Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Sealing Them In

A couple of days ago I wrote about the “single worst decision” that was made in the wake of the hurricane. I was wrong; there were actually two horrible decisions that created one horrible Catch-22.

The first part of the catch was the decision to keep relief workers with food and water out of the city. Early reports had the Red Cross saying straightforwardly that they were told by Homeland Security that the plan was to keep relief out of the city because they wanted everyone to evacuate and believed survivors might not go if they could eat or drink — and that security was so bad they feared “feeding stations might get ransacked.”

Yesterday, the story changed:

Marsha Evans, the national Red Cross president, first made the request to open its relief effort on Sept. 1, three days after Katrina struck, officials say.

“We had adequate supplies, the people and the vehicles,” said Vic Howell, chief executive officer of the agency’s Louisiana Capital Area Chapter. “It was the middle of a military rescue operation trying to save lives. We were asked not to go in and we abided by that recommendation.”

Col. Jay Mayeaux, the deputy director of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said he had asked the Red Cross to wait 24 hours for conditions to be “set” for the operation. But by then a large scale evacuation was under way.

According to Media Matters, the Red Cross spokespeople have issued some rather strange and contradictory statements recently and point out that the head of the Red Cross is a major GOP bigwig. I don’t think anyone knows yet exactly what went on. Whatever the truth of why they held back, nobody disputes the fact that the Red Cross was ready to go in last Thursday and didn’t. The question is why.

The second half of the catch was that it now appears that while people were told for days they would be rescued, and were denied aid during that period, they were also shuffled all over the city and not allowed to leave on foot over the bridges. The story of the EMTs (confirmed by the NY Times today) and the reports by Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera on Friday confirm that this was true.

Yesterday UPI was able to get an interview with Arthur Lawson the chief of the Gretna police whom the EMTs accused of blocking the Crescent City connection bridge — the bridge to which they had been sent by New Orleans police. He said this:

“We shut down the bridge,” Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been “a closed and secure location” since before the storm hit.

“All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down,” he said.

The bridge in question — the Crescent City Connection — is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.

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.

He added that the small town, which he called “a bedroom community” for the city of New Orleans, would have been overwhelmed by the influx.

“There was no food, water or shelter” in Gretna City, Lawson said. “We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.

“If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged.”

[…]

He says that his officers did assist about 4000 people who “arrived at the doorstep of (Gretna City)” either by crossing the bridge before it was closed or approaching from another route.

“We commandeered public transit buses and we took them to higher and safer ground” at the junction of Interstate-10 and Causeway Boulevard where “there was food and shelter,” he said.

Kevin Drum asks the same question I asked when I read this. If the police could do this for people “approaching from another route” (not New Orleans) why couldn’t they have helped others? And when it became clear that the evacuation was terribly late, why couldn’t they let people walk out? I asked that question last Thursday night when I saw the report by Smith and Rivera on Fox news.

I was told by commenters at the time that it would be suicide for people to walk out, but that’s turned out not to be true. As Kevin points out, it was a 20 mile trip on dry roads to safety. Many people would have gladly made that trek. I know that’s exactly what I would have done — or tried to do anyway.

As Teresa Neilson Hayden points out in this amazing post on the same subject, that’s exactly what New Yorkers all did on September 11th. Indeed, New Yorkers expect to walk across bridges to safety in the case of an emergency. There is nothing about letting people walk out of a disaster zone that is in any way unusual. In fact, it’s something that people have done forever. But not this time.

The reason they weren’t allowed to walk out that night, of course, is simple. The police chief says it right out. They decided that saving their fully evacuated “bedroom community” from what they assumed would be “looting, pillaging and burning” by victims of the hurricane was more important than allowing people to save their own lives by walking through their town to safety up the road.

Picture for a moment young women with their children, old people, families, single people gathered together in a make-shift community in the middle of chaos approaching police officers on a bridge begging for help. Picture them being white. Do you think the police would shoot over their heads and push them back? Even if they did that would they then land a helicopter in thier midst in the middle of the night, not to rescue dying elderly, but to force their somewhat safe, visible make-shift community out into the pitch black anarchy of the city?

