Slashdot Mirror
FEMA Sorry for Faking News Briefing
theodp writes "The Federal Emergency Management Agency's No. 2 official apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters. All the while, real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions. In the briefing, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., FEMA's deputy administrator, called on questioners who did not disclose that they were FEMA employees, and gave replies emphasizing that his agency's response to this week's California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005."
How is the Five Year Plan going? Good, I bet.
Sorry... sorry... WTF!!!!
Sorry isn't gonna cut it... try mass resignations!
A government organization went on national TV and intentionally tried to fool millions of Americans into believing a lie so that they didn't look bad.
Oh wait... never mind... I forgot, this is the USA. And we are talking about the government after all. The idiot who thought this up should run for President!
Flying Spaghetti Monster I cant wait until our government acts with our best interests in mind... hell I'd be happy to see it happen just once before I die.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
When considered with the ever increasing powers granted to FEMA this should be enough for many people to speak out. Instead most will flip the channel and it will be business as usual.
http://thisnovember5th.com/
In what world did FEMA think that the truth would not be almost instantly exposed? Who are they employing in the PR dept.? The Three Stooges?
"....his agency's response to this week's California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005." Wow. The gold standard, to which all emergency responses should be judged has finally been exceeded.
FEMA: Making our president look good in comparison since 2000.
FEMA: Where bad decision make someones life better.. we hope.
FEMA: If you can't take the heat fake the press.
FEMA: When drinking becomes a profession.
FEMA: You still get more upside out of us then your executive branch.
FEMA: When disasters strikes.. ohh god your fucked.
FEMA: for great justice.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
First of all... your the director of external affairs... Yep you should have stopped it... SO WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU.
Second, your working very hard to establish credibility and integrity... by trying to trick us into thinking your credible and trustworthy... that's exactly what you DON'T do to establish credibility and integrity.
Finally... I would say that doing exactly the wrong thing hasn't undermine your credibility and integrity, you didn't have any to begin with... this simply ensures that you never will until the current >20% has been eliminated, everyone in that conference resigns, and your agency actually handles a disaster like it knows what it is doing.
It is kind of ironic that FEMA, the agency that is supposed to clean up disasters, actually turns every disaster it is involved in into a bigger disaster through it's absolute incompetence and piss poor public image.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
The Three Stooges are way smarter than these guys.
:-)
The Three Stooges were firemen, and in the army, and plumbers, football players...
My mom says I'm cool.
I would HOPE you could manage to improve your response in an area that still has power, water, sewage and transportation. I live in San Diego, I know people that have had their homes lost, but to compare this with Katrina and give themselves a pat on the back is absurd: the vast majority of the city and infrastructure of this county were completely unaffected. There were outages and near failures, but you didn't have to go far to get back to power, water, sewage and transportation. Heck, if you got tired of the evacuation site at Qualcom? The airport and cruse ship terminals were still open, just take a trip, or just hop on the trolley and go downtown for a nice dinner out. These fires have certainly devastated a lot of people's homes, I have a good freind that has nothing left but his car and a USB flash drive, but this hasn't been the sort of region wide crippling of the storm and floods of Katrina.
When are they going to apologize for faking disaster relief?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The difference being that California wildfires happen every year, almost like clockwork. The hurricane that devistated New Orleans and the coastal regions of Mississippi, while perhaps inevitable, had not occured until that point.
In essence, FEMA is not there to simply help out with expected situations, though that may be part of it. No matter the nobility or necessity, however, it is there, primarily, for unexpected emergencies, and it is simply not doing that job at the moment. Consider the juxtaposition between the rich socialites who have lived in the wildfire-prone region of California for so many years, and the disgustingly poor, predominately black population of New Orleans, who have lived there because their parents lived there, and because they cannot afford to move or live anywhere else. It all boils down to wealth disparity, and who benefits from it. I would encourage everyone to consider that.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Insert self-referential sig here.
See, this is why, faults and all, the USA is loved around the world. It's like watching your goofy cousin make a fool of himself at the wedding reception.
Well
First off, I think this less of an "I'm sorry" situation, but rather "I'm sorry I got caught".
