US: Former federal disaster chief Michael Brown has told senators that the White House knew that New Orleans was flooding a few hours after Hurricane Katrina came ashore, contradicting administration claims that officials did not hear about the flooding until the following day.
Michael Brown, who resigned as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after widespread criticism of his handling of the disaster, said he felt like a scapegoat.
"I certainly feel somewhat abandoned," he said.
Mr Brown said he spoke to a top White House official who was with President George W Bush at Crawford, Texas, twice on 29 August, the day the hurricane struck.
"I think I told him that we were realising our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true," he said. Mr Brown said he made similar comments in an email to White House chief of staff Andrew Card.
"For them to claim that we didn't have awareness of it is just baloney," he said.
The former FEMA chief blamed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was in charge of his agency, for the inadequacy of the federal response to Katrina. He said that natural disasters had become the "stepchild" of Homeland Security, which was preoccupied with terrorist threats.
"There was a culture clash that didn't recognize the absolute inherent science of preparing for a disaster. Any time you break that cycle ... you're doomed to failure. " he said.
The Bush administration has said it only knew definitively early on Tuesday, August 30th, the day after the storm, that the levees had been breached, based on an Army Corps of Engineers assessment.
But documents presented to the senate committee that questioned Mr Brown showed that the earliest official report of a New Orleans levee breach came at 8.30 am on August 29th and that the White House heard about it less than three hours later, at 11.13am.
White House spokesman Scott McLennan said yesterday that there had been conflicting reports coming from New Orleans about the state of the levees but that the administration was focused on providing help as soon as possible.
Denis Staunton
in Washington
Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby has told a grand jury that Mr Cheney authorised him to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of intelligence in making the case for war in Iraq.
Mr Libby faces trial on five counts of perjury and obstructing justice by lying about his role in leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband criticized the administration's case for war.
According to documents filed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Mr Libby claimed that Mr Cheney and other White House superiors authorized him to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
"Mr. Libby testified in the grand jury that he had contact with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in the course of his interaction with reporters in June and July 2003We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Mr Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to Mr Libby's lawyers last month.
Citing sources "with firsthand knowledge of the matter", the National Journal reported yesterday that Mr Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Mr Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Mr Cheney authorised Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the intelligence estimate, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.
Mr Libby has not claimed that the vice-president authorised him to tell journalists that Ms Plame was a CIA agent, although Mr Libby has admitted that he first heard the information from Mr Cheney. The latest testimony suggests that Mr Libby's lawyers will use a defence strategy similar to that employed by Oliver North, who was a National Security Council official in the Reagan administration.
Mr North was in charge of the Reagan administration's efforts to covertly send arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held in the Middle East, and to covertly fund and provide military help to the Nicaraguan Contras at a time when federal law prohibited such activities.
Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, had to dismiss many of the central charges against Mr North, including the most serious ones because intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration refused to declassify documents necessary for a trial on those charges.
One of Mr Libby's lawyers, John D Cline, who was on Mr North's defence team, has demanded more than 10 months of Mr Bush's daily intelligence briefing. The reports are among the most highly classified documents in government and the Bush administration has defied bipartisan requests from the Intelligence committees in Congress to turn them over for review.