One of the puzzles of the 9/11 movie is the fact that they are so adamant about the fact that this movie was based on the 9/11 Commission Report when they actually optioned two other books and the story is obviously at least partially based on them.
I suspect that this is ABC marketing all the way. This FoxNews story from last summer gives it away:
At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries “Untitled Commission Report” and producers refer to it as the “Untitled History Project.”
The production company was called “UHP” productions. One can assume that the rightwing creative team believed that they were making their version of an “historical” docudrama based on various sources. They didn’t seem to see this as “the story of the 9/11 Commission.”
“We are trying to maintain as much accuracy, integrity and be as sensitive as we can in documenting an important series of historical events,” producer Marc Platt told The Post.
The film focuses mostly on the events leading up to the attacks, which don’t appear on screen until the very end, says Platt.
It’s Steve McPherson, the ABC executive in charge of the project who emphasizes the commission:
“For us, having talked to Thomas Kean and the whole commission, we just felt it was a really important thing to bring to air,” ABC chief Stephen McPherson told The Post yesterday at the TV critics press tour in L.A
I have not heard that they spoke with “the whole commission.” Thomas Kean may have been a “consultant” on the series but considering the numerous inaccuracies, it appears the producers may not have really used the 9/11 Commission report as much of a source at all. It was a phony marketing hook.
In any case, Kean doesn’t appear to have been much of a stickler for accuracy. As most of you have probably read by now, the movie features an entirely fabricated scene — and it’s a doozy. Here’s Rush Limbaugh gleefully describing it:
So the CIA, the Northern Alliance, surrounding a house where bin Laden is in Afghanistan, they’re on the verge of capturing, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to proceed.
So they phoned Washington. They phoned the White House. Clinton and his senior staff refused to give authorization for the capture of bin Laden because they’re afraid of political fallout if the mission should go wrong, and if civilians were harmed…Now, the CIA agent in this is portrayed as being astonished. “Are you kidding?” He asked Berger over and over, “Is this really what you guys want?”
Berger then doesn’t answer after giving his first admonition, “You guys go in on your own. If you go in we’re not sanctioning this, we’re not approving this,” and Berger just hangs up on the agent after not answering any of his questions.
Richard Clarke vociferously denies that this ever happened and it is most definitely not part of the 9/11 commission report. This is apparently a key scene, perhaps the most important scene in the movie, in that it indicts the Clinton administration for being too soft and weak to take out bin Laden when they had the chance. Rush certainly does seem to love it. Unfortunately, it just ain’t true.
But what did the last of the “good Republicans,” the 9/11 commissioner/consultant Kean have to say about this completely fabricated scene?
Neither Berger nor Ben-Veniste was consulted on the film. Kean, however, is an official adviser; he says the incident was a fictionalized composite. It was “representative of a series of events compacted into one,” he replied to Ben-Veniste at the time. In a phone interview a few days later, he added, “It’s reasonably accurate.”
No it actually isn’t. It’s a fraud. But Kean’s official impramatur on this project is what ABC has been selling from the beginning. Well, not selling, actually. They are giving this film away for free to the public and to school children saying it is an objective, accurate historical account of the events that led to the worst terrorist attack in American history.
One wonders whether Kean has actually seen the movie or if he understands that his credibility has just been flushed down the toilet by the marketing department at ABC news. But then, perhaps he doesn’t care. Matt Stoller reports on the allegedly bi-partisan Kean. It isn’t pretty.
Update:Firedoglake’s spotlight project has an interesting way to contact ABC affiliates. ThinkProgress has another helpful tool. . Update II:Jennifer Nix at FDL reports that she was on a call with journalists questioning Tom Kean today and that they were asking some tough questions. It also appears that ABC may be shamed into changing its phony “based on the 9/11 Commission Report” pitch. That is excellent news, if true.
The single most damaging thing about this rightwing fiction is that they have been presenting it as based on the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report, which gave it credibility that it simply has no right to. If they are forced to discard that then we have a tiny victory. I would hope that they will also edit out the blatantly fraudulant scenes, allow a rebuttal after the movie or pull it from their schedule all together. But this would be a start.
