read these articles by the esteemed David McGowan. They're lengthy, complex, but there isn't a critical writer alive that is more thorough than McGowan.
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr73.htmlsnip
It is painfully obvious that many of the former residents of New Orleans will never be going home. Many did not survive, though we will never know the true number since it was apparent from early on that the death toll would be covered up. Of those who did survive, many have seen the last of their family homes. Residents of New Orleans probably didn’t realize it at the time, but the stage was set two months before Katrina came ashore, on June 23, 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, decreed that it was well within the ‘rule of law’ for the government to seize what is ostensibly privately held land so that that land can then be passed into the grubby, bloody hands of developers.
The stage was actually set earlier than that, in April 2005, when the United States Congress, in its infinite wisdom, opted to pass some bankruptcy ‘reform’ legislation. I’ll defer to the L.A. Times once again for an explanation of exactly how that ‘reform’ will come into play:
After virtually every major hurricane of the last 25 years, bankruptcy filings have grown significantly faster than usual as victims sought to shake off old debts in order to rebuild their economically ruined lives.
But unless changes are made to an overhaul of the nation’s bankruptcy law due to kick in next month, many of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and the resulting floods will have a substantially harder time winning court relief from loans they incurred for homes and businesses that are now gone, according to a variety of judges, lawyers and policy experts.
“Just because your house or car is somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t mean that your auto loan or mortgage went with it,” said Brady C. Williamson, who was appointed by President Clinton to head a national bankruptcy commission in the mid-1990s. (Peter Gosselin “New Bankruptcy Law Could Exact a Toll on Storm Victims,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2005)
Imagine, if you will, this purely – ahem – ‘hypothetical’ scenario (which, as we all know, could never happen in the land of the free and home of the brave): under the pretense that conditions are far too dangerous for you to stay, you and your family are forced from your family home by heavily armed troops. You are then shipped off, against your will, to some distant, unspecified location, where your actions are monitored lest you decide to do something crazy, such as attempting to return to what you, quite foolishly, still think of as your home. That home, meanwhile, is condemned and quickly bulldozed, though the actual damage to the property was quite minimal. The ground that your house used to stand on is seized by the government and will soon serve as the home of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at the new Disneyland New Orleans®. Having been stripped of everything that you once called your own – including your home and all its furnishings, the land it stood on, your vehicle(s), and your job – and having been separated from your friends and neighbors, you are now faced with the daunting prospect of completely rebuilding your life with little to work with other than a mountain of debt, which, you are quickly assured, you will be required to pay back. And guess what? This month’s payments are already past due.
If you were ever to find yourself in this ‘hypothetical’ predicament, which of the following would best describe your situation? (a) I live in some sort of hellish, Kafkaesque police state; (b) I live in the world’s greatest democracy; or (c) I’m Caucasian, so this doesn’t really apply to me – yet.
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That “glancing blow” would have serious repercussions – but not until the next day. Hurricane Katrina arrived on the shores of New Orleans on Monday morning, August 29. By the time night fell on the partially evacuated city, it appeared as though the danger had passed and New Orleans had successfully dodged a bullet. The Category 4 winds never really materialized, the rain was no match for New Orleans’ formidable pumping system, and all 350 miles of the city’s system of levees and canals held fast against the feared storm surges. Until, that is, the wee hours of the morning of Tuesday, August 30, when three canals (the 17th Street Canal, the London Street Canal and the Industrial Canal, aka the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal) suffered major breaches in no less than five separate locations.
The official story, for the first several weeks, was that storm surges from the mighty Katrina were simply too much for the overburdened levee walls to handle. The rising water first surged over the tops of the levee walls, we were to believe, sending the first floodwaters into New Orleans, and then the levee walls themselves ultimately succumbed to the surging waters. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Now, that’s a nice little story. It really is. It’s at least as good, I’d have to say, as any of the other stories cooked up in recent years to explain away unusual events. True, if you really give it some thought – like, say, for thirty seconds or so – then it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but that has never stopped a wild yarn from becoming a part of the new reality before, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.
