Dan Among Den

Garrett: ... And FEMA, at least initially, in the minds of some, did not respond enough.

Hume: The words seamless don't exactly spring to mind. But look, they are down there, The Red Cross, for example, is there.

Garrett: Standing by, ready.

Hume: Standing by, ready. Why didn't FEMA send The Red Cross into New Orleans when we had all of the people there on that bridge overpass and elsewhere. Why not?

Garrett: First of all, no jurisdiction. FEMA works with The Red Cross, The Salvation Army and other organizations but it has no control to order them to go one place or the other. Secondarily, The Red Cross was ready. I got off the phone with one of their officials. They had a vanguard of trucks with water, food, hygiene equipment, all sorts of things ready to go where? To the Superdome and convention center. Why weren't they there? The Louisiana Department of Homeland Security told them they could not go.

Hume: This is isn't the Louisiana branch of the federal Homeland Security? This is --

Garrett: The state's own agency devoted to the state's homeland security. They told them you cannot go there. Why? The Red Cross tells me that state agency in Louisiana said, look, we do not want to create a magnet for more people to come to the Superdome or convention center, we want to get them out. So at the same time local officials were screaming where is the food, where is the water? The Red Cross was standing by ready, the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security said you can't go.

The Red Cross backs this up with their FAQ:

• Access to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
• The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Back to the transcript, when discussing why FEMA didn't step in earlier to take control of everything:

Garrett: [The governor] had a choice, as I am told. She could have taken up the offer from FEMA to federalize all of the activities in Louisiana, meaning that FEMA would be in control of everything. Not only law enforcement, but everything else. She declined to give them that authority. So essentially FEMA was trapped between two bureaucracies. One the Department Of Homeland Security where many of its decisions have to be reviewed and in some cases approved, and a recalcitrant state bureaucracy that wasn't going to give them the authority they needed to make things happen, among them, the National Guard.

So, FEMA didn't do enough. Going back to my earlier questions, was FEMA allowed to do more? Apparently not.

Let me know if you run across that quote of Bush offering to only rescue the white folks, ok?

[Note: for those of you unable to discern sarcasm, that last bit was sarcasm. Yes, things were handled poorly, and yes, most residents of New Orleans are black, but if you have not yet learned that correlation does not equal causation, then you shouldn't be out there claiming to make a logical argument. Furthermore, I'm not trying lay 100% of the blame on Lousisiana and New Orleans officials, but after sitting by for a week watching the President be slandered as a murdering racist, I thought I should speak up a bit.]