Now that we know “The Path to 9/11” is not actually based on the 9/11 Commission report, it is probably a good idea to take a look at what is actually was based on (aside from the fevered wingnut dreams of its creative team.) ABC had optioned a couple of books for the project. The first is called “The Cell” co-written by John Miller, formerly of ABC’s 20/20. It follows the story of John O’Neill, who is played by the star of the movie, Harvey Kietel.
Miller, you’ll recall, is the ABC spokesmodel who left the network and went directly work as the head of counterterrorism for the LAPD. This was, as you might imagine, something of a shock to the locals, who expected that their new counterterrorism chief would be someone who had at least a tiny bit of law enforcement experience. LA, after all, is a serious terrorist target, having been the destination of the thwarted Millenium plot. We take our terrorism quite seriously here.
When was the last time a top LAPD official made the tabloid’s gossipy Page Six? Umm–never? But John Miller, the ex-TV journalist brought in by chief William Bratton to head up the local anti-terrorism fight, makes the New York Post over his rocky reception here in Los Angeles.
“New Yorker and former ABC anchor John Miller is having a hard time fitting in at his new job with the Los Angeles Police Dept. Miller, who was hired by his pal Bill Bratton to be the LAPD’s head of counterterrorism, is technically a civilian…When notoriously nightlife-loving Miller showed up to a crime scene at Club Lingerie on Sunset Boulevard, a fellow officer quipped, “So John, did you really respond to the call? Or were you here already?”
Miller, the ex-ABC reporter who chief William Bratton found a $157,000-a-year job at the LAPD — as anti-terrorism boss and head of the Critical Incident Management Bureau, despite no cop experience — has enough trouble being taken seriously by LAPD officers and by journalists in town. On Thursday, his burden got heavier. He was stopped at LAX with a loaded gun in his computer bag and briefly detained before boarding a flight to New York with his wife and child. The LAPD-issued .38 and a license to carry it are two of the perks Bratton gifted Miller with to go with the job. (Miller was Bratton’s PR spokesman back at the NYPD). Miller was allowed to go ahead and fly to New York to celebrate Barbara Walters’ retirement, but he may face a fine and the wrath of his sponsor. At an evening press conference, Bratton said:
“I talked to John when he was on the plane, and he was incredibly embarrassed for himself, for his family and for the department. Apparently, he was moving things around from one case to another when he was packing and he forgot the gun was there.”
He gets the gun back when he returns. But if you’re inclined to forget where you put a loaded handgun, should you really be one of only about 100 civilian Angelenos licensed to carry one? The chief quipped, “I’m confident that he did not try to smuggle a weapon on the plane, that he and his family did not plan to hijack a plane and fly off to Cuba or something.” L.A. Times, L.A. Daily News, N.Y. Daily News, N.Y. Post
Even in Lala-land, having a showbiz counter-terrorism chief running around carrying loaded weapons on airplanes was a bit much.
LAPD chief Bill Bratton’s anti-terrorism commander, John Miller, has turned in the handguns he was caught with while boarding at LAX a few weeks back. Miller, the ex-ABC newsman who Bratton brought when he came here from New York, also gave up the department-issued Chevy Tahoe with lights and siren. Apparently everyone agreed the PR downside wasn’t worth the upside, and the official line is Miller voluntarily surrendered the perks.
After showering himself in ignominy for a few years here in LA, he is now doing PR for the FBI. He is a member of the Bush Adminstration. You can see why ABC isn’t advertising the fact that their soap opera is partly based on his work.
You won’t find it from me. Not when it comes to opposing the fascist incompetents running this country. Not after the adulterous Gingrich said this:
COLMES: We were just talking about [House Democratic Leader] Nancy Pelosi [CA] and what she wants to do in this effort to perhaps get Rumsfeld removed. He recently made some very controversial comments, basically suggesting that critics of the Iraq war are tantamount to Hitler’s appeasers. Do you agree with him on those comments?
GINGRICH: Essentially, sure. I mean, I think you’ve got to say that —
COLMES: You’re calling appeasers people who disagree with the Bush policy administration —
GINGRICH: Look —
COLMES: — comparing them to those who enabled Hitler?
GINGRICH: Yes.
COLMES: That’s an astounding comment —
GINGRICH: GINGRICH: What’s your — what’s your — why? Why is it astounding?
Are Disney and ABC becoming willing tools of the right wing? Or are they simply currying favor with James Dobson and the far right out corporate necessity? Either way, something very strange is happening in Mouseland.
