President Bush has named Frances Fragos Townsend, his domestic security adviser, to lead an internal White House inquiry into the administration's performance in handling Hurricane Katrina, Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman, said Monday.

Of course! Makes perfect sense. Why complicate things by dragging in some outside bureaucratic flunky to run your token investigation, when you've got one sitting right at your elbow? A flunky with prior cover up experience, no less:

Ms. Townsend, a former federal prosecutor, has undertaken a number of sensitive and high-profile tasks for Mr. Bush, most recently overseeing the reorganization of the nation's intelligence services after the intelligence failures about Iraq's weapons capabilities.

(Note how smoothly the boys in the New Pravda's steno pool handle the euphemisms of Bushspeak: "reorganization" for "purge," and "intelligence failures" for "lies." I wish my dog was that well trained.)

We've met Ms. Townsend before -- she's the brainless, heartless bitch who tried to turn the London bombings into a selling point for Shrub's war in Iraq, by arguing that:

the war in Iraq attracts terrorists "where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London."

Thus consigning the dead and maimed civilians of Iraq to the limbo land of political expediency -- the human equivalent of road kill.

But the more relevant atrocity is Ms. Townsend's involvement in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, in which she played the role of bureaucratic troubleshooter sent to speed up the production line:

The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense "pressure" from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to "pull the intelligence out" of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib . . .

Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, described "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to get information from detainees, including a visit to the prison last fall by an aide to Rice that was "purely on detainee operations and reporting" . . . Rice staffer Fran Townsend said Thursday that she spent about two hours at Abu Ghraib last November and recalls that Jordan was her guide.

Naturally, none of this makes it into the New Pravda story ("What do you think we are, journalists?") although Townsend's alleged reputation for being "tough and independent" does -- albeit without a shred of sourcing or any substantive evidence of her tough independence, other than a brief mention of the fact that she's a Republican lawyer who worked in the Clinton Justice Department. (I know a few Clinton partisans who would say the same about Janet Reno.)

But Townsend's previous dirty work assignments at least involved her area of expertise -- intelligence policy and the arcane, Orwellian laws governing the national security state. On the other hand, her resume contains absolutely no job experience whatsoever in the fields of disaster response, emergency relief or the management of large, bureaucratic organizations.

Which I guess makes her the perfect candidate for the job, from the Cheney administration's point of view.

I wonder if she knows anything about Arabian horses . . .