1. The fact that the commission's main MO was to try and push off all the responsibility to the Corps and then not give them the tools to get the job done is so typical. It happens all over the place..... however, it takes two to tango. First there is the party that tries to do this and then there is the party that lets it happen to them. As professional engineers, one simply can't be involved in projects where the non-engineers impose conditions that negate proper engineering. Why didn't the Corps simply walk away from it? After all, it's their engineering credentials that are being put on the line, not the politicians. Once someone has accepted that responsibility, it's theirs and that's all there is to it.
2. With regards to your comment that 'there was regularly demonstrations of concern .... but a lack of response by anyone to correct the problems.' Do you have evidence that the Corps regularly issued reports that stated that this or that is necessary 'to preserve the integrity of the levees' but these were rejected? Have you seen a report from the Corps that warned of imminent danger because of the commission's rejection of a recommendation?
3. In conjunction with question 2, why as noted earlier did the Corps then accept responsibility for the failure?
4.With regards to your comment that 'levees were designed and built a very long time ago in accordance with the engineering standards of the day', this might very well be true. However, that doesn't really mean very much from the perspective of the liability of the Corps depending on how the original and subsequent Terms of Reference for the project were established and carried out. Once something is unable to do the job anymore with the required margins of safety, it is incumbent on the engineers to let the 'owners' know. Was this properly and formally done? If it was and the politicians chose to blow through all the red lights anyway(which means that THEY are now taking responsibility for it), why did the Corps accept responsibility in the resulting inquiry? Personally, I don't think the engineering ethics issues here are much different than the decision by senior management people in Morton Thiokol and NASA to launch Challenger. The only ones who looked good in the resulting inquiry were all the engineers who were protesting the decision to launch but were overruled. In the case of the flooding of New Orleans, where does the buck stop?
5. You made the comment about 'shift the blame for the levees breaching....'. This was the point of the link in Post 26. Do you know for certain that the levees were breached? And do you discount the evidence shown in the link that indicates that water ended up in New Orleans as a result of a levee failure as opposed to them being breached (which I assume means over-topped)?
Assuming that the levees were in fact breached, isn't that still an engineering design issue - meaning that someone simply did not allow for the water to get as high as it actually did? I would assume that it is.... meaning that someone didn't allow for enough margin in establishing their worst case scenario.