E-mail a friendMelanie Sloan
original airdate April 30, 2007
Melanie Sloan is Executive Director of the nonprofit organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). She previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in DC and as Minority Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, specializing in criminal enforcement issues. As Counsel for the Crime Subcommittee, she drafted portions of the ‘94 Crime Bill, including the Violence Against Women Act. Sloan received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago.
Melanie Sloan
Tavis: Melanie Sloan is executive director of the public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. She's also a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee under Congressman John Conyers. As I mentioned at the top a moment ago, her watchdog organization uncovered documents that broke the story over the weekend about these unclaimed Katrina donations. Melanie Sloan joins us tonight from Washington. Melanie, nice to have you on the program.
Melanie Sloan: It's my pleasure.
Tavis: As I mentioned earlier, this is quite a shocking story, particularly for those of us who've been covering this for all these many months. Let me just give you a platform here. For those who've not seen, heard, read the story in "The Washington Post," what did you uncover relative to all of this money that was offered that quite frankly was not accepted?
Sloan: Sure. Well, back last - after the hurricane occurred in 2005, we started reading a bunch of articles talking about how there had been offers of financial aid and other kinds of assistance coming in from around the globe to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and yet it seemed like many of those offers of aid weren't being taken advantage of.
So we submitted something called a Freedom of Information Act request, which is a way a regular citizen can get information from the government. And we sent this request over to the State Department to ask them about all the offers of aid that had come in, and what the United States had done in response to those requests for aid.
Well, we filed that back in September of 2005, but it takes a very long time to get the government to respond to you, and we had to sue them, eventually, for documents. But over the course of the past year or so, documents have been trickling in showing a pattern whereby the United States was offered over $854 million worth of assistance from countries around the globe, and the United States took advantage of only about $40 million worth of that, getting that $40 million to the actual victims of the hurricane.
Tavis: So almost a billion dollars offered, and we only took advantage of about $40 billion - $40 million?
Sloan: Forty million.
Tavis: I mean $40 million.
Sloan: That's right.
Tavis: Forty million of over $800 million. A dumb question: why? Or put another way, why not?
Sloan: I think that first is a matter of arrogance. The United States is a country that is used to giving aid, not accepting it, and we had no mechanisms set up by we had a process to accept offers of aid and distribute it to victims. But there was also a lot of incompetence and a lot of malfeasance. The State Department officials didn't really know how to deal with all these offers of aid, and they were then forced to deal with FEMA, which as we all know now is a terribly mismanaged agency that bungled the hurricane entirely.
And FEMA officials would not even get back to State Department officials to tell them what to do with those offers of aid.
Tavis: Let me ask you, as a watchdog in Washington, whether or not that answer is acceptable. And I'm talking specifically about the answer that we did not have a system in place. I'm just trying to imagine if I'm a victim of his hurricane, knowing that there's another almost billion dollars that was offered that might have come to me to help me rebuild my life and my government didn't accept it, do I accept the answer that we couldn't take it because we didn't have systems in place to receive aid?
Sloan: Oh, no, absolutely not. And the fact is, when we realized we didn't have a system in place, we should have gotten one into place. We could have remedied this. We're supposed to be one of the most advanced countries in the world. That we couldn't figure out a way to get the aid that people were so generously offering and getting it to the victims who so desperately needed it is really just shameful and shocking.
There were some really concrete examples of things that didn't get to people. Other countries offered things like medical assistance, blankets, baby food, and we turned those offers down. So our government was really just ignoring the needs of the victims of Katrina and saying, "We don't need help."
Tavis: Give me some sense of the kinds of countries who were offering us aid.
Sloan: So many countries. Peru offered us aid. Bangladesh. France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy. Italy offered us medical supplies, and in fact we took the medical supplies and then let them be damaged by weather and then had to decide over at the State Department whether to tell Italy the truth, to confess that these medical supplies had been destroyed.
We turned down an offer of a cruise ship from Greece to house hurricane victims because we said the cruise ship wouldn't get here fast enough - even though it would have been here about a month after the hurricane. Instead, we ended up renting two cruise ships from Carnival at a huge cost to the American taxpayer, and those cruise ships, as we all know, were overcrowded and we still didn't have enough housing for people. So I think even a month after the hurricane, those victims would have been very happy to have that cruise ship from Greece.
