6A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14. 2006
Last-minute shopping
Megan True/KANSAN
Andrew Pepperdine, Olathe freshman, shops for a Valentine's present for his girlfriend Monday afternoon at Dillons, 1015 W. 23rd St. Pepperdine said he was trying to pick out the right gift.
Bush administration fires back at Brown
BY LARA JAKES JORDAN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NATION
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Monday pushed back hard against Katrina-response criticism leveled by ex-disaster agency chief Michael Brown and congressional investigators.
"I reject outright the suggestion that President Bush was anything less than fully involved," said White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff "unequivocaly and strongly" rejected sugges
Both spoke at a conference of state emergency management directors in suburban Alexandria. Va.
Their rebuttal came as a Republican-written House report blamed government-wide ineptitude for mishandling Hurricane Katrina relief. A report by Congress' investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, reached similar conclusions and singled out Chertoff for delays.
tions that his agency was preoccupied with terror threats at the expense of preparing for natural disasters.
Both Townsend and Chert-
off took swipes at Brown, who resigned under pressure in September as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"There is no place for a lone ranger in emergency management," said Chertoff, whose Department of Homeland Security is FEMA's parent agency.
Brown testified before a Senate committee last week that he issued repeated warnings to the White House and DHS the day the hurricane struck, Aug. 29, that levees had failed and New Orleans was seriously flooding.
mouse and DHS had dragged their feet. Bush and other federal officials have said they did not know until the next day, Aug. 30, that levees had been breached.
He suggested that the White
"For Secretary Chertoff to claim that I failed to keep him informed beiles the numerous telephone calls and e-mails between me and him prior to, during and after landfall" of the storm, Brown said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
On Monday, Brown defended his performance.
Brown also applauded congressional investigations into the government's response.
WORLD
Hussein chants against Bush at hearings
BY HAMZA HENDAWI
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Prosecutors tried to link Saddam Hussein directly to torture and executions, producing documents with his orders and handwriting and putting one of his closest confidants on the stand Monday.
After the raucous start, prosecutors made their strongest attempt yet to prove Saddam's role in a wave of arrests and executions that followed a 1982 attempt on his life in the Shiite
"This is a cheap attitude," Khaled al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The former Iraqi leader and his co-defendants were forced to attend the session. Saddam appeared in a traditional Arab robe and bedroom slippers instead of his usual crisp suit, arguing vehemently with the judge and shouting "Down with Bush!" as he waved his finger.
The defendants have rejected court-appointed attorneys named to replace their own lawyers who walked out of the trial last month, and are demanding the removal of chief judge Rouf Abdel-Rahman. In Jordan, Saddam's chief defense lawyer said there were no plans to end the boycott and denounced the court for forcing the former leader to attend.
His top co-defendant and half brother, Barzan Ibrahim — dressed only in long underwear — struggled with guards as he was pulled into the courtroom. Ibrahim, the former chief of intelligence, then sat on the floor with his back to the judge in protest for much of the session.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein gestures in court inside the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq, during the latest session of his trial Monday.
village of Dujail.
Twenty-six prosecution witnesses have testified since the Saddam trial began Oct. 19, many providing accounts of torture and imprisonment in the crackdown, but they could not directly pin them on Saddam.
For the first time, the prosecution introduced documents and put two former members of Saddam's regime on the stand. The witnesses included one of his closest aides, Ahmed Hussein Khudayer al-Samarrai, head of Saddam's presidential office from 1984 to 1991 and then again from 1995 until Saddam's ouster in 2003.
Screens in the courtroom, including the press gallery, showed a document in Arabic dated to 1984 allegedly written and signed by Saddam in which he ratified "the execution of the Dujail criminals." A handwritten note at the bottom was allegedly by al-Samarrai.
Asked if the note was his handwriting, al-Samarrai, 62, said he could not be sure.
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