Thousands of Sunnis demonstrated in Iraq against the new constitution as the campaign for its rejection in a coming referendum swung into action.

And, in what was seen as another blow to the United States and Britain, the secretary general of the Arab League warned that adopting the constitution in its current form will be a ” true recipe for chaos” with reverberations around the region.

The draft document, approved by the Shia and Kurdish factions but rejected by Sunni Arabs, was finally delivered to the National Assembly at the weekend.

But Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary general, said yesterday: “I share the concerns of many Iraqis about the lack of consensus on the constitution. I do not believe in this division between Shia and Sunni and Muslims and Christians and Arabs and Kurds.

“I find this is a true recipe for chaos and perhaps a catastrophe in Iraq and around it.”
commondreams.org

A day after being pummeled by Hurricane Katrina, the Crescent City had no power, little drinking water, dwindling food supplies and water rising in the streets.

Water levels continued to rise downtown after sections of two levees collapsed, leaving 80 percent of the city under water as deep as 20 feet in places. (See photographer’s account of coastal damage — 3:29 )

Authorities warned that efforts to limit the flooding have been unsuccessful, and that residents may not be able to return home for a month.

“It’s a difficult, difficult situation,” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco told CNN. “The Corps Of Engineers has attempted to fix the situation under emergency conditions. They’re not the best conditions, and probably too little, too late.”

Water from Lake Pontchartrain was pouring into downtown from levee breaches, rising steadily throughout the day along Canal Street, the main thoroughfare that separates the central business district from the French Quarter. (Map)

Coast Guard crews in helicopters continued to pluck people stranded on the roofs of their inundated houses, while state and local rescue crews used boats to reach residents marooned by the floods. (Watch the video account of unanswered screams — 1:57)

Wildlife and Fisheries workers rescued more than 3,000 people Tuesday, Sen. Mary Landrieu told a reporter.

More than 1,200 people were rescued Monday, and a Coast Guard spokesman said Tuesday night that rescuers “really have no idea” how many people remain stranded.

Two major medical centers, Charity Hospital and Tulane University Hospital, had to be evacuated because of rising water and power outages.

Hundreds of people were looting businesses downtown, throwing rocks through windows and hauling away goods from stores. Some looters were brazenly trying on clothes in the street. Police said the looting was happening citywide.

Landrieu said she “can understand” how some people might loot to get food or water, but said she had no tolerance for people motivated by avarice. Such lawlessness “is the worst kind of behavior.”

By mid-afternoon, officers armed with automatic weapons could be seen on downtown streets, and sporadic gunfire could be heard, although the source was unclear.
cnn.com

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — New Orleans resembled a war zone more than a modern American metropolis Tuesday, as Gulf Coast communities struggled to deal with the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Deteriorating conditions in New Orleans will force authorities to evacuate the thousands of people at city shelters, including the Louisiana Superdome, where a policeman told CNN unrest was escalating.

The officer expressed concern that the situation could worsen overnight after three shootings, looting and a number of attempted carjackings during the afternoon. (See video of the looting — 1:25)

Officials could not yet provide accurate estimates for fatalities or time needed for recovery in the area and are focusing, instead, on widespread search-and-rescue operations.
cnn.com

SARALAND, Ala., Aug. 30 – Hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the New Orleans area stranded in overcrowded hotels, motels and makeshift shelters and on highways across much of the South underscored a new reality on Tuesday: an extended diaspora of a city’s worth of people, one rarely seen in the annals of urban disaster.

As news spread that the devastated, largely emptied and cordoned-off New Orleans area would not be habitable until at least next week, hurricane refugees gathered in hotel lobbies and shelters around television sets beaming images of their waterlogged city and turned to cellphones and laptops, usually in vain, for information about the homes, relatives and neighbors they had left behind.

Hotels as far away as Houston (350 miles from New Orleans), Memphis (395 miles) and Little Rock (445 miles) were booked, and the American Red Cross had opened more than 230 shelters in schools, churches and civic centers spread through six Southern states.

Many found themselves wandering anew after maxing out credit cards or being forced to leave previously booked rooms.

America Williams, 34, evacuated on Sunday, piling into a sport utility vehicle with her boyfriend and 13 of his relatives – seven of them children. “They just told us to drive, to drive east or west to get as far from the storm as possible,” Ms. Williams said. “Our intention was to go to Atlanta, but it was raining so hard we stopped in Birmingham.”

