They Haven’t Got Mail

The Katrina hearings haven’t only revealed critical information about White House responses to the hurricane. They’ve also uncovered the online secrets of Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Chertoff.

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By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 3:57 p.m. ET Feb. 15, 2006

Feb. 15, 2006 - The business world and government departments depend upon it, grade-school kids are taught how to use it and Osama bin Laden’s followers have become skilled practitioners. But congressional investigations of government responses to Hurricane Katrina have revealed that two of the nation’s key crisis managers, the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, do not use e-mail.

During the course of their inquiries, which culminated this week in public hearings and the release of a scathing House committee report, congressional investigators sent the Bush administration extensive requests for papers and e-mails documenting how the administration responded before and after the hurricane made landfall on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans last August. The White House refused to turn over high-level documentation, asserting that communications between President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and their aides were covered by executive privilege.

When it came to documentation of how Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Donald Rumsfeld responded to Katrina, however, congressional investigators got a different answer from the administration. The House committee established to investigate Katrina was “informed that neither Secretary Chertoff nor Secretary Rumsfeld use e-mail,” reported Reps. Charlie Melancon and William Jefferson, two Louisiana Democrats who participated in the inquiry despite a boycott by other House Democrats who felt that the inquiry was too partisan. The Democrats made the disclosure in a report attached as an appendix to a widely publicized investigative report released today by the Republican majority which led the House Katrina investigation. (The Democrats’ report added that despite investigators’ requests for other documentation, “We received no other records we requested, such as phone logs, e-mail records of assistants, or other internal communications that would show how Secretary Chertoff and Secretary Rumsfeld received information, communicated with other government officials, or gave orders.”)

Spokesmen for the two officials maintain that Rumsfeld and Chertoff were kept informed during Katrina the same way as they keep in touch during other crises: through aides and a variety of other communications methods. “This is a large organization with a very competent staff that that kept the secretary well informed on Defense Department operations throughout Katrina,” Bryan Whitman, a Defense spokesman, told NEWSWEEK. Brian Besanceney, Chertoff’s top spokesman, said: “Every senior DHS official knows that, if they have important information to convey to the secretary, they go to his office or pick up the phone.”

But Dr. Irwin Redlener, a disaster-preparedness expert at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, expressed surprise that two officials in such critical positions would not be adept at routine methods of modern communication. “This can’t be true,” he said, only half-jokingly. “It’s almost inconceivable in 2006 for officials at that level of government not to be directly connected to systems of communications.”

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