Ashcroft & Mueller testimony demanded in rights violation case

Ashcroft, Mueller, Told to Testify in Muslims' Suit of Abuse & Torture in Brooklyn Detention Center after 9/11
A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other top government officials will have to answer questions under oath in a lawsuit that accuses them of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrants held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn after 9/11. The officials had sought to have the lawsuit dismissed without testimony, arguing in part that they had governmental immunity from its claims, that the court lacked jurisdiction because they live outside New York State, and that the Sept. 11 attacks created "special factors" outweighing the plaintiffs' right to sue for damages for constitutional violations.
But the judge, John Gleeson, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, rejected those arguments, allowing the case to proceed - and opening the door to depositions of Mr. Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, by lawyers for the two plaintiffs: Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian immigrant who ran a restaurant in Times Square, and Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani immigrant whose Long Island customers knew him as "the cable guy." The lawsuit charges that, solely because of their race, religion or national origin, the two men were physically abused and deprived of due process while being detained for more than eight months in the harsh maximum-security unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. The men, who eventually pleaded guilty to minor criminal charges unrelated to terrorism and were deported, charged that they were repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled. They said they were kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as "terrorists" and "Muslim bastards," and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one in which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.
"Our nation's unique and complex law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do not warrant the elimination of remedies for the constitutional violations alleged here," Judge Gleeson wrote in his decision. It was also celebrated by lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought a companion lawsuit as a class action on behalf of other immigrant detainees in 2002. The government's motion to dismiss that suit, using many of the same arguments, is pending before the same judge.
"The fact that Judge Gleeson ruled that this case can keep Ashcroft on the hook --that would never happen in a regular prison-abuse case," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. "The judge understood that this isn't just a case about individuals being abused in detention. These are people who were singled out according to a policy created on the highest levels of government."
Judge Gleeson cited a scathing 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general that found widespread abuse of detainees at the Brooklyn center.
The report said that Mr. Ashcroft's policy was to hold detainees on any legal pretext until the F.B.I. cleared them, even though such clearances took months and many had been picked up by chance, not because they were legitimate terrorism suspects.
"The post-Sept. 11 context provides support for the plaintiffs' assertions that defendants were involved in creating and/or implementing the detention policy under which plaintiffs were confined without due process," the judge wrote. In effect, the judge gave the plaintiffs an opportunity to try to establish the personal involvement of Mr. Ashcroft and other high-ranking defendants through discovery, rather than simply accepting the defense's argument of immunity at this early stage of the litigation. The "qualified immunity" that shields government officials "will not allow the attorney general to carry out his national security functions wholly free from concern for his personal liability," Judge Gleeson wrote, quoting a Supreme Court decision that involved then-Attorney General John N. Mitchell's unauthorized wiretap of a radical group. "He may on occasion have to pause to consider whether a proposed course of action can be squared with the Constitution and laws of the United States."

Racist thug spouting evil rhetoric, criminals going down

Radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett: "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Bill Bennett's Morning in America airs on approximately 115 radio stations with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners.
This from a former Secretary of Education! No wonder our school system is in such a mess, with this sort of attitude in officials from 20 years ago. Perhaps if we hadn't had a RACIST like Bennett as Sec. of Ed. under Reagan, things might have been improved in the last 20 years. I agree with the commentary on WhatReallyHappened.com:
"You could quit taxing the people into poverty and the crime rate would go down.
You could bring back decent paying jobs and the crime rate would go down.
You could stop criminalizing harmless personal behavior and the crime rate would go down.
You could hang all the liars in government and the media and the crime rate would go down.
Ever since New Orleans I have seen what appears to be a concerted effort to fan racial tensions in this country. At first I thought it was merely to cast the Victims of the hurricanes as unsympathetic, in order to deflect anger from Bush for slashing flood control funding to pay for his illegal war in Iraq. But as Bennett's idiocy proves, that campaign to fan the flames of race hate is still continuing, and I think I know why.
Right now George Bush knows that the country is starting to hate him and the government that backed his lies. Bush is trying to figure out a way to declare martial law. Race riots in multiple cities would provide such an excuse, and even better, the Neocons would feel safer if they can trick the American people into fighting each other, instead of uniting to fight a corrupt and illegal government that continues to lie us all into wars.
So, you think about this as you see more and more media efforts to pit one race against the other. It's just another government scam against We The People. If we are fighting each other, we cannot fight the tyrant, and the tyrant knows this. If you pick up a rock or a stick and aim it at your fellow American, you are doing EXACTLY what George Bush and his Neocon perpetual-war-for-Israel thugs want you to do."

Criminals stick together
Even though Tom DeLay has been indicted for criminal conspiracy by a Texas Grand Jury, the Bush regime continues to stick by their man. DeLay stepped down as Majority Leader. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan continued to refer to the indicted DeLay as an "ally and friend" of President Bush.
I know he'll live to regret that statement.

SEC Opens 'Formal' Investigation of Frist
As Republicans scramble to defend Tom DeLay, there were significant developments in a scandal involving the Senate's top Republican, Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has given subpoena power to investigators looking into potential insider trading by Frist of shares of his family's corporation the Hospital Corporation of America. The SEC has officially changed the investigation's status from informal to formal. The nonpartisan Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights estimates that Frist made between $2 million and $6 million by selling his HCA holdings just before stock values plummeted in the face of a bad earnings report.

ExxonMobil Charged With Price Gauging
Senate Democrats are calling for an investigation into allegations that oil giant ExxonMobil has artificially pushed up the price of gasoline in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Democrats cite accusations from some gas station owners that they had been ordered by the company to raise prices at the pump.

Reuters Protests 'Long Parade' of Media Deaths in Iraq
The Reuters News Agency says the conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq, including increasing detention and accidental shootings of journalists, is preventing full coverage of the war from reaching the American public. In a letter to Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reuters said U.S. forces were limiting the ability of independent journalists to operate. The letter from the agency's Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger called on Warner to raise these issues with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who is due to testify to the committee on Thursday. Schlesinger referred to "a long parade of disturbing incidents whereby professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully detained, and/or illegally abused by U.S. forces in Iraq." At least 66 journalists and media workers, most of them Iraqis, have been killed in Iraq since March 2003.

JACK ABRAMOFF: the pal DeLay can't shake
"Today there is already plenty of speculation in Washington that the White House is wavering about DeLay: As much as the president prizes loyalty, he is intolerant of sleaze and impatient with damaging distractions from his agenda. "Within six months, Karl will force him out," a senior administration official from the first term says, speaking, of course, of Karl Rove. At least one conservative redoubt, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has already thrown open the door. Mr. DeLay has "an unsavory whiff that could have GOP loyalists reaching for the political Glade if it gets any worse," the paper wrote last week."
That's rich, Bush intolerant of sleaze--and letting Rove sort it out!

Read the full account from my post of 5/13/05:
Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants -- from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh -- were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas.
So compelling was the case for change the Alaska Republican marshaled that in early 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Murkowski worker reform bill. But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay.
DeLay fully approved of the working and living conditions. The Texan's salute to the owners and Abramoff's government clients was recorded by ABC-TV News: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system." Later, DeLay would tell The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin that the low-wage, anti-union conditions of the Marianas constituted "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island."
Here's my suggestion, if found guilty, DeLay & Abramoff should be put to work in the slave labor sweatshops they enabled in the Mariana Islands. Leave them there to rot.

Aides describe WH as "hellhole" & " insane asylum”
Depressed and demoralized White House staffers say working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is “life in a hellhole” as they try to deal with a sullen, moody President whose temper tantrums drive staffers crying from the room and bring the business of running the country to a halt.“It’s like working in an insane asylum,” says one White House aide. “People walk around like they’re in a trance. We’re the dance band on the Titanic, playing out our last songs to people who know the ship is sinking and none of us are going to make it.” Increasing reports from the usually tight-lipped staff of the Bush Administration talk of a West Wing dominated by gallows humor, long faces and a depression that has all but paralyzed daily routines.“If (Bush) is on the road you can breathe a little easier for the day, knowing that those with him are catching hell and the mood will be a little easier in the Wing (West Wing) until he returns,” says another aide.
“Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him…Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.”
I like that word, bunker, it brings to mind a place where tyrants give up in defeat when they're cornered.

Passing the buck--the old broken record

Cartoon by Nick Anderson
Michael Brown passes the buck
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco will appear before a Senate panel this morning, but she's already come out swinging against former FEMA head Michael Brown. Blanco takes strong exception to a charge by Brown that she waited until the eve of the storm to order an evacuation of New Orleans. She says Brown's comment clearly demonstrates what she says is the "appalling degree" to which he's "out of touch with the truth or reality."
"I'm happy you left," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn. "Because that kind of look in the lights like a deer tells me that you weren't capable to do the job."
"You get an F-minus in my book," said Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss.
At several points, Brown turned red in the face and slapped the table in front of him.
"So I guess you want me to be the superhero, to step in there and take everyone out of New Orleans," Brown said. [Now he thinks of it!!!]
"What I wanted you to do is do your job and coordinate," Shays retorted.
Blanco vehemently denied that she waited until the eve of the storm to order an evacuation of New Orleans. She said her order came on the morning of Aug. 27 — two days before the storm — resulting in 1.3 million people evacuating the city. "Such falsehoods and misleading statements, made under oath before Congress, are shocking," Blanco said in a statement.
Brown said FEMA coordinates and manages disaster relief, but the emergency first response is the job of state and local authorities. (Actually, FEMA has a mandate to intercede proactively at any time during a declared emergency). Brown also said the agency was stretched too thin to respond to a catastrophe of Katrina's size. Brown described FEMA as a politically powerless arm of Homeland Security, which he said had siphoned more than $77 million from his agency over the past three years. Additionally, he said Homeland Security cut FEMA budget requests — including one for hurricane preparedness — before they were ever presented to Congress. Brown also said FEMA's response was hurt by the Bush administration's focus on the so-called war on terror at the expense of domestic emergency operations. Brown said FEMA was short 500 people in an organization of about 2,500.
Brown struck a conciliatory tone with Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, who chastised him for not seeking fiscal or oversight help from Congress before the storm. "I don't know how you can sleep at night," Granger said. "You lost the battle."
Brown, his voice dropping slightly, responded: "I probably should have just resigned my post earlier and gone public with some of these things because I have a great admiration for the men and women of FEMA and what they do, and they don't deserve what they've been getting."


Vast Majority Of Reported Atrocities in New Orleans Were False
In other news on Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Times-Picayune is reporting that the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false. The paper said most of the horror stories that emerged from the Superdome have never been confirmed. Police now say six people died inside the Superdome - four from natural causes, one from a drug overdose and one suicide. There have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The Los Angeles Times reports that "race may have played a factor" in the wild rumors that spread through much of the media.

Supreme Court To Take Up Campaign Finance Laws
The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that may determine the future of the country's campaign finance laws. 30 years ago the court ruled that the government may limit how much money donors give to candidates, but it may not limit how much the candidates spend. The case centers on a Vermont state law that caps spending in races for governor at $300,000 per candidate, with smaller caps for other state offices. Backers of the law's provision say a favorable ruling from the high court could stem the ever growing tide of big money in politics; critics of the law say limiting spending on campaigns improperly impinges free speech.

INDICTED!
TOM DELAY INDICTED.
With a Texas Grand Jury today issuing a criminal indictment for conspiracy against Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, there is also almost total silence surrounding the Federal Grand Jury case building against the leakers of the covert identities of Valerie Plame Wilson and her non-official cover CIA team. Such silence among both prosecutors and defense attorneys is an indication that something is about to break in that case. For the last few months, the political rumor mill in Washington has suggested that CIA leak special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald would hand down indictments by the end of September. It is noteworthy that there are also rumors that the White House may name its second Supreme Court choice on Friday, September 30.
Shortly after being indicted, DeLay announced he would step aside as Majority Leader. He is expected to be replaced by California's David Dreier.

Now why would they do something like that?

FAA Managers Destroyed 9/11 Tape
Recording Contained Accounts of Communications With Hijacked Planes
Six air traffic controllers provided accounts of their communications with hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, on a tape recording that was later destroyed by Federal Aviation Administration managers, according to a government investigative report issued today.
It is unclear what information was on the tape because no one ever listened to, transcribed or duplicated it, the report by the Department of Transportation inspector general said. [Does anyone actually believe that?????] The report concluded that the FAA generally cooperated with the independent panel investigating the terrorist attacks by providing documents about its activities on Sept. 11, but the actions of two FAA managers "did not, in our view, serve the interests of the FAA, the Department [of Transportation] or the public." WHO ARE THEY?
The report was conducted at the request of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, complained that the FAA had been less than forthcoming in turning over documents and issued a subpoena to the agency for more information. The FAA said it was cooperating fully with the 9/11 panel. The agency said it took disciplinary action against the employee who destroyed the tape but declined to elaborate on what kind of action they took.
"We believe the audiotape in question appears to be consistent with written statements and other materials provided to FBI investigators and would not have added in any significant way to the information contained in what has already been provided to investigators and members of the 9/11 commission," said FAA spokesman Greg Martin.
Hours after the hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, an FAA manager at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center gathered six controllers who communicated or tracked two of the hijacked planes and recorded in a one-hour interview their personal accounts of what occurred, the report stated. The manager, who is not named in the report, said that his intentions were to provide quick information to federal officials investigating the attack before the air traffic controllers involved took sick leave for the stress of their experiences, as is common practice. According to the report, a second manager at the New York center promised a union official representing the controllers that he would "get rid of" the tape after controllers used it to provide written statements to federal officials about the events of the day. [Why did he promise that?]