After two nights in three $50 rooms at a motel, the family ran out of money and moved on Tuesday to the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center, where the Red Cross had just opened a shelter. “We’re down to our very last,” Ms. Williams said. “We came here for some type of assistance, some type of help.”
nytimes.com

JERUSALEM, Aug. 30 – Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister, announced Tuesday that he intended to challenge the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, as leader of the governing Likud party, a move that threatened the coalition government and increased the likelihood of early elections.

The two men are longtime rivals in the right-wing Likud party. Mr. Netanyahu quit as finance minister earlier this month to protest Mr. Sharon’s decision to withdraw Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank.

Mr. Sharon “has abandoned the way of Likud, and chose another way, the way of the left,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a Tel Aviv news conference, accompanied by a number of Likud legislators.

“Sharon gave and gave and gave some more, and the Palestinians got more and more and more” he said. “And what did we get in return? The answer is: Nothing, nothing and nothing.”
Full: nytimes.com

The stage is set for the real nightmare to begin. Sharon will be recalled as a benign moderate compared to Netanyahu, the miracle baby of 7/7, who was warned ahead of time while hundreds were blown to pieces.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 – Even as the economy grew, incomes stagnated last year and the poverty rate rose, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. It was the first time on record that household incomes failed to increase for five straight years.

The portion of Americans without health insurance remained roughly steady at 16 percent, the bureau said. A smaller percentage of people were covered by their employers, but two big government programs, Medicaid and military insurance, grew.

The census’s annual report card on the nation’s economic well-being showed that a four-year-old expansion had still not done much to benefit many households. Median pretax income, $44,389, was at its lowest point since 1997, after inflation.

Though the reasons are not wholly clear, economists say technology and global trade appear to be holding down pay for many workers. The rising cost of health care benefits has also eaten into pay increases.

After the report’s release, Bush administration officials said that the job market had continued to improve since the end of 2004 and that they hoped incomes were now rising and poverty was falling. The poverty rate “is the last, lonely trailing indicator of the business cycle,” said Elizabeth Anderson, chief of staff in the economics and statistics administration of the Commerce Department.
nytimes.com

Oh. Okay, Elizabeth…

SAN MIGUEL, Mexico, Aug. 28 – After four years of hiding, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista rebel movement in southern Mexico has been holding “town hall” meetings with leftists, labor leaders, students, Indian rights advocates and other supporters in an effort to forge a national campaign to rewrite Mexico’s Constitution along socialist lines.

The rebel, who calls himself Subcommander Marcos, emerged from the woods on Sunday morning surrounded by 24 armed rebels for a second day of listening to the leaders of dozens of charities devoted to social work and human rights. All the rebels wore the movement’s trademark black balaclava helmets, including Marcos, who may be the only man in history to make a ski mask and pipe look sexy.

The weekend gathering looked like a cross between the Woodstock concert, a Grange Hall meeting and a convention of Che Guevara fans. At times it looked as if a public hearing in the East Village had been transported to a horse pasture in the rugged green mountains here.

…The attendees included an organization representing lesbian anarchists, a collective of witches, advocates fighting the privatization of waterworks, gay-rights promoters who call themselves polysexuals and well-respected human rights monitors in Chiapas.
nytimes.com

ha ha ha. Very funny. Witches, polysexuals, and fighters for water privatization. What a loony bunch. This is the New York Times so so sophisticated take on blatant bias.

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 30 (UPI) — Martial law was declared in New Orleans midday Tuesday as the city continued flooding from at least two levees damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

WWL-TV, New Orleans, which evacuated its studios earlier, reported airlifts of sandbags had been ordered as water flooded along the city’s landmark Canal Street. No one but emergency personnel was being allowed into the city, whose two airports were under water. Looting was reported.

Mayor Ray Nagin said bodies have been seen floating in floodwaters, although neither city nor Louisiana state officials had issued a preliminary death toll.

Nagin said the city’s Twin Span Bridge is “totally destroyed” and that 80 percent of the city is underwater. New Orleans is 6 feet below sea level, and reliant on levees to hold back water from Lake Ponchartrain.

He also predicted there would be no electricity in the city for four to six weeks. Natural gas leaks were also reported throughout the city, CNN reported.