But regardless of whether they are truly sorry for this fiasco, they STILL don't get the problem. It's not that they staged a news conference, it's why they staged the conference that is the issue. They don't care about "emergency management", they only care about *public relations*. And while they claim that things are so much better than Katrina, this mock press conference only proves that nothing has changed.
On the positive side, Kanye West might be heartened to learn that it isn't just black people -- George Bush doesn't care about *anybody*.
The parent made exactly the points I was to make. I'll add that the FEMA leadership lost what ever points they earned for not screwing the pooch this time around due to their complete lack of transparency. It's been bad enough with the unattributed propaganda videos the Administration has passed around to the media over the last six years, but faking a news conference for a heavily covered story? Gee-zus. They'd have looked more honest hiring Kevin Nealon.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Hey, lets stage a minor disaster that we can handle and are prepared for so we can look like heroes fixing it.
God spoke to me.
The military offered helicopters for dropping water on the fires, but they weren't allowed to because California State Department of Forestry rules required that a CDF fire spotter ride in each aircraft. Not only did it take more than 24 hours to get the fire spotters to the choppers, but there weren't enough spotters to man all the available aircraft.
Some official allowed an exception to the rule to allow just one spotter for each squadron of three, but by the time this was all sorted out, the high winds proved to be too dangerous, and so the aircraft were grounded.
Had they been able to take off when first called upon, the winds wouldn't have been so severe and they might have been able to contain the fire.
What's worse is that the military has several C-130 transport planes on call for dropping very large amounts of water from the air. I saw one of these at the Big Bear Lake fire in 1985, and it was a truly awesome sight to behold.
However, it was determined that their tanks were unsafe, so several years ago they were taken out of service until a new tank could be designed. The first try at a new tank didn't fit in the planes - yes, you read that right - so they went back to the drawing board.
It's been four years since then and they still don't have a new tank design.
Let me find you a link.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Someone needs to tag this 'wagthedog'.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
You think this isn't standard in an administration which lied to start an illegal war and bullied its allies about it?
Slashdot: news from nerds.
is traveling abroad, and I told her that FEMA had staged a press conference, with all the gory details, over a Skype chat. She thought I was joking... but it didn't take as much to convince her as I thought it would, and that... that is what happens when cynicism=real life. What. The. Fuck.
She's in Shanghai right now giving company training, getting disrespect from her students because she's 5'4", blond, and female (most of all); and there's nothing she can do about it because the double standard nowadays is that we as Americans MUST respect everyone else's culture but they are allowed to do fuck all to us in their homeland and in ours and we must respect that lest they perceive insult... When our own government makes a mockery of itself in full view of it's constituents then how are we any different from any hard-line, third-world, dictator state?
Wow that went south in a hurry. Sorry for that. Fema sucks.
There is simply too much glass..
looks to me like the last time this happened (with the fake VNRs) the GAO put every agency on notice that faking a news report and not disclosing it was blantantly illegal
here's the relevant letter from the GAO: http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20050222093810-51492.pdf
any FEMA administrator that knew that fake reporters were asking the questions needs to immediately resign or be indicted if they try to avoid responsibility for this propaganda
No, for the foreseeable future these lard suckers will continue to do what they are told and our politicians will continue to be a bunch of corrupt and hypocritical bastards whose only goal is to grab all the money they can for themselves. I'm hoping to be comfortably dead by the time this state of affairs changes, since it will probably end in a global environmental disaster, riots after all the oil runs out or economic collapse along the lines of what happened with Russia in the 90's.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
It's kinda sad, but unless your next government truly cleans up, you need a revolution, I'm scared and sad to say that less won't do.
I can tell you why that will not happen in two words:
"Baaaaaa......baaaaaaa......"
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
So, I guess this means that FEMA's lesson from Katrina was that they needed better press coverage?
Anyway, besides Jeff Gannon, we've seen this before. Here's another case:
March 29, 2005
Despite a rising chorus of condemnation from journalists and media critics, the George W. Bush administration shows no signs of abandoning its distribution of taxpayer-funded "news" to U.S. newspapers, radio and television stations.
Free press advocates are up in arms about what they say is the covert dissemination of propaganda by government agencies.
