Katrina Storm Page I

                Picture from www.Rense.com

             "Various types of belief can be implanted in many people after brain function has been deliberately disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgement and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of "herd instinct" , and appear most spectacularly in war time, during severe epidemics, and in all  similar periods of common, which increase anxiety and so individual or mass suggestibility."  Dr William Sargant, a psychiatrist at the Tavistock Institute, in his 1957 book, Battle For The Mind.

      Seven New Orleans police officers indicted
       for post-Katrina killings

           Accepting the 'Government was Incompetent' Katrina Spin Will Kill Us

         Mike Brown Advises 'Take The Scenic Route In Life' By Judith Moriarty

             George W. Bush Still Rocks! (Well, Not Really) By Mark Morford SF Gate Columnist

            Witnesses Confirm Paramedic Story Of Cops Blocking Escape 9-11-5

                The 'City' Of Louisiana By Keith Olbermann MSNBC 9-7-5

              Creating Catastrophe From Disaster The Fourth Anniversary Of 911 By Jim Kirwan

              We had to kill our patients
            by CAROLINE GRAHAM and JO KNOWSLEY, Mail on Sunday 09:01am 11th September 2005

           Mercenaries guard homes of the rich in New Orleans Jamie Wilson in New OrleansMonday September 12, 2005
           The Guardian

          Dutch, Mexican Marines Help US Soldiers With Cleanup By George Pawlaczyk Knight Ridder Newspapers
            9-11-5

         Seven New Orleans police officers indicted
       for post-Katrina killings

               By Naomi Spencer
              5 January 2007

Seven New Orleans police officers were indicted by a grand jury December 28 on charges of murder and attempted murder for shooting six unarmed refugees as they attempted to cross a bridge to dry ground following Hurricane Katrina.

The cops are also accused in three separate lawsuits of killing two and wounding four citizens in the unprovoked attack on the eastside Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, six days after Katrina devastated the city. One of those killed was a 40-year-old mentally disabled man; the other was a high school senior who had been separated from his family. Wounded were the mentally handicapped man’s older brother, and four members of another family.

The officers were booked Tuesday in the midst of a police-sponsored rally that was widely covered by the media, where they were hailed as “heroes.” In the January 2 New Orleans Times Picayune, local NAACP branch president Danatus King noted that the public round of applause by the police for accused murderers would almost certainly have a chilling effect on potential testimony from witnesses in the current cases and in the future.

Lawyers for the indicted officers have already filed motions aimed at overturning the charges, calling the evidence “paltry at best.” Franz Zibilich, an attorney for one of the officers, told the Associated Press Thursday, “As a wise man once said, a district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”

Circumstances surrounding the shootings have never been made clear, in large part because the New Orleans police force itself was responsible for collecting vital evidence and investigating the deaths. But like many other occurrences following Katrina, the events on the bridge epitomize the brutality and dehumanization inflicted on survivors by corrupt law enforcement.

In the days after the city flooded, at least 100,000 mostly poor residents were trapped without supplies or rescue. Hundreds awaited emergency aid on rooftops and tens of thousands were crammed into the Superdome sports arena in sweltering, filthy conditions. After nearly a week without help, thousands of city residents set out on their own in search of potable water, food, and missing loved ones.

The cases against NOPD officers assert that on the morning of the incident, families making their way over the bridge in search of relief and missing relatives came under gunfire from heavily armed men.

According to papers filed with the court, most of the shooters were out-of-uniform members of the New Orleans police department, who had suddenly arrived at the bridge in a commandeered rental truck and immediately began firing on the families. Killed were two men who attempted to flee, and four others were seriously wounded.

Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, died of seven gunshot wounds to the back. He and his brother, Lance Madison, 49, were crossing the bridge to escape the floodwaters. Like masses of others, the two had been stranded on the roof of an apartment building awaiting rescue for several days before deciding to brave the submerged streets.

As they reached the middle of the Danziger Bridge, according to Lance Madison, the brothers were shot at. When they began running, one of the officers shot Ronald in the shoulder. Lance, also wounded, moved his brother to a motel parking lot, where he was arrested.

The police claimed that both brothers were threatening them, and that Ronald Madison, described only as an “unidentified gunman,” ran to the end of the bridge toward a motel, “reached into his waist [sic] and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him.” Lance Madison was held for six months before being released without an indictment against him.

Another family was attacked at the base of the bridge. Leonard and Susan Bartholomew; their teenage son and daughter; their nephew, Jose Holmes; and his teenage friend, James Brissette were all crossing the bridge together in search of supplies. Brissette, a 19-year-old high school senior from the Ninth Ward searching for his mother with the Bartholomews, was shot and killed.

In a September 13, 2006, interview on National Public Radio, Susan Bartholomew described that officers opened fire without warning, hitting five of the six members of her group. “When I look,” she recounted, “we’re all on the ground and all you can see is blood. Everywhere. You can hear everybody hollering, moaning, everybody been shot and in pain.... My right arm was on the ground lying next to me. The only thing that was attached to it was a piece of skin. It had been shot off.”

