The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • A13

Orlando Sentinel: PRODUCT: OS DESK: ASEC DATE: 02-16-2006 EDITION: MET ZONE: MET PAGE: A13.0 DEADLINE: 23.12 OP: apinkston COMPOSETIME: 00.48 CMYK Orlando Sentinel final THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2006 A13 Panel lambastes Chertoff for his response to Katrina CHERTOFF FROM Al RED HUBERORLANDO SENTINEL Joyce Kesse (2nd from left), the mother of Jennifer Kesse, joins a group hug Monday with family members outside the Mosaic at Millenia condos in Orlando, where Jennifer lived before her disappearance. Armchair sleuths abuzz with Kesse tips DENNIS COOKTHE ASSOCIATED PRESS Rep. Tom Davis, R.Va., (left) looks at a poster-size copy of 'A Failure of a 600-page report by a House special investigating committee. The report chided U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for being too passive in his response to Hurricane Katrina.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Chumuckla, is at right. 'Secretary Chertoff failed to take the reins from Brown quickly REP. TOM DAVIS, R-VA. J7 mittee, acknowledged that his department had received e-mails describing the unfolding catastrophe.

However, he said his staff decided to withhold information from him until it had been verified by "ground truth" again because of his experience during Sept. 11, when top officials were bombarded with imprecise data and unchecked rumors. He said he has since taken steps to make sure that would not happen in future. In the months after Katrina, criticism of the botched federal response focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its director, Michael Brown, who resigned under fire. But FEMA is part of the Homeland Security Department.

As investigators have dug deeper, the spotlight has shifted to Chertoff because of his failure to step in despite clear signs that the response was going awry. Although Chertoff was hailed as a brilliant choice when President Bush picked him to head the department more than a year ago and was confirmed unanimously by the Senate, the criticism of his conduct during Katrina has become so pointed that a House special investigating committee titled its 600-page report "A Failure of Initiative." It chided Chertoff for being too passive. The report was released Wednesday, although many of its findings had been reported earlier. In its opening pages, the House report noted a succession of steps Chertoff "should have" taken before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and after the government began to stumble. Most, if not all the steps were part of the elaborate procedures that had been developed for responding to disasters, the report said.

The House report was especially devastating for Chertoff and the Bush administration because it was written largely by Republicans Democrats boycotted most of the committee's sessions and because it painted the government's failures with a broad brush. "Secretary Chertoff failed to take the reins from Brown quickly enough," said Rep. Tom Davis, the committee chairman. "The White House failed to act on the massive amounts of information at its disposal." On the Senate side, Collins particularly criticized Chertoff for waiting until after the disaster had struck to designate a point person to manage the federal response, as called for in the government's advance plan. "That's like having the generals show up after the battle had already begun," she said.

Chertoff said he had thought FEMA knew more about dealing with hurricanes than anyone else in govern- sue the perpetrators. He said he was trying to avoid that mistake with Katrina. "I didn't want to get in their hair," he said of FEMA and other operations managers. Chertoff also attributed his policy of limiting the flow of information to senior officials to his Sept. 1 1 experience.

Sen. Carl Levin, citing a chain of e-mails about flooding in New Orleans, asked why the messages "never got to you," why no one is being "held accountable for failing to do what they were supposed to do." Chertoff said that his top coordinators at the department's operations center wanted to make sure the information they forwarded to him had been substantiated. In addition, some e-mail warnings that the committee said had been sent to the Homeland Security operations center never reached it, he said. At the start of the Senate hearing, Collins expressed incredulity at the "late, uncertain and ineffective" DHS response to Katrina. "If our government failed so utterly in preparing for and responding to a disaster that was long predicted and imminent for days, we must wonder how much more profound the failure would be if a disaster were to take us completely by surprise, such as a terrorist attack," she said.

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper. or whether her computer's Web history searches and e-mails were checked. As of late Wednesday, there were more than 370 messages on 121 topics on the site's "suggestion" forum. 'Were there any moving vanstrucks in the complex on Monday 123 or Tues 125?" reads a typical comment on the site. "Have these all been checked out? Also is there a garbage pickup on Tuesday Morning? Maybe they saw something.

Are there any people with medical conditions Might want to question them, they sometimes have delusional feelingsfantasies or relationships in their mind with people that haven't a clue how they feel." 3,200 words of advice One Web posting on the Kesse Web site is more than 3,200 words long, throwing out a blizzard of questions and ideas that could serve as a worthy outline for an episode of CSI. Another offers to contact a person at NASA who may be able to provide real-time satellite images of possible crime scenes. Some tips come in the old-fashioned way by phone. More than a dozen psychics have called Orlando police offering their visions, said homicide Sgt. Richard Ring, who is supervising the investigation.

And Cri-meline has received an unusual number of calls from people offering advice to cops, rather than typical informational tips, said Orlando Detective Barb Bergen, who helps manage the anonymous-tip hotline at 1-800-423-8477. The sheer volume of information and advice means that the task of sifting through the information is daunting. Crimeline makes reports on each one of its Kesse callers, who could be eligible for a reward of up to $115,000. Orlando police also logs its tips even the ones from psychics, Ring said. Real tipsters sometimes pose as psychics to conceal their identity.

Drew Kesse, Jennifer's father, regularly pleads with television audiences to report even seemingly insignificant information to authorities. They also monitor postings on their Web site daily and pass some of the advice to police, Drew Kesse said. "We don't know what information will lead us to Jennifer," Kesse said. Willoughby Mariano can be reached at wmarianoorlandosentinel.com or 407420-5171. MIXED MESSAGE THE STUDY: A huge 7-year study of whether calcium and vitamin-D supplements can protect against bone breaks in older women offered disappointing, mixed results.

