When Army National Guard units are not mobilized or under federal control, they report to the Governors of their respective state or territory. The President serves as commander-in-chief for units mobilized for federal active duty.

Originally posted by skippytjc

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans has been the most featured and vocal personality during this crisis. The mayor is easily the sharpest and most heard critic of the federal government’s efforts after the storm. Mayor Ray Nagin is a household name today.

But there is something that most media outlets have all but over looked: Where was Nagin and what was he doing BEFORE the hurricane? Nagin apparently did nothing but tell the people he represented to evacuate. Sounds like a reasonable action for a mayor in a situation like this, but was that enough? Apparently not.

The people who did not evacuate New Orleans were mostly the poor and low income residents of that city. They simply couldn’t afford to leave. It costs money and resources to evacuate from your home. You need transportation, food and lodging, and spare cash or credit to survive away from home and they didn’t have it. I mentioned in another post that even I couldn’t afford to leave my house for very long even though I am not poor, let alone up and evacuate. I would possibly have stayed too as a result.

Mayor Nagin did not provide his needy residents the means to evacuate, pure and simple. How can this man criticize the federal help in the aftermath when he could have averted a great deal of the human toll of this storm in the first place?

We elect officials to protect and represent us, and not just in everyday life and affairs, but in emergencies and special circumstances. This storm was not a sneak attack and its severity was not a surprise. The Mayor was concerned enough to call for evacuations days before the storm. But he did nothing to help the people who could not leave; he failed these people in the most critical way possible: He allowed them to stay and die.

I suggest Mayor Nagin be held responsible for his amazing lack of competency and absolute neglect of the people who counted on him the most. He simply did not one thing to remove the people who were unable to do it themselves. And out of every single person in that city, he is the MOST responsible decisions such as these.

For each person who has died as a result of this tragedy who WOULD have left if the means were provided them, Mayor Ray Nagin is responsible. It doesn’t go past his desk.

Criminal negligence in the most severe way


[edit on 8-9-2005 by skippytjc]

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.