For some reason, no editorial board wanted to hear from a historian who was pointing out that wild rumors about racial violence are a regular feature of urban disturbances in America and should be treated skeptically by the press until real evidence emerges.
I imagine they thought that Perlstein was playing the race card — like all us liberals do at the drop of a hat. Nobody wants to hear it.
Meanwhile, here’s some more fallout — and another little illustration of why the Section 8 idea is meeting resistence:
GREENSBURG, La., Sept. 27 – The federal government, straining to find temporary housing for thousands of evacuees from New Orleans, has generally encountered hospitality in cities and towns in the gulf area. But the reception has been very different in the small parish of St. Helena.
Here, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, white residents have spoken up at public meetings to oppose vehemently the construction of temporary housing for the evacuees, most of whom are black. The tension could complicate tentative plans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy land in the parish for trailer lots.
“The only thing we see about these people on the news is what happened in the Superdome,” said Philip Devall, 42, a white resident of Greensburg, at a recent meeting of the parish government. “They’re rapists and thugs and murderers. I’m telling you, half of them have criminal records. I’ve worked all my life to have what I have. I can’t lose it, and I can’t stand guard 24 hours a day.”
About 2,000 evacuees have been staying with friends and family in the parish since Hurricane Katrina, and police officials here say that crime related to the newcomers has been virtually nonexistent. But many residents say that fear is the driving force behind their opposition.
“I want to know how many sex offenders they’re going to move in next to me,” said Marci Kent, 36, also a white resident of Greensburg, at the meeting. “And I got daughters, too.”
When one white man expressed concern at the meeting over possibly losing his valuables to lawless evacuees, a black woman turned around and angrily pointed a finger at him. “We work hard for what we got, too,” she said. “But these people need a place to stay.”
Pre$$titutes reports that righty bloggers are going all Claude Rains on us because they “just realized” that the media reported anarchy and violence in New Orleans that was unsubstantiated. Drudge is especially shocked that anyone would spread scurrilous rumors.
They are holding the media responsible for the Katrina aftermath and they are not entirely wrong. Of course the media should have been skeptical of these crazy rumors and should have wondered why they weren’t seeing any evidence of the alleged mayhem as they waded through the city. All I ever saw was a few desultory looters hauling around some boxes of sneakers.
The media certainly need to ask themselves some probing questions about why they were so gullible. It didn’t pass the smell test from the get as far as I was concerned. (But then as TBOGG pithily reminds us, it isn’t exactly the first time the media have bought into rumor and speculation hook line and sinker, now is it?)
But blaming the media is missing the point. They, like many others, chose to believe something for which there was no evidence. The press saw and reported the wretched spectacle of the evacuees living in horrible conditions, waiting and begging for help, but by that time everything was seen within the prism of the earlier (and ongoing) reports of violence. They need to do some soul searching about that.
Even those who lived it, for many reasons, saw the situation as anarchic and dangerous for their own reasons.
Bud Hopes, of Brisbane, was praised for saving dozens of tourists as the supposed safe haven of the city’s Superdome became a hellhole.
“I would have to say that Bud is solely responsible for our evacuation,” Vanessa Cullington, 22, of Sydney, told the Sunday Herald Sun by mobile phone from a bus carrying 10 Australians to safety in Dallas, Texas.
“I dread to think what would have happened if we hadn’t got out. It’s so great to be free.”
News of the group’s escape came as reports said as many as 10,000 people might have been killed by the hurricane and its aftermath, and President George Bush ordered more troops and an increased aid effort for the stricken Gulf of Mexico states.
As the Australians left the Superdome, food and water were almost non-existent and the stiflingly hot arena was filled with 25,000 people and the stench of human waste. Gangs stalked the tourists and women were threatened with rape.
“Bud took control. He was calm and kept it together the whole time,” Ms Cullington said.
Mr Hopes, 32, said: “That was the worst place in the universe. Ninety-eight per cent of the people around the world are good. In that place, 98 per cent of the people were bad.
