Bush under fire after botched rescue operation

THE Bush administration was yesterday fighting to save face after its botched rescue plans left New Orleans at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina.

Battered and sickened survivors have made no attempt to disguise their anger: “We have been abandoned by our own country,” said Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans. “It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.”

After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitude that al-Qaida-linked websites called evidence of the “wrath of God” striking America, National Guard troops and US marshals patrolled the city, stricken in the days after the hurricane by anarchic violence and looting. Local and federal officials expect to find thousands of corpses still floating in flood waters or locked inside homes and buildings destroyed by the devastating storm that struck the US Gulf coast last Monday.