Government transparency. What a concept.
A key slice out of a piece in tomorrow’s Times …
These candid exchanges are just a few of the glimpses inside Louisiana’s highest leadership that emerged late Friday in an extraordinary release of about 100,000 pages of state documents detailing the response to Hurricane Katrina by Ms. Blanco and her staff. The state compiled the documents – including e-mail messages, hand-written notes, correspondence with the White House, and thousands of offers of assistance and desperate pleas for help – at the request of two Congressional committees looking into the state’s preparedness and response.
“As we move forward, I believe the public deserves a full accounting of the response at all levels of government to the largest natural disaster in U.S. history,” Ms. Blanco said in a statement about the release of the documents.
…
She said the documents demonstrated “hard-working, sleep-deprived public servants operating under enormous pressure and rapidly changing circumstances.” They also show that as Hurricane Katrina approached and inundated New Orleans, Ms. Blanco’s top aides realized how quickly it was becoming both a human and a political nightmare.
“This is absolutely the worst-case situation we have long feared,” Andy Kopplin, the governor’s chief of staff, wrote in an e-mail message to the Blanco administration’s top aides the day before the storm hit New Orleans. “Pray for Louisiana citizens as this storm nears.”
The correspondence released on Friday apparently received almost no editing, other than the blacking out of certain names and telephone numbers for people not associated with the state government. It includes handwritten notes, audio recordings of conference calls and even a few doodles on legal pads.
Is anything like this even remotely imaginable at the federal level today?