“Everyone brought their drugs, they brought guns, they brought knives. Soldiers were shot.
“It was like a refugee camp within a prison.
“It was full on. It was the worst thing I have seen in my life. I have never been so frightened.”
Realising that foreigners were a target, Mr Hopes and the other Aussies gathered tourists from Europe, South America and elsewhere into one part of the building.
“There were 65 of us, so we were able to look after each other — especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened.” Mr Hopes said.
He said they had organised escorts for the women when they had gone for food or to the toilet, and rosters to keep guard while others slept.
“We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning.”
John McNeil, 20, of Brisbane, said the worst point had come after two days when soldiers had told them the power in the dome was failing and there was only 10 minutes worth of gas left.
“I looked at Bud and said, ‘That will be the end of us’,” Mr McNeil said.
“The gangs . . . knew where we were. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We prayed for a miracle and the lights stayed on.”
[…]
Mrs McNeil broke down when she saw images of her son leaving New Orleans.
“There have been times during this past week when we didn’t know if we would see him again,” she said.
Mr McNeil said he could see a change in his son.
“They’ve been traumatised,” he said. “I think they’ve witnessed several atrocities.”.
They worked themselves into a frenzy, just as a whole lot of other people did.(98% were bad!!!) They may have been threatened. I have no way of knowing. But it was a long way from “atrocities.” The reports of others — many of whom were white — at the Superdome don’t bear out their story. These were people who were convinced that because they were the minority, they were going to be killed. But there are many other whites who didn’t see themselves threatened this way at all. Perceptions were everything. Beliefs and prejudices about race and class were everything.
It was even as if some people expected it to happen, somewhere in their subconscious, even before the rumors started. Check out this post at 10:05 am on Monday, August 29th, when people still thought “a bullet had been dodged” in New Orleans, long before anyone realized that the cavalry was waiting for massive reinforcements before it would dare to enter the barbarous city:
ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg] I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It’s never too soon to be prepared. Posted at 10:05 AM
You can’t blame the MSM for that. They hadn’t even begun to report the mayhem that shortly caused Peggy Noonan (and her latest manly hero, Haley Barbour) to call for the looters (a useful euphemism) to be shot on sight.
At 10:45 on the morning after the hurricane, Jonah has already called forth the “Lord of the Flies” image that would be emblematic of New Orleans the next few days. (This google search shows just how many references there were.) Jonah made a few more peurile remarks about how the loss was worse for middle class families and the like before he finally settled down and realized that the disaster was of epic prooprtions. But he predicted the “anarchy” even before the rumors that turned out to be false began. It existed in his mind. I think it existed in a lot of people’s minds.
(If you’d like some real fun, go to the Corner link and read Rich Lowry’s comments as he breathlessly clips items and snippets of news reports about violence and mayhem.)
I’m not letting the media off the hook. They too took these ridiculous stories on faith and there were serious consequences to them being circulated. But the question that must be asked isn’t why the media reported them — the question is why so many people, including the media, were so willing to believe them in the absence of any real evidence.
The internal polls must be worse that we thought. They are really grasping at straws:
Facing criticism that he appeared disengaged from the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina, President Bush has been looking for opportunities to show his concern. But the White House will take the effort a step further Tuesday, venturing into untested waters by putting the nation’s first lady on reality television.
Laura Bush will travel to storm-damaged Biloxi, Miss., to film a spot on the feel-good, wish-granting hit “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” Mrs. Bush sought to be on the program because she shares the “same principles” that the producers hold, her press secretary said.
In its standard format, the popular ABC series finds hard-pressed but deserving families, sends them away for short vacations and then, in a whirlwind of carpentry and appliance-shopping, gives them new homes. This time, though, the show will broadcast from an underserved shelter near Biloxi, where a convoy of trucks stocked with everything from mattresses to pants will arrive, courtesy of Sears, one of the show’s sponsors.
It’s not clear exactly what Mrs. Bush will do, but Tom Forman, executive producer and creator, said he is hoping that she’ll just pitch in and help unload.