Once upon a time, in a more innocent era, people might have questioned how it was that storm surges could have caused the breaches in the levees nearly a full day after the storm had hit town. “How can that be?” they might have asked. “The storm came through here on Monday and the levees weren’t breached until Tuesday. The wind and rain were pretty well gone by then, so it seems to me like it would have been kind of an odd time for a massive storm surge. And it seems pretty darn peculiar that all five of those breaches – all five of them! – occurred under cover of night some 18-21 hours after Katrina came ashore.”
Today, in these much more enlightened times, we would never raise such foolish questions. Instead, we instinctively do what is expected of all refined, cultured men and women of the twenty-first century: we warmly embrace whatever nonsensical lies are thrown our way, and then we go and share those lies with others, only to find that everyone else already knows the same lies, which is okay, as it turns out, because that makes it easier for us to all sit around and discuss current events as though we actually know what we’re talking about.
In this particular situation, however, we do not have to blindly accept the first official lie. There are slightly different rules at play here, because this is one of those cases where the official story has been officially repudiated. That official repudiation, however, was a rather coy one, which means that this is a situation where it is okay to believe either the first official lie or the second official lie. Either one will do just fine, just so long as you firmly believe in one of the two. The closest parallel I can think of here concerns the attack on the Pentagon on September 11. Readers will recall that at first it was claimed that the plane and everything in it was vaporized by the intense heat from the resulting fire. Later, however, it was claimed that the passengers were actually recovered and identified through DNA analysis, and that the plane had been largely reconstructed and was sitting in an unidentified aircraft hangar.
Obviously, both stories could not possibly be true, and, in fact, neither one of them was actually true. But that’s not the point here. The point here is that it is perfectly okay to be a true believer in either official version of reality. What is not okay is trying to insert your own reality, or, worse yet, a relatively objective reality into the mix. That would be considered a major faux pas. The important thing to remember here is that, while you are not limited to a specific official reality, you must choose from one of the available official realities. And as I started to say, there is a new official story concerning the breached levees. It goes something like this:
The levee breaches along two major canals that flooded New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina resulted from massive soil failures under concrete storm walls, not from hurricane surges that sent water over the tops of the walls as Army officials initially said, according to teams of investigators who have examined evidence in the last week. The findings appear to chip away at the simple story that the storm surge was much larger and higher than the walls were designed to handle … Investigators have found no evidence of such overflow and foundational scouring at the breaches in the London Avenue and 17th Street Canals, two main failures behind the central New Orleans flooding. In fact, in one case, water marks are a full 2½ feet below the tops of the walls. (Ralph Vartabedian “Soil Failure, Not Overflow, Cited in Levee Breaches,” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2005, Page A26)
and oh so very, much more here as well ALL copied with explicit permission from the author of course.
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At least one fact seems indisputable: neither "incompetence" nor "lack of preparation" can even begin to explain the actions of national, state and local officials in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It is perfectly obvious that there was a planned response, and that plan was fully implemented. The confusion over this has apparently arisen due to the erroneous belief that that plan had something to do with rescuing and providing aid and comfort to survivors.
If the problem was just that FEMA had failed to adequately respond to the disaster, then maybe, just maybe, we could write it off as incompetence. Far more difficult to explain away is that FEMA, and/or the Department of Homeland Security, actively prevented any other individuals or groups from responding. And we're not talking here about a couple of anomalous incidents. No, we're talking about an undeniable pattern of criminal behavior.
