| Bush pumping in more support for Gulf Coast |
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Washington (24x7Updates) -- President Bush, seeking to stem criticism that a slow federal response has contributed to needless misery, said Saturday he is ordering additional active duty forces to the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast.
“The enormity of the task requires more resources,” the president said. “In America we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.”
Bush said 4,000 active duty troops are already in the area and 7,000 more will arrive in the next 72 hours. Those troops will be in addition to some 21,000 National Guard troops already in the region.
The decision came after the president met for nearly an hour with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and others involved in planning the recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
Bush took the rare step of delivering his Saturday morning radio broadcast live from the White House Rose Garden with Rumsfeld, Chertoff and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by his side.
Bush was resolute during his remarks, but he smiled when he commented on the people of the region, which he visited Friday.
“When you talk to the proud folks in the area, you see a spirit that cannot be broken,” he said.
Bush took the rare step of delivering his Saturday morning radio broadcast live from the White House Rose Garden with Rumsfeld, Chertoff and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by his side.
Bush was resolute and sobering during his remarks, but he smiled when he commented on the people of the region, which he visited Friday.
``When you talk to the proud folks in the area, you see a spirit that cannot be broken,’’ he said.
After returning to Washington late Friday from nearly seven hours spent touring some of the most devastated areas of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Bush took several more steps in his effort to meet that pledge of support and to recapture the leadership kudos he won after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Bush immediately signed a $10.5 billion disaster aid package passed by Congress - an amount he repeatedly called ``just the beginning’’ of federal expenditures for storm relief. He issued a memorandum saying Hurricane Katrina had created a ``severe energy supply interruption’’ that could damage the national economy, and he formally authorized the release of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The White House was planning for a return trip to the damaged area on Monday, scrapping Bush’s plans for a Labor Day speech in Maryland in favor of stops in undisclosed parts of the storm-affected region. Aides arranged for a hurricane briefing to be the first item on Bush’s daily agenda for the future.
``I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen,’’ the president said in New Orleans as he ended his tour Friday. ``I understand the devastation requires more than one day’s attention.’’
Describing that devastation in Mississippi and elsewhere along the coast that was battered by Katrina’s enormous winds, Bush said it was ``as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine.’’
Indeed, he walked, drove or flew by incredible destruction - enormous casino barges flung like toys onto dry land, houses collapsed on themselves like decks of cards, staircases leading nowhere, and thousands of only cement squares and piles of debris where buildings used to be.
In New Orleans, where massive flooding from breaches in the city’s levees caused the worst problems, Bush talked about the suffering of the people who have gone days without rescue, food, water or medicine - some dying in the process.
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