Next week, the cabinet will appear on the special New Orleans version of Survivor, where the Bush team will loll around the pool in Crawford deciding what to have for dinner while the all black 9th ward team lives on bugs and swims through snake infested flood waters to safety. The winners will have their capital gains taxes cut to zero.
Via John at Americablog, I found this article about the warporn site from the Online Journalism Review that is quite interesting.
Near the end the author briefly addresses what I think is the most disturbing aspect of this disheartening story — the combination of sexual pornography and real violent images.
While it was difficult for me to ascertain the motivation for people who were posting gory photos to NTFU, I did talk to Steven Most, a psychology postdoctoral fellow at Yale University who has studied the effects of violent and sexual images. He helped explain what these horribly violent images had in common with the nude photographs of women.
“They both seem to be particularly arousing in an emotional way,” Most said. “Emotional stimuli can be rated in different ways. You could see something and rate how positive or negative it is. But separate from that is how arousing the image is. A positive picture of a cute puppy dog could be positive but not that arousing, whereas a picture of an opposite sex nude could be just as positive but be rated as extremely arousing. And a picture of a mutilation could be rated as extremely negative but highly arousing. Lately there’s been a lot of theories saying that what we’re drawn to is the arousing nature of an image regardless of whether we see it as negative or positive.”
I am not a psychologist but I think it would be very surprising if combining these arousing sexual and violent images did not result in twisting some people’s psyches. It cannot be healthy to get your thrills through deadly, bloody violence and sexual images in the same place, at the same time in the same way. The porn site is a “girlfriend and wife” site — it’s not professional porn stars. Those images of the naked girls next door are being given away for free to men who are posting pictures of mangled bodies of people they purport to hate with every fiber of their being. It is worlds colliding in a very dangerous way.
Sexual sado-masochism has been out there for millenia but it is highly ritualized fantasy. This is all too real. I have to think that it is problematic that people are getting so negatively and positively aroused by real death and gore at the same time.
There is something very disturbing about the images of sexual torture we’ve seen and heard about in this war, generally. The forced masturbation, the pyramids, the female interrogators and the fake menstrual blood, the constant nudity, all of it. Violence against prisoners in the new Human Rights Watch report is expressed as “fucking” instead of beating. Not “fucking up” or “fucking with” — just plain “fucking” as in “I walking in and saw him fucking the prisoner.”
I cannot help but think that something has gone terribly wrong here. From the top of the hierarchy ordering sexual humiliation techniques, to obscure web-sites selling war gore and pictures of girls next door together, this is a very sexualized war and it’s damned strange, particularly coming from a regime that pretends to be an arbiter of strict sexual morals.
It’s clear that the leadership of this country is extremely concerned with consensual sex between two adults but they find images of sexual violence and kinky torture techniques to be thoroughly acceptable among soldiers and useful to the war effort. This is a very odd perception and one that leads us back to the conclusion that something extremely unhealthy has invaded our body politic.
I hesitate to bring this up because nothing is more impolitic these days. After reading excerpts from this article over at the Cunningrealist, I was quite taken aback. I knew that Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire was covered up but I was unaware that he was also a vocal opponent of the Iraq war.
My first shocking thought after reading it was that a high profile star like him could have been seen by someone as a very dangerous guy. He might have been fragged.
It’s hardly better that Americans killed him by accident. But it is better. I no longer trust what any official says about the Iraq war. There seem to be no limits. If it’s true that the military routinely forces innocent people into stress positions so painful they pass out, anything could be true. Even that.
About ten o’clock in the morning, there was an alarm of a fire at the house of serjeant Burns, opposite fort Garden….