After the gunfire, Bartholomew said that cops in shirts emblazoned with the letters “NOPD” surrounded them, pointing weapons at them and telling them not to look up. Nineteen-year-old Jose Holmes, who had been hit twice and whose right arm was shattered, hid behind a cement slab in a walkway alongside the bridge. An officer approached him, he told NPR, then, “He leaned over the cement block, he put the rifle to my stomach and shot me twice.”

An internal police department investigation summarily cleared all the indicted officers of wrongdoing, concluding that the officers acted in self-defense. The police version of events, however, is rife with errors and unsubstantiated claims.

Initially, for example, the NOPD stated that officers were responding to a call from repair contractors who being fired upon by snipers. The official police report, issued a month afterward, claimed the police were responding instead to an emergency report that two fellow officers were “down” from gunfire under the bridge.

The incident was further characterized by the NOPD as the attempted murders of a St. Landry Parish deputy sheriff and seven other New Orleans officers. But the deputy sheriff was later revealed to be a former police officer with a criminal record participating in the shooting while posing as a deputy.

As with most developments following the hurricane, New Orleans residents killed and wounded on the bridge were vilified by officials and the media. Dozens of officers, meanwhile, engaged in car theft, organized looting rings, and numerous fatal shootings.

Elements within the NOPD responsible for its decades-long reputation of corruption, vigilantism, and thuggery were emboldened by the Bush administration’s handling of the disaster and justified by demonization of the hurricane victims in media coverage.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, police and other security personnel carried out several other high-profile attacks on black residents. On October 8, 2005, three city cops and at least one federal agent were caught on video brutally beating a 64-year-old retired schoolteacher (see “Videotaped police beating in New Orleans”). On December 27, half a dozen New Orleans police pepper-sprayed and shot to death a mentally disturbed man who was brandishing a small knife (see “New Orleans police gun down mentally ill man”).

The impunity with which many of these crimes were perpetrated in the midst of unprecedented catastrophe embodied the savagery of the ruling establishment toward the working class and extreme social polarization coloring its response.

That it has taken a year and a half to reach arraignment is indicative of the state of the city’s social infrastructure and reconstruction—a process government officials, including President Bush, declare could take a quarter century.

Sixteen months after Katrina, much of New Orleans remains in utter shambles. Less than half of the population has returned, and in the working class neighborhoods of Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes, most seriously damaged homes remain standing without repair or demolition.

The $7.5 billion Road Home federal rebuilding fund has thus far distributed aid to a mere 97 homeowners out of the 90,000 who have applied. Of the 77,000 low-income homeowner applications for the $10.4 billion Community Development Block Grant, only a few dozen have received aid.

Hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents remain displaced; a quarter million are living precariously in Texas, most dependent on inadequate federal aid and state social services. Another 100,000 remain in Georgia. More than 80,000 families in Louisiana are crowded into FEMA trailers. Most of the displaced are destitute and overwhelmingly black residents of New Orleans who were unable to evacuate on their own before the hurricane’s impact.

Reproduced from: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/nola-j05.shtml

 

      Mike Brown Advises
        'Take The Scenic
         Route In Life'

               By Judith Moriarty
                 noahshouse@adelphia.net
               9-12-5

 

                 

 

 

Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Michael Brown Director of FEMA, finally showed up days late, and a dollar short, to the worst natural catastrophe this country. Rumsfeld, who calls those shredded in Iraq, "collateral damage", and "not counted", can hardly be counted on to elicit heartfelt compassion; for hundreds of thousands of victims, dead, homeless, jobless, or left behind to die in flooded nursing homes, charity hospitals, the Convention Center, the Superdome, and ramshackle housing - without food or water. While the media feigned outrage, and officials called for harsh measures; for those caught looting stores, of foodstuffs, shoes, diapers, clothing and, yikes, plasma TVs - all of it junk from China slave labor factories, there was little outrage over the vans that pulled up to Iraq's museum, and systematically looted the place of tens of thousands, of irreplaceable artifacts - Baghdad being the Cradle of Civilization. Apparently 'collectors' knew exactly what they wanted, as those doing the looting knew what was of value. Vaults holding the most valuable of items - had their doors blown off. Meantime U.S. soldiers sat on tanks and guarded the Ministry of Oil. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, when confronted with this mayhem, benignly shrugged and said, "Democracy is a messy business. Stuff happens." There's looting and then there's looting, it all depends on the circumstances, the color of one's skin, and the message wished conveyed to the mind - numbed populous.

 

Michael Brown's credentials for running the country's number one disaster agency; was his stint directing the International Arabian Horse Association, from which he was fired. But in the good ol' boys, in-crowd, Brown replaced Joe Allbaugh of FEMA, his old college roommate. Allbaugh went on to bigger bucks in the lobbying field for corporate interests in Iraq.

 

But hey, they needed a fall guy, a stooge, for when the proverbial crap hit the fan, and Brown is perfect for the job. Everyone seems SHOCKED, that Brown proved so inept and out - to - lunch! Please! Nobody in Congress or the media paid any attention when Brown replaced his buddy Allbaugh. Heck lap - dog Senator Lieberman who's not sure what party he belongs to, remarked at confirmation hearings, that Brown had "particularly useful" qualifications because he had worked in Edmond, Oklahoma, 30 years ago as an assistant city manager. Hey, I worked at an A&P to earn money for my hospital training; I wonder what cushy job I can get?

