(LA) Times-Picayune Points Finger for Rescue Failure Straight at the President

From Ed and Pub:

While the angry barbs and finger pointing continue to assign blame for the horrendously poor response to the Gulf Coast hurricane catastrophe, Jim Amoss, the editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans -- now publishing out of Houma, La. -- is mincing no words. The feeble response, he says in an interview, is “ultimately his failure, and it is a colossal one that may have cost lives.”

On Sunday, an angry Times-Picayune published an "open letter" to the president -- which E&P was first to reprint on this site that morning, drawing wide national attention to it. Since then it has been republished by the Seattle Times and on CNN.com, read in full on MSNBC, and quoted in hundreds of other newspapers. Among other things, it called for the firing of Michael Brown, head of FEMA, and other top officials involved in fumbling the crisis.

Now Editor Amoss, in an interview with The Oregonian in Portland, has explained why the paper wrote it: "We needed to address the president directly .... We felt that this is ultimately his failure, and it is a colossal one that may have cost lives, and certainly much physical damage to our community."