Scant offered intl. aid helped Katrina victims-WPost

WASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) - Just $40 million of $854 million offered to the United States to help the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina has been used so far, and most of the offered aid was never collected, the Washington Post reported in Sunday's editions.

Key supplies and services such as mobile telephone systems, medicines and cruise ships to house victims were delayed or refused because the U.S. government could not handle them, the newspaper said.

The 2005 disaster so far has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $125 billion, and complaints continue about the slow pace of recovery in New Orleans, which was devastated by floods.

The public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington amassed more than 10,000 pages of documents from U.S. diplomats around the world that have been released intermittently since last fall under the Freedom of Information Act, and made them available to the Post, the newspaper said.

It cited an exchange of documents in which State Department officials worried over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medical supplies had been left to spoil and were destroyed.

"Tell them we blew it," one official wrote, according to the newspaper. But then she added: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."

U.S. officials turned down numerous offers of troops and search and rescue teams, even as New Orleans residents waited to be rescued from rooftops, the newspaper said.

The United States declined 54 of 77 recorded offers of aid from three of its closest allies -- Canada, Britain and Israel -- according to a State Department table, the newspaper said.

"There is a lack of accountability in where the money comes in and where it goes," the newspaper quoted Melanie Sloan, executive director of the public interest group, as saying.

"It's clear that they're trying to hide their ineptitude, incompetence and malfeasance," she said, according to the Post.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said in a statement the U.S. government appreciated support from around the world and that Katrina had proved to be "a unique event in many ways," the Post said.

"As we continue our planning for the future, we will draw on the lessons learned from this experience to ensure that we make the best use of any possible foreign assistance that might be offered," it quoted Casey as saying.

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