Towards noon a fire broke out in the roof of Mrs. Hilton’s house…on the East side of captain Sarly’s house….Upon view, it was plain that the fire must have been purposely laid…. There was a cry among the people, the Spanish Negroes; the Spanish Negroes; take up the Spanish Negroes. The occasion of this was the two fires…happening so closely together….and it being known that Sarly had purchased a Spanish Negro, some time before brought into his port, among several others….and that they afterwards pretending to have been free men in their country, began to grumble at their hard usage, of being sold as slaves. This probably gave rise to the suspicion, that this Negro, out of revenge, had been the instrument of these two fires; and he behaving insolently upon some people’s asking him questions concerning them…it was told to a magistrate who was near, and he ordered him to jail, and also gave direction to constables to commit all the rest of that cargo [of Africans], in order for their safe custody and examination….
While the justices were proceeding to examination, about four o’clock there was another alarm of fire….
While the people were extinguishing the fire at this storehouse, and had almost mastered it, there was another cry of fire, which diverted the people attending the storehouse to the new alarm…but a man who had been on the top of the house assisting in extinguishing the fire, saw a Negro leap out at the end window of one of them…which occasioned him to cry out…that the Negroes were rising….
I wrote quite a bit about the fear of the black mob being the real reason why the response to Katrina was delayed in New Orleans and how this fear has been imprinted on the collective lizard brain of America since the early days of our history.
Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA — Beron doesn’t remember his name — came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
“I’ve got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome,” Beron recalled the doctor saying.
The real total?
Six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the handoff of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice.
State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been murdered inside the stadium.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and law-enforcement officials.
That the nation’s frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city’s top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.
The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees — mass murders, rapes and beatings — have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
“I think 99 percent of it is [expletive],” said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. “Don’t get me wrong — bad things happened. But I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything … 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.”
Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina — making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.
“I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites,” he said. “It’s unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn’t the case. And they [national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. … It’s not consistent with the highest standards of journalism.”
It is, however, entirely consistent with a peculiar type of racism that sees a large group of African Americans as a recipe for violence and anarchy in the absence of strict control. And it’s this racism — not the kind of racism that would have had George W. Bush saying that he couldn’t be bothered saving people because he hates blacks — that played into the death and destruction of Katrina. We’ve managed to drive a lot of that overt hostility underground in the lat 40 years. The racist fear, however, is stoked every time a wily politician runs on the “law and order” platform.
Even the cops — or maybe especially the cops — were whipped into a frenzy:
As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation’s media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center.
Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of “babies,” and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of “hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people” inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies “we couldn’t count.”
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an “almost animalistic state.”
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
“The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible,” Compass said, admitting his earlier statements were false. Asked the source of the information, Compass said he didn’t remember.
Nagin frankly acknowledged he doesn’t know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Superdome and the Convention Center — and may never. “I’m having a hard time getting a good body count,” he said.
Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities’ response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to situations that turned out not to exist.
Military, law-enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees — about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center — overwhelmed their security personnel.
The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds in the Dome, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence.
“Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated,” said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. “If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them — then that became 18.”
Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified — and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant.
Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome’s locker rooms, where he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through about six inches of water, Watt’s attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt’s leg came from his own gun — he accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to jail, Baldwin said.
Inside the Convention Center, Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Thursday. He said thugs hot-wired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, nor did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on about six occasions.
Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Col. Jacques Thibodeaux to put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center around noon on Friday.
It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. They found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any murders, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.
One widely circulated story, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsman, held that “30 or 40 bodies” were stored in a Convention Center freezer.
But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah’s Casino, said Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, who conducted the review.
I doubt that this will get the kind of wide coverage that the initial reports did. And those initial reports clearly indicate that relief was held back because of the alleged anarchy in the streets:
Violence disrupted relief efforts Thursday in New Orleans as authorities rescued desperate residents still trapped in the flooded city and tried to evacuate thousands of others living among corpses and human waste.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown said his agency was attempting to work “under conditions of urban warfare.”
Police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from armed miscreants roaming seemingly at will.
Officers warned a CNN crew to stay off the streets because of escalating danger, and cautioned others about attempted shootings and rapes by groups of young men.
They had to wait for more National Guard to put down the crazy violence. Remember, nobody could come in with relief supplies because it was too dangerous.