I’m pretty sure that the police would have let them walk through their precious bedroom community. They might have guarded their town, but they would have let them walk. And if they were under orders from others not to let them through, they surely would not have dispersed them back into New Orleans in the middle of the night.

Think about how many children we saw during those days. Lots and lots of them. And fragile elderly. Young women with tiny babies. That’s who was fleeing that chaos.

Again, I’m sure there were looters and thugs in this mix. I have little doubt that people felt unsafe on the streets. Which is all the more reason that the authorities should have brought in national guard immediately and allowed the red cross to set up some relif centers so that people could feel safe, organize themselves and be evacuated in an orderly fashion. And the fact that everyone was terrified of being on the streets is the reason they should have let them flee the city across the bridge.

As it was, the victims were victimized first by the hurricane, an unpreventable act of nature, and were then frightened half to death by lawlessness, both real and imagined. When they turned to the cops for help, their lives were deemed less valuable than some well insured storefront in Gretna, Louisiana. Police, whom I assume are mostly good people doing difficult jobs, looked at mothers with 6 month old babies and saw a criminal who was going to “loot, pillage and burn” their town.

Kevin asks why the National Guard and other authorities right under the bridge at the convention center did nothing if suburban cops from the other side of the bridge were preventing people from leaving. It’s a good question, but it kind of answers itself. The authorities were obviously either in a similar state of mind and obliging each other’s civic desire to keep out the “mob” or they were operating under the same orders. We don’t know the answer to that yet.

It’s possible that FEMA issued a directive to to seal off the city, nobody in nobody out, but it’s actually more likely that the second half of the catch is the result of local cops and other authorities making it clear that they weren’t going to have a bunch of crazed negroes marauding through the suburbs. (The reports of “we always knew this would happen” from Baton Rouge illustrate that point.)

The New York Times, linked above, reports this:

The lawlessness that erupted in New Orleans soon after the hurricane terrified officials throughout Louisiana, and even a week later, law enforcement officers rarely entered the city without heavy weaponry.

It is becoming clear to me that this is also one of the main reasons for the delayed response. The question is whether it was true that the city had erupted into wild anarchy in the streets that required the deployment of thousands upon thousands of military to quell, or whether it was another example of primal white fear of black revolt.

We don’t have the facts yet. It’s clear that there were violent young men who intimidated and assaulted people at both the rescue sites, although there are differing accounts of how pervasive they were. There was looting — but nothing on the scale of what we saw in Bagdad, when people stripped the electical wiring out of buildings and stole the toilets from the bathrooms. We will probably never know how much was stolen, but considering how hard it was to transport anything, it’s probably not as bad as some thought. There were certainly reports of shots fired and snipers, but as in earlier examples of civic chaos, it’s often difficult to say who is shooting and who is shooting back.

Oddly, the press wasn’t able to capture much of it, at least not that they showed or wrote about. There was some footage of looting of TV’s (I might have stolen a TV myself, with the thought that I could get to some electricity or a generator and find out what was going on.) There were a couple of broadcasts of men with guns being confronted by police. But, if the city was overrun by criminals, the media failed to capture the full force of the anarchy with pictures and that is curious.

I suspect it was people’s imaginations that supplied that.

I may be wrong. It’s possible that authorities were wise to hold back food and water for five long days because it was too dangerous to proceed into the city. Perhaps the gangs of thugs were so numerous and so dangerous that police had to keep women and children from leaving the city on foot because some criminals might sneak out with them. This could all turn out to be the case. But my suspicion is that a decision was made somewhere along the line that they were going to contain what they believed to be certain anarchy in New Orleans until they could assemble an overwhelming force of men with guns. (Why it took so long to assemble that force is another question.) Irrational fear of the mob was the reason the Red Cross didn’t enter the city. And this was the reason the police didn’t allow people to leave the city on foot in large numbers.