In one case, the administration -- seeking to build support among black families for its education reform plans -- paid a prominent African American pundit, Armstrong Williams, 240,000 dollars to promote the "No Child Left Behind" law on his nationally syndicated television show and through his newspaper column, and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
Two other nationally known journalists, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus, have also admitted accepting thousands of dollars to endorse government programs.
Since 2001, the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service has fielded 40 reporters, producers and public affairs specialists to create "good military news" to be beamed to home audiences via local news stations. The service's "good news" segments have reportedly reached 41 million Americans via local newscasts -- in most cases, without the station acknowledging their source.
More than 20 different federal agencies used taxpayer funds to produce television news segments promoting Bush administration policies. These "video news releases," or VNRs, were broadcast on hundreds of local news programs. without disclosing their source....
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0329-12.htm
It wasn't that FEMA lied, or FEMA screwed up (or that there are several dozen Presidential Executive Orders in place allowing them to supersede the Constitution, hijack transportation, communications, food and fuel supplies accross the whole country, including private and commercial farm land, etc (thanks to Komrade Klinton's handiwork)). All it takes is a "real big disaster". And given how inept "ordinary Americans" are at just about every damn thing that is involved in surviving a catastrophe (or just plain every day life) I am surprised it hasn't happened yet.
No, sireee, you had to get pissed because they got busted lying. This was an attempt to see how hijacking the press would work, is my guess. I don't recall if "commandeering" the press is yet among the executive orders, but the rest is in place.
Somehow, "I told you so" just does not seem to tell it.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
It's just the Barbarians in charge (the so called CEO leadership style as influenced by Enron) - the rule of law hasn't entirely vanished and will return after a few technical difficulties.
That's it. They'll put up with enormous shit otherwise. So if you keep up the flow of cheeseburgers and TV, the dictators will rule forever. --Or until such a time as the rest of the world decides to invade or the whole system is so totally sucked dry that it collapses with a dry wheeze like Russia did at the end of the cold war. Yep, it's a grim situation. But it gets worse. . .
I'm not convinced that this is all about just simple control. Has anybody noticed there seem to be a lot more rocks falling out of the sky recently? I sure have. There's bigger stuff at stake here. All those miles of barbed wire enclosures don't get built for nothing. The next ten months are going to be interesting, to say the least. I hope for one of two things; that people wake the hell up and throw Bush and Cheney and crew in prison forever and reinstate a real government, or that we have a really, really good TV season in 2008 and that McDonnald's has a two for one special, because it's not just FEMA, --this Blackwater thing operating on American soil is totally freaky.
Excellent Youtube video [youtube.com] dealing with this stuff. . .
-FL
From the end of the TFA:
O. M. G.
About 72 hours apparently. Oh well, looks like they learned SOMETHING from Katrina. Not necessarily what one would have hoped they would learn ... but something.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Don't forget what FEMA was called by a member (can't remember which) in hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Hurricane Katrina: "Failed Every Major Assignment."
Ah, the joys of watching C-SPAN in the middle of the night...
The mega-bank engineered self-bailout of their failed SIV gambles matters. The debate over fire code revisions in southern california matters. The upcoming elections in Kenya matter. The 17th China Party Congress matters. All this matters a lot, to everyone who reads this, whether they realize it or not.
But none of that means it belongs on slashdot.
"stuff that matters" doesn't mean "whatever zonk wants to post today".
And it doesn't mean that we get another ill-informed politico-hype site like
There are other, much, much better sources for this sort of material. All we get here is poorly understood issues presented in some sort of breathless grandstanding manner. It's old, it's on 50 other sites, and it's boring.
...the course to a totalitarian dictatorship/oligarchy, that is. Control the media... eventually, just make it up... it's happened many times before. Even if it's done in an ridiculous manner, the fact that there are people in charge of FEMA who think it's OK should set alarm bells ringing.
Goofy cousin with ICBMs, indeed. Not just goofy, but aggressive, arrogant and loud-mouthed as well.
Fortunately, your fascism will be a capitalist one, so it's OK!
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Its not so much the government nuking its own people as much as it is the security infrastructure that is holding those nukes would break down. Just imagine if some screwball goes out to fight the immigrants with "the big one".