Instead, the second manager said he destroyed the tape between December 2001 and January 2002 by crushing the tape with his hand, cutting it into small pieces and depositing the pieces into trash cans around the building, the report said. The tape's existence was never made known to federal officials investigating the attack, nor to FAA officials in Washington. Staff members of the 9/11 panel found out about the tape during interviews with some controllers who participated in the recording. One controller said she asked to listen to the tape in order to prepare her written account of her experience, but one of the managers denied her request. The New York managers acknowledged that they received an e-mail from FAA officials instructing them to retain all materials related to the Sept. 11 attacks. "If a question arises whether or not you should retain the data, RETAIN IT," the report quoted the e-mail as saying. But the managers decided not to include the tape in a November 2001 "Formal Accident Package" report the office prepared because one manager said he did not want to break his word to the union official and he did not think the tape should ever have been made.The inspector general concluded today that the managers' actions resulted in the loss of potential evidence that would allow the 9/11 commission to compare controllers' recollection of the events immediately after the attacks with the written statements prepared three weeks later. "The destruction of evidence in the Government's possession, in this case an audiotape -- particularly during times of national crisis -- has the effect of fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public."

CIA Intelligence Reports Seven Months Before 9/11 said Iraq Posed No Threat to U.S, Containment Was Working

CIA Director George Tenet testified before Congress in February 2001 that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States or to other countries in the Middle East.
But immediately after the terrorist attacks on 9-11, which the Bush administration has said Iraq is partially responsible for, the President and his advisers were already making a case for war against Iraq without so much as providing a shred of evidence to back up their allegations that Iraq and its former President, Saddam Hussein, helped al-Qaida hijackers plan the catastrophe.

Iraq denounces British rescue in Basra: Why did undercover agents have anti-tank missle?

Could this have a connection with "Group 13"?
"Today, in the United Kingdom, there exists a paramilitary unit called Group 13. The sole purpose of this ultra secretive unit is deniable assassination and it operates in the world of shadows. So little is known about them, that it is exceptionally hard to document its activities with any certainty...The Special Air Service was formed during WW11 by David Stirling with the intention to operate behind enemy lines and to perform acts of sabotage and assassination. By 1969, the SAS had been sent to Northern Ireland to perform covert operations against the IRA - which included assassination. To cover their deployment to this politically sensitive area they chose the guise of “training teams.” ...Little is known of the SAS’s secret intelligence network, apart from one enlightening publication. Ranulf Fiennes, the Artic trekker was a one time member of the SAS. In his book, The Feather Men, he reveals the existence of an unofficial group of former SAS officers and soldiers who, amongst other activities, are tasked with protecting members of the SAS whose lives are under threat as a result of their activities. "

London Bomber Mastermind Was Working For MI6
Haroon Aswat is the primary suspect as the mastermind of the London Bombings 7/7. He was working for MI6, it has been confirmed by leading U.S. and French intelligence asset/agents. Now an FBI agent in Seattle has demanded that former USDA federal agent, Dr Janette Parker, stop talking to the British media about how the FBI obstructed their own top terrorism investigator, John O’Neill in his enquiries. Dr Parker, who worked alongside O’Neill-- although not in an official capacity-- is fearful of her life.
British citizens should be demanding of Prime Minister Blair why SIS/MI6 was using Haroon Aswat as an agent, and why, as John Loftus claims, was Aswat – who was on the British security services ‘Watch List’, allowed to leave the UK, when the British Police were desperately searching for him?
“International terrorism is VERY BIG business,” our source confirmed. “The U.S. and UK trade in terrorism like it is some kind of off-the-shelf commodity. Forget the destruction of lives to normal people, women and children. I have been there and done it all. Your Dr Parker has done the right thing. Like me she is cladding herself with insurance – like a Kevlar jacket, and I wish her all the best.”

Sheehan Arrested During Anti-War Protest
Cindy Sheehan was arrested Monday along with dozens of others protesting outside the White House. Sheehan, carrying a photo of her son in his Army uniform, was among hundreds of protesters who marched around the White House and then down the two-block pedestrian walkway on Pennsylvania Avenue. [And Sheehan was among the 300,000 protesters who marched on Saturday.] When they reached the front of the White House, dozens sat down - knowing they would be arrested - and began singing and chanting "Stop the war now!"
Police Sgt. L.J. McNally said Sheehan and the others would be taken to a processing center where they would be fingerprinted and photographed, then given a ticket and released. The process would take several hours, he said.
I wonder why, when I heard this, I imagined her being interrogated by Karl Rove and his henchmen?

"Vee haff vays of making you shut up!"
Lynndie England Convicted For Abusing Iraqi Detainees
Here at home, a military jury has convicted Lynndie England of abusing Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. The 22-year-old army reservist was photographed holding a naked Iraqi prisoner by a leash and pointing to an inmate's genitals. She faces up to 10 years in jail. To date no high-ranking Pentagon official has faced charges or been reprimanded in connection to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. [Why not?]

Report: FEMA Rehires Michael Brown As A Consultant
CBS News is reporting that the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, has been rehired by the agency to serve as a consultant to evaluate its response following Hurricane Katrina. [Isn't that just ducky!!!!]
Former FEMA Chief Blames Local Officials for Failures
"I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences and work together," Mr. Brown said. "I just couldn't pull that off. My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional." Representative William Jefferson, a Democrat from New Orleans, immediately challenged Mr. Brown's assertions, saying that he found it "absolutely stunning" that Mr. Brown would blame the governor and mayor. At another point, Mr. Jefferson asked, "Would it surprise you to know that folks in Mississippi and Alabama have complaints which are similar to ours about FEMA's lack of response?"
"Congressman," Mr. Brown said, "every state, in every disaster, has a complaint about FEMA."

GOP blocks attempt to let Katrina victims declare bankruptcy
When Congress agreed this spring to tighten the bankruptcy laws and crack down on consumers who took on debt irresponsibly, no one had the victims of Hurricane Katrina in mind. The law was intended to keep individuals from taking on debts they had no intention of paying off. Right after Hurricane Katrina struck, several lawmakers - mostly Democrats but including some Senate Republicans - suggested that storm victims along the Gulf Coast should get relief from the new law's stricter provisions,but many once-solvent Katrina victims are likely to be caught up in the net intended to catch deadbeats, but House Republicans, who fought off a proposed amendment that would have made bankruptcy filings easier for victims of natural disasters, said there was no reason to carve out a broad exemption just because of the storm. In the meantime, many victims of Hurricane Katrina - and the much smaller group ruined by Hurricane Rita - will face a kind of Catch-22. Those who try to beat the Oct. 17 deadline in hopes of filing under the less-onerous current law may find it impossible to do so, because residence rules generally require that individuals seek protection against creditors in their hometowns.
<>Louis Farrakhan: Divers Found Levee Explosives
Nation of Islam chief Minister Louis Farrakhan has expanded on his theory that New Orleans' levees were blown up during Hurricane Katrina, announcing Friday that divers working on the levee break have found evidence of explosives. "These explosives are from the government side," he said during a press conference in Memphis held to promote his upcoming Million Man Anniversary March. In quotes picked up by Memphis TV station WMC, Farrakhan demanded an investigation into the Bush administration's levee plot. If true, he insisted: "somebody is guilty, then not only of mass destruction of property, but of mass murder."Farrakhan predicted that when New Orleans is rebuilt, it will be "a white city." "It will be rebuilt to the exclusion of the poor who have been dispersed all over the country," he said. "I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach," Farrakhan explained during a stop in Charleston, South Carolina. "It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."

Katrina relief contracts come under investigation
Billions of dollars of reconstruction contracts awarded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are being investigated amid concerns of cronyism and abuse. More than 80% of the $1.5bn (£850m) in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were awarded without bidding or with only limited competition, including enormous deals with Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton - the former employer of vice-president Dick Cheney - and the Shaw Group. The lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, George Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of FEMA, has represented both companies.
Richard Skinner, the inspector general for the department of homeland security, told the New York Times that 60 members of his staff were examining Hurricane Katrina contracts. "We are very apprehensive about what we are seeing. When you do something like this you do increase the vulnerability for fraud, plain waste, abuse and mismanagement."
Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the most senior Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, told the newspaper that FEMA and other federal agencies were delivering too much of the work to corporations with political connections instead of local companies. "There is just more of the good old-boy system taking care of its political allies," Mr Thompson said. "FEMA and others have put out these contracts in such a haphazard manner, I don't know how they can come up with anything that is accountable to the taxpayer."
Contracts signed so far include more than 15 that exceed $100m, including five of $500m or more, mostly for debris removal along the Gulf coast devastated by the hurricane four weeks ago. Congressional investigators are looking into a $568m contract awarded to AshBritt, a Florida company that was a client of the former lobbying firm of Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi.

Longtime GOP Fundraiser Elected to Head CPB
Longtime Republican fundraiser Cheryl Halpern has become the new chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Before President Bush appointed Halpern to the CPB in 2002, she served on the Broadcasting Board of Governors overseeing such government-funded media projects as Voice of America, Radio Marti in Cuba and Radio Free Iraq. She is the former national chair of the Republican Jewish Coalition. She has accused National Public Radio of being biased against Israel. Like her predecessor, Kenneth Tomlinson, Halpern has also criticized the journalism of Bill Moyers. Two years ago she publicly agreed with Senator Trent Lott's comment that Moyers is "the most partisan and nonobjective person I know in media of any kind." The website PoliticalMoneyLine.com reports she has given over $300,000 in political contributions in recent years almost all to Republicans. Recipients have included President Bush, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi and Sam Brownback of Kansas. The group Common Cause warned Monday that the selection of Halpern may "mean more politicizing for public broadcasting."

For all the proponents of "coincidence theory"

Dehumanization and desensitization run amok

War Pornography
US soldiers trade grisly photos of dead and mutilated Iraqis for access to amateur porn.
"If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsF**kedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.
At Wilson's Web site, you can see an Arab man's face sliced off and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man's head, his face crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver's seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.
The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by the soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The soldier who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, "What every Iraqi should look like." The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption "bad day for this dude." One soldier posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection "DIE HAJI DIE." The soldiers take pride, even joy, in displaying the dead.
This could become a public-relations catastrophe. Government officials have repeatedly denounced the al-Jazeera network for airing grisly footage of Iraqi war casualties and American prisoners of war. The legal fight over whether to release the remaining photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib has dragged on for months, but none of these can compare to the prospect of American troops casually bartering pictures of suffering and death for porn.
"Two years ago, if somebody had said our soldiers would do these things to detainees and take pictures of it, I would have said that's a lie," sighed recently retired General Michael Marchand, who as assistant judge advocate general for the Army was responsible for reforming military training policy to make sure nothing like Abu Ghraib ever happens again. "What soldiers do, I'm not sure I can guess anymore.""

Anti-War Protesters March on Washington

Opponents of the war in Iraq rallied by the thousands Saturday to demand the return of U.S. troops, staging a day of protest, song and remembrance of the dead in marches through Washington, other U.S. cities and capitals abroad. More than 2,000 people gathered on the Ellipse hours before the showcase demonstration past the White House, the first wave of what organizers said would be the largest Washington rally since the war began.
"We have to get involved," said Erika McCroskey, 27, who came from Des Moines, Iowa, with her younger sister and mother for her first demonstration, traveling in just one of the buses that poured into the capital from far-flung places.
"Bush Lied, Thousands Died," said one sign. "End the Occupation," said another.
Thousands of anti-war protesters marched through London to call for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. Violent clashes between insurgents and British troops in the southern Iraq town of Basra in recent days highlighted the need to get out, protesters said.
"Enough is enough," said Lindsey German, an official of the Stop the War Coalition, which organized the march. "It is now time, once again, for the British people to step forward into the streets and insist that this time we will not be ignored." Rallies were planned, too, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Florence, Rome, Paris and Madrid.
In a hitch for some coming to the protest, five Amtrak trains running between New York and Washington were delayed for about two hours Saturday morning for repair of overhead electrical lines.
"We believe we are at a tipping point whereby the anti-war sentiment has now become the majority sentiment," said Brian Becker, national coordinator for ANSWER, one of the main anti-war organizers.
Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who drew thousands of demonstrators to her 26-day vigil outside President Bush's Texas ranch last month, joined the protest. Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed in an ambush in Sadr City, Iraq, last year.
Supporters of President Bush's policy in Iraq assembled in smaller numbers to get their voice heard in the day's anti-war din.
The protest route runs to the front of the White House, down to the Justice Department and then back to the Washington Monument, site of an 11-hour concert and rally featuring folk singer Joan Baez and stretching well into the night.
Sheehan and other mothers against the war held a small rally near the Washington Monument on Friday. They spoke just a few feet from 1,000 white wooden crosses tucked into the grass to symbolize the more than 1,900 members of the U.S. armed forces who have died since the beginning of the war in March 2003.
On the Net:
ANSWER Coalition: http://www.answercoalition.org
Gold Star Families for Peace: http://www.gsfp.org
Families United for our Troops: http://www.unitedforourtroops.com

Houston's poor the next crop of hurricane victims?