The question is if there was a real mob to fear or if the sight of large numbers of displaced black people made people assume there was one. Our history suggests the latter. As I wrote before, that’s one of the oldest stories in the book.

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Letdown

I can’t wait to hear what Chris Matthews is going to say about the new Bigfoot that Bush has named today — Admiral Thad Allen.

Here’s a picture of him:

I think he looks the part and he certainly has the experience. And everybody loves a man in uniform. But he’s no matinee idol like Rudy or Stormin’ Norman. I suspect that Tweety is going to be very disappointed. Big Dick Cheney just flew on home and they appointed an Admiral nobody’s ever heard of to be the new Viceroy.

He should have known better. This is the Bush administration we’re talking about. They could barely tolerate having Powell in the administration. They are not going to bring in a “czar” that will show the president for the callow cheerleader he is.

“… some top Bush aides think a brand-name disaster boss like Giuliani, dubbed “America’s Mayor” for his leadership after 9/11, or former secretary of state Colin Powell would remind Americans of the administration’s sluggish initial response to the hurricane.

“You don’t want someone overshadowing the President,” said an official in the “ride it out” camp. “That leaves him looking weak.”

Poor Tweety. He so badly wanted a big macho super star to head down there and take over. (I’m still willing to give him Schwarzenneger.) This admiral seems more like someone who knows how to actually do things. Tweety needs a man’s man who can act like a man and talk like a man and make him feel like a man. This guy just doesn’t have the “grandeur” he was looking for.

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Snippy the Pinhead

I’ve been thinking about Nancy Pelosi’s comments about Bush the other day:

At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

“He said ‘Why would I do that?'” Pelosi said.

“‘I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?'”

“Oblivious, in denial, dangerous,” she added.

He wasn’t oblivious or in denial. He was pissed. That is a standard immature, spoiled, frat boy comment. And he is nothing if not a spoiled, immature frat-boy.

Remember this?

Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. “He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn’t get past,” Allison recalled. “He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too.”

That’s the kind of person who comes back in someone’s face with an “I know you are but what am I” comment like he gave Pelosi. Of course he knew he’d fucked up. He was just showing his snotty little shithead stripes. You can’t blame him. He’s under pressure. Presidentin’ is hard work for a lazy, mediocre richie rich.

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Wishin’ and a Hopin’

When asked about why there was such a failure of response to the hurricane considering the lessons of 9/11, McClellan just launched into a litany of “that horrible day…never again…preventing terrorists attacks” as if bringing up the attacks mitigates the scope of their malfeasance rather than exacerbates it. I doubt they can wring much more out of that sponge, but maybe they can. It’s been four years since 9/11 and clearly they have actually gotten worse at disaster response, not better. It doesn’t seem very smart to keep pointing that out.

As the chairmen of the 9/11 commission said yesterday:

“The same mistakes made on 9/11 were made over again, in some cases worse,” Kean said. “Those are system-wide failures that can be fixed and should have been fixed right away.”

Added Hamilton: “I’m surprised, I’m disappointed and maybe even a little depressed that we did not do better four years after 9/11. It says we’re still very vulnerable.”

Josh Marshall has a full rundown on the various implications of this NY Times article, which seems to indicate that while hurricane victims were dying on national television, the Justice Department was debating the fine points of posse commitatus and worrying about whether it would look good to take command from a female governor. This is the same justice department that has declared torture to be legal and asserted a previously unheard of doctrine that the president has unlimited powers during wartime.

Perhaps Bush should have declared war on Mexico, then nobody would have been confused about whether the president of the United States could legally respond when the Governor of Louisiana said she needed all the help she could get.