... well, that might actually solve the illegal immigration problem as long as he uses one of the really big ones.
Ha
Seriously though, when the security infrastructure breaks down (as it did in Russia) those weapons become available to any fruitcake with an agenda. What amazes me is that we haven't been hit with an ex-Soviet-era nuke yet. Of course, the things do require continual maintenance and if just left to themselves tend to become useless, so it's possible they don't have one that still works. On the other hand, just having the nuclear material means you could roll your own, I suppose.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No revolution in sight...and don't expect one.
In the first few decades of the last century, labor unions were founded and became dominant in the US; by 1950 more than half of American workers were union, and, having won, the leaders turned to the next social problem, equal rights. Beginning in the mid-fifties, the same personalities, by and large, and methods were used to bring about legal racial equality, culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of 1964. In that year, the focus turned from unions and racial equality to (VietNam) war resistance.
Although both the Union and the Civil Rights movements survived many, many casualties in their struggle, they persisted until the goal was reached. Not so the the war resisters: the National Guard shootings of demonstrators at Kent State University, Ohio, stopped the "Peace" movement in its tracks.
Had the union or civil rights movements been abandoned because two people were killed in the resulting violence, nothing would have been accomplished.
Now, of course, no outrage is enough even to get our (US) citizens up in arms (pun intended).
The framers of our Constitution understood it was simply an *experiment* and once the government learned to game the people (as FEMA has apologized for) the people would replace it, having learned from the current experiment what pitfalls to avoid next time.
T. Jefferson reckoned the consititution ought to be replace every thirty years or so. We're WAAAYY overdue.
Liberty is fed with the blood of tyrants.
This isn't the first time FEMA has done this sort of thing. The more I've researched this agency, from it's creation through all of it's efforts, it's resources, it's inclusion in executive orders and laws which affect the very core of our ideals and constitutional republic, it's subterfuge and misconduct, it's public face as portrayed in the media vs the reality of it's mandate, and how very little the general public knows about that mandate - the more I find to be concerned about.
While researching FEMA initially I was looking to disprove disturbing things I had heard and read; it was not a case where I went looking to substantiate fears, if anything I went into the research with a "FEMA are the good guys" bias, but what I found was far worse than I imagined it could be, and I am genuinely concerned for the security of my country.
I have posted before about FEMA and the executive orders which created and empower it. Rather than repeat any of that, I would urge anyone reading this to look into FEMA and it's mandate and actions on their own. Google it, especially the executive orders and the current anti-terror laws which have removed a lot of your rights.
"If and when martial law comes to America at large, it will be under the auspices of the shadowy Federal Emergency Management Agency ("FEMA"), a massive, secretive agency operated from a huge, fortified bunker in Virginia, and established by unconstitutional means to carry out an unconstitutional and indeed anti-constitutional program."
- excerpt from RICO complaint pending against Bush II admin (I am not claiming that the RICO case is with or without merit, only that the particular statement quoted is accurate in my opinion).
FEMA is very likely sorry that they were caught. The question of whether they're sorry they did it in the first place is still up for debate. Available evidence points to "not a fucking chance."
in which FEMA employees posed as reporters
Maybe one of these days FEMA employees could start impersonating first responders.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I am not advocating an armed revolution. I *am* advocating passive demonstrations against these abhorrent policies, typified by FEMA's sham news conference.
My Kent State example was not that demonstrators should have shot back at Guardsmen, but that the "Peace Movement" had neither the courage nor even the integrity to continue regardless of personal danger -- courage that the union movement and civil rights movement found. Those movemenets did not take arms against the government, they persisted until the government's cupidity was profoundly unmasked, and the voters changed the government's policies.
I am the last to advocate war. I am a Viet Nam vet. I have seen war. You will not like it.
But no empire lasts forever; it looks like the US Empire is falling faster than any before it. Look to the history of Great Britain after World War Two for a clue as to what will happen to the US -- that is, IF we find an undiscovered stash of oil on the order of the one in the North Sea that has been keeping GB monetarily afloat for decades.
But that's another story.
Hint: it might be a crime for a US citizen to advocate taking up arms against his government. It might be called treason.
