by Jordan Flaherty
What actually happened in New Orleans these past two weeks? We need to sort through the rumors and distortions. Perhaps we need our version of South Africa’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission. Some way to sort through the many narratives and find a truth, and to find justice.

I spent yesterday inside the city of New Orleans, speaking to a few of the last holdouts in the 9th ward/ bywater neighborhood. Their stories paint a very different picture from what we’ve heard in the media. Instead of stories of gangs of criminals and police and soldiers keeping order, there were stories of collective action, everyone looking out for each other, communal responses.
counterpunch.org

WASHINGTON – The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.

Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the “principal federal official” in charge of the storm.

As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina’s early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.

But Chertoff – not Brown – was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government’s blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.

But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn’t shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.
realcities.com

When nature turns nasty, refugees flee a swamped city and anarchy prevails, it seems there is only one adjective that will do: Hurricane Katrina has, inevitably, been compared to an “African” tragedy.
Images of helmeted white troops rescuing hapless black people have cemented the comparison, reminding viewers of the famous image from the Mozambican floods of a white South African helicopter crew rescuing a black woman who had given birth in a tree.

Africa has become an acceptable byword for disaster. Even some African journalists such as the CNN correspondent Jeff Koinange, a Kenyan, have been unable to resist the parallel.
“It was an America that resembled a large African refugee camp,” Koinange wrote recently in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper. “This was the New Orleans I encountered in the summer of 2005. Not Niger, not Darfur, not Monrovia – New Orleans, Louisiana, the 18th state in the union.”

For Africans, Katrina has not only exposed racial divides within the US; it has been a reminder of how the developed world sees their continent.

As a commentator in the same newspaper put it a few days later: “The Africa of Koinange’s imagination is the continent where bad things happen without fail. If there isn’t civil strife in which deranged men hack their neighbours with machetes, women with shrivelled breasts suckle their skeletal babies.”
guardian.co.uk

by Mike Whitney
The siege of Tal Afar follows a familiar pattern of brutal American incursions into densely populated areas under the pretense of fighting terrorism. It is a ritual that is repeated endlessly despite the dismal results. The Pentagon seems to prefer these grand displays of military strength to anything that might produce a political solution. It brings to mind the old saw, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again; expecting a different result.” This appears to be the guiding principle of the Defense Dept. with Tal Afar serving as the most recent example.

In the present case, a city of 250,000 has been almost entirely evacuated following weeks of artillery bombardment, aerial bombing raids, downed power-lines and water-system, and house-to-house searches.

Ho-hum. Such paltry events never even reach the front page of American newspapers where the ceremony of American suffering is the only topic of interest.

The remaining occupants of the city have reported the killing and maiming of innocent women and children, the use of chemical weapons, and the predictable destruction of Mosques and holy sites. In Tal Afar the Pentagon’s “Hearts and Minds” program seems to be running at high-gear.

There was no doubt that Donald Rumsfeld would use the cover of Hurricane Katrina to mount a massive attack in Iraq, and he didn’t disappoint. The military conducted a 10,000 man invasion only to find that the city had been abandoned and that the Iraqi resistance had slipped away without incident. Not one foreign fighter was captured during the siege despite claims that the city was a haven for foreign terrorists.

Colonel Greg Reilly told Al Jazeera that the resistance “went into hiding, avoiding us. That’s why there’s no fighting..They are not putting up a fight”.
informationclearinghouse.info

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 /U.S. Newswire/ — Wal-Mart workers on four continents sued the giant retailer today in California Superior Court in Los Angeles. They maintain that Wal-Mart failed to meet its contractual duty to ensure that its suppliers pay basic wages due; forced them to work excessive hours seven days a week with no time off for holidays; obstructed their attempts to form a union; and, made false and misleading statements to the American public about the company’s labor and human rights practices.

by Thulani Davis
When I woke up today, the only thought that came to mind was Reverend Jesse Jackson’s indignant cry, “This is the bottom of the slave ship we are looking at.”

