Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by greed.
"Corps never pursued design doubts" is the claim on the article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Apparently it was not simply Katrina's storm surge that flooded the city of New Orleans (causing approximately 900 counted fatalities and a large part of the US$57 billion dollars of insured damage from the storm); no, it was the improperly engineered levees that collapsed when the storm surge hit them. Who knew that peat doesn't give good support when you anchor a levee in it? (Well, someone knew, because otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to do their core samples from below the level of the peats.)
And it turns out that the Army Corps of Engineers knew about these design failures in 1990, but didn't bother to do anything except hide the reports away until after the levees collapsed and the city flooded.
Ho ho ho.
And, in unrelated news, Tropical Storm Zeta -- the 27th named Atlantic storm of the year! -- has spun up in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean.
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Those responsible need to be held criminally liable. But this is of course much more than an individual problem. It is a problem of a political culture that has institutionalized corruption and is driven by greed.