Posted on 01/18/2010 6:48:50 AM PST by kristinn
With the window of survivability still open for Haitians trapped in the rubble of last week's catastrophic earthquake, the UN and FEMA are telling search and rescue teams waiting to deploy to Haiti to forget about it.
Reports out of Houston are saying that one of the premier search and rescue units in the world has been on standby since shortly after the quake but was never called.
Texas TV station KTRK gave this description of Texas Task Force 1:
The TX-TF1 team which was activated for this deployment was a Type I Urban Search and Rescue Team which is comprised of 80 personnel, 4 search and rescue canines, search and technical rescue personnel, physicians, paramedics, structural engineers, other support personnel, and approximately 50 tons of rescue equipment and supplies. The team is self-sustaining for 14 days and deployable by aircraft to anywhere within 4 hours of activation. The task force has also deployed nationally over 70 times, to include the Shuttle Columbia disaster, the World Trade Center, Hurricanes Katrina and Ike.
KTRK and The Houston Chronicle are both reporting:
"The United Nations mission in the country has declared the search and rescue teams already in the nation are sufficient to handle the task and the Texas team and others prepared to deploy would not be needed."
Anyone paying attention over the weekend knows that people were still being rescued, and others that rescuers knew were alive died while waiting to be rescued.
This is yet one more example of Barack Obama failing to take the bull by the horns and get promised help to the Haitians quickly and efficiently.
Reuters notes that there is talk that Obama's response could end up hurting him politically:
This could be a foreign policy Katrina for Obama," said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington think tank.
Birns said already there were negative headlines coming out of Haiti because aid is flowing too slowly.
"The Obama administration cannot allow itself to be tarnished by the kind of headlines that Bush was getting because of Katrina," he said.
The Obama administration has made a show of portraying Obama as hands-on in the relief effort, even releasing a timeline of his phone calls and meetings on Haiti since the quake struck.
Obama spent yesterday campaigning, first in a Black church in Washington, D.C. and then in Boston for Democrat U.S. Senate nominee Martha Coakley.
I know there is mistakes in there before the teacher points it out
The picture looks like Obama is trying to sell Bush and Clinton some dope. ;-)
and another, California:
Local Search And Rescue Team Still Waiting To Leave For Haiti
http://sfappeal.com/alley/2010/01/local-search-and-rescue-team-still-waiting-to-leave-for-haiti.php
We need to get out of the way and let the world deal with this led by the UN not just us trying to take over everything as it is not just our problem
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Can’t you see the bizarre similarities though? Aside from the clear differences (another nation, albeit right on our border, and the UN?) Bammy is caught in the same rock and hard place that Bush was, and can’t do a THING about it in reality. Neither could Bush (the tragedy in New Orleans was huge also, and mistakes were made - but at least as many by the state of LA and the city of NO, as were made by the FEDS, imho).
And in this chaos in Haiti - you can see also what too many cooks in the kitchen can do to the efforts.
And yet the RATS *insisted* on blaming Bush, Republicans and Racism on every last bit of suffering there.
And we’re going to hold ‘em to their LUDICROUS, assanine, ridiculous principles in Haiti.
That, imho, is what kristinn is doing. He’s exposing the HYPOCRISY of the left in plain view at the moment.
Reality for a moment - the chaos in Haiti is a natural disaster of immense proportions and no pissing match between the US and UN, nor whether we take refugees into the US even temporarily, will ever change that.
“OBAMAO is only a wordy babling empty wishfull-thinking,fake bleeding-heart, libtard trying to use and fuel mediatic emotions in order to fool some crowds”
Probably the best that can be said of him.
I am watching China in Africa. I am expecting the equivalent of smallpox infected blankets to find theirway into that continent.
Only Kathleen Blanco could do that - she was the governor of LA at the time, and she was a complete no show.
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It was even worse than that, because
1: there was ample warning that the monster hurricane was coming, and
2: her disaster advisor, James Lee Witt, FEMA director in the Clinton administration, advised her not to give the Federal Govt the authority to take over control of the rescue efforts.
Sounds just like the obstructionist efforts of the UN in Haiti, doesn’t it. I’m sure the Pres of Haiti did not care who took the lead, he was also “homeless” after the quake.
I said I agree with your last post ref obama and how the media are treating this.
but to add and point out we should not be bringing thousands upon thousands of them into florida .
If Bush had acted like this he would have been destroyed but instead obama goes to MA etc.
“However, if Bush is going to get hammered with Katrina by people who cant pass a civics course on division of powers, then the same idiots I guess can start hammering Obama for not invading Haiti and calling it the temporary 51st state.”
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Bingo. The whole point is that we’re pointing out the hypocrisy. For my part, we also sent money to World Vision which has hundreds/thousands of sponsered children in Haiti, who are all safe, btw, and who have inserted tents, supplies and medical supplies to help at least 10,000 families. Groups like World Vision WILL make a difference - as did tens of thousands of churches in the wake of Katrina.
But I’m sure the RATS still called those fine Christians who helped their brothers and sisters there, ‘terrorists.’
RATS will be RATS...we’re just rightly pointing out the blatant hypocrisy in plain view (while doing something REAL about helping!)
Each of these reports taken on their own sounds bad - Texas search team, French and Docs w/o Borders inflatable hospitals - but what is the big picture? It's easy to micro-manage from a keyboard. Every group ready to serve but not called will be issuing their press release if for nothing more than to buck up their own troops. Can't trust the MSM to give us the full picture.
Of course, that does require that adults be in charge and that decisions are well-reasoned. I saw no capitalized letters in the headline that gave me that confidence. Starting with the letter "O."
They've been digging with their bare hands to rescue people, they've self-organized in camps, they've collected and buried tens of thousands of dead, they're tending to children in orphanages.
To post that they're "wont help themselves and are standing around waiting for others to help them" is not accurate at all.
If Bush had acted like this he would have been destroyed but instead obama goes to MA etc.”
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Oh yeah. Complete and total double standards. And they do it without blinking an eye. The basTURDS.
But we KNOW this about the RATS. We are taking a moment to point out a particularly grievous example.
Looks like GW is snickering at the built in teleprompter:)
the rats and the media which are the same really have always given hypocrisy coverage.
It pisses me off to no end
“I am watching China in Africa.”
Huh?
Katrina would have been an appropriate place for the president to use his executive powers in an emergency. Same goes for Obama and Haiti. In this case, follow the money. There are millions, possibly billions now, flowing into Haiti, which is why Aristide wants to return and could be why the UN, a very corrupt organization, wants full control. What happened to the billions already sent to Haiti, under UN control, before the earthquake?
“Looks like GW is snickering at the built in teleprompter:)”
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Funny.
That has occurred to me too. China will either subjugate or kill and Africa is too nice a prize for the land and resource hungry Chinese. I am trying to guess whether they will align with or take over Russia too.
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