I think Jesse actually put his finger on what happened to all of us this week. Those shots we’ve seen are, as he said, the bottom of the slave ships. I think that really goes to why all the rest of us watching are so traumatized. And I think it is necessary to repeat what he has said about how the people in this country have a high tolerance for viewing “black pain.” Yes, while we are asking the unheard question as to why a third of New Orleans’ population is poor and all black, everyone from the president on down is comfortable with these realities of our ongoing unemployment, overcrowding, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, neighborhood crime and despair.

Jesse’s metaphor is also so apt in that you only had to listen to five minutes of reporting to know families had been separated in ways that could be irreparable – across states, even mothers from month-old babies…just evacuating babies without contact with the parents is such a nightmare, I hate even hearing about it. These are the people who were marginalized from the Internet as well; are they going to run to a computer site?

African Americans in this crisis are further having the devastating experience of watching parents suffer and die right in their faces on sidewalks where people were forced to stand, not even sit for days. And the people crowded next to them experienced the same deaths. And like our ancestors, the poor today will have no access to therapeutic treatment. This is where you just have to agree with Jesse that the people in charge have the capacity to tolerate scenes of suffering they know have been suffered by blacks for generations.

At the same time, people among the stranded have been made aware that they are being portrayed as lawless by media people who are freaking out at the idea of thousands of black people not guarded by police. That in itself is a legacy of slavery. And even as we watched, the reporters and anchors on both NBC and CNN last week both misidentified Congressman John Lewis as Congressman Elijah Cummings for hours. This is one of the staples of the era when I was young and black people first appeared on TV and no one could tell one of us from another. This is really tired, old nonsense. I found myself filing email complaints to the networks, even though I know John Lewis and many others probably told them.

Lastly, there is now what is called the Katrina Diaspora. This diaspora of people without resources puts the restoration of families and community at risk, and in the case of New Orleans’ black community, probably makes that impossible. Even people who own land there are going to be in deep trouble trying to hold onto it when the real estate boondoggle gets in the courts. I’m afraid we’ll be reading a lot of stupid crap about how they couldn’t be found, taxes were owed, etc. as in times past throughout the South. That’s why I hope Jesse gets someone to bring people like Congressman Bennie Thompson into the fold, as he is familiar with the commission that had to be set up in the Delta because people are still trying to get back land stolen in the 1930s. And the developers are probably asking for eminent domain to be declared even as I’m typing.

Will Jackson, Rev. Al, Rep. Elijah Cummings, et. al. be asking after the fact, after they’ve read about development plans in the papers that the black community be represented at the table of planning “the NEW New Orleans?” The cultural heritage of New Orleans, which is so singular, is in serious jeopardy. The perfect mix of forces and cultures was based in a particularly unique feature of the dispersion of Africans during slavery: a disproportionate share of the Yoruba brought here (who were a minority within the groups in Middle Passage) landed in that area. What happened after that in encounters with the French, the Caribbean and the peoples of the States, cannot be replicated. Replacing the architecture with vinyl versions of shotgun and camel back houses will not produce any Buddy Boldens, Jelly Roll Mortons or Louis Armstrongs. As a writer, I myself have used the invaluable records kept there of this unique heritage. Just as one had to worry in the several rounds of the bombing of Baghdad that not only were untold people being killed but some of the oldest treasures of human life, I feel even more concerned that no one will care that thousands have died in New Orleans, others thousands dislocated and that one of our own cultural treasures, the city of New Orleans itself, will be deprived of its cultural engine.

This is a tragedy not only for the millions there on the ground, and the national economy but for the culture at large. We are witnessing in a matter of days a dislocation one-fifth the size of Middle Passage – which took place over more than 200 years. And all those conveniences of modern social organization which would mitigate its effects for most of us – phone, internet, cars, gasoline, and family with ample housing – do not apply to this country’s poor. For them, getting lost may mean not being found any more easily than in 1865 when people went on foot and in wagons following word of mouth leads to find where family members may have been sent.