No Way Out: Many Poor Stuck in Houston
Wilma Skinner would like to scream at the officials of this city. If only they would pick up their phones.
"I done called for a shelter, I done called for help. There ain't none. No one answers," she said, standing in blistering heat outside a check-cashing store that had just run out of its main commodity. "Everyone just says, 'Get out, get out.' I've got no way of getting out. And now I've got no money."
"All the banks are closed and I just got off work," said Thomas Visor, holding his sweaty paycheck as he, too, tried to get inside the store, where more than 100 people, all of them black or Hispanic, fretted in line. "This is crazy. How are you supposed to evacuate a hurricane if you don't have money? Answer me that?"

Naomi Klein "Purging the Poor"
I was doing some research about the fights over development before the hurricane, because one of the things that I have noticed in my research is these huge, cataclysmic events are often opportunities to exploit the dislocation that happens after a natural disaster to ram through very unpopular policies. So I started researching what the battles were in New Orleans before the hurricane. And, of course, there were very, very fierce, an you know you’ve covered this on your show, very fierce battles going on around housing projects, and gentrification in the city where conflicts between people who were demanding affordable housing and particularly the tourism sector on the French Quarter, and over the course of the research, I saw the staggering feature, which is that the French Quarter, which as you said is 90% white, is also almost half empty. In the most recent census, and the market hasn't changed since then, the French Quarter had a 37% vacancy rate, which means that 37% of the apartments and homes in the French Quarter are sitting empty. I looked at the census again, and looked at all of these other areas that the mayor has said are dry and inhabitable and found that there were comparably high vacancy rates in other areas, like the Garden District and Central Business District. What we found was that in fact there are 12,000 empty apartments and houses in the dry areas. Which means that those could be affordable houses for people.

Democracy Now! interview with Jeremy Scahill about Private Security Contractors in New Orleans
"As business leaders and government officials talk openly of changing the demographics of what was one of the most culturally vibrant of America's cities, mercenaries from companies like DynCorp, Intercon, American Security Group, Blackhawk, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) are fanning out to guard private businesses and homes, as well as government projects and institutions. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235. Some, like Blackwater, are under federal contract. Others have been hired by the wealthy elite."
read his article "Blackwater Down" in THE NATION magazine

William M. Arkin, "Early Warning" column from Washington Post
Today in DC: Commandos in the Streets?
Are they planning something nasty for the anti-war protesters?
Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a highly classified "demonstration." Granite ShadowGranite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military’s extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control. When that "area of operations" is the United States, things become particularly sensitive. That's where Granite Shadow comes in. U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the military's new homeland security command, is preparing its draft version of CONPLAN 0400 for military operations in the United States, and the resulting Granite Shadow plan has been classified above Top Secret by adding a Special Category (SPECAT)
Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.
Both plans seem to live behind a veil of extraordinary secrecy because military forces operating under them have already been given a series of ''special authorities'' by the President and the secretary of defense. These special authorities include, presumably, military roles in civilian law enforcement and abrogation of State's powers in a declared or perceived emergency. I can't see how the Defense Department can continue this line of argument post-Katrina. We see the human cost of a system of contingency planning done in complete secret, with a lack of any debate as to what should be the federal government's priorities, emphasis, and rules.

Prison Camps in the US--for whom?
Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose. Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.

Peace & Justice

Camp Casey converges on Washington DC for huge weekend rally
Cindy Sheehan brought her anti-war crusade to Washington, DC, on Wednesday, arriving with a caravan of three RVs and several cars ferrying about three dozen military families and Iraq War veterans on the final leg of their 21-day Bring Them Home Now tour. The tour included members of Gold Star Families for Peace, which Sheehan helped found, Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Veterans for Peace. They set off from their encampment outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, on August 31 and covered 51 cities in 28 states in a hell-bent sprint to mobilize public opinion against the war in Iraq while building momentum for what they hope will be a 100,000-strong peace march in DC this Saturday.

RAW Story discloses leaked documents recommending cutting programs to pay for Katrina/Halliburton/Bechtel/Fluor slush fund
House Republican Study Committee recommends axing Nat'l Endowment for the Arts, Humanities, Amtrak, Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds; Cancel anti-drug ads,moon mission, cut AIDS aid, first responder grants. Click on above link to read copies of documents.

Report: Hurricane tax aid does more for wealthier survivors
Tax breaks designed to help Hurricane Katrina victims get their hands on needed cash could do more for higher income survivors than for the neediest, a congressional report says.

75,000 Body Bags Purchased For New Orleans

Questions mount over Hurricane Katrina’s death count. Estimates are now well below 10,000 with the death toll currently standing at 648 for Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. So, why did the Bush Administration order 75,000 body bags? Along that line, other things don’t add up. For instance, why did FEMA contact a crematorium in the local area; how could people identify their loved ones if only ashes remain? Why did FEMA rebuff efforts of volunteer morticians? Why did the feds try to ban reporters from covering the body recovery effort? Why have the feds employed mercenaries in New Orleans? Don’t we have plenty of volunteers, police and military in the U.S. to get any job done that needs doing? What’s really going on?

Gasoline in Venezuela is 15 cents per gallon

British "Undercover Soldiers" Caught driving Booby Trapped Car
Why were undercover British "soldiers" wearing traditional Arab headscarves firing at Iraqi police?
The incident took place just prior to a major religious event in Basra. The report suggests that the police thought the British soldiers looked "suspicious". What was the nature of their mission?
Occupation forces are supposesd to be collaborating with Iraqi authorities.Why did Britsh Forces have to storm the prison using tanks and armoured vehicles to liberate the British undercover agents?
"British forces used up to 10 tanks supported by helicopters to smash through the walls of the jail and free the two British servicemen." Was there concern that the British "soldiers" who were being held by the Iraqi National Guard would be obliged to reveal the nature and objective of their undercover mission?
A report of Al Jazeera TV suggests that the British undercover soldiers were driving a booby trapped car loaded with ammunition. The Al Jazeera report also suggests that the riots directed against British military presence were motivated because the British undercover soldiers were planning to explode the booby trapped car in the centre of Basra. Is this an isolated incident or is part of a pattern? More significantly, have the occupation forces been involved in similar undercover missions?
Syrian TV (Sept 19, 2005) reports the following:

Ten Iraqis - seven police commandos, two civilians and a child - were killed and more than 10 others wounded in the explosion of two car bombs near two checkpoints in Al-Mahmudiyah and Al-Latifiyah south of Baghdad while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were heading towards the city of Karbala to mark the anniversary of a religious event.
And in a significant incident in the city of Basra, which is also marking the same religious event, Iraqi demonstrators set fire to two British tanks near a police station after Iraqi police had arrested two British soldiers disguised in civilian clothes for opening fire on police. Eight armoured British vehicles surrounded the police station before the eruption of the confrontations. A policeman at the scene said the two detained Britons were wearing traditional Iraqi jallabahs [loose cloaks] and wigs.

From Pat Buchanan's American Spectator:

But at this stage of the game, barring some imaginative political moves that bear some resemblance to the Bush Administration circa 2002, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even some longtime Bush team members in various Cabinet level departments say this Administration is done for. You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking," says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. "You get the impression that we're more than listless. We're sunk."...

Bill Frist's suspicious dumping of hospital stock

Frist decided in June to dump all the stock, and later cited as the reason his desire to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, eyebrows went up among ethics experts and congressional watchdogs. Why did he do it at that time? Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold, its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.The timing thus raised questions about whether Frist had somehow traded on information he obtained in advance from the company. HCA executives sold 574,882 shares worth $19,942,610 between May 17 and June 10. A company spokesman, Jeff Prescott, said the executives are entitled "like other stockholders [to] make personal decisions . . . about when to sell."

GOVERNMENT CAUGHT DESTROYING MORE INDIAN RECORDS IN VIOLATION OF COURT ORDERS

At the same time that the Interior Department is bragging to Congress about its Indian Trust accounting plan, the National Archives and Records Administration reports ongoing destruction of Bureau of Indian Affairs accounting records only a few blocks from the federal courthouse in Washington. In a filing last week, NARA disclosed that it is investigating "one or more incidents...involving what may be intentional acts aimed at unlawfully removing or disposing of permanent records from the Interior Department..."

"Since the late 19th century, many original reservation lands were broken up into parcels, and along with their own private parcels, the American Indians retained the mineral and timber rights to what had been the reservation lands, with the US Government acting as trustee. But the American Indians had a hard time getting their funds from the trust, and in 1996 filed a class action lawsuit. The subsequent trial has revealed that billions of dollars of American Indian money are missing, and worse, the US Government has been destroying records to conceal just where that money went and how it was stolen. Two Clinton-era Cabinet members were charged with contempt of court for refusing to provide documentation to the courts. The court is trying to work out a settlement, but the US Government is still trying to obfuscate the matter, claiming that the American Indians are not really owed all that much money and as this article shows, the US Government is still trying to eradicate all the records of the matter."

Up to 10,000 South African elephants to be slaughtered

The South African government plans to end its 10-year ban on culling elephants, which may result in the slaughter of up to 10,000 of the beasts. But anticipating protest from animal welfare groups around the world, the government will have an 18-month consultation period before starting the cull, reports the Times of London. Government officials say culling is needed to reduce the elephant population in the Kruger national park to protect trees, some of them 4,000 years old, as well as vegetation and water supplies. They say an adult elephant consumes about 375 pounds of vegetation a day. The country's environment minister says between 7,000 and 10,000 animals would be killed, the report said. The current elephant population of about 14,000 in the Kruger Park reportedly has become a threat to the habitats of rare antelopes, eagles and other threatened creatures.
'Elephant culling is something I would rather not have to do,' he said. 'If there was any way of avoiding it we would have done that. But the do-nothing approach is no longer an option.'

New low approval rating

Only 32% of respondents in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted September 16-18 approve of the way president Bush is handling the war in Iraq, while 67% disapprove. The number is by far the lowest since the invasion, and represents an astonishing 8 point drop in the week since the previous poll. Prior to the current survey, the president’s approval rating on the war had held steady at 40% since mid-May.

In the same poll, respondents said by roughly the same 2-1 margin that the $260 billion appropriated for the Iraq war so far was too much, and that they had little or no confidence the money was being well spent.

Cindy Sheehan gives a speech in Union Square prior to being
chased off by cops:
http://thirdplanetvideo.com/Movies/CindySheehan.mov

George Galloway's statement in response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath:
"The scenes from the stricken city almost defy belief. Many, many thousands of people left to die in what is the richest, most powerful country on Earth. This obscenity is as far from a natural disaster as George Bush and the U.S. elite are from the suffering masses of New Orleans. The images of Bush luxuriating at his ranch and of his secretary of state shopping for $7,000 shoes while disaster swamped the U.S. Gulf Coast will haunt this administration.
"In the most terrible way imaginable they show to the whole world that it is not only the lives of people in Baghdad, Fallujah and Palestine that Bush holds cheap. It is also his own citizens - the black and poor people left behind with no food, water or shelter. This is not simply manslaughter through incompetence, though the White House's incompetence abounds. It is murder - for Bush was warned four years ago of the threat to New Orleans, as surely as he was warned of the disaster that would come of his war on Iraq. ...
"His is the America of Halliburton, the M-16 rifle, the cluster bomb, the gated communities of the rich and of the billionaires he grew up with in Texas. There is another America. It is the land of the poor of Louisiana, it is the land of the young men and women economically conscripted into the military. It is the land of the glorious multiethnic mix that was New Orleans, it is the land of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and of great struggles for justice."

Cartoon by Nick Anderson
Another Abramoff/Delay buddy, David Safavian arrested
A former Bush administration official was arrested Monday on charges he made false statements and obstructed a federal investigation into his dealings with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to court documents and government officials.David Safavian, then-chief of staff of the General Services Administration and a former Abramoff lobbying associate, concealed from federal investigators that Abramoff was seeking to do business with GSA when Safavian joined him on a golf trip to Scotland in 2002, according to an FBI affidavit and the officials. Safavian worked with Abramoff on the team at the Preston, Gates & Ellis law firm that was lobbying to keep the Northern Mariana Islands free from certain U.S. labor and immigration laws during the last half of the 1990s. Abramoff is not named in the affidavit, but two government officials confirmed he is the person referred to in the affidavit as Lobbyist A.

