New FEMA story...Camp Greyhound

[Lagomorph]

Did this really happen in America?” Asked in the Hurricane Katrina chronicle “Zeitoun,” by the wife of the man whose harrowing storm odyssey is the heart of the book, the question hangs over the story like a cloud. Answering it is the mission of this worthy addition to our understanding of the 2005 disaster.

“Zeitoun” evolved from a Katrina oral history collection, “Voices from the Storm.” According to “Zeitoun’s” thorough endnotes, even among the compelling narratives in that collection, the Zeitouns’ story stood out and inspired further investigation.

Dave Eggers is one of nonfiction’s most inventive practitioners (his memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” was included in the 2009 Los Angeles Times list of “61 Essential Post-Modern Reads”). However, “Zeitoun” could slip seamlessly into a newspaper’s daily pages. In clean, subtly adorned narrative prose crafted from the perspective of the husband and the wife in alternating sections and chapters, the book is a fast-paced, fair-minded and rational, but shocking, expose.

“Zeitoun” depicts the Kafkaesque — here the adjective is deserved — nightmare of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, co-owner with his wife, Kathy, of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor in New Orleans.

Kathy and Zeitoun are almost too good to be true. For example: Zeitoun as a younger man in New Orleans (where he came after immigrating to Houston from Syria) was on his way to a contracting job one morning via bicycle (he didn’t own a car) and blew a tire.

http://www.buffalonews.com/185/story/772426.html

[barbtries]

1. read the entire article

this snip does not begin to tell the story. which is almost beyond belief.

sometimes i think there should be a push for justice for the gwbush admin on more than one front: the war in iraq (managed by lying to congress and to the people of the USA), torture (clearly war crimes), and katrina (criminal dereliction of duty). and if we could ever get to the bottom of what really happened on 911...let's just say their crimes were legion.

that some of these perps are still in office, and that others continue to walk free upon the earth, many of them still popping up on the evening news as if they are upright and respectable citizens, is like a rod of frustration that has permanently moved into my being.

typo

[midnight]

2. What I would like to know is why the disater plans were removed

from the entire state?

[SpiralHawk]

3. "Smirk." - xCommander AWOL (R)

[barbtries]

4. i go with the G word

genocide. that's my take on it.

[Louisiana1976]

5. Me, too!

[Boxerfan]

6. My beliefs about America were shattered that day.

Remember what Bush was doing to help...

He served them cake!


He played them a song!



What the hell more did you people want???

I just don't get you people




(Sarcasm of course)

[TxRider]

7. I remember that bus station detention area was covered fairly well on the news.

I never heard much about it after a few days though.

I do suspect there may be more to the story though.

[struggle4progress]

8. Excerpt: 'Zeitoun'

... The fish, sardines, would begin gathering soon after, a slow mass of silver rising from below. The fish were attracted to plankton, and the plankton were attracted to the light. They would begin to circle, a chain linked loosely, and over the next hour their numbers would grow. The black gaps between silver links would close until the fishermen could see, below, a solid mass of silver spinning.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun was only thirteen when he began fishing for sardines this way, a method called lampara, borrowed from the Italians. He had waited years to join the men and teenagers on the night boats, and he'd spent those years asking questions. Why only on moonless nights? Because, his brother Ahmad said, on moon-filled nights the plankton would be visible everywhere, spread out all over the sea, and the sardines could see and eat the glowing organisms with ease. But without a moon the men could make their own, and could bring the sardines to the surface in stunning concentrations. You have to see it, Ahmad told his little brother. You've never seen anything like this.

And when Abdulrahman first witnessed the sardines circling in the black he could not believe the sight, the beauty of the undulating sil- ver orb below the white and gold lantern light. He said nothing, and the other fishermen were careful to be quiet, too, paddling without motors, lest they scare away the catch. They would whisper over the sea, telling jokes and talking about women and girls as they watched the fish rise and spin beneath them. A few hours later, once the sardines were ready, tens of thousands of them glistening in the refracted light, the fishermen would cinch the net and haul them in.

They would motor back to the shore and bring the sardines to the fish broker in the market before dawn. He would pay the men and boys, and would then sell the fish all over western Syria — Lattakia, Baniyas, Damascus. The fishermen would split the money, with Abdulrahman and Ahmad bringing their share home. Their father had passed away the year before and their mother was of fragile health and mind, so all funds they earned fishing went toward the welfare of the house they shared with ten siblings ...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=107009266

[struggle4progress]

9. After the Deluge

By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: August 13, 2009

... Day 1, post-storm, no problem: about a foot of storm sludge in the streets.

Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have failed. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation.

Zeitoun saves elderly and dehydrated residents trapped in rotting, collapsing homes: “Help me,” comes the voice of an old woman. “Her patterned dress was spread out on the surface of the water like a great floating flower. Her legs dangled below. She was holding on to a bookshelf.” In his first day in the canoe, Zeitoun assists in the rescue of five residents. “He had never felt such urgency and purpose,” Eggers writes. “He was needed” ...

The book takes a sudden turn when six armed officers show up at Zeitoun’s house. He thinks they are there to help him, and he’s happy to point them to people in need of assistance. Wrong assumption ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Egan-t.html

[struggle4progress]

10. Muslim man imprisoned during rescue of Katrina victims

... After a day of rescuing people from the crushing floodwaters, including an old woman, Zeitoun, who owns a construction business, returned to his home. Because of his house’s high stilts, he was spared the most devastating of the flood waters. His wife, Kathy, had fled with their family but he had remained in New Orleans. He was in his house with a Syrian friend and a white American client. A boat appeared carrying a group of men in military fatigues with machine guns. Zeitoun isn’t sure if the men were actual military personnel or employees of a company like Blackwater, which was also active in New Orleans at the time.

The men approached Zeitoun and asked him if he needed any help or food supplies. Zeitoun refused, saying that he had everything under control. Then they took a closer look at him. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “This is my home,” Zeitoun replied. Six men then jumped into his home from their boat, and waving their guns at him asked to see his ID. He produced it and the men yelled “get in the boat!” waving their machine guns in his face. They refused to say why he was being taken. Zeitoun asked if he could at least go back inside and get a piece of paper on which he had written his wife’s number. “If you step inside,” said one of the gun toting men, “I’ll shoot you.” He was forced on the boat and watched his house slip further away in the distance.

He arrived on dry land and was immediately handcuffed and thrown in a white van. The men drove him to a New Orleans bus station that had been fashioned into a prison which, according to Zeitoun, “looked exactly like Guantanamo Bay.” There were high security fences and men with machine guns posted at every corner and on the roof. Zeitoun said he realized that if anything happened to him no one would know. He and a few other Muslims who were also in the prison were routinely called “terrorists” and “Taliban” by the guards. He underwent humiliating strip cavity searches and was denied a blanket. For three days he languished in the prison and underwent sleep deprivation, handcuffed upright next to a loud generator. The floor was filthy. He was then transferred by bus to a correctional facility near Baton Rouge staffed by Louisiana State Prison officials and treated, he says, as if he “had killed somebody.” He was taken deep into the recesses of the prison and put in a tiny cell.

Despite the fact that he had excruciatingly painful injuries, he was refused medial attention for a serious cut he had on his foot and was not allowed to make any calls to his family or anyone else. In addition, he almost starved as nearly every meal he was served included pork, which as a Muslim he could not eat, a fact he had disclosed during initial “processing” at the prison ...

http://journeyintoamerica.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/muslim-imprisoned-during-rescue-of-katrina-victims/

[struggle4progress]

11. Abdulrahman Zeitoun's poet-Katrina odyssey

Abdulrahman Zeitoun's poet-Katrina odyssey
By Susan Larson
July 14, 2009, 4:45AM

... Unable to make a phone call, called "al Qaeda" and "Taliban," unable to eat the pork that was served, Zeitoun lost weight, grew ill, clung to memories of family, sustained by his strong Muslim faith. Eventually he was moved to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Facility in St. Gabriel, La., and he got word to his wife through a frightened missionary of his whereabouts. After protracted and Kafka-esque legal proceedings, he was finally released almost a month later. The Department of Homeland Security lost interest in him; eventually he was charged with looting and released ...

http://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2009/07/abdulrahman_zeitouns_poetkatri.html

[struggle4progress]

12. Abdulrahman Zeitoun: From terror suspect to noble citizen in one book

From The Sunday Times
August 23, 2009
Tony Allen-Mills

... Bush’s much-criticised disaster relief agency “is in this account a band of paramilitary thugs, seeing everything through the dark lens of counter-terrorism,” one critic noted. The Miami Herald added: “The Zeitouns have rebuilt their businesses and still live in New Orleans and Eggers contributes his book profits to a foundation in their name. The funds will be distributed to local groups for post-Katrina rebuilding projects.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6806427.ece