The government has managed the news for quite some time, in all manner of creative ways. FEMA simply got caught. Don't think for a moment that this is the first time something like this has been done either by FEMA or by the government in general. They have long been of the mind that the citizens (and the fourth estate, and the constitution) are an inconvenience, rather than supervisory bodies and limits they are responsible to.
Just spend a little time with Google looking for managed news, faked news, and government.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Such a blatant (and incompetent) attempt at deception of the US populace by a senior official in our government should be regarded as treason.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
What the mean is, sorry because they were caught.
I don't understand why you say the peace movement stopped with the killings at Kent State. I remember outrage, but not stopping. What precisely do you think stopped? What stopped was the Vietnam War.
There is even a peace movement today with a lot of the same people involved that were involved in the 60's.
The rest of the world did not get the U.S. government they deserve. You've got an obligation to the countries which have been fucked over by the U.S. to set things right.
Oh please. Naomi Wolf didn't cut the video together herself. I know plenty of people all over the political spectrum who make typos, and far worse, so that's an exceptionally lame excuse for not wanting to listen to a lecture. If you don't like the material being discussed, why not just say so rather than find excuses to avoid listening? --Or maybe, (horrors), offer up your own 'reasoned argument' for why you think the material is at fault. --I've written many hundreds of such arguments in my time, so I figured it couldn't hurt to hear it from another person's perspective. --I thought she did a pretty succinct job, although a little more confidence at the end of her speech might have been appropriate.
-FL
Since when did the Kent State Massacre put an end to the anti-war movement? That's not how I remember it, and I've never even seen anyone claim this. The movement continued, the war became increasingly unpopular, and the US withdrew.
Incidentally, four students were killed at Kent State, not two: Alison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder. Only the first two were participants in the protest; the second two were bystanders.
In reality, you'd probably end up wishing that what the gov't called it was treason. The trend is clear; a person who is resisting, advocating resistance, or doing anything contrary to the will of the State is a terrorist. Terrorists are not to be considered human, and it's expected that any action that involves the treatment of the terrorist is not only acceptable, but it will not even be questioned.
The first step to oppressing a people is to stop believing that they are human. That's why they're called insurgents, which is defined in Webster's as "a rebel not recognized as a belligerent" (with belligerent meaning "belonging to or recognized
Of course, that's also why the people who live in the USA are 'consumers', not people. I was at a party last night; it was not an extremely large gathering, there was drinking but no noise problems, and there was nothing disruptive about it. 4 police cars pull up, no less than 6 officers get out and talk amongst themselves. 2 of them walk up to the entryway to a patio (clearly belonging to the apartment). I ask what the problem is, and (non-belligerently) tell them that this is private property and that they're not welcome. One of the officers looks at me, and says (direct quote) "What are you going to do about it?" and walks into the patio area and begins questioning and demanding ID from everyone in sight. (Everyone was over 21.) We're losing this battle rapidly, and the trends in other areas work against us.
Freedom was nice while it lasted.
From the article you cite:
This is true, but the parent poster did not post the entire quote; he missed a very important two words, "...patriots and..."
The quote is actually, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Jefferson knew exactly what it took to overthrow a government, and did not ignore the costs to the rebelling side. People today like to ignore those words when they talk about revolution, because they don't like to think that they will actually have to pay the price themselves, and seem to think they will lose support by mentioning it.
J.
. . . and only half of what you see.
This is nothing new in the "News" biz. Remember Bush's phony Iraq videoconference with the troops where the "questions" were rehearsed beforehand?
Lest we think only government officials do this, or only Republicans, remember:
. . . NBC's "expose" of exploding gas tanks on pickup trucks using footage supplied by an advocacy group (funded by trial lawyers, btw) where incendiary devices were used to create explosions on cue?
. . . Dan Rather's phony National Guard memos?
Ask yourself how an author gets interviewed on 60 Minutes. Is it because CBS' parent company also owns the publisher? Why do so many "investigative journalism" pieces about corporate malfeasance get broadcast just before jury selection begins in the civil case? Why do so many trade magazine articles read like press releases (because they are)?
There is no objective standard for what "news" is. It's up to us to pay attention to the source and timing of the information we are being fed, and decide its value.