From the Washington Post today:

Michael D. Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was rebuffed in his request for a claim of executive privilege and plans to testify to a Senate panel today about his calls and e-mails to President Bush and top White House aides in the Hurricane Katrina crisis, Brown's lawyer said yesterday.

White House Counsel Harriet Miers declined to offer Brown a legal defense for declining to testify or respond to a Feb. 6 letter advising that without such protection Brown "intends to answer all questions fully, completely and accurately," said Brown's lawyer, Andrew W. Lester. (emphasis added)

Strange behavior from a lying, corrupt, rampantly abusive, imperial administration, no? So is the White House hanging Brownie out to dry, or does it really fear his testimony but can't find any justification for extending a claim of executive privilege? Or was Brown trying to bully the administration into giving him executive privilege protection by threatening to "tell all" and the White House called his bluff?

Some clues can be found in the details provided in the New York Times today. The Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security received word late Monday night (9:27p.m.) that the 17th street levee in New Orleans had broken and also that the news eventually reached the White House around midnight. The Times treats this as a contradiction to the White House's initial claim it didn't learn about the levee breaking until Tuesday morning - even though the White House says it was receiving conflicting reports. Nevertheless, the Times continues:

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.

Clearly, there was a great deal of confusion and the federal government, along with a great many other people including the news media in New Orleans and around the country, developed a misperception of the severity of what had actually taken place.

The Times' investigation revealed a number of other details showing that there is plenty of blame to go around for failures that occurred all across the board at the local and state levels as well as the federal level:

Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were these:

¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.

¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.

¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no plans in place to do any of this."

¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.

¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.

¶Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.

Brown's testimony will be embarrassing to the administration because it will refocus attention on the many failures surrounding the Katrina tragedy, including those at FEMA and DHS. But I would think all the political damage from the debacle is already "priced in", so to speak, and I'll be surprised if we hear anything from Brown that will drastically change the public's opinion on the matter.