House GOP Opens Slimmed-Down Inquiry Into Katrina

I would expect opposite results from a Democratic committee. They trust will as always be somewhere in between.

This is another watse of taxpayers dollars.

The official explanation for the collapse of some of the flood walls protecting New Orleans has been that Hurricane Katrina simply overwhelmed the system. But reports Wednesday in both The Washington Post and The New York Times suggested that Katrina might not have been as powerful as advertised and that the real culprit was the system itself - flood walls so poorly constructed that they were easily breached.
This points a finger at either the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw the design and construction of the flood walls, or Congress, which appears to have underfinanced the projects, or both.
Corps officials have said all along that the system was not designed to protect the city from hurricanes larger than Category 3, and corps spokesmen continue to insist that Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it hit the Gulf Coast. But federal meteorologists now say that New Orleans did not get the full brunt of the storm, whose strongest winds passed dozens of miles east of the city.
Other research, meanwhile, has turned up serious weaknesses in the thinner and less stable flood walls built along the city's canal system beginning in the 1960s. The failure of these walls led to much of the devastation.
Here again the research seems to contradict the official version, which is that surges reached the top of the flood walls, causing some sections to collapse. Yet Louisiana State University researchers doubt the water ever got that high. Even if it had, they contend, it would have been contained by properly constructed flood walls.
A detailed analysis of the storm and of the city's defenses will take months. It is not clear, for instance, whether the flood walls' weaknesses were the result of faulty engineering and shoddy workmanship on the corps' part or whether they resulted from Congress's unwillingness over the years to provide enough money.
What is clear is that whatever investigation Congress undertakes, either on its own or with outside counsel, it must meet high standards of diligence and spare no one, including those in Congress.