 

Out here in the real world try getting a job today without pissing in a bottle for suspected drugs, taking a lie detector test - lest you be tempted to steal some piece of imported trash, and a background search, that takes you back to the night you were conceived! Chances are, in this self - righteous - holier - than - thou environment; you better hope it was in a proper bedroom, between dutifully married people, and not in a car, on the beach, or some sleazy motel room. All of this for a job a wigget factory, stocking shelves, a flagman on a highway job, or collecting carts in some asphalt parking lot.

 

Now none of this is applicable if your aspirations are higher; like becoming President, running a Savings and Loan Bank, becoming a TV evangelist, running Amtrak, an airline company, or a corporation; responsible for billions, and the job security/ pensions of thousands of employees. Here you get a pass and go directly to Park Place. One might think that a person entrusted with the nation's welfare in times of catastrophe, might need a background in organizational skills? With no Arabian horses - reported as floating dead and bloated, in the muck and mire of the sewage, of New Orleans - maybe Brown thought that was his assignment? No wonder the President said he was doing a "heck of a job".

 

It's been reported, that Mr. Brown's job as assistant city manager in Edmond, was nothing more than an "internship". The best that his boss could say about Mike was that he was on time and always wore a "suit and a starched white shirt". That's good enough for me. I know that if I were sitting out in the 100% humidity of 100 degree Louisiana swamp heat; with dead bodies, rats, water moccasins, and alligators waiting to chomp on me, as soon as I keeled over; that Mike in his suit and starched shirt just might look like the second coming of Christ . But then Mike wouldn't have appeared out of the scorching, blistering haze; because by his own admission, he was totally unaware of the tens of thousands of citizens left stranded at the convention center for days - although that's all that was on TV hour after hour after hour.

 

Cheney, tan and rested, from fly fishing in the pristine waters of Jackson Hole, Wyoming; absent fecal matter, bodies, dead animals, oil and poisonous vermin, remarked when he finally showed up, " I think the performance in general at least in terms of the information I've received from locals is definitely very impressive". One has to wonder at times, if the lot of these guys didn't arrive here on some asteroid called Oz. I live in backwater NH, and I know more, than the well paid Vice - President of the United State and the Director of FEMA. What's wrong with this picture and me receiving no paycheck - obscene pension plan - or out shopping for a multi - million estate, like Lynn Cheney is on Chesapeake Bay. What with Halliburton getting contracts for the cleanup down there - God know how many more homes they'll be able to buy while citizens live at rest stops or in Barbara Scarlet O' Bush's - Astrodome, "I think they're doing quite well".

 

One would imagine, that the President would have been more selective ( maybe not ), in this political patronage appointment, that was responsible for the lives of so many, who naively believe that government has their best interests at heart, and will be there in an emergency. In fact, none of these clowns at FEMA are qualified except in spin.

 

With a 47 billion dollar Homeland (American) Defense Agency it's obvious that the real defense and response came from ordinary citizens, who didn't show up in suits, or call a press conference, to state how much they cared. They were there from the very beginning and were hindered in many respects by officials.

 

Take Boss - Hog, Police Chief, Arthur Lawson; of the City of Gretna that is across the bridge from New Orleans and remained dry. When citizens tried to escape to some semblance of normalcy, this bozo had the audacious gall (not surprising down there) to close the bridge to foot traffic. Two paramedics, the Bradshaw couple, visiting New Orleans, joined a group of people who had been turned out by the hotels they were staying at. When they tried to reach the Superdome they were turned back by National Guards.

 

Ms. Bradshaw stated that she asked, "What's our alternative?" The guards told her that was their problem and that no, they did not have extra water to give them. As they made their way to the bridge in order to leave the city, armed Gretna (bedroom community to New Orleans) police formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Ms. Bradshaw stated on MSNBC Sept 10-05, that they began firing their weapons over their heads. When they asked police why they couldn't cross the bridge, they said that the West Bank wasn't going to become New Orleans. The Bradshaw's said that there was no doubt in their minds, that because there were few whites in their group, with the majority being Black, that's why they were refused help. When the Bradshaw's then set up a camp for the some 90 people, the police came and took their food and water. This Hog - Boss Police Chief, Lawson, said on MSNBC, that Grenta, had no food or places for people to stay; that they were keeping people from crossing for their own protection! If you visit the website of Gretna; you'll note that there are numerous schools, churches, and hotels. The police were allowing cars to pass. This is probably very alien to those who've never lived in the South or in a large city. When I lived in CT, there were these bedroom communities outside the large city where I lived. There were no Blacks, unless they were the maids or groundskeepers. When a veteran I knew, went back to visit the exclusive town, where he grew up, he told me a police cruiser followed him every bit of the way. Back from war and bedraggled and ill, there was no longer the pretense of flags - ribbons - or supporting the troops.

