Bryan Preston is founder of Junkyard Blog, where he has done excellent work on the New Orleans Bus Fiasco. He has exceeded his bandwidth limit and his blog is down, but he is still gathering info on local government failures in the hurricane aftermath. [UPDATE: Bryan will be guest-blogging here until Junkyard Blog comes back online.] Bryan sends along a transcript from a DoD press briefing about the meltdown of the New Orleans Police Department–an abject failure that the Left simply cannot pin on President Bush. Read the whole thing. NOPD flaked out…bigtime:

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More: Solomonia noted the DoD briefing yesterday.

GEN. BLUM: …The real issue, particularly in New Orleans, is that no one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans. Once that assessment was made, that the normal 1500 man police force in New Orleans was substantially degraded, which contributed obviously to less police presence and less police capability, then the requirement became obvious and that’s when we started flowing military police into the theater.

Two days ago we flowed 1400 military policemen in. Yesterday, 1400 more. Today 1400 more. Today there are 7,000 citizen soldiers — Army National Guard, badge-carrying military policemen and other soldiers trained in support to civil law enforcement — that are on the streets, available to the mayor, provided by the governor to the mayor to assist the New Orleans police department.

I am absolutely confident that the security situation as it has improved in the last 24 hours will improve two-fold in the next 24 hours, and soon it won’t be an issue at all.

Will something ever go wrong in New Orleans? Sure. Things went wrong in New Orleans and every other populated area around in our country and around the world every day. But I think you’ll see a return to normal levels very soon, perhaps in the next 24 hours.

Q: General, you mentioned a disintegration of the New Orleans Police Department. Do you know how many officers are still on duty?

GEN. BLUM: I would rather not say. I think you’d be better to refer that question to the mayor of New Orleans. I have my own estimate. I would say they are significantly degraded and they have less than one-third of their original capability.

Q: So is it fair to say it is the National Guard that’s keeping law and order in New Orleans?

GEN. BLUM: No. As long as there’s one uniformed police officer in the city of New Orleans, we will send as many National Guard soldiers to augment, support and work in support of that lone law enforcement officer as necessary. So if hypothetically there’s only one left, who’s in charge? It’s still that lone police officer supported by the National Guard in their role as military support to law enforcement.

We are not in the lead. We have no need nor intention of imposing martial law or having the military police the United States of America.

Q: What happened to the other police, general?

GEN. BLUM: Again, that can be best addressed, but what was told to me by the Mayor day before yesterday is many of them lost their homes, many of them lost ability to get to the precinct, many of them who did show up found what they were dealing with so overwhelming and dangerous or threatening to them as an individual that they made the personal decision to not risk their life until the situation made more sense to them. That was an individual decision, it was not the police chief’s decision or the mayor’s decision. I think that the mayor and police chief are working right now to reconstitute the New Orleans Police Department, but that question would much better be addressed to them for detail.

[SNIP]

Q: One quick follow-up. Is it fair to say, using the convention center as an example, that one reason it took until Friday to get aid in is the National Guard needed time to build up a response team with military police to ensure law and order because the New Orleans Police Department had degraded so much?

GEN. BLUM: That is not only fair, it is accurate. You’ve concisely stated exactly what was needed, and I told you why. We took the time to build the right force. The outcome was superb. No lives hurt, nobody injured. It was done almost invisibly.

Q: And you estimate there’s about a third of the New Orleans Police Department left. Do you remember about how many are in the New Orleans Police Department?

GEN. BLUM: On a normal day they should have 1,500 paid officers in New Orleans, give or take. Some people have said it’s 1,650. It’s in the rough order of 1,500-man police force, and I think the mayor told me they’re down to less than 500.

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