response came, several hours later. “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner,” it said.41 Four days after the hurricane hit, Bush arrived to survey the damage and famously proclaimed, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”
But two weeks into the disaster, with the Bush administration facing its worst PR nightmare, Brown was finally replaced as on-site manager by an experienced outsider.
When it was over, the Gulf Coast was devastated, and New Orleans in particular. The city’s protective levee system was swamped; 80 percent of the city—along with many of its neighboring areas—was underwater for weeks. Destruction stretched from Louisiana through Mississippi into Alabama. The images of frightened families clinging to rooftops awaiting rescue, of elderly people who died strapped to their beds in retirement homes, of gun-toting vigilantes protecting wealthy areas against looters—these were the legacy of Brownie’s heckuva job.
Despite the fact that the warnings had been more than ample, with accurate forecasts and lots of advance notice from the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, more than 1,800 people died, and damage was estimated to exceed $81 billion. The agency that is charged to act, didn’t. Brown later blamed state and local officials for the slow response, but it was clear to the nation that he and his agency had fallen down on the job.
THE STATE OF FEMA under George W. Bush stood in stark contrast to its condition under Bill Clinton. The latter had inherited an agency riddled with patronage. For example, Bush Sr. had appointed as director Wallace Stickney, a former neighbor of John Sununu, his chief of staff.42 Stickney, who lacked crisis management experience, presided over FEMA’s inept response to Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew during the first and last years of the elder Bush’s term. Many observers believe the administration’s handling of these events contributed to Poppy’s loss to Clinton in 1992.
Clinton, by contrast, appointed a seasoned pro to head the agency— James Lee Witt, who had been in charge of disaster management in Arkansas. Clinton even gave the FEMA director a seat in his cabinet. Morale soared, and a bipartisan group of senators actually sought to keep Witt on indefinitely, drafting legislation to make the FEMA directorship a longer-term, fixed position. Even George W. Bush praised Witt—and then canned him.
In 2001, W. appointed his longtime enforcer Joe Allbaugh. Allbaugh had almost no relevant experience or qualifications, beyond serving as the governor’s liaison to emergency agencies during minor crises in Texas. At FEMA, he would have more than eight thousand employees and a four-billion-dollar budget. Allbaugh was confirmed by the Senate after minimal scrutiny in a 91–0 vote. He became head of FEMA in February 2001.
A true Bush acolyte, Allbaugh took a harshly partisan approach. Anyone Witt had liked, Allbaugh saw as a potential problem. One holdover senior staffer made the mistake of complimenting Allbaugh on his fine performance on Meet the Press the previous weekend. “Why would you care?” Allbaugh snapped. “Joe Allbaugh didn’t trust many people,” Trey Reid, a former senior FEMA official, told me in 2005. “He was very insular, and had a tight circle.”43
Allbaugh soon embarked on a Nixonian purge and a series of internal investigations into everything undertaken by the Witt administration. Allbaugh’s lengthiest inquiry was into a headdress that used to hang on Witt’s wall, a token of appreciation from a Native American tribe in recognition of his efforts following the Oklahoma City bombing. Someone said it might contain feathers from the protected bald eagle—a federal offense—but the probe, which even involved the FBI, fizzled when they turned out to be dyed chicken feathers.
Abandoning a tradition of placing civil-service professionals in vital posts, Allbaugh quickly staffed the agency with loyalists, many of them political operatives with no professional experience in emergency disaster management.