—————————————
Flashback: Bush Held Back Funding On Hurricane Defense
New Orleans City Business

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified millions of dollars in flood and hurricane protection projects in the New Orleans district.

Chances are, though, most projects will not be funded in the president’s 2006 fiscal year budget to be released today.

In general, funding for construction has been on a downward trend for the past several years, said Marcia Demma, chief of the New Orleans Corps’ programs management branch.

In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.

Demma said NOC expects its construction budget to be slashed again this year, which means local construction companies won’t receive work from the Corps and residents won’t see any new hurricane protection projects.

Demma said she couldn’t say exactly how much construction funding will be cut until the president’s budget is released today. But it’s down, she said.

The New Orleans district has at least $65 million in projects in need of fiscal year 2005 funding. In fiscal year 2006, the need more than doubles to at least $150 million.

Unfunded projects include widening drainage canals, flood- proofing bridges and building pumping stations in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. The Corps also wants to build levees in unprotected areas on the West Bank.

Demma does not expect the Corps to award many more projects before fiscal year 2005 ends.

The New Orleans district already owed about $11 million to construction companies after funding dried up last July, well before the end of the fiscal year. By paying its debt, the Corps lost money it could have spent on other projects in 2005.

Boh Bros. Construction Co. LLC of New Orleans waited until November for the Corps to pay off a nearly $2 million debt, said Robert S. Boh, company president.

When the Corps doesn’t pay its bills, companies like Boh Bros. either use internal funds or borrow money to continue work.

That is a tough burden that is placed on us, Boh said.

Boh said his situation was not as bad as construction companies working the Corps’ Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.

The burden that reduced funding puts on us is that funds are not necessarily available in each fiscal year to pay for the construction work that we might be able to do, Boh said. They’re running out of funds and presenting the contractor with a real dilemma.

The most urgent work being delayed by funding shortfalls involves levee construction on the West Bank.

The West Bank doesn’t have the first level of protection completed. So, that’s the really critical one, Demma said.

On the bright side, the West Bank work has been receiving higher funding than usual in the past few years to get this work done, she said.

Still, $3.5 million in West Bank construction contracts have not been funded in fiscal year 2005.

SELA has a backlog of $35 million, according to the Corps’ 2005 budget.

Our progress is definitely beginning to slow, said Stan Green, SELA project manager.

Green said SELA has 14 project plans that could be awarded if funds were available. SELA’s highest priority, he said, is completing an intake culvert for Dwyer Road in eastern New Orleans. The culvert, an underground concrete box that carries water to a pumping station, would improve the flow of water to the Dwyer Road pumping station, where construction should be completed by October, he said. A roughly $18 million contract for the culvert has been not awarded due to lack of money, he said.

Fourteen SELA projects worth $114 million could be awarded, he said. But SELA’s 2005 budget is only $28.5 million, he said.

The last time a SELA contract was awarded was early in fiscal year 2004, he said.

We’re just continuing work that’s been under way for some time, he said.

Green said the 14 projects consist of widening canals and replacing bridges, such as the West Esplanade Avenue bridge at Elmwood Canal, which restricts water flow in area canals.

I think the projects are of critical importance in reducing rainfall flooding, Green said. I’d say in the last two or three years, the work that we’ve already done under SELA has made a significant difference. We have a lot of benefits yet to be realized from this work we haven’t built yet.

The 2006 SELA budget has also been cut, Green said.

Corps projects are important to companies such as Boh Bros., which is in the middle of a $36 million contract to install floodgates for the Harvey Canal.

Boh said the unpredictable pay pattern will make him scrutinize Corps contracts more closely before applying for work.

Well, we’re going to have to look at each one now, he said. We’ll have to make a judgment about the likelihood of funding being adequate to pay for the work.
prisonplanet.com

This was a disaster which at best, like 9-11, was allowed to happen, and at worst…
It’s hard not to notice that the FEMA scenario of martial law and soldiers patrolling the streets ala the conspiracy theorists’ worst nightmare is now unfolding in New Orleans, that the people perched in trees and being airlifted off roofs are black people, that ‘Homeland Security’ is putting in a star appearance. This whole thing stinks like the streets of New Orleans about now…

by Robert Fisk
…Having been three or four trains in front of the King’s Cross tube that exploded on 7 July, I take these things seriously myself. And were I back on the London Tube today, I’d probably be trying to avoid young men with backpacks – as well as armed members of the Metropolitan Police.

