President Bush assured us full information about the government's response to Hurricane Katrina.

On Sept. 6, a week after the storm destroyed much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Bush vowed that he would ''lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong."

On Sept. 15, Bush reaffirmed that ''Congress is preparing an investigation, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan repeated this pledge in at least five press briefings between Sept. 7 and Oct. 12. In his Sept. 19 briefing, McClellan said: ''We're going to work closely with Congress to make sure that they conduct a thorough investigation so that we can apply those lessons to future response efforts . . . There's going to be a bipartisan investigation by Congress. They're going to do a thorough investigation . . . The president's made it very clear that he accepts responsibility for the federal government's role."

The flood of promises have receded behind the White House's recovery and reconstruction efforts. This does not refer to the rebuilding of New Orleans. This is about the new stone walls at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Bush's reflex on every controversy, from energy policy to handling of intelligence, is to invoke executive privilege. Katrina is no different. He is refusing to provide Congress documents that might show how seriously Chief of Staff Andrew Card and other top advisers took Katrina.

The refusal is galling in light of this week's revelations that gut Bush's most famous statement on Katrina. Three days after Katrina hit, Bush told ABC-TV, ''I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm, but these levees got breached, and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded."

But several major print news organizations reported that two days before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had a computer slide presentation that warned Katrina could be worse than a fictional Category 3 hurricane in its mock preparedness exercises. Katrina roared into a Category 5 storm over the Gulf of Mexico (sustained winds of over 155 miles an hour) before hitting the coast as a Category 3 (sustained winds of 111 to 130 mph).

The FEMA report said Katrina's storm surge ''could greatly overtop levees and protective systems." It also said that mock projections of destruction ''is exceeded by Hurricane Katrina real-life impacts."

At 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29 and hours before the storm hit, the Department of Homeland Security sent an e-mail to the White House situation room. The e-mail, which the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported was written when Katrina was a Category 4, said, ''The potential for severe storm surge to overwhelm Lake Pontchartrain levees is the greatest concern for New Orleans." The report said any Category 4 storm ''will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching. This could leave the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months."

And yet the White House responded like a deer caught staring at a tidal wave. Under criticism for saying no one could have anticipated the breach of the levees, Bush tried on Sept. 12 to retrofit his statement into the context that ''a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through, at first people said, 'Whew!' There was a sense of relaxation . . . I was listening to people, probably over the air waves, say, 'The bullet has been dodged.' "

The problem for Bush is that the contradictions go beyond him. On Sept. 3, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff also said the combination of a Category 4 hurricane and the breach of the levees was a combination that was ''unreasonably foreseeable." He said, ''This major breach of the levee, while something itself that might have been anticipated, coming together (with the Category 4 storm) I think, was outside the scope of what people I think reasonably foresaw."

At that time, we did not know that there was a report from Chertoff's own storm analysts that warned, ''Any storm rated Category 4 or greater will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching." At a press conference Thursday, Bush defended his executive privilege on Katrina. He said he needs to protect the right to get ''sound" and ''unvarnished" advice in private. But his sound advice told him that Katrina's destruction was reasonably foreseeable. Despite Bush's stone walls, the truth has breached the levees.

Derrick Z. Jackson was a 2001 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary and a winner of commentary awards from the National Education Writers Association and the Unity Awards in Media from Lincoln University in Missouri. A Globe columnist since 1988, Jackson is a five-time winner and 10-time finalist for political and sports commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists. He is a three-time winner of the Sword of Hope commentary award from the New England Division of the American Cancer Society. Prior to joining the Globe, Jackson won several awards at Newsday, including the 1985 Columbia University Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City.

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