Bush busted again

Reports out today indicate that the white house was warned in the hours before Katrina hit that the city would be inundated, and that any category 4 storm or higher, such as Katrina, would breach the levees and cause severe flooding.
The internal Department of Homeland Security documents, which were forwarded to the White House at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, hours before the storm hit, contradict statements by President Bush and the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, that no one expected the storm protection system in New Orleans to be breached.

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Mr. Bush said in a television interview on Sept. 1. "Now we're having to deal with it, and will." Liar.

Other documents released Tuesday show that the weekend before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Homeland Security Department officials predicted that its impact would be worse than a doomsday-like emergency planning exercise conducted in Louisiana in July 2004. In that drill, held because of common knowledge that New Orleans was susceptible to hurricane-driven flooding, emergency planners predicted that in a Category 3 storm, one million people would be forced to move away, 17 percent of the nation's oil refining capacity would be knocked out and as many as 60,000 lives might be lost.

"Exercise projection is exceeded by Hurricane Katrina real-life impacts," the Aug. 27 department report said, two days before the storm hit New Orleans. The loss of life in Hurricane Katrina was far less - at least 1,350 deaths have been confirmed so far - but the estimated number of dislocated residents was not far off.

We may have to start as a new daily feature "Bush's Lie of the Day" if this current pace continues.