It is unbearable, and unconscionable.
blackcommentator.com

by Jesse Jackson
The victims have been dispersed to states across the country. Many still sleep on cots in arenas, desperately trying to locate family members separated in the furies of Katrina. They are struggling with a staggering psychological toll — destruction of homes, loss of jobs, suffering, abandonment, displacement to a new city, prospects unclear, past literally under water.

But while the victims are simply trying to get their bearings, the barracudas are circling. Naomi Klein, who witnessed this in Iraq, calls it “disaster capitalism.” Congress has appropriated $62 billion already. Hundreds of billions more will be spent on reclaiming the Gulf Coast, rebuilding and relocation. The feeding frenzy has begun.

Already Halliburton is on hand with a no-bid contract for reconstruction. Fluor, Bechtel, the Shaw Group — Republican-linked firms — are lining up for contracts. Lobbyists like Joe Allbaugh, close friend of George Bush, and James Lee Witt, close friend of Bill Clinton — both former heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency — are advising their corporate clients to get teams on the scene. Normal rules of contracting and competition are being waived in the emergency. Big bucks are on the table. It is a time to be wired politically.

The ideologues are in the hunt, too. Newt Gingrich is circulating memos calling for turning the region into a massive enterprise zone, slashing corporate taxes, reducing regulations. The oil lobby is pushing for drilling in Alaska and off the shores of the United States. Right wing activist Grover Norquist calls for cutting taxes on the wealthy even more to stimulate the economy. Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flak suggests conservatives use the crisis to try out their favorite ideas — vouchers for education and health care.

President Bush characteristically issued an executive order effectively lowering the wages of reconstruction workers — and hiking the profits of their companies. He wiped out the requirement to pay prevailing wages in the disaster region, apparently thinking that $9 an hour for construction workers was too high a price to pay. The government can save money, no doubt, by exploiting illegal immigrant labor.

The New Orleans business establishment has already created a headquarters in Baton Rouge. They want to reopen the French Quarter, which didn’t suffer much flooding in 90 days. They are planning to lobby for one of the 2008 presidential nominating conventions — although it is hard to imagine that Republicans would want to remind folks of the administration’s monumental failure. They’re talking about capturing the next available Super Bowl.

Business optimism and energy are vital for rebuilding New Orleans. Big dreams and big schemes are essential to the human spirit that will bring the Gulf Coast back. But those who were abandoned in the Superdome are looking at another manmade catastrophe. Dispersed in 40 states, Katrina’s victims are struggling to get by, as companies pick up contracts and others get the jobs. If New Orleans is rebuilt as an enterprise zone, private investors will wait for the government to clean up the mess and then build luxury condos to replace affordable housing. They’ll turn New Orleans into a theme park, with its former residents unable to afford to come back.

We shouldn’t let disaster capitalists make a killing while those who suffered the greatest devastation are left out of the mix. We need a serious plan to rebuild vital infrastructure, to make New Orleans sustainable, to develop affordable housing and mass transit, to rebuild schools. Tax breaks and enterprise zones will end up building floating casinos and luxury condos. We need public investment, linked to a Civilian Construction and Conservation Corps that gives priority to housing, hiring, training and putting to work the poor people who lost.

The Bush administration’s inaction and indifference after Katrina hit abandoned the poor and added to their suffering. It would be tragic now if action by the Republican Congress and the Bush administration added to the misery. These people already have had their past swept away by Katrina’s furies. We should ensure that their future is not erased by right wing ideologues rewarding disaster capitalists and excluding those who suffered the most from the deal.
commondreams/chicago sun-times

A Shameful Proclamation
On Thursday, President Bush issued a proclamation suspending the law that requires employers to pay the locally prevailing wage to construction workers on federally financed projects. The suspension applies to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages – thus perpetuating their poverty – is unacceptable.