 

New Orleans will come back, but it will be absent the multitudes of poor folks and Black residents. They'll have themselves a Mardi Gras theme town, complete with hotels and corporate businesses and we'll be picking up the tab. It'll be Disney World Times Square. We'll be made to pick up the tab for decades of ineptness and incompetence; from the derelict levee system, to the barrier islands and marshes - all destroyed from years of oil and gas drilling, and 8000 miles of canals, dug through wetlands, by the Army Corps of Engineers. This disaster was made and created by man and allowed to happen - much like the Everglades, that we're now being billed billions to restore. Hey, but Representative Baker of Baton Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Yep - good old God, decided to flood ONLY the poor sections of New Orleans, and protect the French Quarter - and exclusive/business parts of town. It's just like these hypocritical - self -righteous prigs, to shrug and tell the folks, "Obviously you were the sinners in town - the ner' do wells, and God kicked you all to the curb. Got problems go to Him about it."

 

The Wall Street Journal reports, Sept 8 -05, that "The mostly African - American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there are scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white (isn't God good - JM) and more affluent areas streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators."

 

"The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich - and a terminus for the armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe. Ashton O' Dwyer who lives on the city's grandest street, has cell phone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday the city's water service sprang to life. A pair of oil - company engineers, dispatched by his son - in - law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline. . Despite the disaster, the city's moneyed, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery. 'New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here, 'says Ashton, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires."

 

"High society is still dominated by these old - line families, represented by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city's Coca - Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of 'knewes', groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi - Gras. A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community know as Audubon Place, is the home of Jams Reiss, descendent of an old - line Uptown family. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his home and that of his neighbors."

 

"The power elite of New Orleans - insist that the city won't restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high - crime rate. The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and few poor people. 'Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way; demographically, geographically and politically, ' he says, 'I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out'."

 

The article goes on of about their plans for the rebirth of New Orleans, taking place now in Dallas, to get the place - their part, up and running in time for Mardi - Gras. With the billions being thrown around by Congress and the President ( 60 billion thus far ) it's heartening to see that tax dollars will be rebuilding an exclusive - Mardi - Gras haven; for these arrogant - elitist jerks . As one can see, the TV media showed none of this hardship in the exclusive sections of town - well guarded and suffering no deprivations. Why one would think that all of New Orleans was a stew of jonsing crack heads, pimps, whores, drug dealers, and white trash. All of them looting and rampaging through the town. That's what you were supposed to see. It's called managed news. Nah, these folks will be scattered from Oklahoma to Maine. You won't see any settled in Jackson Hole, Kennebunkport, Chesapeake Bay, Georgetown, the Hamptons, Rye, N.Y, Greenwich, CT, etc.

 

Gentrification by Disaster - and it worked out perfectly for the elites in New Orleans, who didn't move off their lazy asses to help anyone (except themselves) while thousands of citizens from across the nation collected water - gas - food - and clothing! But then they don't do 'scut - work ', and darn, all the help was drowning or dying of thirst at the Convention Center, or Superdome.

 

But our buddy Michael Brown of FEMA wraps it up nicely, "I believe each of you has the world at your beckoning call, but I also believe that you should take advantage of the 'scenic route' when the opportunity arises. Remember to have passion for life and all that it brings you on the scenic route, and continue to make those memories" M. Brown, Commencement Address - Florida Institute of Technology University, Dec 18, 04. Gosh, Mike sure gave the folks in New Orleans and the entire Gulf some memories these past two weeks. As for the 'scenic route' well that's debatable.

 

            Reproduced from www.rense.com

 

George W. Bush

 

Still Rocks!
(Well, Not Really)

By Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist
9-11-5

 

"He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific job of protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat: No. Matter. What."

 

Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly...

 

---

 

Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and in denial and he pretty much let all those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action.

 

This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor, or anything that doesn't directly serve his handlers' agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego or anything that isn't spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie charts and reassuring matronly tones.

 

And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the world, according to SF Gate's own World Views column: "Maddening incompetence ... reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily Mail. "Can't get it together," says a major paper in Italy. "A plethora of grim tales of disaster," says the Scotsman. "Superpower or Third World?" asks the Spanish daily Noticias de Álava. Why did BushCo fail its first great national-security test since Sept. 11, despite having two days' advance notice of Katrina's wrath? asks Le Monde. And on it goes, the world's powers looking on in one part shock and one part disgust and all parts repugnance for Bush's rampant ineptitude and America's apparent inability to take care of its own.

 

But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man's president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.

 

He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific job of protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat: No. Matter. What. Flood hurricane disaster war social breakdown economic collapse? Doesn't matter. Corporate interests über alles, baby. Protect the core, reassure the base, screw everyone else unless it begins to affect the poll numbers and then finger-point, deflect, prevaricate. All of a piece, really. Because Bush, he was never actually meant to, you know, lead.

 

So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is, after all doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell, the day after Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed straight to San Diego to party with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.

 

Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably say you thought it would be different? Just look. All major social services are being gutted. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a joke, second in line only to the ungodly useless Homeland Security Department, which has become about as reassuring and trustworthy and humane an organization as a prison in Guantánamo.

 

The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans just last year. The White House hacked that down to about $40 million, even as it passed the most bloated and nauseatingly pork-filled $12.3 billion energy bill in recent history, one that guaranteed we'd be sucking at the tit of foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in Big Energy for decades to come, even as more and more teenagers die in Iraq for Bush's inept and failed war. Yay politics.