Earlier this year, you’ll remember that they cancelled, at the last minute, a reality TV show called “Welcome To The Neighborhood” which featured a gay couple competing for a house. The NY Timesreported:
Ten days before the first episode was to be shown, ABC executives canceled Welcome to the Neighborhood, saying that they were concerned that viewers who might have been appalled at some early statements made in the show –including homophobic barbs –might not hang in for the sixth episode, when several of those same neighbors pronounced themselves newly open-minded about gays and other groups.
ABC acted amid protests by the National Fair Housing Alliance, which had expressed concern about a competition in which race, religion and sexual orientation were discussed as factors in the awarding of a house. But two producers of the show, speaking publicly about the cancellation for the first time, say the network was confident it had the legal standing to give away a house as a game-show prize. One, Bill Kennedy, a co-executive producer who helped develop the series with his son, Eric, suggested an alternative explanation. He said that the protests might have been most significant as a diversion that allowed the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s owner, to pre-empt a show that could have interfered with a much bigger enterprise: the courting of evangelical Christian audiences for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Disney hoped that the film, widely viewed as a parable of the Resurrection, would be the first in a profitable movie franchise.
In the months and weeks before Welcome to the Neighborhood was to have its premiere, as Disney sought to build church support for Narnia, four religious groups lifted longtime boycotts of the company that had been largely prompted by Disney’s tolerance of periodic gatherings by gay tourists at its theme parks. Representatives for two of those groups now say that broadcasting Neighborhood could have complicated their support for Narnia. One, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, lifted the last of the boycotts against Disney on June 22, a week before ABC announced it was pulling the series.
[…]
Asked whether Disney’s plans for Narnia had affected Neighborhood, Mr. Brockman of ABC referred a reporter to comments made on July 26 by Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, to a gathering of television critics. At that time it was not widely known that a gay couple had won the competition. Instead, Mr. McPherson, a champion of the show until its sudden cancellation, was asked if he had been influenced by criticism by civil rights groups.
“If I stopped airing things just because advocacy groups had issues with it, we would run a test pattern,” Mr. McPherson said. Rather, he said, he had begun to worry that some of the neighbors’ most intolerant statements early on could confuse the audience’s understanding of “the message you were trying to get across.”
Right. Mr. McPherson, very slickly avoided the question of whether it was pressure from the religious right and implied it was done for the benefit of gays, which is not credible — particularly since we know that he hired a religious cultist to direct his 40 million dollar mini-series “The Path To 9/11” written by a well known, far right wing writer.
David Cunningham, the young director, is the son of a famous leader of a controversial evangelical youth ministry called Youth With A Mission. It has been heavily criticized over the years for its authoritarian teachings and cultlike attributes. Cunningham’s alma mater is the YWAM “college” called the University of Nations, which teaches filmmaking as a way to spread the gospel. Some members of the group even worked on the film.
Cunningham has worked with other members of the religious right in Hollywood with the intention of spreading the word. His previous film, received ecstatically in the Christian right community, was called “To End All Wars”* produced by Jack Hafer, a fellow religious rightist. Cunningham was chosen as one of the 30 emerging voices who are the “future of the American church” by Charisma Magazine. He’s quoted saying:
“My life’s mission is to challenge and shape culture through film.”
The writer of this project, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is a well documented rightwing filmmaker:
“To quote Team America, he’s [Michael Moore] an out of control socialist weasel.” —Interview, June 9, 2005.
There is obviously nothing wrong with these conservative activists making films. There have always been those with a conservative point of view in Hollywood; studio bosses and network executives tend to be conservative in all senses of the word. But it is more than a little bit odd that ABC chose this particular creative duo to develop and film a hugely expensive six hour mini-series about the political culpability for 9/11. You’d think they could have found some people who were less politically invested in a particular point of view than these two.
It’s even more odd that they have gone such great lengths to advertise it as being based upon the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report when, in fact, they optioned two other books as sources for the film, one of which is widely touted on the right. Therefore, the series is quite obviously a compilation of several sources and the product of the worldview of its rightwing creative team. In other words it is a work of fiction. To advertise it as being “based” on the 9/11 Commission Report is a fraud on the public.
And now they have announced that they will not show advertising on this big 40 million dollar investment and will distribute it for free to 100,000 educators around the country and on i-tunes. It’s basically a gift to the Republican party and the conservative movement.
