Verbatim: Oct. 31, 2005

By DEPARTMENT Monday, Oct. 31, 2005

    • "I can't get out of my head the visions of children and babies I saw sitting [in the Superdome], helpless, looking at me and hoping I could make a difference."MARTY BAHAMONDE, the lone FEMA official who was in New Orleans when Katrina struck, in an e-mail to a colleague on Sept. 3. Bahamonde read the e-mail last week while testifying to Congress and said his superiors failed to respond to his repeated calls for help

    "Come and fight like men." JIM BAKER, U.S. Army sergeant, taunting the Taliban by loudspeaker after members of his unit apparently set the corpses of two Afghan fighters on fire. The scene was captured on video by an Australian photojournalist

    "There is some background noise here ... but the American people expect me to do my job, and I'm going to." PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, responding to a reporter's question about whether he was preoccupied by the controversies that are dogging his Administration

    "I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing and followed up with some reporting of my own." BILL KELLER, executive editor of the New York Times, in a memo to his staff last week about the lessons learned from his paper's handling of Plamegate

    "We thought the tsunami was bad. This is worse." JAN EGELAND, U.N. emergency-aid coordinator, as the death toll from the Pakistan earthquake rose to an estimated 80,000 and relief workers struggled to help 3 million displaced survivors

    "Death by blog is not really the way to go." NEIL FRENCH, former creative director of ad giant WPP Group, who quit amid protests after he said at an industry event that women "don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to. They're crap."

    "If he doesn't drink and eat bacon and generally act like a pig, I don't think it's Homer." AL JEAN, executive producer of The Simpsons, which is now airing on Arab TV with substantial changes to accommodate Arab sensibilities

    Sources: Los Angeles Times (2); AP (2); Guardian; New York Times; Independent