The ostensible rationale for suspending the law is to reduce taxpayers’ costs. Does Mr. Bush really believe it is the will of the American people to deny the prevailing wage to construction workers in New Orleans, Biloxi and other hard-hit areas? Besides, the proclamation doesn’t require contractors to pass on the savings they will get by cutting wages from current low levels. Around New Orleans, the prevailing hourly wage for a truck driver working on a levee is $9.04; for an electrician, it’s $14.30.

FEMA has relieved volunteers of their emergency mortuary services in Louisiana only, and contracted out to Kenyon, a “wholly-owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International” of Houston, Texas.

Are the alarms sounding yet? LightUpTheDarkness reminds us why they should be:

You may remember Service Corporation International, SCI, as it was part of the case against confirming Alberto Gonzales due to his involvement in the Texas and Florida scandals known as Funeralgate. As we covered back in February, Service Corporation International was “recycling” graves, removing the bodies that were there originally and throwing them in the woods to use the space to house new customers at two Jewish cemeteries in Florida . Service Corporation International, the world’s largest funeral service company, is headed by Robert Waltrip, a longtime friend and generous financial patron of the Bush family. Eliza May was head of the Texas Funeral Services Commission when it began receiving complaints about unlicensed embalmers, and sued when she was fired. Gonzales kept Bush from testifying in this case and was also under scrutiny when a memo surfaced that was sent to his office when he was Bush’s gubernatorial counsel. The memo suggested possible improprieties by two funeral commissioners with ties to SCI and Joeseph Allbaugh, Bush’s former chief of staff in Austin, 2000 presidential campaign manager, who now serves as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The case was suddenly settled in November 2001. The Menorah Gardens case in Florida, involving 72 families, was settled in Oct of 2004.

So, coincident with the emergence of happy talk and silver linings – Sure, it’s bad, but New Orleans rescuers find fewer dead than feared – the duties of processing Louisiana’s fresh kill is consigned to Bush Texas mafia with a criminal record including desecration of human remains, “recycling” graves and dumping bodies.

There is a deeply bizarre note to this, because to anyone who has paid attention to this slow-motion atrocity the bodies will be hidden in plain sight. (There is pointed irony, as well: in a bid at boosting government transparancy, China has just announced that it will no longer treat death tolls from natural disasters as state secrets.) The arrival of SCI in New Orleans is like a shredder truck pulling up outside the offices of a crooked firm expecting a forensic audit. The evidence – the bodies that are still tied to lamp posts – could be going up in the smoke of one of the city’s uncontained fires, or weighted down and dumped in the bayou. It’s not unimaginable – SCI has already done this.
rigorousintuition.blogspot.com

Disaster Capitalism in New Orleans
The cost (or here) of cleaning up the results of Bush’s negligence in failing to deal with global warming and spending money needed for New Orleans levees on his war in Iraq may be as much as the $300 billion spent in four years to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, what most people would regard as a cost, the entrepreneurial politicians in the Bush White House see as yet another opportunity to transfer money from taxpayers to their personal friends. The scheme is blatantly obvious:
Bush has started to issue Iraq-style no-bid contracts, with cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend.
Old buddies like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor are first in line. Joe Allbaugh, the former director of FEMA, is lobbying for Halliburton, and another winner of the Katrina windfall, Shaw Group Inc.
In order to increase profitability at the expense of the working people most affected by the hurricane and thus most in need of money, Bush has removed (or here) federal minimum-wage provisions from the reconstruction contracts.

Some came to burn. Many more came to marvel and then plunder. But for young Mohammed Hijezi it was enough just to touch the sea for the first time. The nine-year-old lives a short run from the beach but until yesterday the Israeli military cut off access and he had never seen the sea.
“I came very early, as soon as I had my breakfast and put on my clothes,” he said. “I was supposed to go to school. My parents don’t know. I was dreaming of swimming. The water is very beautiful and very cold.”