About 24,000 National Guard members will be in Louisiana and Mississippi by the end of the week to combat looting and quell gunfire that disrupted the rescue of survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today at a news conference that 1,400 will go to New Orleans daily for the next three days, expanding a force of 3,000 that’s trying to maintain order in a city flooded and left without power by the storm three days ago.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said National Guardsmen from Arkansas were prepared to use deadly force as they try to restore order in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune reported.
Blanco said at a news conference today that the guardsmen “know how to shoot to kill … and I expect they will,” the New Orleans newspaper said.
Some rescue operations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were suspended in areas where gunfire broke out, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington, the Associated Press reported. People trying to board amphibious vehicles outside New Orleans’s Charity Hospital were shot at while trying to evacuate, Cable News Network reported.
The Bush administration Official Katrina Talking Point these days is directed entirely at this situation. They are making the case that if the federal government had had direct control of the situation they could have called in the National Guard instead of ebing forced to wait for the hormonal, hysterical Kathleen Blanco to stop wringing her flighty hands and ask for them. The rationale seems to be that if they could have “secured” the city earlier there would have been a quicker response.
But it was fear of the black mob that prevented the relief agencies from entering the city — a paranoid delusion. The red cross and others could have come into the city days earlier. There were those who said that they shouldn’t be allowed to provide food and water because the evacuees would allegedly be so content that they would not be inclined to leave. But they were also told that they’d be mobbed by the crazed crowd and perhaps killed by the roving gangs of armed thugs who were raping babies and killing anyone who got in their way.
They have been able to confirm four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The same number that there would have been if Katrina had not hit. One of them took place at the Convention Center. There were no murders at the Superdome. The cop who was famously shot down by a roving gang actually shot himself in the leg by accident.
We don’t know how many people died because people were so afraid of the black mob that they would not allow relief workers with food, water and medical help into the city in the days after the flooding. I wonder if this tragic little lady made it to a more dignified place to live out her last days.
Dorothy Divic, 89, is surrounded by onlookers trying to keep her alive on a street outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005. Several people among the thousands of stranded hurricane evacuees have died while waiting outside the building, with no sign of imminent help on the way. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
Update: If you’ve been denied the opportunity to read this widely disseminated e-maim Snopes has it in its entirety. It starts off like this:
I’ve been watching the news lately and have seen scenes that have made me want to vomit. And no it wasn’t dead bodies, the city under water, or the sludge everywhere. It was PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOR. The people on T.V. (99% being Black) were DEMANDING help. They were not asking nicely but demanding as if society owed these people something. Well the honest truth is WE DON’T.
Help should be asked for in a kind manner and then appreciated. This is not what the press (FOX in particular) was showing, what I was seeing was a group of people who are yelling, demanding, looting, killing, raping, and SHOOTING back at the demanded help!
And so it goes. And FoxNews is reporting that authorities are doing backround checks on evacuees who are seeking shelter and over half have criminal records.
“It’s a balancing act,” said Kyle Smith, deputy director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (search). “We don’t want to treat them like criminals after they have been traumatized, but we want to make sure they are in no danger nor the families they are housed with.”
No word on those who have enough money to stay in hotels. Lock up the white women.
Update II:
I am aware that both Compass and Nagin are black. African Americans were also usually the ones who blew the whistle on slave revolts. It’s a complicated psychology. Certainly one can understand why people in jobs of trust and authority would want to distance themselves from a group that is so widely feared and reviled.
LIMBAUGH: From the Associated Press, Mary Dalrymple doing the honors of writing this story. “House and Senate tax writers agreed yesterday to a package of tax breaks designed to help Hurricane Katrina victims recoup their losses and access needed cash. The Congressional Research Service, an office that provides lawmakers with nonpartisan legislative analysis, said some of those tax breaks could do more for higher income survivors than for the neediest.”