George Tenet--time for that expose book deal?
Mr. Tenet's decision to defend himself against the charges in the report poses a potential crisis for the White House. According to a former clandestine services officer, the former CIA director turned down a publisher's $4.5 million book offer because he didn't want to embarrass the White House by rehashing the failure to prevent September 11 and the flawed intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Tenet, according to a knowledgeable source, had a "wink and a nod" understanding with the White House that he wouldn't be scapegoated for intelligence failings. The deal, one source says, was sealed with the award of the Presidential Freedom Medal. Now that deal may be off. Mr. Tenet's rebuttal to the report is detailed and explicit. In defending his integrity as CIA director, Mr. Tenet treads perilously close to affirming the account of Richard Clarke, the former NSC terrorism official whose public disclosure of the Bush administration's delay in adopting a strategy against al Qaeda stirred controversy last summer.

UK Soldiers caught dressed as Iraqis, posing as "insurgents" and killing local police
BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after Iraqi authorities detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on police. "We can confirm that a shooting incident involving U.K. military personnel has taken place which is currently being investigated," a British military spokesman said in a statement.

Before the two British Special Forces men were freed by force on Monday, an Al Jazeera report suggested that the men were driving a booby-trapped car around Basra which was loaded with ammunition and explosives. The Al Jazeera report (see below) also indicates that the unrest in Basra was motivated by the perception that the two British soldiers were planning to detonate the explosives-packed car in the centre of Basra:
[Al-Shaykh] If you really want to look for truth, then we should resort to the Iraqi justice away from the British provocations against the sons of Basra, particularly what happened today when the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market.
However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime.

BBC's version:
UK soldiers 'freed from militia'
Two British soldiers whose imprisonment prompted UK troops to storm a Basra police station were later rescued from militia, the Ministry of Defence says. Brigadier John Lorimer said it was of "deep concern" the men detained by police ended up held by Shia militia.Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili said the men - possibly working undercover - were arrested for allegedly shooting dead a policeman and wounding another.The arrests sparked unrest in which Army vehicles were attacked. In a statement, Lorimer said that under Iraqi law the soldiers should have been handed over to coalition authorities, but this failed to happen despite repeated requests.
Since when do Shia militia control Iraqi jails and the Basra police station?
Who wrote the Iraqi law that says UK soldiers are above the law?
The reports stated two British commando special forces dressed as Iraqis have been caught by the Iraqis after they were found shooting and killing local policemen. And the Iraqis put them in jail. The British army then, came with tanks, destroyed the jail and freed the two british commandos. In the process, all the Iraqi prisoners in the jail ran away to freedom. Riots started, and I saw British tanks engulfed with molotov coktails and British soldiers runing out of their tanks, some were on fire. This report give crediblity to the 'conspiracy theorists' who have long claimed many terrorist acts in Iraq are, in fact, being initiated and carried out by US, British and Israeli forces. The TRUTH is the British had to either rescue or kill these two commandos in order to keep these operations secret.

British Army vehicles under attack during bid to recover arrested servicemen

A wide array of weapons reportedly taken from the men was shown

as well as black wigs and uniforms.

British forces in tanks and helicopters stormed an Iraqi jail tonight to rescue two service personnel who were arrested after allegedly shooting dead a local policeman and wounding another, the governor of Basra said. British troops had arrived at the police station where the two men were being held and encircled the building. They were attacked by demonstrators with rocks and petrol bombs. One soldier was seen engulfed by flames tumbling from his tank and gunfire was exchanged between the two sides, leaving three soldiers injured and two civilians dead. Later, more than 10 tanks and helicopters broke down the walls of the jail in the rescue operation to release the two arrested servicemen. It was also reported that 150 Iraqi prisoners escaped in what Mohammed al-Waili, the governor of Basra, described as a 'barbaric, savage and irresponsible' act. The Ministry of Defense refused to comment after officials said that the two men were undercover officers dressed as Arabs. The spokesman said: "We can confirm that the two military personnel have been released." Mr al-Waili said: "A British force of more than 10 tanks backed by helicopters attacked the central jail and destroyed it. This is an irresponsible act." He said the British force had spirited the prisoners away to an unknown location.
British tanks smash Iraqi jail to free UK soldiers
BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - British forces used tanks to smash down the walls of a prison in the southern city of Basra and freed two undercover British soldiers seized earlier by Iraqi forces, an Interior Ministry official said on Monday. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said half a dozen tanks had broken down the walls of the jail and troops had then stormed in to free the two British soldiers. The governor of Basra confirmed that the jail had been broken into. The Interior Ministry official said dozens of Iraqi prisoners being held at the jail had escaped at the same time.

Perhaps this has something to do with P2OG:
Look Out ! Here Comes P2OG
Donald Rumsfeld's plan to fight terror is to create a lot more of it. In an L.A. Times column, military analyst William Arkin describes the Pentagon's plan to create an elite secret army, equipped with a vast array of equipment and resources, using "aggressive new 'off-the-books' tactics." He calls it, "the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces since the Vietnam era.". The Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) would carrry out "secret operations aimed at 'stimulating reactions' among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction – that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by U.S. forces." Wait a minute – prod terrorists into action?! And just to make sure that we lose international support altogether, the brief declares the U.S. will hold "states/sub-state actors accountable" and "signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk." Posted by lakshmi on November 5, 2002

The Fun Never Ends

Money that Congress set aside for New Orleans evacuation plan went instead to studying bridge

As far back as eight years ago, Congress ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop a plan for evacuating New Orleans during a massive hurricane, but the money instead went to studying the causeway bridge that spans the city's Lake Ponchartrain, officials say. "They never used it for the intended purpose," said former Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La. "The whole intent was to give them resources so they could plan an evacuation of New Orleans that anticipated that a very large number of people would never leave." In Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, attention has focused on the inability of local and federal officials to evacuate or prepare for the large number of poor people, many of them minorities, who had no access to transportation and remained behind. That possibility was one of the concerns that led Congress in 1997 to set aside $500,000 for FEMA to create "a comprehensive analysis and plan of all evacuation alternatives for the New Orleans metropolitan area." Frustrated two years later that nothing materialized, Congress strengthened its directive. This time it ordered "an evacuation plan for a Category 3 or greater storm, a levee break, flood or other natural disaster for the New Orleans area." The $500,000 that Congress appropriated for the evacuation plan went to a commission that studied future options for the 24-mile bridge over Lake Ponchartrain, FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney said.The hefty report produced by the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission "primarily was not about evacuation," said Robert Lambert, the general manager for the bridge expressway.

Locals, Officials Suggest Levees were Intentionally Blown

Could the levees in New Orleans have been INTENTIONALLY blown out in order to provide the justification for total FEMA federal takeover? The locals certainly seem to think so, yet, as usual, the mainstream media is barely picking up on this wave of opinion, so it is left to us once again to bring the issue into the open.This website distances itself from claims that the levees were blown to target the lower class areas and save the richer areas. The fact is that the disaster affected everyone, and now that the lower classes have largely been evacuated, the middle class are being targeted by door to door raids. Jack booted thugs are arresting people if they don’t leave and confiscating their firearms.When Katrina hit, it drifted 15 miles to the east of where forecasters said it would strike. Therefore it wasn’t quite the monster described. The storm passed through with relatively minor damage, it was the the storm surge from the Gulf that caused Lake Pontchartrain to rise three feet and the subsequent flooding. Katrina hit early on Monday 29th August, the levees broke in three places - along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal,and the London Street Canal. (Click here for a MapThe main storm surge from Hurricane Katrina washed into Lake Pontchartrain at around 7AM on August 29th when the counterclockwise motion of Katrina was pushing water from the Gulf of Mexico into the lake. Some are questioning the timeline of the levee failures, suggesting that there was a 21 hour discrepancy between the storm surge and the collapse of the levees . This is not the case. The first levee broke just a few hours after the hurricane hit on the same morning.

White House Tries To Blame Flooding on Environmentalists
The Mississippi Clarion Ledger is reporting that it has obtained internals emails from the Justice Department that indicates the Bush administration may be seeking to blame the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina on environmentalists. The Justice Department is seeking information from various U.S. attorneys offices on whether they have defended any cases involving environmental groups seeking to block the Army Corps of Engineers from working on the levees around New Orleans.

Suburb Ok'd Decision To Block New Orleans Evacuees
The City Council in Gretna Louisiana has passed a resolution supporting a move by the police chief to seal off a bridge that could have been used by thousands of people in New Orleans to evacuate. Gretna is a largely white town while the vast majority of the evacuees in New Orleans were African-American. The town's mayor Ronnie Harris said "This wasn't just one man's decision. The whole community backs it." Hundreds of men, women and children were turned away as they tried to cross the bridge over the Mississippi River. There were reports that officers fired gunshots over the heads of some people trying to cross the bridge. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin criticized the town's move to close off the bridge. He said "We allowed people to cross ... because they were dying in the convention center. We made a decision to protect people.... They made a decision to protect property."

Grapple-in-the-Big-Apple
Listen to a debate between anti-Iraq war British PM George Galloway and writer Christopher Hitchens held in NY last week & moderated by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

Government Coverup of Dangerous Toxins in New Orleans
Hugh Kauffman, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency who specializes in emergency response, told Morning Sedition hosts Marc Maron and Mark Riley that a government cover-up is taking place right now, as we speak, to hide information about the dangerous toxins in the flood waters of the Gulf Coast region. Kauffman, a 35-year EPA veteran who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, says that the Bush administration is preventing the EPA from releasing information that oil and chemical companies are mandated by law to provide. Kauffman says the Bush administration’s cover-up is endangering residents and relief workers throughout the Gulf Coast region, who are being exposed to dangerous levels of toxins, some of which have been proven to cause cancer and birth defects. Kauffman, who was the chief investigator for the 9/11 clean up, also said that the Bush administration engaged in the same practice after 9/11—covering up the truth about the dangers in the air and water and lying to the public in the weeks after the disaster. Kauffman said that over 75% of the heroes who responded to 9/11 have gotten sick and in some cases have died because of exposure to toxins at Ground Zero, and that he fears a similar fate will befall relief workers and residents in the Gulf Coast now.

Electricity Turned On In New Orleans Neighborhood For Bush, Turned Off When He Left
Brian Williams / MSNBC | September 17 2005
I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing when the power came back on for blocks on end. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions. It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is under government occupation, and portions of it under government-enforced lockdown. Police cars rule the streets. They (along with Humvees, ambulances, fire apparatus, FEMA trucks and all official-looking SUVs) are generally not stopped at checkpoints and roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long lines and snap judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast roped-off regions here. If we did not have the services of an off-duty law enforcement officer, we could not do our jobs in the course of a work day and get back in time to put together the broadcast and get on the air.

When will they admit the truth about Depleted Uranium?
The U.S. government's duplicity about the harmful effects of depleted uranium appears to have no limits. While the Pentagon tells U.S. military personnel that the health risks from inhaling depleted uranium are low, a study - sponsored by the Dept. of Defense - confirms that even low-level radiation causes cancer. A government-funded study has confirmed what nuclear experts have known for decades: Any dose of ionizing radiation poses serious health risks. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published a report in June 2005 confirming that ionizing radiation (IR) causes cancer. The consensus opinion of the 17 independent scientists who signed the report was that exposure to radiation from medical x-rays and nuclear medicine is directly linked to cancer.

41 Members Of Congress Ask Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald To Determine If Additional Federal Laws Were Broken
Washington, D.C. - Troubled by what they see as violations of federal law that prohibit making false and fraudulent statements to Congress, Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and 40 of his House colleagues today sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald asking that he expand his investigation of who in the Bush Administration revealed to the news media that Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a covert agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Hinchey and his colleagues urged Fitzgerald, who was designated as special prosecutor for the case, to examine the causes behind the exposure of Plame's identity -- specifically, the Bush Administration's false and fraudulent claims in January 2003 that Iraq had sought uranium for a nuclear weapon, which the Administration used as one of the key grounds to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Many Iraqis believe ’suicide’ bombings done by US to start a civil war

Ali Ghazi, also a Shia from the Iraqi deep south. "I believe it is the Americans who are doing this, pretending it is the Sunni, so there will be a civil war and they can control our wealth." Many survivors lying mangled by this morning’s bombs subscribed to a conspiracy theory according to which the US wants to rule Iraq by fomenting differences between Shia and Sunni.... many of those wounded denied there would be a war between Shia and Sunni. Mohammed Abdul Karim, an injured Shia at Noman hospital, pointed out that he was in a Sunni district and the Sunni doctors were doing everything to help him.

DIEB-THROAT : 'Diebold System One of Greatest Threats Democracy Has Ever Known'

U.S. Homeland Security 'Cyber Alert' Prior to '04 Election -- Warning Votes Can be 'Modified Remotely' via 'Undocumented Backdoor' in Central Tabulator Software!