Among numerous other crimes against the people of New Orleans, FEMA declined an offer from the city of Chicago to send “44 Chicago Fire Department rescue and medical personnel and their gear, more than 100 Chicago police officers, 140 Streets and Sanitation, 146 Public Health and 8 Human Services workers, and a fleet of vehicles including 29 trucks, two boats and a mobile clinic.” Instead, FEMA asked Chicago to send just a single truck. (“Daley ‘Shocked’ at Federal Snub of Offers to Help,” Chicago Tribune, September 2, 2005)
FEMA also refused to allow into New Orleans “up to 500 Florida airboat pilots
volunteered to rescue Hurricane Katrina victims, transport relief workers and ferry supplies.” Many of the pilots had “spent thousands of their own dollars stocking their boats and swamp buggies with food, water, medical supplies and fuel.” (Nancy Imperiale “Airboaters Stalled by FEMA,” Sun Sentinel, September 2, 2005) Meanwhile, “More than 50 civilian aircraft responding to separate requests for evacuations from hospitals and other agencies swarmed to the area a day after Katrina hit, but FEMA blocked their efforts” as well. (“After 9/11, a Master Plan for Disasters Was Drawn; It Didn’t Weather the Storm,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2005)
Not to be outdone, the Department of Homeland Security refused to allow the Red Cross to deliver food. Said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the organization, “The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans.” (Ann Rodgers “Homeland Security Won’t Let Red Cross Deliver Food,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 3, 2005)
In other news, FEMA opted to all but ignore an offshore Naval ship, the USS Bataan, that was equipped with a 600-bed hospital, six operating rooms, a 1,200-man crew, helicopters, doctors, food, water, and the ability to desalinate up to 100,000 gallons of drinking water per day. According to a report in the Chicago Tribune, the “role in the relief effort of the sizable medical staff on board the Bataan was not up to the Navy, but to FEMA officials directing the overall effort.” (Stephen J. Hedges “Navy Ship Nearby Underused,” Chicago Tribune, September 4, 2005) In a similar vein, FEMA passed on an offer from the University of North Carolina to supply a state-of-the-art mobile hospital. (http://edition.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/09/04/katrina.sick.redtape.ap/)
On September 5, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) blasted FEMA in a report carried by London’s Financial Times: “Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by .” Landrieu also criticized FEMA for “dragging its feet” (a rather charitable characterization of FEMA's actions) when Amtrak offered the use of its trains to evacuate victims. (http://news.ft.com/cms/s/84aa35cc-1da8-11da-b40b-00000e) On September 6, an Associated Press report carried the following quote from Ben Morris, mayor of Slidell, Louisiana: “We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we’ve heard that they’ve gone around seizing equipment from our contractors.” (http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWLBLOG.ac3fcea.html)
More than a week after Katrina came ashore, the Associated Press reported that "hundreds of firefighters who volunteered to help rescue victims of Hurricane Katrina" had instead been whiling away their time "playing cards, taking classes on the Federal Emergency Management Agency's history and lounging at an Atlanta airport hotel." The FEMA official in charge of the firefighters explained that the agency "wanted to make certain they were sent where the need was greatest." And since FEMA apparently hadn't yet determined where the need was greatest, a week after the need arose, it was best to just let the skilled rescue workers sit idle. ("Eager to Help, Frustrated Firefighters Wait for Orders," Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2005, page A26)
Next came a report that a “German military plane carrying 15 tons of military rations for survivors of Hurricane Katrina was sent back by U.S. authorities … Since Hurricane Katrina struck the United States, many international donors have complained of frustration that bureaucratic entanglements have hindered shipments to the United States.” (Claudia Kemmer “German Plane with 15 Tons of Aid Turned Back From U.S.,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 10, 2005) And then came one of the most appalling stories of all, courtesy of The Advocate: “In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered to stop by a federal official because he wasn’t registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ‘I begged him to let me continue,’ said Perlmutter, who left his home and practice as an orthopedic surgeon in Pennsylvania to come to Louisiana and volunteer to care for hurricane victims. ‘People were dying, and I was the only doctor on the tarmac (at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport) where scores of nonresponsive patients lay on stretchers. Two patients died in front of me.’ … FEMA issued a formal response to Perlmutter’s story, acknowledging that the agency does not use voluntary physicians.” (Laurie Smith Anderson “Doctor Says FEMA Ordered Him to Stop Treating Hurricane Victims,” The Advocate, September 16, 2005)
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