What is going on over at Disney/ABC? Are they selling out their shareholders to a small shadowy group of Hollywood rightwingers because they share their worldview? Or is it just a gambit for Disney to keep Focus on the Family on their side as they roll out the “Narnia” franchise? Has Disney been so successfully mau-maued by the religious right that they are now in the business of blatantly propping up the Republican Party on its behalf?
Whatever it is, it’s quite clear that they are determined to make the nation believe this work of fiction is a credible depiction of the events leading up to 9/11 when it is quite clearly a biased political drama written with the intention of making the Clinton administration culpable for the attacks in the minds of Americans. They chose people with a politiical and cultural agenda to make this film and have been dishonest in promoting it.
What is going on over at Disney?
Update: After refusing to screen the movie for anyone to the left of Hugh Hewitt and then disappearing the public blog after numerous “clarifications,” they are now refusing to allow any lefty bloggers on a promotional phone call today with their paid shill Thomas Kean, who lends his official impramatur as co-chairman of the 9/11 commission to this work of fiction.
* “To End All Wars” actually has an embedded message that would frighten the war-mongering 101st keyboarders to the depth of their bunny slippers. At the end, it’s all about forgiveness, which, as we all, know is anathema to any self-respecting wingnut. But I’m sure they enjoyed the gory crucifixion and beheading scenes. What rightwing Christian tale would be complete without them?
One of the less noticed rhetorical strategies of the right is what could be termed micro-propaganda. What I’m referring to are offhand or nearly offhand remarks with a rightwing bias, even entire articles that are so small or trivial that anyone who would take the trouble to complain about them would be dismissed as harping on the meaningless. Cumulatively, however, these little biases add up, and create a nearly unconscious, but utterly ubiquitous, atmosphere of bias against anyone or any cause to the left of Lieberman.
Now the proximate subject of this post – an unimportant article in the Times Book Review – may elicit comments along the lines, “How could you waste even a single pixel and my precious time on this” but the topic – the ubiquity and insidiousness of rightwing propaganda – is a crucial one.
Richard Brookhiser,the senior editor of National Review, was provide with an entire page of the New York Times Book Review to discourse upon, I kid you not, the marginal jottings of John Adams in his books. Could anything be more trivial or less ripe for rightwing Wurlitizing? Ahh, but that’s why they pay Brookhiser the big bucks.
In keeping with the scholarly conceit of pseudo-academics like Gingrich and others, Brookhiser types up his overall impression of Adams’s notes with an atavistic partisan spin: “What he [Adams] most dislikes is breezy confidence; the pieties of both left and right set him off.” [Emphasis added.] This positions Adams as a paragon of dispassionate disinterest, calmly far above the fray. But this is total poppycock. First of all, the “dispassionate observer” bears no relation to the actual Adams, which can easily be verified by reading what Franklin thought of Adams’ awful diplomacy in France during the war, or by what happened later to Franklin’s nephew Benjamin Bache during Adams’ presidency. More importantly, the modern notions of “right” and “left” really don’t apply at all to Adams’ politics.* It’s an artificial conceit that distorts Adams’ beliefs beyond recognition and a sign that stealth rightwing propagandizing is Brookhiser’s real intent.
Brookhiser also sets up with his phrase the expectation that we will receive a balanced, even-numbered set of examples of Adams skewering equally “the pieties of the right and the left.” In fact, we encounter only three main examples (Adams’s marginalia in his own books don’t count, as he is above the fray, remember?). Two are clearly from people Brookhiser considers left – Rousseau and the “English feminist” Mary Woolstonecraft – and one whom he apparently considers right, Henry St. John.
About the “lefties” – again, this is Brookhiser’s labelling, not Adams’s and certainly not mine – Brookhiser quotes Adams at his sneering best. “Ha! ha! ha!” smirks Adams at Rousseau. “This foolish woman,” Adams rants against Woolstonecraft.
As for Adams on the presumed righty Henry St. John, Brookhiser starts by informing us that Adams thought “more highly” of him than he did of Rousseau, and Brookhiser describes St. John’s “supple attacks on the Whig establishment” which made him “popular in revolutionary America.” So how bad could St. John be if the Patriots of 1776 made him popular? And indeed, the Adams marginalia hardly mock St. John – “not always” is about as close to mockery as Adams gets.
