Ex-FEMA Head Slams White House

Michael Brown Blames Bush Administration For Katrina Response

(CBS/AP) 
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he did not know that New Orleans' levees were breached until Aug. 30. Bush at the time said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

But Brown had another story. He specifically hammered away at Chertoff, and described a relationship so dysfunctional the two men weren't even talking directly as New Orleans' levees were crumbling, Attkisson reports.

Chertoff wouldn't talk to CBS News today when asked. His office says he had a very busy day and would rather focus on lessons learned than on responding to things Brown said. He testifies next week.

At an occasionally contentious White House briefing Friday, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said there were conflicting reports about the levees in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

"We knew of the flooding that was going on," McClellan said. "That's why our top priority was focused on saving lives. ... The cause of the flooding was secondary to that top priority and that's the way it should be."

After three hours of testimony, Brown was handed a subpoena ordering him to reappear in front of a House panel investigating the storm response. Brown is expected to be questioned by House investigators this weekend — days before the panel is expected to release its findings on the storm.

Some senators suggested Brown look inward before pointing the finger elsewhere.

"You're not prepared to put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies," said Norm Coleman, R-Minn. "Perhaps you may get a more sympathetic hearing if you had a willingness to confess your own sins in this."

Brown responded: "That's very easy for you to say sitting behind that dais and not being there in the middle of that disaster watching that human suffering and watching those people dying and trying to deal with those structural dysfunctionalities, even within the federal government."

The disjointed federal response, Brown said, was in part the result of FEMA being swallowed in 2003 by the newly created Homeland Security Department, which he said was focused on fighting terrorism.

Back in New Orleans, CBS News correspondent Byron Pitts spoke with residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, which flooded severely after Hurricane Katrina, and has barely seen improvement since. Oliver Thomas couldn't hold back tears while expressing his frustrations at the slow — or absent — government response.

"I said I wasn't going to cry anymore because I knew no one's going to help us, but I still hope for it," he said. "We're American citizens. We pay taxes. Our family members died in the war."

Natural disasters "had become the stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security," he said. Had there been a report that "a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that," he added.

Some senators attempted to trace the failures back to the White House.

"You quite appropriately and admirably wanted to get the word to the president as quickly as you could," said Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., asking about Brown's conversation with Hagin on the evening of Aug. 29. "Did you tell Mr. Hagin in that phone call that New Orleans was flooding?"

Brown answered: "I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true."

Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, suggested Brown may have delayed the federal response by cutting Homeland Security out of the loop about the levee failures and going straight to the White House.

"I think I now understand why Secretary Chertoff says he didn't know," Bennett said. "The reason he didn't know is because you didn't think it important to tell him."

Brown said he communicated directly with the White House instead of Homeland Security because FEMA's parent agency "just bogged things down."