Yes. People, they’re going to get tax breaks for Katrina. It may help the rich more. The rich may benefit more from taxes and tax cuts that result from Hurricane Katrina. We should rethink this, ladies and gentlemen. Even though the rich were wiped out too, they still may benefit more. I will guarantee you this, ladies and gentlemen: Many of those getting tax cuts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will not have paid any taxes at all. The people who pay taxes today are primarily the upper middle class, the rich, whatever you’re going to call them, and the filthy wealthy.
It’s not worth it to try to specifically decifer his incoherant ramblings, but the message comes through anyway.
Poor people are going to be getting something they don’t deserve. And I think we know which poor people he is talking about.
Americablog has a long post up about the warporn, which I wrote about last week. I do not suggest that you click through to the pictures unless you have a very strong stomach.
It’s worth noting that this site and the stories of prisoner torture that came out in the last week are part of a story that nobody wants to deal with — that is, the story of individual soldiers committing depraved acts on their own. Shystee over at Corrente, takes me to task for suggesting such a thing, and I plead guilty. There is a point at which individual soldiers have to take responsibility as well as the higher ups, whom I agree bear the brunt of the blame.
But, I have seen no evidence that the military heirarchy has instituted a policy of posting gory pictures on sex sites of Iraqis whom we’ve liberated from their lives. It’s possible, I suppose, but this looks to be a matter of individuals entertaining themselves. As I wrote before, I know that taking pictures of battlefield dead has been around since Matthew Brady — and it has served the purpose of documenting the horrors of war for all to see. But this melding of sexual porn and bloody war gore is the sign of something sadistic and perverted (and yes, fascistic.)
There is one stomach churning picture that shows a horrible mangled stump where a foot should be, presumably blown up in a land mine or something like it — and the naked crotch of the woman whose stump is being displayed. It’s called “Nice puss/Bad foot.” It’s possible that the picture is photo-shopped, but regardless of the veracity of the picture itself, it’s obvious that any man who gets an erection from that pic is a man who should not be carrying a gun.
These guys are allowing their ids to run wild and I don’t think there is any excuse for it. They know the difference between right and wrong. They are not under orders to post these pictures nor can there be any thought that it helps the war effort by scaring the “Hajis” or giving these soldiers a forum in which to “release” their “steam.” It’s pure tittilation — “warporn” in the most literal sense and it speaks to something seriously wrong with the military culture that says on the one hand that we are there to liberate the Iraqi people and on the other that these people’s dead and mangled bodies are strangely sexually stimulating.
Note that there is no discussion as to whether these Iraqis are “Baathists” “bitter-enders,” “terrorists,” “insurgents” — or the “good” Iraqis who we liberated from the sick, depraved Saddam. One of the pictures is simply entitled “Die Haji Die.” It is assumed that any dead Iraqi is a terrorist — and that, as we know, is impossible.
None of this is to say that the systematic sexual torture regime we’ve seen in both Iraq and Guantanamo is just the result of a barrel of bad apples. Clearly, the military have taken the simple-minded lessons of “The Arab Mind” to heart and believe that if they sexually humiliate the “Hajis” they’ll crumple. (Big strong American men, meanwhile, wouldn’t be affected whatsoever by being forced to simulate anal sex with other men or being jeered at while wearing ladies underwear.)I think it’s pretty clear that the highest reaches of the government signed off on a whole lot of questionable kinky stuff in the mistaken idea that arabs are different from you and me. And it would appear that some of the soldiers have predictably taken this to heart.
And even if you are to set aside the kinky sexual nature of the War On Terror, I can’t actually understand how anyone would think that even the total abdication of the Geneva Conventions allows for a cook to break a prisoner’s leg with a baseball bat because he needed to relieve some stress. (Did the prisoner complain that there was too much lemon in the bernaise sauce and he just couldn’t take it any more?)
I remember this fascinating letter to Josh Marshall back in May of 2004, from an unnamed ex-military officer. It was right as the Abu Ghraib story broke:
“… it is no secret that ON THE STREET the US Army was and remains openly kicking Iraqi asses whenever and wherever they want to.
About the Army – Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968.
[…]
Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.
The fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney said, “we’re taking the gloves off” certainly created an environment in which the rule of law seemed to have been completely tossed aside. This country went temporarily insane after 9/11. I guess the military hierarchy lost its bearings too, which I find surprising since the highest levels of the officer corps are steeped in the lessons of Vietnam and presumably understood that this was likely the road to perdition.
The lies and misdirection conflating Al Qaeda with Saddam probably contributed more than anything to the horrors that many Iraqis faced at our hands during the first year or so of the occupation. Many soldiers surely internalized the idea that they were wreaking revenge for 9/11. In this, the buck goes all the way to the top and comes to a screeching halt on the desk of the heroic Commander Codpiece. Bush and his boys should have to answer for that, but I suppose it will be left to history to sort it out.
The Human Rights Watch Report about the beatings and torture by the 82nd Airborn does not feature the sexual humiliation and torture, but rather the good old fashioned kind.
On their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all US soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the fucking cook. He shouldn’t be in with no PUCs. The PA came and said to keep him off the leg. Three days later they transported the PUC to Abu Ghraib. The Louisville Slugger [incident] happened around November 2003, certainly before Christmas.
People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could fuck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week. The PA would overlook it. I am sure they knew.
The interrogator [a sergeant] worked in the [intelligence] office. He was former Special Forces. He would come into the PUC tent and request a guy by number. Everyone was tagged. He would say, “Give me #22.” And we would bring him out. He would smoke the guy and fuck him. He would always say to us, “You didn’t see anything, right?” And we would always say, “No, Sergeant.”
One day a soldier came to the PUC tent to get his aggravation out and filled his hands with dirt and hit a PUC in the face. He fucked him. That was the communications guy.
One night a guy came and broke chem lights10 open and beat the PUCs with it. That made them glow in the dark which was real funny but it burned their eyes and their skin was irritated real bad.
If a PUC cooperated Intel would tell us that he was allowed to sleep or got extra food. If he felt the PUC was lying he told us he doesn’t get any fucking sleep and gets no food except maybe crackers. And he tells us to smoke him. [Intel] would tell the Lieutenant that he had to smoke the prisoners and that is what we were told to do. No sleep, water, and just crackers. That’s it. The point of doing all this was to get them ready for interrogation. [The intelligence officer] said he wanted the PUCs so fatigued, so smoked, so demoralized that they want to cooperate. But half of these guys got released because they didn’t do nothing. We sent them back to Fallujah. But if he’s a good guy, you know, now he’s a bad guy because of the way we treated him.
After Abu Ghraib things toned down. We still did it but we were careful. It is still going on now the same way, I am sure. Maybe not as blatant but it is how we do things.
The men who spoke out were conflicted, as I would expect anyone to be. They were bedeviled by a system of rules that broke down when the leadership of this country lost its moral moorings and they did not know how to change the situation from within. You can read their agony of conscience right there on the page. But in the end they have stepped up to report what they saw — and even participated in. They know it was wrong. So do many, many others who have said nothing.
I understand that it is difficult to stand up against the macho military culture that makes it possible to swallow fear and face people who are trying to kill you. I know that soldiers are trained to be machines and they give up a large piece of their free will to their superiors for the good of the unit. But, at some point, each individual is still a human being and has to answer to his conscience. When someone like Joseph Darby comes forward, or this West Point officer and the two sergeants last week, they are acting against a system and peer pressure that is enormous. They are brave men who prove that it is possible to resist the immense pressure to conform. And that is why they are hated. They show that those who participated have violated basic norms of decent human behavior, even in war — and they show that those who say nothing are cowards.
Sadly, I think our sick culture at this point is actually rewarding those who decry the sense of personal responsibility that leads a soldier to speak out against depraved behavior — and excuse barbaric, cruel behavior as a normal way to relieve tension.
I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.
[…]
You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
Everyone needs downtime, and some need to face the demons, whatever that may be and this site is good for that…It also lets everyone know thsat when they get back they will be accepted …let the entertainment continue.