Leaders prove their mettle in times of crisis. And 9/11 was a fairly simple crisis to manage. It was a terrible tragedy and a shocking act of violence but it happened quickly in one small area and then was over. The primary response required by the federal government was to figure out how it happened and take steps to prevent it from happening again. The only immediate decision the president had to make was an easy one — whether to depose the Taliban and break up al Qaeda. And even that decision didn’t have to be made on the spot in the midst of a rapidly changing situation on the ground and ongoing death and destruction. During the event itself and its immediate aftermath he was famously reading “My Pet Goat” and then flying all over the country like a chicken with his head cut off stopping only to make timorous speeches about how we were going to find “these folks” who had done this.

His reputation for great leadership and crisis management consists solely of going before the American paople with a bullhorn and saying “… and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.” That’s not leadership — that’s cheerleading. Bush and his minions have never understood the difference.

This hurricane crisis required a series of on the spot decisions to be made over the course of several days, in terms of preparation and coordination. His delayed response to the event was to tell people how he “understood” there was a lot of work to do. And, of course, his administration was johnny on the spot with slime and defend. For that they have an instant response team of professionals in place.

Leaders also prove their mettle by how they learn from mistakes. Apparently, all the hoohaa we’ve been listening to on a loop over the past five years about 9/11 changing everything was crap. The NY Times article reports this:

… officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration’s senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

The same people who never imagined that planes could fly into buildings apparently never imagined that a terrorist attack or natural disaster could incapacitate local first responders. Dear God. has there ever been a more incompetent administration?

I know it’s not polite to bring this up, but the DHS has received $95.5 billion dollars over the last three years. I think we need to ask what they’ve been spending it on because I can’t see any results.

It appears to me that the lesson that the Bush administration took from 9/11 was that we needed to prevent terrorists from ever hijacking airplanes and flying them into the world trade center again. I think we can feel confident that that will not happen again. After all, there is no world trade center to fly into.

Other than that, we are more vulnerable than we’ve ever been before to every other disaster scenario both manmade and natural — they simply can’t imagine them. This is the faith based, best case scenario, Peter Pan government. They literally believe that wishin’ and a-hopin’ is a plan.

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The Single Worst Decision

Many of you have probably already read this report from two EMTs who ended up part of that group stuck on the freeway overpass for days in New Orleans. If you haven’t, read it. It’s amazing.

If the order to deny relief in order to keep people from resisting evacuation is true, then somebody has committed a horrible, cruel mistake. As these two emergency techs write:

When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. 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 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.

This makes sense to me. The conditions we saw at the convention center were awful and I think much of the despair and helplessness was due to the fact that these people were told repeatedly that they were going to be taken out of there at any moment. If the Red cross had been allowed in to set up their usual relief, with help from the authorities, they could have calmed that situation right down. People can organize themselves and settle in for a wait when they have the basic necessities. It was the hell of feeling abandoned and then locked in the city when they became desperate to leave, that must have been the most horrible. And as these EMT’s showed, it wasn’t a matter of having personal pluck or being able to organize themselves, they were actually inhibited by the authorities from dealing with the situation in a civilized fashion. The authorities actively created chaos so that people would not be comfortable:

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 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 correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “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 or congealed 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” 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 8 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.

This is the group that Shepard Smith was freaking out about on O’Reilly last Thursday night. I wonder if he knew what happened after he made that report.

I think we can all understand the overwhelming nature of this disaster. And there should have been more adequate planning and a better response, no doubt about it. But the decision to deny immediate aid to people in the city is the worst decision of all. Read that story. These tourists were treated like shit by the authorities everywhere they went, just like the locals. Whoever made the decision to deny those people relief and then deny them the ability to leave when they tried to save themselves has blood on his or her hands.

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Waiting For Bigfoot

Chris Matthews is having an orgasm on national television. For days he has spoken of almost nothing but the necessity of Bush sending in a “big foot” like Powell or Giuliani to take charge of the situation. He has pounded on this issue over and over again.

Monday:

MATTHEWS: You know, let me ask you a more general—that‘s a pretty good answer. I like quick answers on HARDBALL. Let me ask you this. During the hell of 9/11, the one good thing about it was—well, we had a president who seemed to be in charge, but we also had somebody on the ground, Rudy Giuliani, who seemed to be the guy who was there every day standing on the street corner, answering questions. You got a sense that there was one person taking the heat, being accountable, being authoritative and being authentic.