The meta-effect is clear. Mock the left, respectfully disagree with the right, whose ideas are worth thinking highly of.
Yes, the article is so monumentally trivial I risk a howl of outrage from Bob Somerby by bothering to waste time on it. Yes, the propaganda is subtle and not the main point. But you multiply this stuff in dozens and dozens of different places and it starts to add up. As I come across them, I’ll point to more examples.
The lesson to be taken from this is that the right never, ever, rests from fomenting their bad ideas. Contrast Brookhiser’s nonsense with Sean Wilentz’s heavily detailed and genuinely dispassionate book on the evolution of American democracy and you’lll get a sense of the difference between the fake erudition of the right and the reality-based scholarship, not of liberals, but of the rest of us. Wilentz may be a liberal, but his book isn’t. And that’s the goal of all genuine scholarship, not the snake oil Brookhiser’s peddling.
*Correct me if I’m wrong but don’t the terms “right” and “left” derive from the French Revolution and, in Adams’s time, referred only to the internal political issues of France? In any event, “right” and “left” as we know them have nothing to do with John Adams, Ben Franklin, or anything connected with American politics in the 18th Century.
I have been so disappointed about not being allowed to screen the new 9/11 docudrama like all the cool rightwing bloggers who have the inside track to liberal Hollywood, that I was forced to watch the orginal documentary footage. It’s as gripping today as it was the day I first saw it:
RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don’t remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.
BEN-VENISTE: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
RICE: I believe the title was, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”
Now, the…
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
That is one of the most famous exchanges in American political history — right up there with “at long last sir, have you no decency” and “there’s a cancer on the presidency.” Do you suppose it’s in the fabulous new docudrama?
How surprising to learn that the new ABC “event movie” scheduled for next week-end called “The Path To 9/11,” touted as being “based on the 9/11 Commission Report,” has been selectively screened only by rightwing columnists and bloggers. Why on earth would ABC do that?
When challenged to explain why the right-wing blogosphere is abuzz with praise for the film, director David Cunningham responded that “we are also being accused of being a left wing movie that bashes Bush” — a claim for which there is absolutely no evidence. I searched Technorati for mentions of the film and found 260 references, mostly from conservative websites, every single one of which had nothing but praise for the film. And although I found numerous examples of conservative pundits and bloggers who reported seeing pre-broadcast screenings, no leftist pundits or bloggers had been given a chance to see it (unless you count Salon.com’s roundup of several 9/11-themed movies).
As further evidence of the filmmakers’ fundamental dishonesty, “Path to 9/11” had its own blog until recently, where screenwriter Nowrasteh attempted to explain away the right-wing blogobuzz about the film by saying, “We can’t control who writes what.” It’s clear, however, that they did carefully control who could see the film prior to broadcast. And in response to criticisms and questions posted in the comments section of their own blog, they airbrushed it out of existence Sunday afternoon, which is why my links above to the apologetics by Cunningham and Nowrasteh no longer work, although the Google cache to the original blog still exists.
Apparently, the rightwing bloggers all got preview copies days ago. Hugh Hewitt wrote:
I, and I am sure many others, have been sent the entire six hour program to preview and review, which I will be doing over the weekend. Edits post-distribution of the review DVDs would invite scrutiny of the very portions sent down the black hole, underscoring the episodes the censors hoped to hide.
When this was revealed, the lefty bloggers who asked ABC for copies so that they might see it too, were told that they would have to wait until this week. Obviously, none of us will be able to screen it until Wednesday at the earliest and probably not even then. I suspect that it may have been sent out to the rightwing blogs for the specific purpose that was referenced by Hewitt above, and seconded by Instapundit: by ensuring that it was in their hands in its original form, any edits of incorrect information would be preserved and protested vehemently.
And then there’s this wierd question of the “disappeared” blog. Check out the succession of “clarifications” which, before the blog was completely removed, tried to claim that the movie was unbaised, concluding with this from the director:
The redundant statement about Clinton and the emphasis to protect his legacy instead of trying to learn from the failures of BOTH administrations smells of “agenda”. You may feel we “bash” Clinton and/or you may feel we “bash” Bush but the facts are that the eight years from the first WTC bombing to the day of 9/11 involved two administrations with plenty of culpability all around. Something needs to explain how that happened.
