Katrina Video and Transcript Magically Appear

Earlier this week, the Associated Press released videotape of a pre-Katrina briefing, and Newsweek received an e-mail containing a transcript of a briefing President George “LBJ” Bush had as the hurricane was destroying New Orleans. The White House is saying that there is nothing new in any of this, while the president’s numerous detractors claim it shows the White House lied about its actions back in August and September. However, the real story is that the White House told Congress some time ago that the records just released didn’t exist.

The secure videoconference that the Associate Press released and that ran on every news network Wednesday night and into Thursday showed the August 29, noon discussions. National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield is seen saying, “I don’t think anyone can tell you with confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very great concern.” Needless to say, the White House didn’t want that released, since the president (who was on the call and who assured everyone that resources were in place), said just a couple days later, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Clearly, the administration didn’t leak this to the press, and it appears to have come from Atlanta, where FEMA taped it by pointing a video camera at the monitor.

Such a recording is cumbersome, and it is not standard procedure. Instead, recording such a conference as a video file on a computer server is the norm. The question this raises is “why go to the trouble of getting a video camera and tape and record it that way?” A reasonable person might conclude that the tape was a work-around because the Atlanta office of FEMA didn’t have its computer recording mechanism working. A more conspiracy-minded person might say that someone decided to make a recording of a briefing that was deliberately not recorded by normal means.

Be that as it may, Newsweek received a transcript of this briefing by e-mail Wednesday. As the magazine put it,

[T]he administration initially told Congress that the transcript for the Aug. 29 call—the call congressional investigators were most curious about, given that it occurred as the hurricane was actually battering the Gulf Coast—did not exist, with officials initially telling Capitol Hill that someone at FEMA or Homeland Security forgot to push the button on a tape recorder.

‘Everybody has been looking for that transcript,’ former FEMA chief Michael Brown said Wednesday.