BenT handed me several printouts today. The first was an estimate by a government agency called DMORT, a mortuary group within this nations bureaucracy, who has been told to expect 40,000 bodies to come out of this disaster. I'm hoping that's a "prepare-for-the-worst" senario, and not the actual figure.

The remaining 3 were timelines of the events pre, and after, Katrina. I understand why a lot of folks are enamored of timelines, but the ones I saw ranged from poor to fair... And that's being fair. The first was a mere 4 pages of printout supposedly laying out the events of 6+ days... Grossly inadequate, and obviously compiled to favor a particular view-- an agenda if you will --or to generate a few talking points. The 2nd wasn't any better, though it did have an extra page.

The 3rd was the most impressive; A whopping 28 pages of printout! This was the most "thorough" of the three, but again a failure, because it relied almost solely on reports from the Times-Picayune, New Orleans answer to daily news print.

The disclaimer on the very first page about wanting to set records straight, not point fingers, assign blame, etcetera, et al, while admirable, failed in at least one respect. The author chose to rely solely on the Times-Picayune-- hardly a good journalistic practice --like the world is expected to believe the Times-P is the repository for every bit of information relative to the events prior to and after the Katrina disaster. Still, it was the best of the three... Which isn't saying much. There was still too much left out.

I prefer to wait on a sanctioned investigation, preferably one that doesn't involve politicians, elected officials, or bureaucrats determining and assigning responsibility for America's poorest showing in a national disaster. The 9-11 commission failed because of who politicians chose to conduct the investigation. As a result, the investigation had one agenda-- aside from giving the American people a nice Tom Clancy-ish style book to read when all was said and done --which was to shunt blame from the federal government and government officials on "...either side of the political fence"* -- to include politicians, and blame the attacks on a systemic failure of law enforcement and a lack of information sharing between government agencies. Conveniently, this was not far from the complete truth.

How many of you have heard of Operation Able Danger? Not many, I'm sure, and that's because the MSM isn't carrying it. I'm not going to go into that here, except to say this... The Able Danger FUBAR does shed light on a possible explanation as to why Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives and why he was given a free pass in the end. Note I said "possible" explanation. It is pure speculation and unlikely to ever be substantiated since Mr. Burger defaced and shredded a good many of said documents before making a token return of "some" papers to the National Archive.

But back to Timelines. They can be very informative, but I'd prefer to let that particular room air out before confronting the stink that's surely to come. It would be nice if we didn't have to deal with the Race Pimps at the same time, but... file that away under "Pipe Dreams".

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*From the song "Russians" by Sting, from the CD "Dream of the Blue Turtles"