It's now three days after the Corps of Engineers admitted, in Senate testimony under oath, that its design and construction mistakes--not local levee boards, not state officials, not any of the other finger-pointees--were responsible for the breach of the 17th St. Floodwall which inundated much of central New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Nothing in the NYT or WashPost, nothing on the networks. This indicates that somebody in India might care. NPR? The last piece on this issue from them was this, in which our federal government took 800 pages a month ago to deny what the Corps just admitted this week. The fact that a high-ranking official of a federal agency took the blame for the worst man-made disaster in American history should, by all reasonable criteria, be some kind of news in this country.
I'd write more about this, but I'm busy not caring about the Moussaoui trial.
ADDENDUM: Attention, certain commenters who prefer to believe the Corps over those independent experts looking over the Corps' shoulder in rebuilding the levees--this from the TP;
In fact, the corps admitted last week that since the initial controversy, it has replaced a section of the levee Bea said was being rebuilt with soils that were too sandy to withstand the pounding of a hurricane storm surge. Hitchings said the weak soils at that section were missed by the corps inspectors on the job site who are monitoring the material being used by contractors. Since then, the number of inspectors has been doubled, and outside engineering firms participating in the job also have a more robust presence at the site, he said.