Mark's Notebook

They Haven’t Got Mail

Newsweek

By Mark Hosenball, Newsweek

The business world and government departments depend upon it, grade-school kids are taught how to use it and Osama bin Laden’s followers have become skilled practitioners. But congressional investigations of government responses to Hurricane Katrina have revealed that two of the nation’s key crisis managers, the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, do not use e-mail.

The House committee established to investigate Katrina was informed that neither Secretary Chertoff nor Secretary Rumsfeld use e-mail.

Spokesmen for the two officials maintain that Rumsfeld and Chertoff were kept informed during Katrina the same way as they keep in touch during other crises: through aides and a variety of other communications methods. Brian Besanceney, Chertoff’s top spokesman, said: “Every senior DHS official knows that, if they have important information to convey to the secretary, they go to his office or pick up the phone.”

But Dr. Irwin Redlener, a disaster-preparedness expert at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, expressed surprise that two officials in such critical positions would not be adept at routine methods of modern communication. “This can’t be true,” he said, only half-jokingly. “It’s almost inconceivable in 2006 for officials at that level of government not to be directly connected to systems of communications.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11371281/site/newsweek/

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008