Possessing little experience with large-scale disasters, Allbaugh was happy to embrace the administration’s view of FEMA as a bloated entitlement program in need of drastic cutbacks. “His position was that the states ought to take a bigger role,” said Reid. And that’s where the problems in New Orleans partially began. Flood mitigation, a high priority under Witt, received short shrift under Allbaugh. The chief of mitigation, Anthony Lowe, was replaced with a veteran of an insurance industry determined to minimize its own liability to homeowners.44
At FEMA, as throughout the administration, the foxes had taken over the hen house and were partying up. Out the door, one by one, went the experienced disaster-relief managers, and in came the political opportunists and the industry lobbyists. “Many of their skilled management team left,” said Steve Kanstoroom, an independent fraud detection expert. “You had a train running down the tracks with nobody driving it.”45
Cashing In
As Governor Bush’s chief of staff and campaign manager, Allbaugh had pushed the antigovernment rhetoric. Yet the moment he left government, he began finding ways for it to spend more, not less, taxpayer money. Following his departure from FEMA, he quickly formed the lobbying firm Allbaugh Company with his wife, Diane, an attorney, to cash in on his years in government. Newsweek said Joe Al
lbaugh has “the hide of a rhino” when it comes to criticism of conflicts of interest, and it showed.
When the Allbaughs first moved to Texas, Diane had signed on as a lobbyist with a number of large corporate clients with pressing business before the state. That was while her husband held a highly visible position as the governor’s top aide. When the newspapers reported the story, Governor Bush’s office hastened to announce new rules, and Diane declared an end to her Texas lobbying career. However, she was soon ensconced in a “non-lobbying” position with a law firm representing some of the same companies. In Washington, she jumped into the K Street bazaar, becoming “of counsel” to Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, which Fortune magazine described at the time as the country’s most powerful lobbying firm.46 The name partner Haley Barbour served as Republican National Committee chairman from 1993 to 1997, the period in which the GOP captured both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954.47 He was truly wired, and his decision to hire Mrs. Allbaugh was a shrewd one.
While Joe Allbaugh was still at FEMA and serving on Cheney’s secretive energy task force, his wife was being paid as a “consul tant” by Reliant Energy, Entergy, and Texas Utilities Co. The connection couldn’t have hurt Bar-bour as he pushed the Cheney task force to recommend that the new administration renege on its campaign promise to limit the carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants—the ones that contribute heavily to climate change. Bush, citing the task force findings, complied.
Bad news was good news where Joe Allbaugh was concerned. Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton, became one of Allbaugh’s biggest lobbying clients. Its then-subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root would get at least sixty-one million dollars’ worth of Katrina business from the federal government.48
Allbaugh’s post-FEMA ventures were not restricted to the domestic disaster business. His departure from government and entrance into defense contracting took place precisely as the invasion of Iraq unfolded. September 11 had not only offered a pretext for invading Iraq; it also set in motion a boom for military contractors, which had been concerned about the diminishing demand for weaponry in a post-Communist era. At the same time it justified the creation of a vast new domestic security industry, another lucrative component of the military-industrial complex. Both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security now had endless programs to fund in the name of a new kind of war—carried out abroad and at home, against an invisible enemy, and with no expiration date. The annual corporate reports of government contractors practically gushed over the new opportunities. “I think our shareholders understand why we’re in this business,” said Halliburton chief executive David J. Lesar.49
With Barbour Griffith and numerous ex-officials of the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, Allbaugh formed a company called New Bridge Strategies, which moved to secure contracts in Iraq the moment hostilities commenced. He also formed Blackwell Fairbanks, a joint venture with Andrew Lundquist, with whom he had served on Cheney’s energy task force. (The name of the company is based on the hometowns of the two principals.) Clients in 2004 included the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin; Blackwell Fairbanks would later report that it had lobbied the offices of both the president and the vice president. Filings for the Allbaugh Company show among its clients Oshkosh Truck, the leading supplier of vehicles to the Pentagon.
A COG in the Big Wheel
Why did Joe Allbaugh even want to run FEMA? In the first days of the Clinton-Bush transition, amid speculation about who might get what post, Allbaugh’s name was bandied about in connection with a few positions, among them White House chief of staff. No one mentioned FEMA, but then another factor came into play: Allbaugh’s close relationship with Dick Cheney, who saw FEMA’s principal role less as helping Americans during an emergency than as maintaining White House control during one.