I still don‘t see a face of this relief effort. I don‘t see one person. Would that help? Or am I being naive, one person standing there saying, I‘m in charge of relief and reconstruction right now; I will make the calls?

[…]

MATTHEWS: Right.
Congressman Livingston, you love that area. You grew up there. That‘s your home. Do you think we should have somebody like a Rudy Giuliani or a Colin Powell, some big shot on the site who says, I will make the big decisions at federal, state and level right now? Somebody is in charge.

[..]

MATTHEWS: OK. We‘re going to come back. We are going to be covering this.
Joe Scarborough, do we need one man in charge down there, do you think?

MATTHEWS: You know, during the 9/11 tragedy, we had at least a face on the ground. We had a face in the White House, the president‘s, obviously. And we had the face on the ground, Giuliani. To really make this relief effort work and this reconstruction effort work in the next several months and years, even, does the president have to name one person as sort of a man in charge, a woman in charge, who is out there and says, look, state, federal and local, come to me; we are going to make this thing work?

Tuesday:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Howard Safir, the big question. Should the president have a person of high prestige and command ability, almost like a young Douglas MacArthur or a younger, perhaps, Colin Powell—I don‘t want to knock him—he might be the right guy—who stands ready to take charge in these tragic situations? Or should he pick them on the spot, like right now pick somebody?

[…]

MATTHEWS: Well, there‘s been a lot of buzz around Washington, as you know, David, as to whether the president will name a big name to go down there, like a Giuliani or a Colin Powell to be the man on the spot. Making the vice president that man on the spot, is he in fact not promoting the vice president once again to a very high executive position?

[…]

Yesterday:

MATTHEWS: But with what mandate? Is Cheney‘s challenge to show the flag, to show the administration cares about the suffering and wants to smarten up the relief effort and thereby lower the heat on President Bush? Is Cheney‘s challenge to chop off heads? Will Dick Cheney be the butcher who lops off some bureaucrat heads, starting with FEMA Director Michael Brown, and thereby reforge the federal relief effort? Is Cheney‘s challenge to take charge personally of the reconstruction?

Will the most powerful vice president in American history become the man who ramrods the rise of the new South and with it a legacy that could promote a draft for a Cheney presidency? The question is a big one. Is Cheney charging down South to serve as President Bush‘s executioner or full-fledged viceroy?

[…]

MATTHEWS: Coming up, Vice President Dick Cheney is headed, with or without the boots, to the Gulf Coast. Will he take the lead in the rescue of those Gulf states and save President Bush‘s legacy in the process? Is this about public relations, this trip? Is it about lopping heads in the bad work some of people have done in this relief effort? Or is he taking on a very big job down there, as the president‘s viceroy for cleaning up that area?

Former New York Police Chief Bernie Kerik was a towering figure in New York after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. He‘s going to come here and talk about whether it should be Dick Cheney‘s job or maybe Rudy Giuliani‘s job.

MATTHEWS: You know, whenever we have, Mr. Commissioner [Kerik}, a big challenge, like rebuilding Tokyo after World War II or rebuilding Berlin or saving Berlin from the communists, the president of the United States, whoever he was, would name a big figure, Lucius Clay in Berlin airlift, of course, the general, or, of course General MacArthur in Tokyo.

He became basically an American Caesar over there. I want to ask you when we come back whether the president doesn‘t have to do something like that now and pick somebody big to go in there, whether it‘s the vice president, to go down there and move down in New Orleans for six months, or put in Rudy Giuliani or Colin Powell in there, somebody who is a power figure that will take—who will give orders and put everything together and do something like you folks did up in New York during 9/11.

[…]

MATTHEWS: OK. One last time with David Gregory. Will the president let Dick Cheney be his big foot down there this week, and that‘s enough, or does he still feel the need to put a Giuliani in there or a Colin Powell in there as his viceroy in that part of the country?

