The President today announced that he will conduct an inquiry into his administration's response to last week's Gulf coast disasters.
"I'm going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong," he said in reply to criticism that the authorities were too slow to respond.
Since Mr. Bush's own inadequate grasp of the situation and failure to take appropriate action is part of what any such inquiry must address, the President's ownership of this project can only be regarded as improper. An independent inquiry is required. Presumably, some variant on an independent panel of inquiry is what the President is describing here -- along the lines of the several 9/11 panels the President long resisted and whose ultimate performance his administration seriously impaired by narrowing the inquiries' charges to exclude any actors and agencies the administration would find it inconvenient to have criticized.
The White House, for instance.
If such inquiries are to be in any way meaningful, and not simply political cover, they must be truly independent and cannot be tailored to avoid questions various parties find it embarassing or painful to have asked. The scope of these inquiries also must go beyond mere finger-pointing between and among local, state and federal agencies and officials. The restructuring of FEMA by submerging it into the Department of Homeland Security must be part of these inquiries, as must the administration's funding and personnel priorities. We have been assured for four years now that the administration's foreign policy choices are not being made at the expense of domestic -- homeland -- security. That assertion must be tested in these inquiries, and must be tested honestly. I do not know what the ultimate conclusion of such a line of questioning would be. At this point, no one does, and anyone who insists that he does is both a fool and a knave.
If the President wants to take meaningful action now, he should fire both Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff and replace them with experienced, capable individuals, without the delays an empty inquiry would afford. This may not be the administration's style, but that style plainly needs to be changed.
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