 

Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi march into New Orleans immediately after Katrina exited to take charge and keep the peace? Why, because most of them are serving in that same violent and brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30 percent of the guard is stuck over there along with 50 percent of their equipment. Yay Vietnam 2.0.

 

Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after Katrina struck to timidly plead with his parent company, Homeland Security, for some backup, not to actually get their hands dirty but rather to help "convey a positive image" about the government's response to the victims? Why, because he's an incompetent lackey Bush appointee who was fired from his former job as head of something called the International Arabian Horse Association. Yay pathetic nepotism.

 

Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist, icon of hollow self-righteousness and the energy magnate's friend, has already leveraged the Katrina nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska, much in the way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot Act down the nation's throat and make fear and xenophobia a national pastime. And let's not forget trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which has already scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina damage, thanks to the fact that the former director of FEMA is now a Halliburton lobbyist. Ah, war and death and tragedy. They are just so goddamn profitable, right, Dubya?

 

And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark ordering an investigation into what happened to all the fish. Unless this probe starts and ends in the White House, unless it hangs Bush himself up by his monkey ears and dangles him over a river of toxic Louisiana sewage, it's merely useless and insulting and more than a little sad.

 

Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right, his core base of supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting, condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or homosexual or anti-war? This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong to a minority and don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per annum to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in the Louisiana bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker.

 

Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the military. God bless America.

 

_____

 

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

 

As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.

 

c -2005 SF Gate

 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articlecgi?file=/gate/
archive/2005/09/09/notes090905.DTL

 

 

     Reproduced from www.rense.com

 

Witnesses Confirm
Paramedic Story Of
Cops Blocking Escape
9-11-5

 

Police agencies south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds attempting to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, according to two paramedics who were in the crowd.

 

The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people. The witnesses said they had been told by New Orleans police to cross this same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.

 

Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.

 

``The police kept saying, `We don't want another Super Dome,' and `This isn't New Orleans,' '' said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.

 

Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., police department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.

 

``As soon as things calm down, we will do an inquiry and find out what happened,'' he said.

 

Bradshaw and his partner, Lorrie Beth Slonsky, wrote an account about their experiences that has been widely e-mailed.

Cathey Golden, a 51-year-old from Boston, and her 13-year-old son, Ramon Golden, on Friday confirmed the account.

 

The four met at the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter. Bradshaw and Slonsky had attended a convention for emergency medicine specialists. Golden and her two children, including 23-year-old Rashida Golden, were there to visit family.

 

The hotel allowed its guests and nearly 250 residents from the nearby neighborhood to stay until Thursday, Sept 1. With its food exhausted, the hotel's manager finally instructed people to leave. Hotel staff handed out maps to show the way to the city's Convention Center, to which thousands of other evacuees had fled.

 

A group of nearly 200 guests gathered to make their way to the center together, the four said. But on the way, they heard that the Convention Center had become a dangerous, unsanitary pit from which no one was being evacuated. So they stopped in front of a New Orleans police command post near the Harrah's casino on Canal Street.

 

A New Orleans police commander whom none of the four could identify told the crowd that they could not stay there and later told them that buses were being brought to the Crescent City Connection, a nearby bridge to Jefferson Parish, to carry them to safety.

 

But on the bridge there were four police cruisers parked across some lanes. Between six and eight officers stood with shotguns in their hands, the witnesses said. As the crowd approached, the officers shot over the heads of the crowd, most of whom retreated immediately, Bradshaw, Slonsky and Golden and her son said.

 

http://www.mercurynews.com

 

 

Police Made Their Storm Misery Worse

 

9-11-5

 

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, two San Francisco paramedics trapped in New Orleans for five days last week, have a different story to tell than many of the tales that have come out in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

 

By their account, the cops weren't necessarily the good guys, and it was crystal clear that most of the city government structure collapsed along with the levees that left the city at the mercy of the rising waters.

 

When Hurricane Katrina hit Aug. 29, Bradshaw and his longtime live-in girlfriend were at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans' French Quarter, in town for a three-day paramedics conference at the convention center.

 

After the storm died down the next day, they were among 500 people sheltered in hotels throughout the tourist district -- foreign tourists, conference attendees and locals who'd checked in to ride out the storm.

 

The stranded crowd stared at food and water locked in a drugstore across the street from the hotel only to be shooed away by police officers whenever anyone approached the store. Finally, after hours of cat and mouse, the crowd finally broke into the store.

 

"At that point, we had not seen any of the TV coverage or looked at a newspaper, but we guessed there were no video images of European and white tourists, like us, looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter,'' the couple wrote in an eight-page account of their experience.

 

When it became clear that the help they so desperately needed was not coming anytime soon, the group pooled their resources in an effort to buy their way out of the surrounding hell. They ponied up $25,000, enough to lease 10 buses that would carry them out of the city.

 

But as the buses they paid for approached the city, they were immediately commandeered by the National Guard forces that were in New Orleans, Bradshaw and Slonsky said Thursday in an interview back home.

