Startling! Michael Brown Was Set Up: It's All in the Numbers

WP: William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/

Arkin introduces his WP column as a "jog," part blog and part investigative journalism. This jog is interesting:


Michael Brown Was Set Up: It's All in the Numbers

It's so easy to blame Michael Brown, but he got his marching orders from someone else. Weapons of mass destruction, not waves of mass destruction, are the president's priorities. Want to get on the White House Varsity team. Get with the program.

The same obsession that led the Bush administration to see weapons of mass destruction and terrorism in every tea leaf and go to war in Iraq now guides the entire federal government disaster response effort.

How do I prove the point? I've got the goods....

(Arkin presents a list of possible national emergencies and Bush administration directives re. each. The priority placed on natural disasters is very low.)

***

Final Score:

Hurricanes and Natural Disasters: 45
Terrorism and WMD: 1,287

FEMA, often a troubled, and almost always a neglected agency, was folded into the Department of Homeland Security where the name of the game is and was terrorism and WMD. State and local communities were themselves pressured to focus their own meager efforts on counter-terrorism and WMD to "be relevant" (and get the federal dollars). Thank God, Katrina has broken this dysfunctional auto-pilot.

Surely as government bureaucrats write more documents and as commissions get underway in Washington, someone must recognize the corrosive effect of focusing on terrorism and WMD to the exclusion of more plausible, frequent, and frankly, more realistic scenarios. FEMA needs to be restored as an independent agency, and it needs to be focused completely on disaster relief, shedding its "homeland security" (read counter-terrorism) and continuity of government missions (more about that coming up). What is more, the entire black hole of DHS needs to search its soul and balance its efforts between real day-to-day American needs and the competing big-bang mania.