NEW ORLEANS: AN ORCHESTRATED ATROCITY?
A body of evidence has already accumulated that invites only one
conclusion: the US government has deliberately and systematically
hindered the relief effort in New Orleans, has taken measures to
exacerbate the humanitarian crisis, and is doing everything possible to prevent
outside observers entering the city, presumably for fear that they
would find out that no relief operations are going on there, just
operations intended to force people out of the city. The evidence for
this is already abundant, and can be found on many websites critical of
the Bush administration, such as Prison Planet and the Online Journal.
But far worse is evidence suggesting that the Bush administration actually caused the crisis itself. Like Dick Cheney, I've been around the block a few times and I began to suspect that in August-September 2005 there would be an 'event.' This period looked ripe for a major catastrophe not least because of Bush's plunging popularity, the attention garnered by Cindy Sheehan's antiwar vigil at Crawford, the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war itself, and the ongoing investigation of the Valerie Plame affair, which seemed to be honing in at last on the guilty parties. The Republican strategy seems to be to change the subject when issues unfavourable to the administration begin to penetrate the mainstream.
By August this year, circumstances were clearly propitious for the deployment of a weapon of mass distraction. The first indication of an impending event was that all military leave had been cancelled from August 17. Then there was a report from Seymour Hersh forecasting a terrorist attack that would trigger war with Iran starting sometime in September.
During August two strange events occurred in more or less the same part of Utah: 1) a massive amount of explosives detonated when a truck overturned on the highway and 2) a rave party was broken up by the military for no apparent reason and with excessive force. While I pondered whether the two events could have been connected and whether the planned 'event' had gone awry (presumably, the explosives had been intended to detonate somewhere else), the focus shifted to New Orleans, where a major force hurricane was due. Here is a shortlist of suspicious factors which would support the conclusion that the flooding of New Orleans was the 'event' I had been anticipating:
First, the White House declaration of impending emergency which was posted on the White House website on August 27, inexplicably omitted reference to the New Orleans parishes which were at greatest risk from Hurricane Katrina. 'The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.' What about Orleans, St. Bernards, St. Tammany, Palquemines, St. Charles, Jefferson, and others? How can it be that the parishes most likely to be affected were not covered by the declaration of emergency? (See map here)
Second, the cause of the disaster currently afflicting the city of New Orleans was not the hurricane itself, which wreaked the greatest damage on the state of Mississippi, but overflow from Lake Pontchartrain which began about a day after the hurricane had passed. This overflow seems to have been a human-made event. It is impossible not to be struck by the fact that the levees broke in the exact same sections that had undergone reconstruction recently. Dr. Shea Penland of the Pontchartrain Institute states that the 17th Street break occurred 'along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee, it had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick.' So was the work performed in recent months 'reconstruction' - or was it sabotage? Were, as one researcher speculates, 'shaped explosive charges hidden inside of sealed, waterproof compartments during the "construction" on the 17th Street and Industrial Canal levees and conveniently detonated in the aftermath of Katrina'?
There are too many reports of explosions immediately prior to the breach for the possibility to be dismissed lightly. 'Total Information Analysis has reported a claim by intelligence expert Tom Heneghen that 25 earwitnesses cited explosions immediately before the levee breach.' (SOURCE) Prisonplanet.com identifies a number of sources for these allegations. What's more, a report has surfaced according to which Army Corps of Engineers divers found burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall. Allegedly, a chunk was tested, revealing 'traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111.'
Third, US government agencies engaged in suspicious operations that suggest an operation to exacerbate the problem of the breached levee. According to former New Orleans resident Andrea Garland, 'part of the reason our house flooded is they dynamited part of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government.' (SOURCE) According to Steve Watson, this allegation is entirely plausible. It is, in fact, precisely what happened in 1927! 'In 1927, the Mississippi River broke its banks in 145 places, depositing water at depths of up to 30ft over 27,000 square miles of land. ... New Orleans’ (mainly white) business class pressurized the state to dynamite a levee upstream, releasing water into (mainly black) areas of the delta. ... Two parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, which had a combined population of 10,000, were destroyed.' Clearly, things just happen on a much larger scale these days!