Watch the movie! Then let’s talk. If you haven’t seen the movie with your very own eyes – don’t castigate the movie out of ignorance.
-David Cunningham
Smells of agenda, indeed. Obviously,since only some people have had a chance to watch the movie and guage its accuracy, it’s difficult to know. But from what I can tell, there has not been anyone who’s said that the movie “bashes” Bush. In fact, those who’ve seen the whole thing, say things like this:
The Clinton administration will likely go ballistic over this film. (Perhaps why ABC isn’t pushing it at as much as they should be??) It does not have a “partisan” feel to it by any means. The Bush administation comes in for some criticism (Condi Rice in particular comes off rather poorly), but that is nothing comapred to the depiction of Sandy Berger and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. I doubt that they will be able to show their faces in public after this (and also helps to explain why Berger was so eager to try to illegally remove classified documents from the archives before his Senate testimony on the 9/11 events). If Bill Clinton’s current purpose in life is solidify a positive “legacy” for his time in office, this film has the potential to be his biggest hurdle to overcome yet.
Well, I’ll certainly look forward to seeing this fabulously unbiased film. If non-partisan bloggers on Patterico say it tells the real story, who am I to be skeptical?
“We Always Worried This Would Happen”: One Year Ago Today
by digby
“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this [chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.” Barbara Bush, September 4, 2005
One year ago today, most of New Orleans had finally been evacuated. But the reality of what had happened during those few days was still sinking in. The far right web sites were full of stories of everything from child rape to necrophilia.
Here’s the Council of Conservative Citizen’s web site:
Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!
The mainstream press was starting to report things like this:
BATON ROUGE, La. — They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I’m staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.
“Because of the riots,” the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.
“It’s the blacks,” whispered one white woman in the elevator. “We always worried this would happen.”
We heard about people “shitting where they stood” and found out that large number of evacuees had been denied the ability to try to walk out of New Orleans after days went by and they became increasingly desperate. One year ago tonight, Ray Nagin went on Nightline and said this:
JOHN DONOVAN, ABC NEWS: The last thing I want to ask you about is the race question.
So, I’m out at the highway — it was last Thursday — huge number of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Jesse Jackson comes in, looks at the scene, and says it looks like the scene of a, from a slave ship. And I said, “Reverand Jackson,, the imagery suggests you’re saying this is about race.” And he didn’t answer directly, he said, “Take a look at it, what do you think it’s about?”
What’s your response to that?
RAY NAGIN, MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS: (Sighs) You know, I haven’t really thought much about the race issue. I will tell you this. I think it’s, it could be, but it’s a class issue for sure. Because I don’t think this type of response would have happened if this was Orange County, California. This response definitely wouldn’t have happened if it was Manhattan, New York. And I don’t know if it’s color or class.
DONOVAN: In some way, you think that New Orleans got second-class treatment.
NAGIN: I can’t explain the response. And here’s what else I can’t explain: We are basically, almost surrounded by water. To the east, the bridge is out, you can’t escape. Going west, you can’t escape because the bridge is under water. We found one evacuation route, to walk across the Crescent City Connection, on the overpass, down Highway 90 to 310 to I10, to go get relief.
People got restless and there was overcrowding at the convention center. They asked us, “Is there any other option?” We said, “Well, if you want to walk, across the Crescent City Connection, there’s buses coming, you may be able to find some relief.” They started marching. At the parish line, the county line of Gretna, they were met with attack dogs and police officers with machine guns saying “You have to turn back…”
DONOVAN: Go back.
NAGIN: “…because a looter got in a shopping center and set it afire and we want to protect the property in this area.”
DONOVAN: And what does that say to you?
NAGIN: That says that’s a bunch of bull. That says that people value their property, and were protecting property, over human life.
And look, I was not suggesting, or suggesting to the people that they walk down into those neighborhoods. All I wanted them to do and I suggested: walk on the Interstate. And we called FEMA and we said “Drop them water and supplies as they march.” They weren’t gonna go into those doggone neighborhoods. They weren’t going to impact those neighborhoods. Those people were looking to escape, and they cut off the last available exit route out of New Orleans.
DONOVAN: And was that race? Was that class?
