Joe Bruno, agreed to an interview request today with Levees.org after getting out of federal court in New Orleans where he was representing flood survivors in a suit against the Army Corps of Engineers and Washington Group International.

We wanted to know Mr. Bruno’s take on a recent appeals panel’s reversal of its own ruling in March of this year. The panel now says the Army Corps of Engineers, though already found guilty of negligent operation and maintenance of the MR-GO shipping channel, cannot be held financially liable.

“This ruling is obscenely obnoxious,” said Mr. Bruno. “It’s as though the panel said in March that a red light is red, and supplied an abundance of reasons and precedents that the red light is red. But now, the panel says the red light is green, and says it in just one and a half pages. This is politics, not law.”

Before signing off, Mr. Bruno recommended that anyone interested in the strange case of the appeals court about-face should read Robert Verchick’s excellent one-page analysis.

http://www.progressivereform.org/CPRBlog.cfm?idBlog=08E62277-9773-4CA1-85E69FD4E5843072

Robert Verchick is a Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar at Loyola University, recent winner of a Fulbright, and author of Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press, 2010).