Few people realize that Joe Allbaugh even played a role in Dick Cheney’s advance to the vice presidency. In 2000, while Allbaugh was W.’s presidential campaign manager, Cheney was brought in to help research the backgrounds of prospective running mates. When Cheney concluded that he himself was the ideal choice,50 the job of vetting Cheney’s qualifications went to Allbaugh. He quickly signed off on the former congressman and defense secretary, which cleared Cheney’s path to the White House. To be sure, given Cheney’s prior security clearances, Allbaugh’s scrutiny was probably less than thorough. In any case, the Allbaughs and Cheneys quickly felt at home with each other—literally so. When the Cheneys moved into the vice presidential residence in 2001, the Allbaughs bought Cheney’s townhouse in McLean, Virginia, for $690,000. And Cheney put Allbaugh onto his secretive energy task force.
FEMA had been created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter through an executive order; before that, emergency and disaster services were scattered among a host of agencies. From the beginning, FEMA was seen as a vehicle of White House command and control, in times of war more than natural disasters. Samuel Huntington, who drafted the presidential memorandum creating the agency, summed up the basic concept in a book, The Crisis of Democracy. “A government which lacks authority,” he wrote, “will have little ability, short of a cataclysmic crisis, to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary to deal with foreign policy problems and defense.”51 Carter’s FEMA director, John Macy, had emphasized that preparation for natural disasters would take a backseat to defense against nuclear, biological, and terror threats.52 It was principally under Bill Clinton that FEMA focused on disaster relief.
The Bush-Cheney view of FEMA was an almost pure expression of their underlying philosophy. For all their talk of limited government, Bush-Cheney did everything they could to expand the power and reach of the presidency. Often, this took the form of curtailing basic rights long considered the people’s last line of defense against tyranny. The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the case of detainees, the abrogation of the Geneva Conventions on the rights of combatants, the illegal wiretapping, all supposedly instituted in response to 9/11, had in fact been discussed long before that attack. Natural disasters were a minor concern. They were thinking mainly about a vehicle for White House command and control in case of enemy attack, without the constitutional restraints that they considered outmoded and counterproductive.
When the planes hit on 9/11, FEMA was nominally in charge. But off the national radar, that event also represented the first-ever implementation of a concept known as “continuity of government,” or COG. According to a Washington Post report, President Bush “dispatched a shadow government of about one hundred senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack.”53 The Post story, which expanded on material published in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer months earlier, asserted that the plan was “deployed ‘on the fly’ in the first hours of turmoil on Sept. 11.”54
Actually, the plan went back to Executive Order 12656, issued by President Reagan in 1988, which stipulated that the Constitution could be suspended for any emergency “that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.”55 In his book Rumsfeld, journalist Andrew Cockburn quotes a former Pentagon official who claims that during the 1990s, Cheney and Rumsfeld formed “a secret government-in-waiting.”56
Most important for the Bush administration, the Cheney-Rumsfeld group had worked for three decades on preparations to control the American population in the event of a disaster. These included the defacto suspension of the Constitution through a number of steps that became more hotly debated as the Bush administration entered its final months. The administration’s response to terror went far beyond the legal boundaries and reflected a sense that Whatever the president wanted to do, he could do. Cheney backed what author Ron Suskind dubbed the “one percent doctrine,” in which if there is even a 1 percent chance of something coming true, it is important to treat it as a certainty.57
A key part of continuity of government was control of se
gments of the population during periods of unrest. In a 1984 “readiness exercise” implemented by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the National Security Council staffer who also coordinated the secret and illegal contra supply effort, FEMA simulated rounding up four hundred thousand “refugees” for detainment. This was cast as preparation for a possible “uncontrolled population movement” from Mexico to the United States. In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $385 million contract to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root for building “temporary immigration detention centers.”58
The implications are obvious. Yet they penetrated only to the furthest edges of popular culture, where paranoia becomes entertainment. In The X-Files movie of 1998, Agent Fox Mulder is warned of FEMA’s ability to “suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency.” According to a Washington Post article written just after the movie’s release, officials at FEMA were not amused by what they claimed was an inaccurate portrayal of their mandate. “The history of this thing is serious,” said FEMA spokesman Morrie Goodman. “We’ve tightened security at all our facilities because of this.”59
