Word: grounded
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...surprise. With Katrina, you had the same kind of estrangement between officials at the top, who just like on 9/11 were largely talking to themselves on conference calls and passing a lot of flawed information. Their decisions, in turn, were not being communicated to the people on the ground, who were left to improvise...
...What sort of lessons does government still have to learn, based on the response to both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina? We have to figure out how to structure government response so that people on the ground are not left to improvise but have the information they need to make critical decisions. We know from Katrina and 9/11 that in the first critical moments, oftentimes civilians are on their own. And yet there's been no systematic attempt to educate everyone over the age of 12 in the rudiments of crisis response. The evidence is pretty strong from Katrina and 9/11...
...pictures of the mess at Ground Zero...
Similarly, in Afghanistan, bin Laden's erstwhile stomping ground, the fight against the U.S. is being waged by the Taliban, which may once have been an ally of al-Qaeda but now exists entirely independently of bin Laden's movement and will ultimately make its strategic decisions based on its national interests. The sobering reality for bin Laden is that even among those dedicated to resisting the U.S. and its allies, his ideology of global jihad against the "far enemy" (the U.S.) has failed to supplant the more pragmatic Islamist movements such as Hamas, Hizballah and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood...
ArmorGroup's employees did not even appear to be fully aware of the ground rules of their contract. In one incident, according to POGO, guards set out from the embassy at night, armed and dressed in turbans, equipped with the embassy's night-vision equipment, to secure portions of the road between the embassy and the guard base in Camp Sullivan several miles off. But this action violated ArmorGroup's contract, which is only for static security - that is, guards at specified posts. (The role of traveling bodyguards for embassy personnel is contracted out to another firm, Xe, the company...