THE FINDINGS: The supplements offered no blanket protection in the healthy postmenopausal women in the study, but there was a modest benefit for women 60 or older and those who take their tablets most faithfully. IMPLICATIONS: Experts are sticking with government guidelines that say women should keep taking their calcium and vitamin D. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS KESSE FROM A 1 The public long has offered homemade crime theories to police, but never as they do nowadays, when the Internet provides unlimited cyberspace for would-be profilers, law-enforcement expert Richard B. Weinblatt said. And with crime a prime topic on shows such as America's Most Wanted, CNN's Nancy Grace and Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, local cases such as Kesse's are presented to audiences throughout the country, meaning the neighborhood watch has gone nationwide.

"It's almost a case of, 'be careful what you wish said Weinblatt, a former police chief who teaches at Seminole Community College. Kesse, a 24-year-old financial analyst, was reported missing when she did not show up for work on Jan. 24. Her car was found two days later, at a complex about a mile from her Con-roy Road condominium triggering a frenzy of media coverage, police activity and public interest that has kept Kesse's smiling face on local and national news shows and Web sites. By all accounts, she led a life on the straight and narrow, making her disappearance one of the rare missing-persons cases where a troubled past doesn't explain what happened.

Speculation on her whereabouts has rolled in, much of it as posts on Web sites such as the Orlando Sentinel's Crime Blog and jenniferkesse.com, a site the family is using to connect with the community members who have turned out by the hundreds to search for clues. Some Web comments mix prayers for the Kesse family with frustration at the lack of information that police have made public, assuming wrongly, police say that the silence of detectives means they aren't already doing many of the things people suggest. Police say they have released limited information, fearing they might jeopardize the investigation. Check her alarm clock On jenniferkesse.com, visitors have swapped names of specific criminal profilers or psychics they think Orlando police should consult. Some people give investigators detailed advice, asking them, for example, to check whether Kesse's alarm was set to ring Jan.

24, the morning when she failed to show up for work, of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said the results strongly suggested that women 60 or older follow government recommendations for calcium and vitamin to maintain healthy bones. Women should take supplements only if they cannot get enough calcium through their diets and vitamin through exposure to sunlight, she said. The decision for women in their 50s was less clear. In a related study, researchers said calcium also offered no protective effects from colon cancer. It was possible that the seven-year study did not last long enough to see an effect because cancer can take many years to develop, researchers said.

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper. CHIP SOMODEVILLAGETTY IMAGES The Rev. Lennox Yearwood (right), president and chief executive officer of the Hip Hop Caucus, interrupts the testimony of U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff (left) on Wednesday. 'Women and children are being thrown out on the Yearwood shouted before being asked to sit down and be quiet.

ment. Questioned about his failure to work closely with FEMA, Chertoff said he knew his relationship with Brown was strained but said it never occurred to him that Brown deliberately would ignore the secretary and establish procedures for coordinating the response. Brown testified last week that he thought it would "waste my time" to consult with Chertoff. calcium benefits limited in older women, study says In explaining his failure to be proactive, the secretary recalled that he had been serving as assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Justice Department when terrorists struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. "I was on duty on 9-1 1," he said.

After the attacks, he said, high-level bureaucratic infighting hampered efforts to deal with the attacks and pur- supplements experienced hip fractures at a rate of 14 of every 10,000 women compared with a rate of 16 of 10,000 for those taking placebos. Only when researchers parsed the data to examine a subgroup of women those 60 or older who were the most diligent taking their pills did they find some evidence that the supplements could prevent hip fractures. Those taking supplements had hip fractures at a rate of 10 of 10,000 women compared with a rate of 14 of 10,000 for women in the placebo group. Gauging the importance of the results was difficult. Researchers said one problem was that all the women were taking relatively high amounts of calcium in their diets to begin with.

What's more, women in the placebo group who had been tak Vitamin VITAMIN FROM A 1 have fueled sales of calcium supplements to the tune of nearly $1 billion year. Despite the study's weak support for calcium supplements, most researchers continued to endorse taking them if needed to meet federal guidelines for calcium and vitamin D. "It's like the old expression: It couldn't hurt," said Dr. Norman Lasser of the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey and one of the study's authors. He acknowledged the report "couldn't be called a ringing endorsement" of calcium.

Federal guidelines recommend that women 50 or older consume 400 units of vitamin and 1,200 milligrams of calcium daily, equivalent to four 8-ounce glasses of milk. Some studies have found that as few as 5 per ing calcium pills before entering the study were allowed to continue, potentially improving their bone health. Another problem, researchers said, was that a high percentage of women had trouble sticking to the supplement regimen, which required them to take pills twice each day. By the end of the study, just 59 percent of the participants were faithfully taking their pills. Dr.

Joel S. Finkelstein, an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in an editorial accompanying the study that the supplements also might have shown greater benefit if the women received higher dosages of vitamin D. Given the difficulties, "it was a miracle we got the results we did," Lasser, one of the study's authors, said. Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director cent of older women now meet those requirements.

The $18 million study was part of the Women's Health Initiative, a giant federal study that a few years ago showed hormone treatment after menopause conferred more risks than benefits. Last week, the study challenged the benefits of low-fat diets. The calcium study tracked 36,000 women for seven years. Half of the women received 1,000 milligrams of calcium and 400 units of vitamin daily. The rest received a placebo.

Researchers expected a positive result because calcium and vitamin which aids the absorption of calcium, have long been assumed to increase bone strength. They were surprised when the results showed no significant difference. Those taking.