For the first time an insider from Diebold, Inc. is speaking directly to you. Diebold: The company who tabulates -- with zero accountability and zero transparency -- the majority of America's votes. Diebold: The company who gives millions and millions of dollars to Republican politicians and virtually every Board of Election in every county in every state in America. Diebold: The company -- based in Ohio and Texas, by the way -- whose CEO promised in a Republican fundraising letter in 2003 to deliver the state of Ohio to George W. Bush in 2004. And what is this insider -- who we'll call DIEB-THROAT if it helps get your attention -- telling you, America? Only what you already should have known. What even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security already acknowledged in full prior to Election 2004: That your Electoral System, now wholly privatized and run by the "Halliburton of the Voting World" -- is, and has been, open and vulnerable to be rigged by one -- just one -- malicious person. Not "a conspiracy of many." Just One DIEB-THROAT -- someone who knows and works with them -- tells us, in a BRAD BLOG exclusive that I recommend you actually read, that the Diebold system is "one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever known."
Here's the warning the Dept. of Homeland Security gave you in August of 2004. Before the election. Read it.
Here's the warning that "someone who knows" gave you last Thursday. Read it.

New twist on Iraq aid: U.S. seeks donations
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - From the Indian Ocean tsunami to the church around the corner, Americans have shown time and again they are willing to open their pocketbooks for charity, for a total of about $250 billion last year alone. But now, amid pleas for aid after Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has launched an unusual effort to raise charitable contributions for another cause: the government's attempt to rebuild Iraq. <>Although more than $30 billion in taxpayer funds have been appropriated for Iraqi reconstruction, the administration earlier this month launched an Internet-based fundraising effort that it says is aimed at giving Americans "a further stake in building a free and prosperous Iraq." Contributors have no way of knowing who's getting the money or precisely where it's headed, because the government says it must keep the details secret for security reasons.

Frustrated U.S. Finds Few Willing to Join Anti-Chavez Coalition
U.S. policymakers striving to curb the influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are confronting a dilemma: Like a prizefighter, he seems to get stronger with every sparring session. The United States slammed Chavez on Thursday for not doing enough to stop drug traffickers, and the Venezuelan used his United Nations General Assembly address to accuse the U.S. of practicing its own brand of terrorism.
Listen to an interview with Hugo Chavez on Democracy Now! archive.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday a UN committee should investigate how Israel acquired nuclear weapons. In an unyielding speech to the General Assembly, Ahmadinejad said his country had the inalienable right to produce nuclear energy and accused the United States of violating a treaty banning the spread of atomic weapons. The Iranian president also tried to focus international attention on Israel's nuclear activities. He called for the establishment of a UN committee to formulate solutions for nuclear weapons disarmament and said the committee should "investigate how materials, technology and equipment related to atomic weapons made their way to the Zionist regime, in breach of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)."

Trapped in New Orleans by the flood--and martial law

LARRY BRADSHAW and LORRIE BETH SLONSKY are emergency medical services (EMS) workers from San Francisco and contributors to Socialist Worker. They were attending an EMS conference in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. They spent most of the next week trapped by the flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city. Here, they tell their story.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TWO DAYS after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the city’s historic French Quarter remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat.

The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and fled the city. Outside Walgreens’ windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized, and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters.

There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home on Saturday. We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with “hero” images of the National Guard, the troops and police struggling to help the “victims” of the hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.

The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ON DAY Two, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina.

Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources, including the National Guard and scores of buses, were pouring into the city. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible, because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the city. Those who didn’t have the requisite $45 each were subsidized by those who did have extra money.

We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and newborn babies. We waited late into the night for the “imminent” arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute they arrived at the city limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By Day Four, our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously bad. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that “officials” had told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the city, we finally encountered the National Guard.

The guard members told us we wouldn’t be allowed into the Superdome, as the city’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. They further told us that the city’s only other shelter--the convention center--was also descending into chaos and squalor, and that the police weren’t allowing anyone else in.

Quite naturally, we asked, “If we can’t go to the only two shelters in the city, what was our alternative?” The guards told us that this was our problem--and no, they didn’t have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile “law enforcement.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WE WALKED to the police command center at Harrah’s on Canal Street and were told the same thing--that we were on our own, and no, they didn’t have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred.

We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly visible embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we couldn’t stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp.

In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge to the south side of the Mississippi, where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city.

The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation, so was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, “I swear to you that the buses are there.”

We organized ourselves, and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group, and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news.

Families immediately grabbed their few belongings, and quickly, our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and other people in wheelchairs. We marched the two to three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it didn’t dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions.

As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us that there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

OUR SMALL group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and, in the end, decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway--on the center divide, between the O’Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned that we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway, and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet-to-be-seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away--some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two city shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery that New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let’s hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

Now--secure with these two necessities, food and water--cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the city with food and water in the first two or three days, the desperation, frustration and ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery-powered radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the city. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us” had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, “Get off the fucking freeway.” A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of “victims,” they saw “mob” or “riot.” We felt safety in numbers. Our “we must stay together” attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next day, our group of eight walked most of the day, made contact with the New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search-and-rescue team.

We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WE ARRIVED at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We eight were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a Coast Guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There, the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses didn’t have air conditioners. In the dark, hundreds of us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport--because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly and disabled, as we sat for hours waiting to be “medically screened” to make sure we weren’t carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome.

Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

GOP blocks, conceals, hides & evades -- among other things

What do they have to hide?? Everything, it seems.
GOP Blocks Investigations Over Katrina & Downing St. Memo
On Capitol Hill, Republicans have blocked several efforts by Democrats to seek investigations or information on Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. In the Senate, Republicans killed a proposal by Hillary Clinton for an independent investigation of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. Her proposal was rejected on a party line vote of 54 to 44.
A new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll shows that 70 percent of the country supports an independent investigation.
In the House, Republicans rejected attempts by Democrats to force the Bush administration to surrender documents on pre-war intelligence about Iraq connected to the Downing Street Memo. The memo revealed the minutes of a July 2002 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisors that indicate the United States was already committed to attacking Iraq almost a year before the war officially began. The memo also says that the Bush White House "fixed" intelligence data to justify the invasion.
Also on Wednesday, Republicans on the Judiciary and International Relations Committees rejected attempts by Democrats to compel the Bush administration to turn over information and records related to the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

This is democracy? Guess we'll have to hold investigations after we rid the Congress of GOP in 2006

graphic by Nick Anderson
Speaking of hiding, could anyone be more slimy & evasive than John Roberts? From his testimony, you'd think he'd never had an opinion of his own in his life, just did what his superiors told him. Or he is so afraid that he is a radical rightist, he can't be honest without spilling the beans. What lurks behind those glassy, vacant, blue eyes?

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) summed up Democrats' frustration with Roberts' answers, which often describe what cases have said but often do not reveal what Roberts thinks of the reasoning behind them.
"It's as if I asked you what kind of movies you like: 'Tell me two or three good movies,' and you say, 'I like movies with good acting, I like movies with good directing, I like movies with good cinematography,'" Schumer said. "Then I ask you if you like 'Casablanca,' and you respond by saying, 'Lots of people like "Casablanca."' You tell me it's widely settled that 'Casablanca' is one of the great movies."
After laughter stopped, Roberts responded, " 'Dr. Zhivago' and 'North by Northwest.'"
Ha ha ha, chuckles all around. Probably the only question he didn't evade with legalese bullshit in 3 days of questioning. But unfortunately, Schumer is 100% correct. Roberts is practically taking the Fifth Amendment on every question.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) tried to jolt a personal opinion out of Roberts by asking whether he would want the government to tell him what he could do in deciding on whether to withdraw medical care from an insensible and terminally ill loved one. Feinstein, tapping into the recent controversy over the Terry Schiavo case, asked whether Roberts wouldn't want to consider privacy in his decision. Roberts replied that he could not discuss the legal issues because a similar case might come before him. Frustrated that Roberts stuck to discussing law, Feinstein said, "I'm trying to see your feelings as a man. I'm not asking you for a legal view."

Report: Chertoff Failed In Overseeing Hurricane Response
FIRE HIM NEXT!!!
Knight Ridder is reporting that it was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff who was ultimately empowered to mobilize the federal response to Hurricane Katrina - not Michael Brown, the former head of FEMA who resigned earlier this week. Internal records show that Chertoff didn't shift power to Brown until 36 hours after Katrina hit. According to Knight Ridder, Chertoff -- even before the storm struck -- could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. According to the National Response Plan, it was Chertoff - not Brown - who was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster. Knight Ridder is also reporting that it has obtained an internal memo that suggests that Chertoff may have been confused himself about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.
What DID go right, Pres. Bush?

Bush will give an address tonight about reconstruction of New Orleans:
"We'll rebuild, it'll be even better than before. All the refugees will live outside of town in their 100,000 unit FEMA trailer park surrounded by barbed wire & armed private security contractors, and work for minimum wage at the casinos & restaurants for the rich people, who will build mansions in Algiers, 9th Ward, and Kenner, formerly poor neighborhoods. We won't be able to eat the seafood caught in Lake Ponchartrain due to the polluted flood water, but hey, we'll fly seafood in from somewhere else. It'll be great!"

Israeli Court Orders Part of West Bank Wall Torn Down
In Israel, the country's highest court has ordered the government to tear down part of the 400-mile separation wall in the West Bank because it imprisons thousands of Palestinian residents. Last year the international Court of Justice in the Hague ruled that parts of the wall were illegal and should be torn down.
Could we ship part of it to Louisiana to use as a flood wall? Our taxes paid for it.

CPB Inspector General: Tomlinson May Have Violated Rules
Hey GOP--better try covering this up, too.
Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, may have violated internal rules by hiring a consultant to assess the political leanings of public-television shows. This according to Kenneth Konz, the inspector general of the CPB. Konz is in the process of investigating a series of complaints against Tomlinson including his secret hiring of Frederick Mann to monitor programs including NOW with Bill Moyers. Konz told the Bloomberg news agency, "Clearly there are indications of possible violations. There are situations where the board doesn't know what's going on and the chairman needs to operate in a more accountable fashion." Bloomberg reports that Konz may recommend that Tomlinson be barred from serving as director of the CPB. Good riddance!

Mystery surrounds floodwall breaches

Mystery surrounds floodwall breaches
One of the Industrial Canal breaches likely was caused by a loose barge that broke through it. Suhayda said that his inspection of the debris from the 17th Street Canal breach suggests the wall simply gave way. "It looks to have been laterally pushed, not scoured in back with dirt being removed in pieces," he said. "You can see levee material, some distance pushed inside the floodwall area, like a bulldozer pushed it."

As bodies recovered, reporters told "no photos, no stories"
On Saturday, after being challenged in court by CNN, the Bush administration agreed not to prevent the news media from following the effort to recover the bodies of Hurricane Katrina victims. But on Monday, in the Bywater district, that assurance wasn't being followed. The 82nd Airborne soldier told reporters the Army had a policy that requires media to be 300 meters -- more than three football fields in length -- away from the scene of body recoveries in New Orleans. If reporters wrote stories or took pictures of body recoveries, they would be reported and face consequences, he said, including a loss of access for up-close coverage of certain military operations.
(So what?)
Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security director, had said Friday that the recovery effort would be done with dignity, "meaning that there would be no press allowed." Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore later said there would be zero access to the recovery operation. The recovery team collected a body from a green house on St. Anthony Street in nearby Seventh Ward. The dead man, who was slipped into a black body bag and carried out to one of the white vans, had been lying alone on the living room floor for nearly two weeks, neighbors said.
"I told them weeks ago he was in there," said Barry Dominguez, 39, who lives across the street and has refused to leave the neighborhood he grew up in. After the recovery team took away the St. Anthony Street body, two workers urinated on the side of a neighbor's house. (That's "with dignity"?)

FEMA's Brown paid millions in false claims to help Bush win FL votes
Michael Brown, the embattled head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, approved payments in excess of $31 million in taxpayer money to thousands of Florida residents who were unaffected by Hurricane Frances and three other hurricanes last year in an effort to help President Bush win a majority of votes in that state during his reelection campaign, according to published reports.
"Some Homeland Security sources said FEMA's efforts to distribute funds quickly after Frances and three other hurricanes that hit the key political battleground state of Florida in a six-week period last fall were undertaken with a keen awareness of the looming presidential elections," according to a May 19 Washington Post story.


Bush takes credit for blunders
"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said.
Only took him two weeks to figure out what Harry Truman knew: "The Buck Stops Here."
Rather slow on the uptake, isn't he?
The issue, and the distrust, really stem from the fact that we all know that we could be next, we could have been standing around the convention center with no food & water for 5 days while Bush and the FEMA guys patted themselves on the back for the great job they were doing. Their smirking nonchalance in the face of hundreds of thousands of people in peril is seriously malicious, it's not ineptitude, it's cavalier and evil.
USA Today featured a poll on this question of race. Asked whether the president "cares about black people," 67 percent of whites said yes, 79 percent of blacks said no.
People aren't stupid. And George, an "I'm sorry" would have been nice.

Why Do Israelis Keep Posing as Arab Terrorists?
Myths & Assumptions about Arab Fighters
Part I --->Part II
By Cyte

Gadahn (Adam Pearlman) with & without "Al-Qaeda" head gear

Israeli impersonates Arab fighter
Indicted criminal Abramoff hosted Israelis who made believe that Arab terrorists were in America just before 9/11. (Abramoff also contributed money to an "Israeli sniper school", according to testimony by his cronies before a Senate committee into his fradulent business practices prior to his indictment). The problem is that no bodies of Arabs were found at any of the four 9/11 airplane crash sites.
The Mossad was not watching Arab suspects before 9/11. The Mossad was the Arab suspects.
Sometimes the Mossad does it even better. They arrange it so that Arab clerics cooperate with the Mossad by threatening to launch "suicide bombings" or by "claiming responsibility" for Mossad-staged bombings.