And after all the panjandrums in the press about our wonderful security forces, I’d also be taking a close look at these fine and patriotic folk. These are the men (and women?) who lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These are the chaps who couldn’t get a single advance trace of even one of the four suicide bombings on 7 July (nor the un-lethal ones a few days later). These are the lads who gunned down a helpless civilian as he sat on a Tube train.

But hold on a moment, I say to myself again. The 7 July bombings would be a comparatively quiet day in Baghdad. Was I not at the site of the an-Nahda bus station bombings after 43 civilians – as innocent, their lives just as precious as those of Londoners – were torn to pieces last week.

At the al-Kindi hospital, relatives had a problem identifying the dead. Heads were placed next to the wrong torsos, feet next to the wrong legs. A problem there. But there came not a groan from England. We were still locked into our 7 July trauma. No detectives are snooping around the an-Nahda bomb site looking for clues. They’re already four suicide bombs later. An-Nahda is history.

And it dawns on me, sitting on my balcony over the Mediterranean at the end of this week, that we take far too much for granted. We like to have little disconnects in our lives. Maybe this is the fault of daily journalism – where we encapsulate the world every 24 hours, then sleep on it and start a new history the next day in which we fail totally to realise that the narrative did not begin before last night’s deadline but weeks, months, years ago.

For it is a fact, is it not, that if “we” had not invaded Iraq in 2003, those 43 Iraqis would not have been pulverised by those three bombs last week. And it is surely a fact that, had we not invaded Iraq, the 7 July bombs would not have gone off (and I am ignoring Lord Blair’s piffle about “evil ideologies”). In which case the Pope would not last week have been lecturing German Muslims on the evils of “terrorism”.
zmag.org

by Gary Hart
08/24/05 “Washington Post ” — — “Waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool said to push on,” warned an anti-Vietnam war song those many years ago. The McGovern presidential campaign, in those days, which I know something about, is widely viewed as a cause for the decline of the Democratic Party, a gateway through which a new conservative era entered.
Like the cat that jumped on a hot stove and thereafter wouldn’t jump on any stove, hot or cold, today’s Democratic leaders didn’t want to make that mistake again. Many supported the Iraq war resolution and — as the Big Muddy is rising yet again — now find themselves tongue-tied or trying to trump a war president by calling for deployment of more troops. Thus does good money follow bad and bad politics get even worse.

History will deal with George W. Bush and the neoconservatives who misled a mighty nation into a flawed war that is draining the finest military in the world, diverting Guard and reserve forces that should be on the front line of homeland defense, shredding international alliances that prevailed in two world wars and the Cold War, accumulating staggering deficits, misdirecting revenue from education to rebuilding Iraqi buildings we’ve blown up, and weakening America’s national security.

But what will history say about an opposition party that stands silent while all this goes on? My generation of Democrats jumped on the hot stove of Vietnam and now, with its members in positions of responsibility, it is afraid of jumping on any political stove. In their leaders, the American people look for strength, determination and self-confidence, but they also look for courage, wisdom, judgment and, in times of moral crisis, the willingness to say: “I was wrong.”

To stay silent during such a crisis, and particularly to harbor the thought that the administration’s misfortune is the Democrats’ fortune, is cowardly. In 2008 I want a leader who is willing now to say: “I made a mistake, and for my mistake I am going to Iraq and accompanying the next planeload of flag-draped coffins back to Dover Air Force Base. And I am going to ask forgiveness for my mistake from every parent who will talk to me.”

Further, this leader should say: “I am now going to give a series of speeches across the country documenting how the administration did not tell the American people the truth, why this war is making our country more vulnerable and less secure, how we can drive a wedge between Iraqi insurgents and outside jihadists and leave Iraq for the Iraqis to govern, how we can repair the damage done to our military, what we and our allies can do to dry up the jihadists’ swamp, and what dramatic steps we must take to become energy-secure and prevent Gulf Wars III, IV and so on.”
informationclearinghouse.info

Well Hart answers his own question. Even his liberal line reveals at best his incomplete understanding, and at worst the long-standing collusion between so-called US conservatives and liberals in the pillaging of the planet.