 

"If they used the buses to get the most severely ill out of the Superdome and convention center, I have no problem with that,'' Bradshaw said. "The thing that gets me is that if we could get on the phone and get 10 buses, why couldn't FEMA make that call?''

 

With no food, no water and no transportation out of the city, about 200 of the former hotel guests wandered the streets and tried to set up a camp next to a police command center on Canal Street, where they hoped to get aid, protection and information, the couple said.

 

But officers told them they couldn't stay, they had no water for them, and they needed to get up on Highway 90, a bridge that spans the Mississippi River, and walk until they saw the rescue buses they promised would be waiting for them.

 

So late Wednesday afternoon, the group set out for a bridge called the Crescent City Connection, where they would find the help they so desperately needed. But when they arrived atop the highway, the paramedics said, they were met by more police officers, this time from neighboring Gretna, La., who weren't letting anyone pass.

 

"If I weren't there, and hadn't witnessed it for myself, I don't think I would have ever believed this," Bradshaw said.

 

The officers fired warning shots into the air and then leveled their weapons at members of the crowd, Bradshaw said. He approached, hands in the air, displaying his paramedic's badge.

 

"They told us that there would be no Superdomes in their city,'' the couple wrote. "These were code words that if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River -- and you weren't getting out of New Orleans.''

 

And when exhausted hurricane victims set up temporary shelters on the highway, Gretna police came back a few hours later, fired shots into the air again, told people to "get the f -- off the bridge" and used a helicopter to blow down all the makeshift shelters, the paramedics said.

 

When the officers had pushed the crowd back far enough, one of them took the group's food and water, dropped it in the trunk of a patrol car and drove away.

 

Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson confirmed that his officers were under his orders to seal off the suburban city of 17,500 residents.

 

"We had individuals bused into Gretna and dropped off, and we had no idea they were coming. No one ever called us -- we have no shelter in Gretna, and our citizens were under a mandatory evacuation. This place was already locked down.''

 

The few buses that did show up received much the same treatment as Bradshaw, Slonsky and their compatriots: Gretna police officers did not allow anyone off the buses, and like their brothers in blue across the river, they sent them packing.

 

Police officers in Gretna also went into the city's lone sporting goods store and pawn shop and removed more than 1,400 weapons from the shelves to ensure the public safety, Lawson said.

 

Throughout the ordeal, Slonsky said members of the group they camped with became a community that helped each other, shared with each other and, in the end, relied on each other for their very survival.

 

The San Francisco paramedics were finally airlifted Friday to San Antonio, where they endured another couple of days in cramped conditions while they were examined for disease before being released.

 

"We got out of there with only the clothes on our back,'' Bradshaw said. "And the money in my underwear,'' added Slonsky.

 

©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18448.shtml

 

 

    Reproduced from www.rense.com

 

The 'City' Of Louisiana
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC
9-7-5

SECAUCUS - Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

 

Well there's your problem right there.

 

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it. The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might've saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could've brought last Monday and Tuesday - like the President, whose statements have looked like they're being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

 

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called "The Department of Homeland Security": "Louisiana is a city"

 

Politician after politician - Republican and Democrat alike - has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were - congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

 

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded - even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural... and government-made.

 

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.

 

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

 

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans - even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

 

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection - or at least amelioration - against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

 

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

 

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?

 

I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.

 

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been - as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be - whether or not I voted for this President - he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government - our government - "New Orleans."

 

For him, it is a shame - in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

 

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself - it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

 

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.

 

Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana

 

 

 

     Reproduced from www.rense.com

 

Creating Catastrophe
From Disaster
The Fourth Anniversary Of 911
By Jim Kirwan

 

kirwanstudios@earthlink.net
9-12-5

 

Four years ago today the brilliant blue skies of morning over New York City were forever shattered by the impact of the first plane that struck the World Trade Center towers. On that day America and the world were changed forever. National innocence was lost amid the smoke and flames that day and with each day since, our international reputation has been stained by each new lie that the government told both to the nation and the world. The people largely let this happen in the interests of maintaining an imagined "status quo" but with the arrival of Katrina it is clear that a national day of reckoning has arrived.

 

Katrina and 911 share several commonalities and together these events illuminate failures that the American public has yet to face. The true costs of these political calamities, now a billion dollars a day for Katrina alone, presents the congress and the country with a set of real needs that are now in danger of never being met. The lack of political leadership, at all levels, coupled with dedicated incompetence and underscored by arrogance has brought this nation to the brink of collapse. No overview existed, no plan that took the needs of ordinary people into account was ever formed in anything from foreign policy to health or human services, never mind the survivability of any of the national "values" that we have said we hold "so dear."

 

The color of the floodwaters that still covers New Orleans are as black as the true purposes that underlie the War on Iraq. The stench from the aftermath of the storms along the Gulf Coast is at least as powerful as the open sewers of waste corruption and greed that today runs rampant through major cities, both here and abroad where the mega-powers continue to seek control over all international exploits in order to steal that which they cannot obtain in any other way. The fate of the City of New Orleans is unclear at this hour, but the future of the United States is equally uncertain on this fourth anniversary of the attack on the people of this country, by those who would destroy whatever was, in order to own whatever is to come.