Contractor pride in Iraq--(a prison guard at Abu Ghraib)

When Marines are ambushed in Iraq, is it Iraqi resistance fighters or Israeli contractors?
You get the picture.
See also: The Myth of the Suicide Bomber

Justice Dept bought White House 24 hours to dispose of records in Plame scandal
NPR legal correspondent, Nina Totenberg: Well no administration ever wants an independent overseer, and there are very good career people who are in charge of this investigation, but it could get hairy. Yesterday I talked to a former justice department official who wondered to me why the White House had asked the Justice Department if they could wait a day, earlier this week, before directing the White House staff to preserve all phone and email records, and why, similarly, the Justice Department had agreed to let the White House wait that day.
EDWARDS: Would the leaker have to know that Ambassador Wilson's wife was an undercover intelligence officer to be convicted of violating the law?
TOTENBERG: The leaker, I'm told, could be convicted even if he didn't know that he was breaking the law. But to win a conviction, a prosecutor would have to show that the leaker knew the ambassador's wife was a covert intelligence officer and that he willfully disclosed that fact, not by accident.

graphic by Nick Anderson

If You See Something, Say Something

Overkill: Feared Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans
Democracy Now! in NEW ORLEANS -- Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force.
"When they told me New Orleans, I said, 'What country is that in?,'" said one of the Blackwater men. He was wearing his company ID around his neck in a carrying case with the phrase "Operation Iraqi Freedom" printed on it. After bragging about how he drives around Iraq in a "State Department issued level 5, explosion proof BMW," he said he was "just trying to get back to Kirkuk (in the north of Iraq) where the real action is."
Later we overheard him on his cell phone complaining that Blackwater was only paying $350 a day plus per diem. That is much less than the men make serving in more dangerous conditions in Iraq.
Two men we spoke with said they plan on returning to Iraq in October. But, as one mercenary said, they've been told they could be in New Orleans for up to 6 months. "This is a trend," he told us. "You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations." If Blackwater's reputation and record in Iraq are any indication of the kind of "services" the company offers, the people of New Orleans have much to fear.

The Archbishop of Washington
Prayers (like vacations) are the default mode for this president who knows how to chuckle and bow the head in the midst of disaster but not, when it counts, how to govern or to command. If you feel the prickly heat of politics, summon a hymn to make it go away; make accountability seem a blasphemy. Thus has George Bush become the Archbishop of Washington even as his aura as lord protector slides into the putrid black lagoon, bobbing with cadavers and slick with oil, that has swallowed New Orleans. No doubt the born-again president is himself sincere about invoking the Almighty.
...
In the last election campaign George W Bush asked Americans to vote for him as the man who would best fulfil the most essential obligation of government: the impartial and vigilant protection of its citizens.Now the fraudulence of the claim has come back to haunt him, not in Baghdad but in the drowned counties of Louisiana. In the recoil, disgust and fury felt by millions of Americans at this abdication of responsibility, the president - notwithstanding his comically self-serving promise to lead an inquiry into the fiasco - will assuredly reap the whirlwind.

Graphic by Nick Anderson
CNN & Journalists regain right to film recovery of bodies
The US authorities have overturned a ban on journalists following the rescue efforts in New Orleans after a legal challenge from CNN.But they are refusing to allow photographers to accompany boat and helicopter rescue missions aimed at recovering bodies from flooded homes.CNN issued legal proceedings against the Federal Emergency Management Agency after officials said there would be "zero access" to the recovery operation. The district court judge, Keith Ellison, issued a temporary restraining order on Friday against the so-called "zero access" policy. Some opponents to the Bush administration have expressed concern that any media restrictions were politically motivated. They have likened it to restrictions against taking pictures of bodies returning from the war in Iraq.

The Death Toll

The Death Toll -- will we ever know?
Wayne Madsen Report:
"WMR is receiving reports that mercenary private military contractors (PMCs) are now operating in the New Orleans metropolitan area. PMCs have been extremely active in occupied Iraq, especially under the aegis of massive Pentagon omnibus contracts awarded to Halliburton and its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary. Joseph Allbaugh, the former FEMA director under Bush and current FEMA director Michael "Brownie" Brown's college roommate, is currently a registered lobbyist for disaster relief business for Kellogg Brown & Root. Allbaugh's lobbying firm is called the Allbaugh Group. Halliburton has recently been awarded lucrative contracts to repair U.S. Naval bases damaged by Katrina.
The presence of PMCs is worrisome. There are unconfirmed reports of mercenaries shooting residents of New Orleans and that mercenaries are involved in burning the bodies of victims in makeshift crematoria set up throughout the city. Three mercenary companies have been reported to be in the New Orleans area: Blackwater USA, Steele Foundation, and Wackenhut. The reported burning of bodies could be an attempt by the White House to suppress the total death count to an "acceptable," "manageable," and "spinnable" level.
According to well-informed New Orleans sources, New Orleans' wealthiest families, including those who are direct descendants of the French who settled New Orleans are meeting in Dallas today with Bush administration officials, New Orleans city officials, wealthy Texas oilmen, and bankers to plan for the reconstruction of New Orleans. These wealthy New Orleans residents live in the gated community of Audobon Place, a section of the city near the Garden District replete with personal helipads that still has running water and sewage and was only slightly affected by hurricane Katrina. It is now reportedly being patrolled by private Israeli security forces. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a piece with more details on this story. The Dallas meeting focused on rebuilding and re-zoning New Orleans without the "criminal element," a code word for the city's poor African American community.

Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA): "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
Those New Orleans residents have been scattered across the United States and are now under the control of FEMA. There is an understanding by the wealthy New Orleans elite that the poor will never be able to return. The Journal reported that the person who chaired the Dallas meeting was Jimmy Riess, one of the wealthy New Orleans elite who also served as Mayor Ray Nagin's Chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, which is in charge of the city's buses, trolleys, and trains. New Orleans sources report that public transportation was purposely not used to evacuate the poor New Orleans residents as a means to depopulate the poorer and more flood-prone sections of the city. In fact, after the properties in New Orleans poorer communities are razed many of the deed records of the poor and middle class contained in government offices and title companies of Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish may end up being casualties of the flood. As one New Orleans source put it, "people will not have proof they ever owned anything." As for renters and residents of public housing, they will be prevented from returning to their native city, according to New Orleans sources.
.
Graphic by Nick Anderson

ExxonMobil reports highest profits for any company EVER

ExxonMobil Sees Record $10B 2nd Quarter Profit$
Oil giant ExxonMobil is expecting to report profits of over $10 billion over the past quarter -- making it the most profitable single quarter for any company ever. This means ExxonMobil averaged making over 4.5 million dollars every hour for the past three months. During that same period gas prices shot up to record highs. Meanwhile the Energy Department is warning consumers in the Northeast to expect their winter heating bills to jump over 30 percent.

Major Oil Spill Reported in Mississippi River
A major oil spill caused by Hurricane Katrina is threatening the lower Mississippi River region. According to the Financial Times, up to 3.7 million gallons of crude oil has leaked into the Mississippi and some of the oil is expected to find its way into the Gulf of Mexico. Officials estimate the spill is about one-third the size of the huge oil spill caused by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989. Well, there go the gas prices even higher!!

US to Iraq--sorry about those water treatment plants, we're out of money!!
“We have scaled back our projects in many areas,” said James Jeffrey, a senior advisor on Iraq for the State Department. “We do not have the money.” More than two years after Congress approved funding for the rebuilding effort, electricity and oil production in Iraq are at or below prewar levels; and unemployment remains high. Less than half of the U.S. reconstruction money has been spent, but in some sectors, such as electricity and water, security costs have eaten up much of the budget.

Grand jury indicts committee formed by DeLay (He'll be next...)
A grand jury has indicted a political action committee formed by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and a Texas business group in connection with 2002 legislative campaign contributions.The five felony indictments against the two groups were made public Thursday. Neither DeLay nor any individuals with the business group has been charged with any wrongdoing. "All five of these indictments involve the misuse of corporate money to influence Texas elections in 2002," Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle said.


Forced evacuations begin in the Big Easy
Confiscating weapons in New Orleans--the good ol' American Double Standard
No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said. But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.

Locals saw a barge break the levee
Locals from Lakeview subdivision of New Orleans report that after Katrina passed a loose barge struck levee causing breach that flooded city. Wayne Madsen Report has just been informed by evacuees in Baton Rouge from Lakeview, a well-to-do New Orleans neighborhood, that the flooding of the city was caused by a loose barge striking the levee on the 17th Street Canal. The breach was not caused by rising flood waters as reported by FEMA and other agencies. Lakeview is some 1.5 miles down Veterans Boulevard from the 17th St. Canal breach. Distraught evacuees want to know why the Coast Guard or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not secure the barge. The evacuees who witnessed the barge striking the levee also want to know why the major media is not covering this story. It is not known what company owns the barge but if it is a major campaign contributor to the GOP, the answer is self-evident.

Wecome to the FEMA gulag
FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the "host" goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won't allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs - and... it could cause a riot. It gets worse. He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and "a sum of money" and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.

FEMA head Brown lied on his resumee about experience
Michael Brown, under fire over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, cited prior emergency-management experience in an official bio but his duties were “more like an intern.” Time reported.<>Brown's bio on the FEMA Web site says he had once served as an "assistant city manager with emergency services oversight," and a White House news release in 2001 said Brown had worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., in the 1970s "overseeing the emergency-services division." However, a city spokeswoman told the magazine Brown had actually worked as "an assistant to the city manager." The Washington Post reported on Friday that five of eight top FEMA officials had come to their jobs with virtually no experience in handling disasters. The agency's top three leaders, including Brown, had ties to Bush's 2000 presidential campaign or the White House advance operation.

A few things you have to believe are true to believe that Bush won fairly in 2004
12) There was no fraud in Cuyahoga County Ohio where they admitted counting the votes in secret before bringing them out in public to count...
16) In every single instance where exit polls were wrong the discrepancy favored Bush, even though statistical probability tells us that any survey errors should show up in both directions. Half a century of polling and centuries of mathematics must be wrong.

Maybe the days of "Bling-Bling" rap songs is over?
Hell no, we ain't all right
by Chuck D (as read on Air America)
Now all these press conferences, breaking news alerts, this just in:
while your government looks for a war to win
Flames from the blame game, names? Where do I begin?
While the walls closin' in, get some help to my kin.
Who cares, while the rest of the Bush nation stares
As the drama unfolds, as we, the people under the stairs
Fifty percent of this Son-of-a-Bush nation is like
hatin' or Haiti when settin' up assassinations
Ask Pat Robertson, quiz 'em...hmmm, smells like terrorism
Racism in the news, still one-sided views, saying
"Whites find food, pray for the National Guard ready to shoot,
'cause them Blacks, they loot"
Fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, I don't mean to scare
Wasn't this written somewhere?
Disgrace is all I see, a sea of black faces moved to all these places
Emergency state, corpses, alligators & snakes
Big difference between this haze & them diamonds on them VMA's
We better look what's really important under the sun
Especially if you're over 21
This ain't no TV show, it ain't no video, this is real real,
really real, beyond them same old keep it real quotes
from them TV stars drivin' big rim cars
Streets be floodin', B, no matter where you at
No gas, driving is now a luxury
Urgency, a state of emergency, shows
somebody's government is far from reality
I see here, we be the new faces of refugees
Who ain't even overseas, but here on our knees
Forget the plasma TV, ain't no electricity
New world upside down, no order
Shelter, food, what's up with the water?
No answers from disaster, the masses hurtin'
So who we call? Halliburton?
Son-of-a-Bush, how you gonna trust that cat
to fix things, when help is stuck in Iraq
makin' war plans, takin' more stands in Afghanistan
2000 soldiers dying in the sand
But that's over there, right? But what's over here
is a noise so loud some can't hear
But on TV, I can see, bunches of people looking just like me

FEMA-- F is for "Failure"

Jon Stewart on Katrina: "Bush did it"

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002358.html#002358

Resident to Cheney: Go Fuck Yourself, Mr. Cheney!

