This article from Wednesday’s New York Times is just incredible to me:
“There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do,” Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.
In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card’s deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.[...]
Yet even Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, objected when administration officials who were not part of the president’s staff said they could not testify about communications with the White House.[...]
According to Mr. Lieberman, Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, cited such a restriction on Monday, as agency lawyers had advised him not to say whether he had spoken to President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or to comment on the substance of any conversations with any other high-level White House officials.
I was starting to back off my earlier criticism that the current administration is unable to admit its mistakes when they finally conceded that things had not gone as well as they could have in Iraq a few weeks ago. This seems like we’re back to the older days of “See no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil” in the Bush-43 White House.
Considering the magnitude of the disaster, and just how badly things went wrong, there should be a moral obligation to drop partisanship, drop the “defense of the powers of the Presidency” crap, and figure out what went wrong and what needs to be done to prevent it from happening in the future.
Heck, even Jeb Bush said in response to the fumbling of Wilma that he accepted responsibility and wanted to move forward with identifying and fixing failures in the cat recovery system, without wasting effort on a political pass-the-buck/play-the-blame-game circus.