(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

A police car drives past a woman's dead body on the sidewalk at Magazine and Jackson streets.

But SWAT teams are busting into people's houses now.


Leonard Thomas, 23, cries after a SWAT team burst into the flooded home he and his family were living in on Monday, Sept. 5, 2005. Neighbors had reported that they were squatting in the house in the wake of Hurricane Katrina but the authorities left after his family proved they owned the house. Some rescuers are not taking any more food and water to those who have decided to stay in an effort to force them out. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

That is obviously more important than helping them:

Comments

[allblood-nroses.livejournal.com]

You don't know me, but I found your journal by random... and I wanted to say thank you for supplying so much truthful information (and sufficient links) about this whole disaster... I've been afraid to watch the news, I guess (and maybe it makes me a bad person) but... I just don't want to know anymore...

Thanks for the images too...

[bing-crosby.livejournal.com]

the NY Times has that guy on the blue van in one of their slideshows with a caption indicating he was about to get scooped up by the Coast Guard. Not that that detracts from the gist here. It does make me think, though, about how we start seeing the same pictures over and over-- I felt like I recognized some of the people at the Astrodome from the Superdome, or was it just the arrangement of mattresses?

[redheadedmuse.livejournal.com]

your journal is my breaking point. through this whole disaster I've been doing my job in the best rural small town news reporter way I know how, covering local angles on the disaster, calling our regional FEMA director on the carpet for his asinine responses to legitimate questions about the emergency situation, listening to families who lost loved ones tell their stories...without shedding a tear.

I come home, I read your journal, I see photos of the block where I used to do my laundry and drink cheap sake while listening to bluegrass at a Thai restaurant and there's a dead woman on the sidewalk and I just lose my shit.

Thanks for helping the human responses break out in a week where I've worked overtime at locking them down.

[convivium.livejournal.com]

To don the tinfoil hat for a moment: I can't help but feeling there's something suspiciously PsyOpsy about the whole looting/rioting thing. Here are just a couple of reasons*, off the top of my head:

1. There was a unit of volunteer fireman from Houston, with specific expertise in post-hurricane relief, who were prevented by FEMA (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/5/105538/7048) (at gunpoint) from entering the city from the time of their arrival Tuesday morning until they finally returned home in frustration on Saturday. The reason given was that before they could enter the city is first had to be "secured" by the National Guard. One of the many striking things about this incident is that they were prevented from entering the city well before the widespread reports/rumors of violence surfaced. Why?

2. A real turning point seemed to come when a helicopter evacuating people from the Superdome was allegedly shot at. I believe it was that which prompted Nagin to switch the focus of police efforts from rescue operations to "security." Yet the pilot of the helicopter in question says that he was not shot at, and AP reported (http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1087205) that the FAA spokeswoman in Washington said she had no such report. "We're controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on," she said, adding that the FAA was in contact with the military as well as civilian aircraft. Where did this story come from?

A few well-planted rumors, some endlessly recycled video footage of looting, and New Orleans goes from being a "disaster zone" to a "war zone," where the military is literally speaking of undertaking "combat operations" agains the "insurgents" (this is coming straight from the Army Times (http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1077495.php), by the way). It seems almost like an experiment designed to see exactly how little it might take for Americans to accept a declaration of martial law (see how many "reasonable" people were clamoring for it this past week) and a handover of control from civilian agencies straight to the military.

I don't doubt that there were some real instances of violence in the streets and at the Superdome and Convention Center. It would be strange, under the circumstances, if there weren't (even if some of the horrific stories from the Dome truly boggle the imagination and turn the stomach). But they seem to have been parlayed into something much more sinister, something which makes me wonder whether our tolerances are being checked...whether we are being prepared for something bigger.

*I am compiling links to these stories and more here (http://penguinrocket.blogspot.com/2005/09/shocking-and-awful.html).

[mycrust.livejournal.com]

Seriously. Your journal is a great thing.