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/8/123441/6549

Headlines from DEMOCRACY NOW:
Federal Government Attempts to Block Press Access To New Orleans
The Reuters news agency is reporting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is now rejecting requests by journalists to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims. In addition journalists are being asked not to photograph any dead bodies in the region. NBC News Anchor Brian Williams is reporting that police officers have been seen aiming their weapons at members of the media. And a blogger named Bob Brigham has written a widely read dispatch that the National Guard in Jefferson County are under orders to turn all journalists away. "
GOP Announces Joint House-Senate Investigation Into Katrina
Republican House and Senate leaders announced a joint investigation into the government's response to the hurricane. No Democrats attended the press conference announcing the probe. This marks the first joint investigation since the Iran-Contra probe of the 1980s. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada responded to the probe by saying, "An investigation of the Republican administration by a Republican-controlled Congress is like having a pitcher call his own balls and strikes."
Rep. Pelosi Calls On Bush to Fire FEMA Head
In other news on Capitol Hill, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi assailed the head of FEMA, Michael Brown, who she described as having "absolutely no credentials." Before joining FEMA Brown spent 11 years as the head of the International Arabian Horse Association. Pelosi said she recently saw President Bush and urged him to fire Brown. She said the president responded to her request by saying "Why would I do that?" When Pelosi said because of all that went wrong last week, she said he replied "What didn't go right?"
AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't you go through the list of the top men at the head of FEMA?
JUDD LEGUM: Well, right at the top you have Michael Brown, and as you mentioned, just a while ago, he was the Commissioner of Judges at the International Arabian Horse Association. To give you an idea of what he did there, he spent a year investigating whether a breeder performed liposuction on a horse's rear end. So, I think that clearly that 11 years he spent there probably didn't serve him too well when he transferred over to FEMA.

FEMA Filled With Political Appointees, Not Disaster Experts
Questions are also being raised as to why the Bush administration chose to appoint a number of other top officials at FEMA who had no experience handling disasters. FEMA's deputy director and chief of staff Patrick Rhode, was an advance man for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the White House. The agency's third-highest ranking official, Scott Morris, was a public relations expert who worked for a Texas company that produced TV and radio spots for the Bush-Cheney campaign.
Firefighters Complain Over FEMA's Handling of Crisis
Some firefighters went to the press and complained that they were being underutilized. FEMA lashed out at those firefighters who spoke out. FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak said "I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country.
Five Die From Bacteria in Contaminated Flood Water
Federal medical authorities have announced that at least five people have died from a disease related to Hurricane Katrina. They died from a bacteria that can enter the body through open wounds after a slog through polluted water. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is predicting more people will die from coming in contact with contaminated flood water.
County Officials Block Astrodome Radio Plan
Local county officials in Houston Texas are blocking plans for a low power FM radio station to be set up at the Astrodome to service hurricane survivors. The project had already been OK'd by the Federal Communication Commission.


Racist White Elite of New Orleans want poor people to stay gone
"The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically."

FEMA Firefighters kept away from New Orleans during crisis-- by FEMA
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers. Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."

FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/84aa35cc-1da8-11da-b40b-00000e
FEMA turns away experienced firefighters
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/5/105538/7048
FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspec
FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspec
FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05246/565143.stm
FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15147862&BRD=
FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/3/171718/0826
FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509
FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-050902dale
FEMA turns away generators
http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWLBLOG.ac3fcea.html
FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=18470

That last one is real -- not satire but straight from FEMA's website


Priorities:
US Gov't had money to build a wall around Gaza, but not New Orleans?
The Israeli government and military receive $15,139,178* from the U.S. every day.
“Generous as it is, what Israel actually got in U.S. aid is considerably less than what it has cost U.S. taxpayers to provide it. The principal difference is that so long as the U.S. runs an annual budget deficit, every dollar of aid the U.S. gives Israel has to be raised through U.S. government borrowing.- Richard Curtiss

Time to buy Halliburton Stock!

Breaking news from Citizens for Legitimate Government:
Halliburton Stock Reaches All-Time High In Mid-Day Trading
Halliburton Co. will increase prices across all of its energy services business lines next month, the company's Chairman and Chief Executive David Lesar said on Tuesday, although he declined to specify the sizes of those price increases. In mid-day trading, Halliburton shares were up 2.5 percent at $63.89, an all-time high for the stock.

Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Katrina Repair Contracts
A Halliburton Co. subsidiary [Kellogg, Brown & Root Services Inc.] that has come under fire for its reconstruction work in Iraq has begun tapping a $500 million Navy contract to do emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and Marine facilities that were battered by Hurricane Katrina.
Bush to seek another $40 billion for Katrina aid [*Halliburton*] --
With the pumping of New Orleans comes the grim task of collecting bodies Eight days after Hurricane Katrina struck Bush was preparing to ask for $40 billion more in aid for the stricken region, a congressional official said Tuesday.
"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies."
Funeral director deploys to hurricane region
A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there. "DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.
Bodies found piled in freezer at Convention Center --
Mayor says Katrina may have claimed more than 10,000 lives
Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Monday, flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started pointing out bodies. Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. "It's not on, but at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.
Refugees from New Orleans behind barbed wire in Utah
"The Hurricane Katrina insurgency(???!!!) from New Orleans is tucked safely away behind the 6-foot chain link fence with the accommodating barb wire atop chain links. The ONLY entry into Detention Camp Utah [Camp Williams] is through the highly secure military gates that are guarded by armed military guards twenty four seven. The ONLY access to the New Orleans insurgency is granted to military, government officials, and MAINSTREAM media."
Pardon me, these are not "insurgents", they are American taxpayers & citizens!

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
Bush, Blanco spar over military, visit
Blanco says Army brought attitude, not resources
BATON ROUGE - Even as teams of engineers worked to patch ruptured levees in New Orleans, a political breach opened between Gov. Kathleen Blanco and President Bush over who is in charge of the post-Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. One flashpoint came over the weekend, when Blanco said she rebuffed an attempt by the White House to seize control of the mounting military presence in Louisiana, including thousands of state National Guard forces under her authority.

Chertoff: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

Journalists Attacked by Police in New Orleans
Two veteran photojournalists - NPPA member Rick Wilking of Reuters and Getty's Mark Wilson - were robbed of cameras and computer equipment today while on assignment in a neighborhood in New Orleans, and a photojournalist and a reporter were confronted at gunpoint and slammed against a wall by police following a shoot-out between looters and cops that left at least one person dead. Another photojournalist - Lucas Oleniuk of the Toronto Star - was knocked to the ground by police, his gear taken from him initially, when he photographed them shooting at looters and then beating one.

Looks like this is policy--damage control, and not just practiced in Iraq.

FEMA bogged down within "do-nothing" DHS
In June, 16-year FEMA employee Pleasant Mann wrote members of Congress to warn of the agency's decay. "Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation's emergency management capability is being eroded," he wrote. The merger into Dept. of Homeland Security has compounded the agency's problems, he says. "Before, we reported straight to the White House, and now we've got this elaborate bureaucracy on top of us, and a lot of this bureaucracy doesn't think what we're doing is that important, because terrorism isn't our number one," he says. "The biggest frustration here is that we at FEMA have responded to disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11, and here are people who haven't responded to a kitchen fire telling us how to deal with terrorism. You know, there were a lot of people who fell down on the job on 9/11, but it wasn't us." The FEMA program administrator says the crux of the problem is that the agency is buried in DHS, which is regarded as a "do-nothing agency" among FEMA's action-oriented staff. "You know, FEMA could do well by itself, and FEMA was starting to do well by itself. But that's changed."

From this week's "NEW YORKER" magazine
THE WHITE HOUSE UNDER WATER
Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis. The mismanagement of the Katrina floods echoed the White House mismanagement—the cavalier posture, the wretched decisions, the self-delusions—in postwar Iraq. Just as serious, the President’s priorities, his indifference to questions of infrastructure and the environment, magnified an already complicated disaster. In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers’ funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees. Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding. Similarly, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which is supposed to improve drainage and pumping systems in the New Orleans area, recently asked for $62.5 million; the White House proposed $10.5 million.

The President’s incuriosity, his prideful insistence on being an underbriefed “gut player,” is not looking so charming right now, either, if it ever did. In the ABC interview, he said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Even the most cursory review shows that there have been comprehensive and chilling warnings of a potential calamity on the Gulf Coast for years. The most telling, but hardly the only, example was a five-part series in 2002 by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which concluded that a catastrophe was “a matter of when, not if.” The same paper said last year, “For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won’t be finished for at least another decade.” A Category 4 or 5 hurricane would be a catastrophe: “Soon the geographical ‘bowl’ of the Crescent City would fill up with the waters of the lake, leaving those unable to evacuate with little option but to cluster on rooftops—terrain they would have to share with hungry rats, fire ants, nutria, snakes, and perhaps alligators. The water itself would become a festering stew of sewage, gasoline, refinery chemicals, and debris.” And that describes much of the Gulf Coast today.

What do you expect when this is the kind of thing his mother has to say about it:
Barbara Bush: "So many of the people in the area... were underprivileged anyway, So this is working very well for them"...

Why the American dream is one of the biggest lies

Muriel Gray argues that the lessons of hurricane Katrina and its terrible aftermath are not about disaster management but about exposing the falsehoods at the very heart of modern America

What are those lessons to be learned from a destroyed city with thousands dead, little or no relief for survivors, and lawlessness taking over from wind and water as the greatest threat to life? Not very nice lessons unfortunately. As the bodies of the poor, black, disenfranchised southerners bob to the surface of the rat-infested and sewage-infused waters, we’re reminded that America’s position as a big, safe, morally decent democracy with opportunity for all is one of the world’s biggest lies. The American dream that is being held up as the cause worth dying for in the Middle East is as rotten to the core as its demonic administration.

When Bush is temporarily propped up on two legs by his people, out of his natural position on all fours with knuckles resting gently on the White House carpet, to tell the world that his country’s values and people are worth fighting for, he omits to mention that he doesn’t mean poor people or black people. Not only is this huge slice of the American public kept largely invisible, in case it ruins the image of the culture which Bush’s administration demands countries in “the axis of terrorr” adopt, but even when such poverty is exposed to the world the US elite has little shame in publicly holding these stricken citizens in contempt.

Take the comments made to the press by Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. When quizzed on the probable death toll, which is now running into the thousands, Brown said: “Unfortunately that’s going to be attributable to a lot of people who did not heed the warnings. I don’t make judgements about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.”

So when those with cars left the city, leaving behind those with no transport, did that mean that every available coach, truck and helicopter was made available to get them out? Apparently not. Some of those who didn’t “heed the warnings” because they had no means of exit, included charity care homes for the elderly, hospitals, whole housing schemes of poor black residents, a children’s care home, and countless thousands of dispersed penniless people living on state benefits who were trapped and killed, not because they were wilful irresponsible risk takers, but because they were poor, powerless and vulnerable.

The lessons we’re learning from this horror are not about disaster management or speed of response, but about exposing the terrifying falsehoods at the heart of America’s relentless and belligerent quest for world domination. With Bush turning his gimlet eye to Iran, and linking his arm through that of our own dear Tony Blair as he does so, it’s never been more timely to be reminded so dramatically that the US is a deeply dysfunctional, decadent, declining society, imploding with its own prejudices, corruptions and hypocrisies.


FEMA prevented aid from reaching survivors
"We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA--we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines."

What will it take, America?
Jesus Christ, what has gone wrong with Americans? I turned on the radio on Wednesday, to hear a bunch of white middle class rednecks bitching about the price of oil and condemning the "looters". PEOPLE ARE FUCKING DYING FROM STARVATION AND DEHYDRATION IN AN AMERICAN CITY IN 2005. No political correctness can change this simple fact. PEOPLE ARE DYING. If I was in their situation, and my baby was dying from hunger, in diapers that were 3 days old, and my wife was dying through dehydration and starvation, and all that stood between me and their survival was a fucking window in a Walmart, guess what, I would kick the fucking windows in and do exactly what those poor people are doing. Law and order? Fuck law and order. Do you understand, fuck law and order, fuck your bullshit social decency, fuck your bull shit laws, my family are dying, and I am going to save them and god help anyone who gets in my way.

If you are not offended by this alone, if you are not disgusted and angered to the point where you say "this regime needs to be removed, right now, today, and jailed for crimes against humanity", if you are not motivated to throw this murdering scum into prison, freeze all their assets under their Patriot Act, and then distribute their illegally gotten wealth to the victims of hurricane Katrina, wealth that has been stolen at the expense of 1000s of lives around the world, then quite frankly, you are as evil as they are.

Killed by Contempt
Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized. Here's one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.<> Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a "strange paralysis" set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.

Bush to New Orleans: "Drop Dead"
Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." <>Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration. And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.

Falluja Floods the Superdome
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja. A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.

In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.

Priorities? Terror or Reality?