[…]
This site allows soldiers to blow off some steam…Guys, I love this site and I love the pictures. Keep ’em coming and watch your six boys. Hajis deserve death, never forget it.
[…]
“Oh, by the way, fuck them camel jockeys. We didn’t start this shit, and we certainly aren’t hiding behind civilians with 20lbs of explosives strapped to our chests and hidden in a car.”
Only we did start this shit, didn’t we?
This is why the warmongers who type themselves into a frenzy supporting this war should have the balls to go over and fight it. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinert and Paul Ghouley should have to stand there and ask themselves these questions — confront the nightmares that are going to curse these soldiers for the rest of their lives as they try to reconcile what they saw and did.
It’s a nice, pretty abstract concept — fighting tyranny and terrorism for the red, white and blue. But in reality it’s standing in a doorway watching a psychopathic cook break a prisoners leg with a baseball bat because he’s is feeling stressed. It’s hearing innocent people screaming because they have had chemicals dripped into their eyes and on their skin so they’ll “glow in the dark” and amuse the soldiers. It’s having your humanity and your decency challenged every single day and not knowing if you will meet all the tests of bravery, conscience and loyalty that are required in a war that is being fought for vague and inscrutable reasons.
Jonah believes that we are liberating the Iraqi people from a totalitarian dictator. Does he then agree that it’s part of the mission to oggle an Iraqi womans privates while he gloats that her foot was blown off? Does he know what he would do if confronted with sadists who believe that the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi? That “they started this shit?”
The chickenhawks can claim that it is perfectly acceptable to support a war that they have no intention of fighting. But they cannot claim that it is just fine to support a war in which our troops have behaved in an immoral and indecent fashion, which the military has covered up and which was implicitly condoned by the highest reaches of our government. If they supported this they should have to share in the trials of conscience that afflict these poor bastards from the 82nd airborn who came forward (and the ones who did not.) They should have to share in the visions of blood and gore that we see on thay sick porn site and they should have to live with what has been done in their name.
If you support this country’s loss of honor you should have to get down in the mud and grovel with all those who’ve lost their struggle to maintain their humanity while fighting a war that has no end, that doesn’t know who it’s fighting that sees sex and violence intertwined in a sick and twisted way — and that celebrates random, wanton killing of the people we are allegedly fighting for. The chickenhawks in this war, of all wars, are the ones who should have to suffer alongside those who lost their souls killing and beating and torturing for a cause that didn’t exist.
If you haven’t read Billmon’s incredible post on this subject, you need to.
The Note is a wee bit ruffled because Pre$$titutes called them “a stinking repository of Bush-licking Pre$$titution” and uses the novel defense that Bush defenders say they are biased against them so they must be juuuust right.
I suppose it never occurs to them that while it is true that they cannot be biased both for and against Bush it is entirely possible that they could be biased for or against Bush — and one side or the other is working them. Which side, do you suppose, is most likely to be doing that?
They did not object, by the way, to being named the Karl Rove Official Fan Club and Fluffing Society, so I take that to mean they feel quite comfortable with the label. It’s the Bush-licking that seems to have irritated them.
Support for some of the allegations of abuse come from a sergeant of the 82nd Airborne who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch quotes him as saying that, “To ‘F____ a PUC’ means to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. To ‘smoke’ someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out. That happened every day. Some days we would just get bored so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did that for amusement.
“On their day off people would show up all the time,” the sergeant continues in the HRW report. “Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the cook.”
Here’s what the pentagon had to say about it, by an officer who obviously studied at the Tom DeLay school of integrity:
Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner criticized the report as a predictable effort to try to “advance an agenda through the use of distortions and errors in fact.”
If this is true, I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about “Lord of the Flies” in New Orleans. It’s pretty clear that even our own highly disciplined military can lose their humanity without a whole lot of provocation. These weren’t dipshit national guard hicks either. This was the 82nd Airborn. No excuses.
As much as Katrina revealed the ugly underbelly of poverty and race in the country, 9/11 revealed the ugly underbelly of sadism and blind fury. This is a sick culture.
