WE MIGHT have had a faster response to Katrina, and prevented the 9/11 attacks altogether, if only we'd followed the advice of Dick the Butcher: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reportedly was reluctant to order a mandatory evacuation for fear of lawsuits.
God knows why Gov. Kathleen Blanco dragged her feet - dithering seems to be her modus operandi - but I suspect lawyers had a lot to do with it.
My friend Ralph Peters told me his sources in the Pentagon told him lawyers for FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security spent the weekend before Katrina struck arguing about what they could or couldn't do - the emphasis was on couldn't - absent certain permissions from Ms. Blanco.
Former members of Able Danger, a military intelligence unit, have claimed they had identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the members of his cell more than a year before 9/11, and had tried to pass this information on to the FBI, but were forbidden to do so on the advice of Pentagon lawyers.
There are lawyers who can act promptly and decisively in a crisis (see Giuliani, Rudy). But they are the exception rather than the rule. By training and temperament, lawyers are more likely to flash a yellow light than a green one.
It is this fundamental characteristic, my friend Tom Lipscomb told me, that caused a young Donald Rumsfeld to argue that lawyers should be barred from holding public office. It was probably not helpful that both Michael Brown, the head of FEMA when Katrina struck, and Michael Chertoff, his boss at the Department of Homeland Security, are lawyers.
The pernicious impact lawyers can have in a crisis is compounded by bureaucracy.
Bureaucracies typically move at a torpid pace, and insist on following the rules even when the rules make no sense. So firemen were prevented from rescuing Katrina victims until they had received a lecture on sexual harassment policy.
The more layers of bureaucrats through which a decision must pass, the slower the response. Yet Washington's response to any crisis is to create larger bureaucracies.
The only bureaucracy which moves rapidly in a crisis is the military. I think it would be a mistake to make the military a "first responder" in natural disasters, but FEMA should be reorganized along military lines.