Warnings went ignored as Bush slashed flood defence budget to pay for wars
Geoffrey Lean
Vital measures to protect New Orleans from "catastrophic" hurricane damage were scrapped by the Bush administration to pay for its wars on terror and in Iraq, despite official warnings of impending disaster. Funding for flood prevention was slashed by 80 per cent, work on strengthening levees to protect the city was stopped for the first time in 37 years, and planning for housing stranded citizens and evacuating refugees from the Superdome were crippled. Yet the administration had been warned repeatedly of the dangers by its own officials.
In early 2001, at the start of Mr Bush's presidency, his Government's Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) warned that a hurricane hitting New Orleans would be the deadliest of the three most likely catastrophes facing America; the others were a massive San Francisco earthquake and, prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York.
Fema's then director, the Bush appointee Joe Allbaugh, said that the warning caused him "great concern". But the President emasculated the agency, subsuming it into the Department of Homeland Security set up after the 11 September 2001 attacks, which concentrated on the terrorist threat.
This was only one of a series of warnings that predicted what happened last week, including the storm surges brought by the hurricane, the breaching of the levees, the floods covering the city, and the "toxic gumbo" of sewage, oil and chemicals.
Last year an emergency exercise run by the federal, Louisiana and New Orleans governments, featuring a fictional Hurricane Pam, almost exactly foretold the disaster now unfolding. But officials said plans to prepare for an actual catastrophe were abandoned because of cuts. Three years ago, another study concluded that a hurricane less intense than the one that has now hit New Orleans would flood most of the city; in 1998 a less severe one still, Georges, produced a 17ft wall of water.
"No one can say they did not see it coming," reported the The Times-Picayune from New Orleans this week. The newspaper published a five-part series predicting the disaster five years ago. Officials and experts last week wearily recalled their attempts to make the government take action. "It's frustrating to have planned, begged and pleaded that this could happen," said Walter Maestri, emergency management director of the now submerged Jefferson Parish. "They would say, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' Well it's here now."
Warnings stressed the inability of levees to resist a storm surge and the city's increasing vulnerability because of the destruction of natural defences. New Orleans is surrounded by 350 miles of levees - often flat, grass-covered embankments with parks and bicycle tracks - that were built soon after the city was founded in 1718. But tests have shown they are too low to withstand the water whipped up by even a category three hurricane, let alone a category four like Katrina. The levee at the 17th Street Canal, where the crucial breach took place, was particularly vulnerable, with part of it four feet lower than the rest.
Every four miles of marsh shrinks the storm surge by a foot. But the city has become more defenceless as the wetlands that protected it against the sea vanished at a rate of 25 square miles a year - that's one football field every quarter of an hour. The oil and gas industry has caused much of this loss, as have the levees themselves by flushing silt out to sea that used to replenish the Mississippi Delta. While the surges have risen, the city has sunk two feet in the past 60 years.
Natural and man-made defences have long been neglected. A 10-year plan to strengthen levees after a 1965 hurricane was never completed. But the skimping has worsened since President Bush's election, particularly after 11 September. Federal spending on flood control in south-east Louisiana has been cut by almost half since 2001, from $69m (£34.5m) per year to $36.5m. Funds for work at Lake Pontchartrain, the source of the flooding, have fallen by nearly two-thirds over three years, from $14.25m to $5.7m. As a result, work on New Orleans' east bank hurricane levees stopped last summer for the first time in 37 years.
The US Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the levees, requested $27m this year for hurricane protection around the lake. President Bush tried to cut this to $3.9m, although Congress allowed $5.7m. The President also tried to cut $78m to improve drainage and prevent flooding in the city to $30m, though Congress passed $36.5m. A $14bn longer-term project to restore marshes was cut to $570m.
Plans to provide shelter for victims and evacuate the Superdome, started after last year's Hurricane Pam exercise, were abandoned. Eric Tolbert, chief of disaster response at Fema until last February, said this was because funding dried up. "What you are seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," he said last week. "They have been weakened by diversion into terrorism."
Mr Maestri, the Jefferson Parish emergency director, added: "It appears that money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq. I suppose that's the price we pay."

The questions a shocked America is asking its President

It's About People, Not Politics
September 2, 2005
By Ken Schram
SEATTLE - I'll be blunt.
I've never had high expectations of President Bush's leadership.
But then I never expected he'd be completely worthless at a time when the country needed him most.
I'm just not up to being polite after so many days of watching the inept, incompetent and insensitive government reaction to the deplorable conditions in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Days of doctors begging for generators and fuel to keep hospital patients alive; days of people abandoned without food and water; days were thugs and criminals were allowed to gain a violent foothold in the midst of chaos and despair; days where the sick lay dying and the dead lay untended.
And what was the initial White House response to concern that there were too many days with too little help?
It was: Don't turn this into something political.
Excuse me?
What a profusely pitiful attitude.
This isn't about politics. It's about people.
And it's about a Bush administration that doesn't know the difference.
It's about a President who doesn't have the ability to lead a nation in a time of crisis and catastrophe.
I honestly didn't think that George Bush could disappoint America more than he already has.
I was wrong.

CNN--Tell the truth or the official version?
CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they're all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw... people who are dying in front of you.
Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you've got about 3,000 people here in this -- in the Convention Center right now. They're hungry. Don't have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.

FOX News faces up to the facts:
Watch video here
Geraldo & Shep Smith tell Hannity & Colmes of the reality on the ground at the New Orleans Convention Center.
Geraldo: Look in the face of this baby. This is it, no sugar coating, no political spin, no Republicans or Democrats, people suffering! Let them go! Let them outa here! Let them go! Let them walk over this damned interstate and let them outa here!

The questions a shocked America is asking its President
Why has it taken George Bush five days to get to New Orleans?
President Bush was on holiday in Texas when Katrina struck. He then spent Monday on a pre-arranged political fundraising tour of California and Arizona, which he did not cancel or curtail. On Tuesday he surveyed the hurricane damage - but only from the flight deck of Air Force One, prompting criticism that he was too detached from the suffering on the ground. He didn't give a speech until Tuesday afternoon - 36 hours after the storm first hit - and didn't embark on a proper tour of the region until yesterday. Key advisers have come under fire for similar levels of detachment. As the full magnitude of the disaster unfolded, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was seen buying shoes in New York, and Dick Cheney remained on holiday.
How could the world's only superpower be so slow in rescuing its own people?
It will probably take months, even years, to answer that question. But here are a few factors to consider: 1) the federal government's disaster relief agency, Fema, has lost considerable clout because the priority at the Department of Homeland Security has been counter-terrorism; 2) the homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, has no experience in disaster relief; 3) because of Fema's low profile, almost no contingency measures were taken before Katrina struck; 4) the under-resourced local Army Corps of Engineers appeared completely unprepared to conduct emergency operations after the levees were breached; 5) nobody appears to have considered the communications problems inherent in loss of phone and cell-phone service.
Why did he cut funding for flood control and emergency management?
Another question likely to be the subject of official investigations. Local and former federal officials are in little doubt that the budgetary priorities of Iraq, tax cuts and the "war on terror" are to blame. Disaster prevention experts have been studying New Orleans for years and urging upgrades to its levees and other preventive measures. The Army Corps of Engineers was supposed to carry out some of this work last year, but its funding was cut. It seems the Bush administration considered the risk of malicious human attack and the risk of the ravages of nature, and found itself incapable of holding both ideas in its head.
Why did it take so long to send adequate National Guard forces to keep law and order?
The National Guard is under pressure in every US state because of the strains of deployment in Iraq. More than one-third of Louisiana's 10,000 guardsmen are either in Iraq or Afghanistan. No mass deployment of guardsmen from other states is being contemplated because they are all needed in Iraq too. At first, only 3,000 guardsmen were sent to New Orleans, but that was increased to about 10,000 as looting and gun violence became widespread.
How can the US take Iraq, a country of 25 million people, in three weeks but fail to rescue 25,000 of its own ciizens from a sports arena in a big American city?
America's obsession with maintaining its pre-eminent position as the world's largest superpower means it is incapable of responding swiftly and effectively to a humanitarian crisis. While it has the firepower for fighting wars, it does not have the leadership and skills to combat natural disaster.

Ending the Impunity of the Bush White House

by Norman Solomon
The man in the Oval Office is fond of condemning “killers.” But his administration continues to kill with impunity.
“They can go into Iraq and do this and do that,” Martha Madden, former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, said on Sept. 1, “but they can’t drop some food on Canal Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now? It’s just mind-boggling.” The policies are matters of priorities. And the priorities of the Bush White House are clear. For killing in Iraq, they spare no expense. For protecting and sustaining life, the cupboards go bare.
The problem is not incompetence. It’s inhumanity, cruelty and greed.
Media outlets have popularized some tactical critiques of U.S.military operations in Iraq. But the administration is competent enough to keep the military-industrial complex humming. It’s good at generating huge profits for “defense” contractors, oil companies and the like. First things first, and first things last. Why shore up levees when the precious money it would take can be better used for war in Iraq? Why allow National Guard units to remain home when they can be useful, killing and being killed, in a faraway war based on lies?
And when catastrophe hits people close to home, why should the president respond with urgency or adequacy if their lives don’t figure as truly important in his political calculus?
It’s time to end the impunity of President George W. Bush. Of course he doesn’t pull the triggers, drop the bombs or oversee the torture himself. And he avoids the dying that he has facilitated in the wake of the hurricane. White-collar criminals -- in this case, white-collar war criminals -- rarely get close to their dirtiest work. Every minute has counted in the wake of the hurricane. While dawdling and compounding the massive tragedy, Bush wants to shift responsibility. We should stop and think about why he noisily rattled a big tin cup midway through the week. While the death toll rises in New Orleans and criticisms of his inaction grow more outraged across the country, the man wants us to think about making a charitable contribution, not taking political action. But George Bush and Dick Cheney must not be let off the hook. There is something egregiously obscene about the people in charge of the U.S. government telling citizens to donate money for a hurricane relief effort while the administration, from the president on down, has viciously abdicated its most basic responsibilities.
For the activities it views as really important, like the war on Iraq, the Bush White House hardly requires private contributions while siphoning off vast quantities of taxpayer funds. But when the task is to save lives instead of destroying them, kids are supposed to bust open their piggy banks.
“True compassion,” Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” He accused the federal government of demonstrating “hostility to the poor” -- appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.” Four decades later, de facto hostility to the poor remains government policy, and its results include widespread deaths in New Orleans that could have been prevented.
Respect must be paid, and justice must be created. The dead cannot be brought back; the suffering of recent days can’t be undone. But it’s up to us to create maximum pressure for a truly adequate rescue effort -- and to organize effectively while demanding political accountability. That means depriving Bush, Cheney and their congressional allies of the power they ruthlessly enjoy. And that means ending their impunity, so that truth has consequences.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: http://www.WarMadeEasy.com

George Bush's America
<>How is it possible that young children are dying of thirst. Is this Mali? No, it is George Bush's United States of America. How is it possible that people are having to scavenge for food. Is this Burkina Faso? No, it is George Bush's United States of America.

So, this is how President George Bush treats the people who put their trust in him. After siphoning off 200 billion USD of their hard-earned cash to finance his illegal act of butchery overseas, he turns his back on them, leaves them to wallow in the sewage, to lie rotting in the streets and to starve to death.

Welcome to George Bush's United States of America. It appears the man is as inept at governing his own country as he is at conducting foreign policy. George W. Bush will go down in the annals of history as the worst president this country has ever had and the worst leader the international community is unfortunate enough to have been forced to rub shoulders with.

Maybe it should have been named "KYOTO"?

Bush surveys South Coastal damage: "Whoa!"
Maybe it should have been named "KYOTO"?
"As the Gulf Coast struggles to cope the devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina, a number of analysts around the country and the world are reflecting on the unusual severity of the storm and are making a connection with global warming. In Germany, Environmental Minister Jurgen Tritten sparked a political firestorm this week when he penned an article in a German newspaper saying "Greenhouse gasses have to be radically reduced worldwide. The US has, up until this point, had its eyes closed to this emergency." He linked Hurricane Katrina to global warming and America's refusal to reduce emission. In 2001, the Bush administration announced it would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol that has been signed by 120 countries. The global treaty went into effect earlier this year without the support of the United States. In an article in the Boston Globe Tuesday, journalist and author Ross Gelbspan writes, "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming." Gelbspan goes on to write, "Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue."

Why was the flood so devastating?
"The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce."

Graphic by Winston Smith

Warning? What warning?
"Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report in early 2001 that identified the three catastrophes most likely to hit the United States: a terrorist attack on New York, an earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane in New Orleans. Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress did what with the warning that FEMA provided? Here's what: They cut funding for flood and hurricane projects planned by the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers. According to one published report, the New Orleans district had $147 million to spend on such projects in 2001. In fiscal year 2005, which ends next month, the district will have had about $82 million, a drop of about 44 percent. As we reported earlier this week, the Bush administration proposed further cuts for the district for fiscal year 2006."

Graphic by Nick Anderson
Bu$hCo's flood for oil - leaky levees and offshore looting
"President Bush has just told Louisiana to go jump in the Gulf. First Bush convinced the House to cut $20 million out of $37 million that was supposed to go to Louisiana's coastal restoration and flood control. Then, to add insult to injury, we read in The Times-Picayune that Bush is against giving coastal states up to $500 million a year out of royalties from oil and gas drilling off our coasts. Coastal states generate more than a quarter of the oil and gas consumed by the United States, but Bush opposes the Senate's plan to share that income. Inland states now collect 50 percent of royalties from oil, gas and coal mined on federal lands within their borders, but apparently President Bush doesn't think Louisiana deserves the same treatment. This is our president, Louisiana. We helped him win his second term in office, and this is how he thanks us. Our dwindling coastline just isn't Bush's concern. Nor is the prospect of New Orleans under 20 feet water. No, Bush would rather spend $151 billion (so far) on the war in Iraq and give massive tax cuts to the wealthy than protect Louisiana from falling into the Gulf of Mexico."