He has OCD on this issue, desperate to have Bush put a big … “foot” in charge of the disaster.

Today, he found sweet relief for his hard-on. Big Daddy Cheney has arrived:

“a tough guy…smart politician.. trying to figure out how to get his president out of a jam… smart guy, tough warrior..aware that now that he’s put his [huge] boots on the ground he has a stake in this. How big a foot is he going to land on this issue.”

I get the sense that he’s suffering from a bad case of post coital melancholy, though. He just isn’t satisfied. He wanted Rudy so badly he could taste it. And all he got was Dick.

Update: Ooops. Apparently he isn’t going to have to settle for old Dick after all. According to David Gregory the buzz all over town is that the president should apppoint a Katrina Czar. Wow! (I guess “viceroy” didn’t take.) Chris is back in the saddle.

He’s talking up Jack Welch and Norman Schwartzkopf today. I hear Bernie Kerik is available. So is Ken Lay. How about a statue of Ronald Reagan?

And since Chris seems top think that the most important things is for the president to appoint “someone of grandeur, visible and public in America” I am personally willing to offer up Schwarzenneger. In Bush’s America it’s every citizen for him or herself.

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Good Luck

Kevin passes on an article pointing out that there is already a high apartment vacancy rate in the south central region and that the government should just issue section 8 vouchers for people to use to house themselves in already vacant dwellings. He says this seems like something that could be passed right away on a bipartisan basis.

The only problem with this is that you would also have to pass a law that required landlords to accept them. And that, I’m afraid, is a non-starter. A large number of property owners are not going to stand for being forced to accept New Orleans evacuees as tenents and those who would be their neighbors will not accept it either.

I wish it were not true. And I wish that someone could propose something like this on the floor of congress so we could see where people stand — it would be very illustrative of how far we’ve come since the discrimination in housing wars of the 1960’s. That single issue almost succeeded in getting the civil rights act repealed. Sadly, I suspect we haven’t come as far as we might have hoped.

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Wrong Turn

There is something very dangerous happening in New Orleans and I’m not talking about the diseased gumbo that has become the flood waters. The combination of blocking the media, forcing evacuations and too many guns is a recipe for disaster. There is going to be trouble.

Via Atrios and Josh Marshall I see that Brian Williams reported on his blog last night:

An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It’s a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

The media need to be in that city right now in great numbers. There has to be a record of what is going on — for the sake of the soldiers and cops who are in there as much as the residents. This is a recipe for mayhem.

Here’s a passage from the Kerner Commission about the Newark riots of 1967:

. . . On Saturday, July 15, [Director of Police Dominick] Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.

Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.

The Director of Police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his orders were to keep everyone away from windows.

Spina said he told the soldier: “Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street and every state policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper.”

A short time later more “gunshots” were heard. Investigating, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew “where the firing is coming from?” the man said:

“That’s no firing. That’s fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs.”

By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere looking for a sniper. The Director of Police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsmen.

Nevertheless, at six o’clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed were snipers..

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Snapping power lines, firecrackers, and nervous, untrained police and national guardsmen caused much indiscriminate firing. The police often faced a very difficult job for which they were unprepared. According to the director of the Newark police, “Down in the Springfield Avenue area it was so bad that, in my opinion guardsmen were firing upon police and police were firing back, at them.”

I cannot figure out why they have decided to do this. It’s a mistake. In the past government authorities have sent in men with guns for the explicit purpose of taking down troublemakers by any means necessary. I hope that isn’t what’s happened. (That National Guard Colonel saying “this is going to look like “little Somalia” makes me very nervous.)

It is wrong for the government to be keeping the media out of this situation. If they are willing to take the risk of disease they should be allowed in. I hope they scream bloody murder. The media is a mitigating factor not a complication in situations like this. They need to be there.