 

When the purposes for our attack upon Afghanistan began to come under scrutiny, after signing the Unocal pipeline contract there; the directors of the wars moved our troops and the national spotlight to Iraq. When the public began to look more closely into the non-existent reasons for the wars; instead of answers the administration gave the public a complete reorganization of the entire government supposedly to guarantee the safety of every man, woman and child, from any and all threats anywhere or anytime. HOMELAND Insecurity was the result. To do this 22 separate agencies were folded into a completely unmanageable single agency. Katrina has proven that this was a disaster in itself, just waiting to happen, and now that disaster has become this catastrophe that has cost lives and property on a scale that has not been seen since the Civil War. So much for the vision or the leadership of these fools in Washington DC!

 

Our unilateral wars of aggression have been momentarily eclipsed by Katrina, but the damages and heartbreak there have been countered by the outpouring of extreme generosity from not only the American public but from nations and peoples the world over. In the remembrances of this black day in history we must include the facts that both these world-changing events were overseen by those same criminals that are pretending to be legitimate leaders of this nation. However their true constituency consists of that one percent of the population that now owns forty percent of the wealth. The welfare of the mass of ordinary people here represents only an impediment to their continued acquisition of anything and everything of value. As an example of what they have in mind, it is currently rumored that Halliburton wants to begin to privatize the water supply. Perhaps this is part of why so many lies were necessary to cover the true goals of what is really at issue in all the turmoil surrounding these tragic and ongoing events.

 

In Afghanistan and Iraq there were so many outright lies, so much disinformation and created confusion that it has been far more than just "difficult" to get to the truth beneath the mindless aggression of the wars. In Katrina, the lack of information that reached the public just as in Iraq, was the key in dividing the responders, diverting the life-saving services and confounding the critical efforts needed to save lives and property during a natural disaster that was more than just expected as the arrival of this storm had been expected for literally decades, and all the preparations had been made, but were ignored!

 

By stripping FEMA of its real reason for being, which originally was coordination and control of all decisions into a single federal agency that answered only to the president but in this situation confusion and delay were officially inserted into the response plans of the federal government thereby guaranteeing that widespread failures were inevitable.

When Homeland Insecurity was established the most experienced FEMA personnel left and were replaced with political hacks, the government thereby assured that this storm and the others that may yet arrive would have the maximum violent impact on the nation and the public. This, because while the cast of characters at the heart of this darkness that is the Bush administration remains the same; their corrupted reach in all cases has always been the same target, namely the complete subjugation of the American population to their illegal and corporate "Grand Designs" for unopposed power to their "New World Order"

 

In keeping with this plan there is but one final tumbler that needs to fall into place to complete the takeover, and this could not have come at a more appropriate moment for the designers of this impending and unnatural catastrophe. That moment is the predictable rubber-stamp approval of the next Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Bush owes his entire history to this court that functioned under the now deceased Chief Justice Rehnquist. On September 12, 05 amid the heartache and confusion still surrounding Katrina, the hearings for the replacement of the Chief Justice will begin. This all but automatic appointment of John Roberts will seal the fate for decades of people yet unborn. The overburdened public will have no advocates at the hearings to protect the rights of themselves or their children, among those failures in the senate that will sit to "advise and consent." So again the public shall remain the real losers in another sham hearing, for yet another pivotal appointment that will cut off yet another avenue for change in this ever shrinking prison that used to be known as America, "Business-As-Usual" shall again play the heavy in the sad and endless melodrama for the now defunct arena of American political theater, at a time when determination and resolve are the only traits that could remotely save this coming day from becoming part of history. It is interesting that while Bush took nearly a week to decide to act on Katrina"s wrath, he took just 24 hours to appoint John Roberts to the most recent vacancy on the Supreme Court, he seems to know at least what is truly necessary for his personal survival, if not the nation"s.

 

What really awaits the nation on this Fourth Anniversary of 911? Given that every major endeavor that the administration has undertaken has failed, from wars for peace, to tax-cuts for prosperity, all the way to outsourcing 3 million the jobs to improve this stricken economy. Anarchy has millions of new adherents, the world has become far more unstable and gas prices have never been higher. Domestically we have been strangled by policies and programs and tax codes that have stripped us of our individuality our freedoms and the core of our way of life: But we have HOMELAND Insecurity to protect us from phantoms, while the real bandits break every law and enjoy immunity in the two tiered system of the CRIMINAL" Justice system. This coming Friday we"ll have a "National Day of Prayer" that will no doubt fix all those failures that it has taken the bandits five long years to create in depth.

 

Part of the reason we did not respond to Katrina was that Bush sent our national guard off to fight in foreign wars that had nothing at all to do with defending the USA against outside attacks and he left the nation unprotected from the kinds of disasters they were created to assist with. Then he compounded our vulnerability by spending the nation into oblivion with tens of billions wasted on HOMELAND Insecurity and hundreds of billions on the largest military budget in world history. From these sums he and his administration then gave generously in sweetheart secret contracts to their closest friends and supporters. In this effort meant to pay for putting him in office, he further protected his actions by classifying everything as "national security" or SECRET. Bush has taken corruption and political opportunism to a whole new level of expediency while draining the public purse and slashing the benefits of troops and citizens alike, in every area where survival needs help just to stay afloat. Despite all this the world and millions of Americans still rose to the defense of the intended victims of Katrina, despite the best intentions of the Bush administration to inflict maxim dislocation and privation among those least able to survive. This has been a very embarrassing week for the-man-who-would-be-dictator.