Fourth, the US government ensured that the levee breach was not promptly repaired, on the pretext that all available resources were needed for relief efforts elsewhere in the city. This argument sounds reasonable enough - except that the prompt repair of the levee would have minimized the extent of the catastrophe, meaning that there would be many fewer citizens in need of relief. 'In an interview by WWL TV, [New Orleans] Mayor [Ray] Nagin complained vociferously that Louisiana National Guard Blackhawk helicopters were being stopped from dropping sandbags to plug the levee soon after it breached.' (SOURCE) The government was apparently even prepared to kill to prevent the breach from being repaired. What else is one to make of the fact that police fired on eight contractors who had been sent to repair the breach in the 17th Canal levee, killing five? 'A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims [of the police shooting] were contractors on their way to repair a canal.' (SOURCE) Who wanted the levee to go unrepaired? NB: The contractors were apparently from Boh Brothers, a construction company based in Baton Rouge. (Boh Brothers have not yet replied to an email in which I asked them to expressly confirm or disconfirm that the men killed had been Boh Brothers employees.)
The more information that becomes available about the disaster in New Orleans, the more reasonable it becomes to suspect not the hand of God but that of man behind it. As I suggested in my previous post, it is not difficult to establish a motive. At the very least, we are looking now at a real estate bonanza for individuals closely associated with the Bush administration itself. As Naomi Klein observes, 'With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city.' There is no doubt that this has been the game plan for some time and that the government has been on the side of those favouring gentrification over the maintenance of public housing. In 2001, for example, Michael Kelly, who headed the Housing Authority of New Orleans from 1995 to 2000, was the subject of a lawsuit filed 'by current and former residents of the Desire public housing complex in New Orleans [which] alleges that Kelly and other officials illegally developed a plan that "intentionally forces ... residents to abandon the community that they have lived in since birth and relocate to other rundown neighborhoods and houses in an effort to create an affluent neighborhood to attract middle-class African-Americans and Whites."' (SOURCE) A network of interests has therefore existed for some time in New Orleans which found itself pitted against what could be termed the welfare sector. The latter's ability to defend its interest through conventional legal channels would have encouraged the fermentation among corrupt real estate magnates of a conspiracy for the purpose of exploiting a future hurricane as a means of largely eliminating public housing from the city.
BELOW: Apparently, God disapproves of public housing. From Waynemadsenreport.com:
UPDATE: I have looked around the Web to find photos of New Orleans public housing to see how desperately it is in need of being 'cleaned up.' But, to my surprise, even the photos at a website expressly devoted to 'urban decay,' show housing that looks pretty good, at least by comparison to its equivalent in the U.K. and some other parts of the U.S. What's more, some new projects were in advanced stages of completion. One wonders what fate will befall, for example, this quite respectable example of contemporary public housing:
But far worse is evidence suggesting that the Bush administration actually caused the crisis itself. Like Dick Cheney, I've been around the block a few times and I began to suspect that in August-September 2005 there would be an 'event.' This period looked ripe for a major catastrophe not least because of Bush's plunging popularity, the attention garnered by Cindy Sheehan's antiwar vigil at Crawford, the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war itself, and the ongoing investigation of the Valerie Plame affair, which seemed to be honing in at last on the guilty parties. The Republican strategy seems to be to change the subject when issues unfavourable to the administration begin to penetrate the mainstream.
By August this year, circumstances were clearly propitious for the deployment of a weapon of mass distraction. The first indication of an impending event was that all military leave had been cancelled from August 17. Then there was a report from Seymour Hersh forecasting a terrorist attack that would trigger war with Iran starting sometime in September.
During August two strange events occurred in more or less the same part of Utah: 1) a massive amount of explosives detonated when a truck overturned on the highway and 2) a rave party was broken up by the military for no apparent reason and with excessive force. While I pondered whether the two events could have been connected and whether the planned 'event' had gone awry (presumably, the explosives had been intended to detonate somewhere else), the focus shifted to New Orleans, where a major force hurricane was due. Here is a shortlist of suspicious factors which would support the conclusion that the flooding of New Orleans was the 'event' I had been anticipating:
First, the White House declaration of impending emergency which was posted on the White House website on August 27, inexplicably omitted reference to the New Orleans parishes which were at greatest risk from Hurricane Katrina. 'The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.' What about Orleans, St. Bernards, St. Tammany, Palquemines, St. Charles, Jefferson, and others? How can it be that the parishes most likely to be affected were not covered by the declaration of emergency? (See map here)
Second, the cause of the disaster currently afflicting the city of New Orleans was not the hurricane itself, which wreaked the greatest damage on the state of Mississippi, but overflow from Lake Pontchartrain which began about a day after the hurricane had passed. This overflow seems to have been a human-made event. It is impossible not to be struck by the fact that the levees broke in the exact same sections that had undergone reconstruction recently. Dr. Shea Penland of the Pontchartrain Institute states that the 17th Street break occurred 'along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee, it had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick.' So was the work performed in recent months 'reconstruction' - or was it sabotage? Were, as one researcher speculates, 'shaped explosive charges hidden inside of sealed, waterproof compartments during the "construction" on the 17th Street and Industrial Canal levees and conveniently detonated in the aftermath of Katrina'?