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Rotting Magnolias

I mentioned before the hurricane hit that I had lived as a child in Mississippi when Hurricane Betsy hit in 1965. I lived in Bay St. Louis, which was at the eye of Hurricane Katrina and seems to have been completely destroyed.

I’m sad to hear it. It was a beautiful little gothic southern town, dripping in drawly, molassas charm and warm hospitality. It was the location for the Natalie Wood and Robert Redford movie version of Tennessee Williams’ “This Property is Condemned.” I was there when they filmed the scenes down at the abandoned railroad tracks. I haven’t been there in many years, but it was like a place out of time when I lived there and I doubt it changed all that much. We had heirloom roses growing in our backyard that locals said had been planted during the antebellum days. Apparently the house was on the site of an old planatation. My school was said to have been Henry Clay’s summer home, although I don’t know if that was true.

The period I lived in this little town was a momentous time in the south and there was a palpable undercurrent of profound disturbance. In 1965, the march on Selma hit as hard as the hurricane that came along months later.

Many of my readers know that my father is a blazing, unrepentant right wingnut. At 83 he’s still going strong, but in those days he was something to behold. He had been career military (WWII and Korea vet) who retired by the mid 60’s and went to work for the military industrial complex. He was such a die hard conservative that he had even hated Roosevelt. During the depression! In 1965 he was a formidable and charismatic figure. He was also a racist. Still is, but he’s much less open about it. In those days it was no holds barred. And down south, in that period, he had a lot of company.

So, when I was over at Michael Berube’s place last night I came across a vile comment by a reader giving a litany of crimes allegedly committed by the hurricane victims in New Orleans during those horrible days at the convention center and the Superdome, I recalled a strange episode from a period of my childhood spent deep in the heart of Tennessee Williams country.

After Selma, somebody wrote a book that made the rounds among my parents’ friends in Bay St Louis that supposedly showed that the marchers had defecated in the streets, had sex in public and then made the police dogs aggressive with their “sex smell.” I was not allowed to see this book, but my little friends and I got a hold of it. I’ll never forget the images. It was racist pornography.

And then, exactly 40 years later I read this inside that amazing comment I linked to above:

“That same day, when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers had trouble controlling the crowd. People at the back of the mob crushed the people in front against barricades the soldiers put up to contain the crowd. Many people continued to yell obscenities whenever they saw a patrol go by. Some were afraid of losing their place in line and defecated where they stood.”

The commenter didn’t provide links, but the quote above appears to be traced to a story in the Marine Corps Times:

Outside, thousands of civilians were mobbing a walkway leading into a mall that the military is using to process people getting onto the Houston-bound buses. Many civilians have been in the stuck waiting for more than 24 hours. People afraid of losing their places in line have defecated where they stand. People in the front of the mob have been injured from being crushed against steel barricades that separates the civilians from the military men and women trying to conduct the evacuation

Think about what the phrase “defecated where they stood” conjures up. Animals. Cows and Horses defecate where they stand. Humans don’t.

The doctored quote from Berube’s blog takes it to the next level, of course, and explicitly condemns that evacuees as animals (read the rest of his comment for a real treat.)But the original quote is somewhat jarring in itself. It’s a “mob” that somehow “waits.” The barricade is described as “separating” the military from the evacuees. The injuries of people pressed against the barricade are portrayed with out emotion as necessary to “processing” which is not defined. There is no discussion of how a “mob” can stand in a crushing line for 24 hours with no food, water or toilets. The defecation quote seems to be in the story as a prurient non-sequitor.

Here’s a description of the very same scene from a tourist who stood in the same lines:

Finally, Thursday morning, Major Bush—I’m not making this up—declared on a megaphone that we would be evacuated. There was total calm for two hours.

We got in lines that went out towards the neighboring commercial center by a footbridge. They separated men and women, I don’t know why (I thought it might be in order to search people, but we weren’t searched). A guy who was with us was separated from his wife, and he had already lost his home and job.

