"Ms. Townsend, a former federal prosecutor, has undertaken a number of sensitive and high-profile tasks for Mr. Bush, most recently overseeing the reorganization of the nation's intelligence services after the intelligence failures about Iraq's weapons capabilities."
The NYT article does not begin to delve into the true ramifications of Ms. Townsend's past achievements on behalf of Bush. See the billmon blog sheet appended after the NYT article. Just like with the 9/11 inquiry, Bush will resist any independent inquiry to the bitter end. As with 9/11, it will take a strong public effort by a coalition of Katrina families to build up insurmountable pressure to the point Bush caves in and agrees to an independent review of the Katrina Federal response. No Katrina families effort; no independent review. David Bier http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/nationalspecial/20cong.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1127227043-yLWMI1H4lQjy2s+NonTm2Q September 20, 2005 Bush Aide Will Lead Hurricane Inquiry By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and CARL HULSE WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - President Bush has named Frances Fragos Townsend, his domestic security adviser, to lead an internal White House inquiry into the administration's performance in handling Hurricane Katrina, Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman, said Monday. Mr. McClellan said Ms. Townsend's job would be "to follow through on the president's commitment to determine what went wrong, what went right and lessons learned." Ms. Townsend, a former federal prosecutor, has undertaken a number of sensitive and high-profile tasks for Mr. Bush, most recently overseeing the reorganization of the nation's intelligence services after the intelligence failures about Iraq's weapons capabilities. A Republican who served in the Clinton administration's Justice Department before holding a number of jobs under Mr. Bush, Ms. Townsend has a reputation for being tough and independent. But her appointment is unlikely to mute calls from Democrats in Congress for a fully independent investigation. Mr. McClellan said the White House had instructed each cabinet secretary to designate a senior official to work with Ms. Townsend. He said she would convene a meeting of the cabinet secretaries within a few days to discuss the inquiry. On Capitol Hill, Congressional Republicans continued their efforts Monday to persuade Democrats to take part in a special Congressional inquiry into government failures in the response to the hurricane. Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, made a new proposal to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, that would broaden the scope of the inquiry to include the recovery effort. "In these challenging times our country expects its leaders to work together, and not to engage in petty bickering," Mr. Frist said in a letter to his counterpart. Democrats said Mr. Frist's proposal was unsatisfactory. Mr. Reid, along with Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, say that an outside commission is needed to conduct an inquiry. Mr. Bush has derided what he calls the "blame game" and the White House has resisted pressure for a full-scale independent inquiry of the sort conducted into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he has acknowledged shortcomings in the government's response and pledged to seek out all the facts. By moving quickly to get his own inquiry under way, he is addressing the nation's ability to handle a major disaster while also attempting to head off demands by Democrats for an investigation outside of the administration's control. The White House confirmed Ms. Townsend's appointment on a day when the two parties sparred over the budget implications of the storm. Under intense pressure from conservatives to hold the line on spending as the government confronts the bill for Hurricane Katrina, the White House resisted calls to delay the new prescription drug benefit for the elderly and suggested that Congress instead look for savings in a wide range of other domestic programs identified by President Bush. Mr. McClellan appeared to rule out a proposal floated by Republicans on Capitol Hill to put off for one year the start of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, a delay that could save the government $40 billion. Asked at a briefing whether Mr. Bush would consider the delay, Mr. McClellan said it was "important to move forward on the prescription drug benefit, and we are." Despite protests from some Republican leaders who say there is little room to squeeze domestic programs, the White House urged Congress to revisit scores of proposed cuts contained in Mr. Bush's budget for the coming fiscal year, most of which have been ignored by the House and Senate. The intramural debate among Republicans about how far to go in offsetting the costs of storm-related spending, which by some estimates could reach $200 billion or more, was the latest evidence of how the hurricane has upended politics. After making an open-ended pledge last week to do what is necessary to rebuild New Orleans and assist the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the storm, Mr. Bush has had to scramble to reassure conservatives that he has not abandoned his commitment to limited government and fiscal prudence. House Republican leaders are scheduled to meet Tuesday with rank-and-file conservatives to consider possible spending cuts, and on Monday some lawmakers kept the pressure on for delaying the new Medicare drug program. Some conservatives have opposed the drug benefit from the beginning and have seized on the hurricane as an opportunity to delay it. "I never believed that it was responsible to create this new entitlement, but it's even more irresponsible now, given that Hurricane Katrina has created new spending priorities for the federal government," Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said. Lawmakers expect the first major test over the push for spending cuts to occur when they receive the next emergency spending request for the hurricane. John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, said he expected that Congress would take a deliberate approach to that request , in contrast to the way the first $62 billion in hurricane aid was sped to approval. Mr. Bush's response to the storm came under withering attack Monday from the Democratic ticket he defeated last November - Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina. In a speech at Brown University, Mr. Kerry referred to the White House as the "Katrina administration." Asserting that the storm "stripped away any image of competence and exposed to all the true heart and nature of this administration," he said, "The truth is that for four and a half years, real life choices have been replaced by ideological agenda, substance replaced by spin, governance second place always to politics." Republican officials accused Democrats of trying to take political advantage of a tragedy. David Johnston contributed reporting for this article http://billmon.org/archives/002174.html September 20, 2005 Safe Hands According to the New Pravda, Guitar George has asked his top homeland security advisor to investigate the administration's inept handling of a major crisis in . . . homeland security: President Bush has named Frances Fragos Townsend, his domestic security adviser, to lead an internal White House inquiry into the administration's performance in handling Hurricane Katrina, Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman, said Monday. Of course! Makes perfect sense. Why complicate things by dragging in some outside bureaucratic flunky to run your token investigation, when you've got one sitting right at your elbow? A flunky with prior cover up experience, no less: Ms. Townsend, a former federal prosecutor, has undertaken a number of sensitive and high-profile tasks for Mr. Bush, most recently overseeing the reorganization of the nation's intelligence services after the intelligence failures about Iraq's weapons capabilities. (Note how smoothly the boys in the New Pravda's steno pool handle the euphemisms of Bushspeak: "reorganization" for "purge," and "intelligence failures" for "lies." I wish my dog was that well trained.) We've met Ms. Townsend before -- she's the brainless, heartless bitch who tried to turn the London bombings into a selling point for Shrub's war in Iraq, by arguing that: the war in Iraq attracts terrorists "where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London." Thus consigning the dead and maimed civilians of Iraq to the limbo land of political expediency -- the human equivalent of road kill. But the more relevant atrocity is Ms. Townsend's involvement in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, in which she played the role of bureaucratic troubleshooter sent to speed up the production line: The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense "pressure" from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to "pull the intelligence out" of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib . . . Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, described "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to get information from detainees, including a visit to the prison last fall by an aide to Rice that was "purely on detainee operations and reporting" . . . Rice staffer Fran Townsend said Thursday that she spent about two hours at Abu Ghraib last November and recalls that Jordan was her guide. Naturally, none of this makes it into the New Pravda story ("What do you think we are, journalists?") although Townsend's alleged reputation for being "tough and independent" does -- albeit without a shred of sourcing or any substantive evidence of her tough independence, other than a brief mention of the fact that she's a Republican lawyer who worked in the Clinton Justice Department. (I know a few Clinton partisans who would say the same about Janet Reno.) ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? 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