Six Months After Hurricane Katrina, Members Of Congress Survey Damage
BLITZER: Our Zain Verjee is off today. Fredricka Whitfield joining us from the CNN global headquarters in Atlanta with a closer look at other stories. Hi, Fred.</s>FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello to you, Wolf. After a day of relative calm, Baghdad residents are awaiting word on whether a daytime curfew will be extended. Vehicles were banned from city streets today to prevent sectarian attacks on the weekly Muslim holy day. Iraqi authorities say a wave of violence since an attack on a Muslim shrine last week has now claimed at least 500 lives. But a top U.S. military official says Iraqi security forces are responding well and a full-scale civil war is unlikely.</s>GEN. GEORGE CASEY, US ARMY: Anything can happen. But I think as long as the coalition forces are here on the ground working with the Iraqi security forces and the vast majority of the Iraqi people remain committed to forming a government of national unity, which I firmly believe that they do, I think the chances of that are not good.</s>WHITFIELD: And we'll go live to the Pentagon for much more on this story in the next hour. And we're just receiving word of a tentative agreement between Northwest Airlines and its pilots on a tentative pay cut deal. Pilots were the last of the airlines' workers without a deal. This afternoon's agreement if approved, could avert a strike. Union leaders are expected to meet tonight to discuss the deal. And more than 2,000 people are still listed as missing from the hurricane Katrina disaster. Residents of three hard-hit sections of New Orleans are anxiously awaiting the results of new sweeps for bodies in their neighborhoods. Search teams and cadaver dogs are combing through debris in the devastated ninth ward and two other areas. And city officials say Federal funding for the long delayed searches came through only recently, Wolf. We'll have a live report from New Orleans in the next hour of</s>THE SITUATION ROOM. BLITZER: Thanks Fred, very much. Thirty four members of Congress are in Louisiana right now getting a firsthand look at the damage six months after hurricane Katrina. The House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. They vowed to put aside their differences to better help hurricane victims try to rebuild and recover. But two key figures in the Federal government's Katrina response have not put aside their own personal differences. The former FEMA Director Michael Brown and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Brown was here in THE SITUATION ROOM last night. Listen to what Brown says should happen to Chertoff.</s>MICHAEL BROWN, FORMER FEMA DIRECTOR: It appears to me that when Chertoff does things like tells me that I've got to go to Baton Rouge and plop my butt down on a seat in Baton Rouge and run a disaster from there. I think that shows naivete about how disasters are run. And so you either got to get with it or to move on.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Should he lose his job?</s>BROWN: Well, I think so.</s>BLITZER: Brown is going to return to THE SITUATION ROOM tonight live in our 7:00 p.m. Eastern hour for more on his take, what the administration did right, what it did wrong and the immediate response to hurricane Katrina. Michael Brown, live once again here with Jeanne Meserve and me and THE SITUATION ROOM coming up tonight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Meantime, the White House continues to dispute allegations that the president ignored warnings of how bad Katrina would be.</s>TRENT DUFFY, WHITE HOUSE DEPY PRESS SEC: The president was well aware that this was a devastating storm. And we pre-positioned more manpower and material ahead of the storm than ever before. It turned out not to be enough. Now as to FEMA going forward, we do need to strengthen their capabilities, particularly in a regional sense. One thing we learned in Katrina was that we do need to have closer relationships with state and local officials so that when crisis strikes, we're working with people that we know, that know the communities best and that know the neighborhoods the best. And that's what we are doing.</s>BLITZER: Trent Duffy says state and local responders will continue to be the first line of defense in cases of natural disasters or other catastrophic events. Up next here in THE SITUATION ROOM, President Bush calling the nuclear treaty deal he sealed in India historic. Is it also a political burden though for him here at home? We are going to take a closer look. And the immigration wars. We'll tell you what's happening right now and how it's dividing Republicans. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.