Hey, suck-ups! Leave them kids alone!

Another Leak in the Wall,
Part 1,577

We don't need no associations,
We don't need no thought control,
The dark sarcasm of "consultants,"
Suck-ups, leave them kids alone!
Hey! Lawyers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all, it's just another leak in the wall.
All in all, you're just another breach in the wall.

HERE'S WHAT the American Society of Civil Engineers does: First, it takes a whole bunch of money -- almost a million bucks -- from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study why New Orleans drowned even though Hurricane Katrina only sideswiped it.

Then the engineers' study group dances to the tune its client plays -- so the members don't look into this, and they don't look into that, because it's "outside our scope." At least that's what one ASCE member told the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

And then, voila! The engineer group's "peer review" wonders just how much busted levees had to do with flooding New Orleans, anyway, and offers a much less harsh assessment of the Corps' performance than did two independent panels of engineers and other experts studying why the city went into the soup.

Or, rather, why the soup went into the city.

And when the nonprofit advocacy group Levees.org posted a hilarious-but-pointed send up of the "whitewash" -- a video done by high-school kids at the Isidore Newman School -- the group decided to play some hardball. It demanded that Levees.org take down the video.

One can presume there was an "or else" in there somewhere.

You have to wonder whether the ASCE would be so insistent if Levees.org had a million bucks to sling around.

Anyway, the Picayune is on top of things. And we can show you the nefarious teen production today only because the newspaper posted it itself after Levees.org pulled it down. Grassroots advocacy groups lack the legal resources million-dollar federal contracts can buy you.

Here's some of the Times-Picayune coverage:

The civil engineering group's most controversial claims were that much of the death and destruction would have happened even without the levee failure, and that the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet did not serve as a hurricane highway into New Orleans. Reviews by other scientific organizations were much tougher on the corps.

The American Society of Civil Engineers confirmed the launch of an internal ethics probe of its staff and members based on complaints by a University of California-Berkeley professor, who served on a separate independent panel investigating levee failures.

ASCE officials took the unusual step on Tuesday of e-mailing a letter to its Louisiana members that outlined its response to the criticisms of Levees.org in its online video and others.

"Although it was expressly not our intent, the press release was interpreted by some to be supportive of the corps instead of being critical of the mistakes the corps made," said the letter, signed by ASCE President David Mongan. "A few outspoken critics have even castigated ASCE for appearing to pander to the corps and for apparently being apologetic for the many corps mistakes made in the design and construction of the pre-Katrina hurricane protection system.

"This could not be further from the intent of the press release," Mongan wrote.

The civil engineering group is bristling at a video spoofing its levee investigation recently posted on the Internet site YouTube by the local advocacy group Levees.org. The video implies that ASCE engineers were "in some way bribed or corrupted by the corps," the association contends. They demanded it be taken down.

In the spoof, narrators say, "The Army Corps of Engineers asked the American Society of Civil Engineers to hand-pick some members to find the truth.

"Then they paid them nearly a million dollars and awarded them medals of honor. Way to go, guys!" The American Society of Civil Engineers accepted close to $1 million from the corps to compensate the external review committee members for their time and expenses during the two-year investigation.

"These people wouldn't be able to devote that amount of time to this investigation otherwise," ASCE Executive Director Patrick Natale said. "These are subject matter experts who were getting paid nowhere near what they were worth for their expertise."

The video was produced by Stanford Rosenthal, a senior at Isidore Newman School and the son of Levees.org President Sandy Rosenthal, who said her group would remove the video from the Web by Tuesday night, although she believes the allegations it contains are accurate. It has become an Internet phenomenon, garnering tens of thousands of viewers in just a week.

"I told them, yes, we'd take it down, but our Webmaster is 17 years old and is on a field trip and out of town," Rosenthal said Tuesday. "That same youngster is going to be honored this week with the outstanding youth and philanthropy award of the Association of Fundraising Professionals." The student she is referring to is her son.

The ASCE also sent a copy of its letter to Isidore Newman officials, and Rosenthal said she also informed the school that the video was being removed from the Web.

"The reason we're taking it down, quite simply, is we just don't have the personnel or resources to wage a legal battle with the ASCE," Rosenthal said, "even though we stand by every word of the public announcement and contend it's completely accurate."

Levees.org wants a congressionally mandated, independent "8/29 Investigation," similar to the independent federal investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

AND IF LEVEES.ORG ever gets that independent investigation, I bet it'll find that the Corps, the ASCE, FEMA, the Bush Administration . . . it'll find that, all in all, they're just so many leaks in the wall.