NAGIN: I don’t know. You’re going to have to go ask them. But those questions need to be answered. And I’m pissed about it. And I don’t know how many people died as a result of that.
We later got a very vivid first hand report of that night from two paramedics who had been in New Orleans for a convention and couldn’t evacuate. I first read about it on Making Light:
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, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
[…]
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna 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 of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us 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 were not getting out of New Orleans.
A lot of people said this story could not be believed because it was written by two socialists from San Francisco. The account was later verified by numerous others, including the police chief of Gretna, who said:
Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.
[…]
“If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged.”
Part of the reason for this was that from the beginning the primary concern for many was protecting property, not saving people. As I mentioned last week, the morning he got back to Washington, having had to cut his precious vacation short two days, the president on the United States went on television:
He also warned Gulf Coast residents, including those searching for water and food, not to break into businesses or commit other crimes during the crisis.
“There ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this,” Bush said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“If people need water and food, we’re going to do everything we can to get them water and food,” Bush added. “It’s very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume a kind of a civic sense of responsibility so that the situation doesn’t get out of hand, so people don’t exploit the vulnerable.”
The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans,” said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross.
“Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities. We have been at the table every single day [asking for access]. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders.”
Though frustrated, Hosler understood the reasons. The goal is to move people out of an uninhabitable city, and relief operations might keep them there. Security is so bad that she fears feeding stations might get ransacked.
That fear came from the other reports of the crisis, reports like the one that had the rightwing frothing in a complete frenzy over events at different bridge — the alleged “gun battle” at the Danziger Bridge. Guess what:
Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.
Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department’s resolve to take back the streets.
But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city’s east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.
A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.
The two families — one from New Orleans East and solidly middle class, the other poorer and rooted in the Lower 9th Ward — have offered only preliminary information about what they say happened that day. Large gaps remain in the police and civilian accounts of the incident.
News of the Danziger Bridge shootings roared across cable television for a time. But as with many overblown reports of crime and violence immediately after the hurricane, the facts remain elusive.
More recent reports show that at least one of the alleged “thugs” was an unarmed mentally challenged man who was shot in the back five times.
But it was earlier stories of similar lawlessness that led George W. Bush and others to order this — and make the rescue workers wait until it was in place before they could go in to provide food and water:
NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
Jones said the military first needs to establish security throughout the city. Military and police officials have said there are several large areas of the city are in a full state of anarchy
Completely untrue.
Then there were the tales of depravity at the Superdome and the Convention Center which were reported as fact by the media:
Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.
“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” Amoss said, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”
Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans’ top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.
Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on “Oprah” a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.
Compass told of “the little babies getting raped” at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.
State officials this week said their counts of the dead at the city’s two largest evacuation points fell far short of early rumors and news reports. Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.
(National Guard officials put the body count at the Superdome at six, saying the other four bodies came from the area around the stadium.)
Of the 841 [now more than twice that number] recorded hurricane-related deaths in Louisiana, four are identified as gunshot victims, Johannessen said. One victim was found in the Superdome but was believed to have been brought there, and one was found at the Convention Center, he added.
I wrote a lot about a particular form of racism — fear of the black mob — in the weeks after Katrina. I’m sure there will be many academic tomes written devoted to sorting out how this unfolded and why. But there is no doubt that it happened: we watched it in real time as the law ‘n order right reflexively called for looters to be shot on sight in the opening moments of the crisis; as the president issued stern warnings that victims were not to break into businesses for food and water (even as the red cross was told not to bring in food and water because it was unsafe); as the press reported blacks as “looting” and whites as “finding,” and as ever more bizarre rumors of violence and depravity were reported as fact.
Over and over again the fearful lizard brain of the racist mind was inundated with pictures of black people in large numbers in one place and instead of being able to interpret what they were actually seeing — mostly desperate women, children and elderly people who had been cast into a living nightmare — they were afraid. And being afraid, they delayed and dithered and then overreacted until on the final night, as thousands and thousands of people were trapped, thirsty and hungry, living in unimaginable filth having waited minute by minute for a rescue that never came, some of them took matters into their own hands and tried to walk out of that nightmare. They were stopped by men with guns on a bridge.
People will argue that this was an issue of poverty and class, and it surely was. But the assumptions that were made by officials and the press and many people around the nation were knee jerk reactions to African American crime — assumptions that have been successfully exploited by the rightwing for many moons and which never fail to rise up in a situation like this.