 

Under Bush & Company even the dead are denied their place in history. In both wars this administration has undercounted our casualties, and misrepresented the true costs in human life to the public. The true number of those who have died in his unilateral wars needs to reflect the 6,000 to 8,000 more who died on the way to hospitals or on the return trip to the states.

 

The same mindset that contrived the artificial body counts in the Middle East will no doubt be doing the counting of those who died in Katrina's fury. This government cannot be trusted with the truth, anymore than we can look to congress for real answers to the real questions whether that is about the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or the blatant corruption at the highest levels of this government. What is desperately needed is a SPECIAL PROSECUTOR to take this investigation wherever it might lead!

 

Before Katrina there was some discussion about who was to be responsible for what. But two days before Katrina made landfall FEMA was put on notice that it was to be in charge, and they were to work with the cities and the states to see to the evacuations and the provisioning of the survivors. This included water, food and shelter as well as medical care and responsibility. Instead of following that mandate the administration appointed "confusion's disciples" to reign over the hurricane until their lack of real qualifications forced others to take leadership positions that began to get actual results. Unlike the war in Iraq, the Bush puppets here were unmasked and frustrated during Katrina"s recovery phase" would that the same should happen to those running the endless war machine in the Middle East. But in that theater of operations the shield of lies held long enough to establish enough US military deaths to justify holding on to the farce of "staying the course" thus despite the falsified casualty figures, this "action" lasted just long enough to convert the confusion into conflict over whether or not we should withdraw.

 

Having learned nothing-at-all from Vietnam, we seem determined to shape Iraq into another American military defeat because of sheer pig-headedness, and political cowardice in the face of the enemy" and all because the "wisdom" of our leaders refuses to admit to the true facts on the ground in these conflicts.

 

When faced with the obvious incompetence and the total lack of real leadership accompanied by unbounded arrogance the public would seem to have an obligation to confront this travesty openly, with no quarter given. If we do not do this who will be left to speak for us when our lives are on the chopping block of either history or circumstance? How much longer will outright confusion and lies continue to rule this country? Critical decisions are needed on every front at this moment. Throughout the five years of this nightmare nothing has improved. Nor has this administration ever fired anyone, in any capacity that was directly involved in any of the massive failures that have all happened on the watch of the current Bush administration.

 

Looking at the carnage in the wake of Katrina; at the mixture of blood and oil, chemicals and fecal waste that is populated with the bodies of the floating dead. What comes to mind is the potential future of those people still untouched by the stagnant semi-liquid world of death and decay, ruin and disease, pollution and the toxic wastes unleashed. What also comes to mind is that in some strange way all of this seems synonymous with the co-mingling of political failure, massive corruptions and that blind arrogance that has led this nation since September 11, 2001.

 

USA Inc. decided to play with that temperamental tar baby of ill-gotten gains and stolen fortunes on the global stage, and now America is caught up in the muck and mire of those lies and deceits as surely as New Orleans is still flooded in the ruins of her once proud self.

The City of New Orleans will eventually be drained, at least of the surface filth from the storm. How long will it be before we can say the same thing about this government?

 

How can any real nation worthy of the name afford to keep such people at the helm of any government? Where are the artists and the writers, the song makers and the filmmakers, because they are all needed now to write and paint and sing and show these imposters for who and what they have shown themselves to be today? If this experiment we call America doesn't soon begin to get its collective act together, then there may not be a fifth anniversary of this black day on which to recall the failings of those who brought 911 into the world. Either the Crusade of the New World Order will be hobbled into submission by the public that it so despises or the public will have been conquered by the very people that were supposed to serve and protect them from exactly this kind of threat.

 

kirwan

 

 

      Reproduced from www.rense.com

We had to kill our patients

by CAROLINE GRAHAM and JO KNOWSLEY, Mail on Sunday 09:01am 11th September 2005

 

New Orleans: Doctors forced to 'play God'
 

 

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.

Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.

'These people were going to die anyway'

The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."

The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.

"I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.

"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.

"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.

"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.

"The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway."

Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."

Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions."

Mercenaries guard homes of the rich in New Orleans

Jamie Wilson in New Orleans
Monday September 12, 2005
The Guardian

 

"I spoke to one of the other owners on the telephone earlier in the week," Yovi said. "I told him how the water had stopped just at the back gate. God watches out for the rich people, I guess."

 

Dutch, Mexican Marines
Help US Soldiers
With Cleanup
By George Pawlaczyk
Knight Ridder Newspapers
9-11-5

 

ABOARD THE PAPALOAPAN - The Marines have landed in Biloxi. The Mexican Marines.

 

And Dutch Marines, too.

 

Marines from Mexico, the Netherlands and the United States are allies in an international Hurricane Katrina cleanup effort based on ships about 20 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Four Canadian ships are on the way.

 

"Our president called George Bush, and three days later we came here," said Oscar Martinez Pretelin, an officer aboard t