The line was like the Paris metro at the height of rush hour. We were packed like sardines, we couldn’t even see our feet. We walked on garbage, diapers that exploded sometimes, bottles full, with urine, perhaps. There were also bottles of liquor. This lasted from midday Thursday until Friday morning, a total hell.
People fainted every two or three minutes. We heard cries of “somebody down.” They evacuated people towards the barriers. A pregnant woman’s water broke. Twice we heard gunshot and everyone dove for cover. We didn’t have anything to eat, only water.

Imagine for a minute what it would be like to stand in a crushing line for more than 24 hours in overpowering stench and blazing heat after having lived in hell for the previous three days inside the Superdome. Imagine how hard it would be to keep control of yourself, how frightened and how frustrated you would feel.

And yet, that Marine Times reporter and his racist reinterpreter do not see human beings stretched to their limits by conditions that are unimaginable — many of them young mothers with children, old people and others who had no means to get out before the hurricane hit; they see misbehaving animals.

These stories have already become urban legends. Stories of blacks shitting in the streets are making the rounds all over the internet and becoming more and more lurid with each retelling. Just like these very same stories made their way into the homes of racist whites forty years ago and validated all their preconceived notions.

Be skeptical, my friends, and don’t let these claims go unchallenged. This is the illness in our American soul that will not die. It lurks inside all of us, of all races, to some degree. I grew up inside the belly of the beast and I know that I must be vigilant to challenge certain assumptions.

Martin Luther King and the freedom marchers weren’t shitting in the streets in 1965. Desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina were not animals — they were treated like animals. Let’s make sure that we understand the difference.

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Little Pitchers

Max Boot says:

Ordinary people are sitting at home, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding on their television screens. Their hearts are breaking as they watch the horrifying spectacle of an entire city drowned. Many have already contributed what they can to the American Red Cross, to the Salvation Army, to the other armies of compassion, and only wish they could do more.

What must they think of the talking heads who treat this as if it were another bit of minor grist for the political mills? As if this were another story about some politician’s war record or a nominee’s nanny issues. The callowness now on display goes a long way toward explaining why politicians and the media are held in public esteem somewhere above child molesters and below bankers.

Little pitchers have big ears, don’t you know. Shush with the “b-l-a-m-e” game or somebody might get the idea that somebody made a mistake.

Sometimes I wonder if these pundits ever talk to anyone but each other. Apparently, he doesn’t know that “ordinary people” have lots and lots of opinions about how the leadership of this country should behave in a catastrophe. They do not have this strange, fey reticence to engage in “the blame game.” They expect their leaders to take charge — and when the task is huge and unprecedented, they expect their national leaders to take charge and mobilize the nation to help.

Jesus, George W. Bush has spent the last four years babbling about his superior leadership on a loop.

From his stump speech in 2004:

There are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn’t one of those times. This is a time when we need firm resolve, clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation. (Applause.)

None of us will ever forget that week when one era ended and another began. On September the 14th, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers. It’s a day I will never forget. There were workers in hard hats there, yelling, “Whatever it takes.” I was trying to do my best to thank and comfort the firefighters and policemen and the rescuers. A guy grabbed me by the arm, and he said, “Do not let me down.” (Applause.) Ever since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes

This was what he ran and won on — the idea that he alone, the man in charge, wouldn’t “let us down.” But after Iraq — and now this — it’s become clear to many “ordinary Americans” that his stirring assertions of his own committment aren’t enough. There is massive failure and a complete lack of accountability. Actions speak louder than words. You don’t have to be a pundit to understand that when Americans are abandoned in flood waters — while the media were able to film their despair for days on end — that the government let us down.

The guy who said over and over again “my greatest responsibility as President is to protect the American people,” was selling people his leadership abilities in a crisis. And he let the country down. Ordinary people understand that quite well thank you. They aren’t confused in the least. Even if the state a local authorities weren’t on the ball it doesn’t mean that the president was. And he’s the man in the codpiece.

The sub-text of this crisis is that when the shit came down in an overwhelming way our national government failed.

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