Some people tried to raise the consciousness of the media about this at the time. Rick Perlstein wrote an excellent op-ed piece on the subject that was turned down by all the major newspapers. They didn’t want to hear it.
The failures of Katrina cannot be attributed solely to racism, of course. There are many, many reasons for it. But when you look back from the distance of one year on, I think it’s clearer than ever that an irrational, primitive fear of unruly, criminal African Americans contributed hugely to the way that the evacuation was handled — and that some officials like Nagin and Compass contributed by spreading the rumors of violence and giving it official credibility, probably because they thought that it would spur the response rather than delay it.
Deep down, for a lot of people, it’s quite simple:
“It’s the blacks. We always worried this would happen.”
A few short extracts from Vonnegut’s book A Man Without a Country for some Labor Day thinking:
Most Americans don’t know what the socialists did during the first half of the past century with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class. … “Socialism” is no more an evil word than “Christianity.” Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve. … Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn’t you like to say, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
And so on
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes be posted anywhere.
“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break! .. I did get to know one socialist … Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. He was a typical Hoosier idealist, like Debs, was a middle-class person who thought there could be more economic justice in this country. He wanted a better country, that’s all.
After graduating from Harvard, he went to work as a coal miner, urging his working-class brothers to organize in order to get better pay and safer working conditions. He also led protesters at the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927.
Hapgood’s family owned a successful cannery in Indianapolis, and when Powers Hapgood inherited it, he turned it over to the employees, who ruined it.
We met in Indianapolis after the end of the Second World War. He had become an official in the CIO. There had been some sort of dust-up on a picket line, and he was testifying about it in court, and the judge stops everything and asks him, “Mr. Hapgood, here you are, you’re a graduate of Harvard. Why would anyone with your advantages choose to live as you have?” Hapgood answered the judge: “Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, Sir.”
Oh my. Lee Siegel has been dethroned. I once resigned from the blogofascist empire in deference to the Great Man and was only persuaded to return so that I might blog in the grand Siegellian tradition and teach those worthless young would-be writers from knock-about origins a thing or two about culture and talent. Now he is gone and I am adrift. Should I stay and carry on the fight? Or should I leave again in solidarity with my mentor, brother and inspiration?
While I ponder the thought of an internet without Lee Siegel, in honor of the Great Man, I’d like to remind you blogofascists of what you’ll be missing:
You’d think that staring into the mirror and repeating your name over and over would have the opposite effect of helping you get out of yourself, but that’s not the case. The idea is to find a place so deep inside yourself that, with intense concentration, you look to yourself like a stranger. Your very name becomes an alien phrase. Physically, you start to seem imaginary. Spiritually, you start to seem more real. Hoffenshtoffen suggests keeping a packed suitcase standing in the middle of your apartment as a symbolic reminder of that magical fulfillment, self-surrender, when you leave yourself utterly and travel in a trancelike state to pure objective reception of the outer world.
Sounds silly and pretentiously spirituel, I know. But extricating oneself from oneself is the great problem of human life. Buddha’s name for the smothering, clamoring self was “desire”; Plato’s was “appetite”; Rousseau’s was “reason.” (The translations are Sylvester Cointreau’s.) William James, my favorite American writer, wearily wrote to a friend toward the end of his life that the human ego had begun to repel him. I sort of feel like that sometimes. That’s why, more and more, I love the sound of laughter. Not withering, or cruel, or exclusive, knowing laughter. I mean ego-bursting laughter that is like wisdom speaking in slang.
So who is this person staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom? My lips are small and thin; Maya likes the way the upper lip protrudes slightly over the lower one. Carmencita likes the lower lip, but she also wants me to wear cologne. A certain roundness and softness to my face always bothered me. I wanted to look hard and lean and chiseled, just as I wanted to have that invincible steel will of Central European intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, and not all that moist, tremulous high (and low) feeling I’ve inherited from my Russian-Jewish forebears. Everyone in my family is vibrato; there is not a note blanche to be found in our entire genetic pool. Weeping was a form of communication. One sob meant hello, two sobs meant good-bye, three sobs meant “There’s a call for you,” and so forth. Hoffenshtoffen, who gets bored by lachrymosity, says that I was born with a silver violin in my mouth.