There are too many reports of explosions immediately prior to the breach for the possibility to be dismissed lightly. 'Total Information Analysis has reported a claim by intelligence expert Tom Heneghen that 25 earwitnesses cited explosions immediately before the levee breach.' (SOURCE) Prisonplanet.com identifies a number of sources for these allegations. What's more, a report has surfaced according to which Army Corps of Engineers divers found burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall. Allegedly, a chunk was tested, revealing 'traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111.'
Third, US government agencies engaged in suspicious operations that suggest an operation to exacerbate the problem of the breached levee. According to former New Orleans resident Andrea Garland, 'part of the reason our house flooded is they dynamited part of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government.' (SOURCE) According to Steve Watson, this allegation is entirely plausible. It is, in fact, precisely what happened in 1927! 'In 1927, the Mississippi River broke its banks in 145 places, depositing water at depths of up to 30ft over 27,000 square miles of land. ... New Orleans’ (mainly white) business class pressurized the state to dynamite a levee upstream, releasing water into (mainly black) areas of the delta. ... Two parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, which had a combined population of 10,000, were destroyed.' Clearly, things just happen on a much larger scale these days!
Fourth, the US government ensured that the levee breach was not promptly repaired, on the pretext that all available resources were needed for relief efforts elsewhere in the city. This argument sounds reasonable enough - except that the prompt repair of the levee would have minimized the extent of the catastrophe, meaning that there would be many fewer citizens in need of relief. 'In an interview by WWL TV, [New Orleans] Mayor [Ray] Nagin complained vociferously that Louisiana National Guard Blackhawk helicopters were being stopped from dropping sandbags to plug the levee soon after it breached.' (SOURCE) The government was apparently even prepared to kill to prevent the breach from being repaired. What else is one to make of the fact that police fired on eight contractors who had been sent to repair the breach in the 17th Canal levee, killing five? 'A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims [of the police shooting] were contractors on their way to repair a canal.' (SOURCE) Who wanted the levee to go unrepaired? NB: The contractors were apparently from Boh Brothers, a construction company based in Baton Rouge. (Boh Brothers have not yet replied to an email in which I asked them to expressly confirm or disconfirm that the men killed had been Boh Brothers employees.)
The more information that becomes available about the disaster in New Orleans, the more reasonable it becomes to suspect not the hand of God but that of man behind it. As I suggested in my previous post, it is not difficult to establish a motive. At the very least, we are looking now at a real estate bonanza for individuals closely associated with the Bush administration itself. As Naomi Klein observes, 'With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city.' There is no doubt that this has been the game plan for some time and that the government has been on the side of those favouring gentrification over the maintenance of public housing. In 2001, for example, Michael Kelly, who headed the Housing Authority of New Orleans from 1995 to 2000, was the subject of a lawsuit filed 'by current and former residents of the Desire public housing complex in New Orleans [which] alleges that Kelly and other officials illegally developed a plan that "intentionally forces ... residents to abandon the community that they have lived in since birth and relocate to other rundown neighborhoods and houses in an effort to create an affluent neighborhood to attract middle-class African-Americans and Whites."' (SOURCE) A network of interests has therefore existed for some time in New Orleans which found itself pitted against what could be termed the welfare sector. The latter's ability to defend its interest through conventional legal channels would have encouraged the fermentation among corrupt real estate magnates of a conspiracy for the purpose of exploiting a future hurricane as a means of largely eliminating public housing from the city.
BELOW: Apparently, God disapproves of public housing. From Waynemadsenreport.com:
UPDATE: I have looked around the Web to find photos of New Orleans public housing to see how desperately it is in need of being 'cleaned up.' But, to my surprise, even the photos at a website expressly devoted to 'urban decay,' show housing that looks pretty good, at least by comparison to its equivalent in the U.K. and some other parts of the U.S. What's more, some new projects were in advanced stages of completion. One wonders what fate will befall, for example, this quite respectable example of contemporary public housing:
