Moveon.org wants a Katrina Commission
Tue, 09/13/2005 - 23:21 — admin
Received via email:
Will you sign our petition for an independent Katrina Commission?
Senators, including many moderate Republicans, are deciding whether to support a Katrina Commission modeled after the 9/11 Commission, this week. We need a really big number of people to sign the petition to show senators and representatives how much support there is for the Katrina Commission.
President Bush will address the nation about Hurricane Katrina on Thursday. We'll start delivering the petitions to Congress starting Friday morning so senators and representatives will hear what you think the very next day. The goal is to get 250,000 petition signers quickly.
Here's why we need a Katrina Commission:
* We need to learn from Hurricane Katrina. The scale of the disaster makes it urgent that we learn from mistakes. The government can't investigate itself. That means appointing an independent group of experts to sort through the data.
* We need to find the other Michael Browns. Yesterday, FEMA director Michael Brown resigned. Brown had no experience in emergency management-his last job was as the director of the International Arabian Horses Association. And there are many other political appointees like him who could get in the way during a future emergency.
* When President Bush investigates his own government, no one is held accountable. When Bush and his allies have led investigations in the past, they've been whitewashes. The WMD Commission, led by Republicans in the Senate, concluded that no one was really to blame for the falsified intelligence about WMDs in Iraq. And the White House was entirely opposed to the 9/11 Commission until victims' families made it a politically impossible position.
The 9/11 Commission is a good model for the Katrina Commission. It was independent, bipartisan and provided all Americans with an honest and frank assessment of what happened on September 11th-they even published the results as a book. Support for the Katrina Commission is growing. New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton introduced legislation last week that would establish the one.