Tavis: What's your sense of how the State Department has responded? I offered earlier my own assessment. By asking the question, at least, I offered my assessment as to how one is supposed to rationalize what this response was. From your perspective, how do you deal with what they've said?
Sloan: I find it shocking. Yesterday on "Face the Nation," Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, said, "Well, they didn't handle it perfectly but they did the best they could." Well, I just don't think they did the best they could. The best they could was clearly not good enough for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. And I think if more of our government officials had had to spend time in New Orleans and Mississippi and really understand the conditions there, maybe they wouldn't have been so quick to reject the offers of aid from all those countries that were trying to help us.
Tavis: So what has happened to the offers that were not accepted? They just kind of sat around?
Sloan: Well, a bunch of them sat around, a bunch of them were just flat out rejected, and a bunch of them we don't even really know what happened. One of the real scandals that I think is left to congressional investigators to sort out is what happened to the money that did come in? Money was offered by - given to us by other governments and then did it just go into the United States Treasury, and did it actually get to the victims it was supposed to get to? We don't actually have any way to track that money. There's no accountability for that money.
Tavis: With all due respect to your organization - and I am glad and I suspect many others are glad that this story has come to light - but with all due respect to your organization, how is it that your organization has to file under the Freedom of Information Act and then sue the government to get information that I suspect a congressional committee - if someone had had the good sense to ask these same questions could have gotten that information a lot more easy than you as a member of Congress, as the chair of a major committee, yes?
Sloan: Oh, well, I'm certain they could have, but I doubt you haven't noticed over the past two years that congressional committees weren't exactly conducting a lot of oversight over the administration. They were pretty loathe to call the administration in to ask them a question on anything from foreign policy to Katrina to any other matter.
It's only now that the House and Senate have changed over that we're starting to see newly reinvigorated congressional committees, and I'm hoping that they will start asking these questions. Because as I said, we don't have all the answers. We don't know where the money went. I think State Department officials ought to be called in and forced to explain what offers they got, which ones they accepted, why they rejected others when there were clearly people who needed the aid that was being offered, and where all the money is today.
Tavis: All right, so to your point, which is where I wanna go now, how would that happen? Which committee, who chairs that committee, what should happen at this point on the congressional side to turn this into an investigation, to hearings to get the kind of answers to the questions that you're raising right now?
Sloan: Well, I think there are actually several committees that would have oversight. The committees that oversee the State Department could ask questions, the Committee on Government Oversight and Reform could easily conduct hearings. There are committees - I think there's been an ad hoc committee of members of Congress who have been concerned with the Hurricane Katrina that are also holding hearings. So I think there are numerous opportunities now, and it is time for members of Congress to step in and really ask the hard questions.
Tavis: What, going forward here, are some of the lessons that you think we certainly ought to learn from this disaster, for lack of a better word?
Sloan: Well I think the most important thing here is that if we had another hurricane or some other natural disaster today and offers of aid came flooding in tomorrow, we still wouldn't have any way to deal with them. We have learned nothing from the lessons of Katrina, and even tomorrow, new offers of aid could fall by the wayside just as easily as all these other offers. There is no process that's been put into place to handle this sort of issue.
Tavis: If I happen to be, again, a victim of Hurricane Katrina, how should I read this story? I suspect that a victim of the hurricane would read this story a little bit differently than you or I, who were not in New Orleans when this happened.
Sloan: I think that a victim of the hurricane might be pretty depressed to realize that there was even more aid that hasn't reached them. So many of the victims that I see on television are talking still today about how they just haven't been helped by the government, and how aid isn't reaching them. And now we know that even more money was intended for them and didn't get there, and they should be asking their members of Congress and their state and government officials to find out where this money is. And they should be demanding answers.
Tavis: So finally, now that your organization has helped break this critical story, what do you do with this data at this point?
Sloan: Well, we got over 25,000 documents from the State Department, so we're still mining them and we will still stay on top of this story to make sure that all of the members of the public and media know what else we find. We've also sent similar Freedom of Information Act requests to the Department of Homeland Security so we can get answers about their real response to Hurricane Katrina, too. So we'll be on this for I think the coming years.
Tavis: The organization is Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Her name is Melanie Sloan. Melanie, thank you for your work in this area and for breaking the story, and thanks for giving us the chance to talk to you tonight.
Sloan: Thanks for having me.
Tavis: Glad to have you on.
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