…Yesterday, Israel described the attempts to burn down or bulldoze synagogues in four former Gaza settlements as “barbaric”.
guardian.co.uk

Barbaric? It is BARBARIC to have forbidden the children of Gaza from putting their feet in the sea. They destroyed a couple of abandoned synagogues? How many houses did the Israelis bulldoze with people living inside???

In the September 10 Guardian Meacher writes:

‘According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan, trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA’s contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly, this was “with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies”.

‘As the 2002 Dutch government report on Bosnia makes clear, the US provided a green light to groups on the state department list of terrorist organisations, including the Lebanese-based Hizbullah, to operate in Bosnia – an episode that calls into question the credibility of the subsequent “war on terror”.

‘For nearly a decade the US helped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilise the former Yugoslavia. The insurgents were also allowed to move further east to Kosovo. By the end of the fighting in Bosnia there were tens of thousands of Islamist insurgents in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo; many then moved west to Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

‘Less well known is evidence of the British government’s relationship with a wider Islamist terrorist network. During an interview on Fox TV this summer, the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus reported that British intelligence had used the al-Muhajiroun group in London to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo. Since July Scotland Yard has been interested in an alleged member of al-Muhajiroun, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who some sources have suggested could have been behind the London bombings.

‘According to Loftus, Aswat was detained in Pakistan after leaving Britain, but was released after 24 hours. He was subsequently returned to Britain from Zambia, but has been detained solely for extradition to the US, not for questioning about the London bombings. Loftus claimed that Aswat is a British-backed double agent, pursued by the police but protected by MI6.

‘One British Muslim of Pakistani origin radicalised by the civil war in Yugoslavia was LSE-educated Omar Saeed Sheikh. He is now in jail in Pakistan under sentence of death for the killing of the US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 – although many (including Pearl’s widow and the US authorities) doubt that he committed the murder. However, reports from Pakistan suggest that Sheikh continues to be active from jail, keeping in touch with friends and followers in Britain.

Sheikh was recruited as a student by Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), which operates a network in Britain. It has actively recruited Britons from universities and colleges since the early 1990s, and has boasted of its numerous British Muslim volunteers.

‘Investigations in Pakistan have suggested that on his visits there Shehzad Tanweer, one of the London suicide bombers, contacted members of two outlawed local groups and trained at two camps in Karachi and near Lahore. Indeed the network of groups now being uncovered in Pakistan may point to senior al-Qaida operatives having played a part in selecting members of the bombers’ cell. The Observer Research Foundation has argued that there are even “grounds to suspect that the [London] blasts were orchestrated by Omar Sheikh from his jail in Pakistan”.

‘Why then is Omar Sheikh not being dealt with when he is already under sentence of death? Astonishingly his appeal to a higher court against the sentence was adjourned in July for the 32nd time and has since been adjourned indefinitely. This is all the more remarkable when this is the same Omar Sheikh who, at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lormel, director of FBI’s financial crimes unit.

‘Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for questioning by the US about 9/11. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission Report of July 2004 sought to downplay the role of Pakistan with the comment: “To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance” – a statement of breathtaking disingenuousness.

‘All this highlights the resistance to getting at the truth about the 9/11 attacks and to an effective crackdown on the forces fomenting terrorist bombings in the west, including Britain. The extraordinary US forbearance towards Omar Sheikh, its restraint towards the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, Dr AQ Khan, selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, the huge US military assistance to Pakistan and the US decision last year to designate Pakistan as a major non-Nato ally in south Asia all betoken a deeper strategic set of goals as the real priority in its relationship with Pakistan. These might be surmised as Pakistan providing sizeable military contingents for Iraq to replace US troops, or Pakistani troops replacing Nato forces in Afghanistan. Or it could involve the use of Pakistani military bases for US intervention in Iran, or strengthening Pakistan as a base in relation to India and China.

‘Whether the hunt for those behind the London bombers can prevail against these powerful political forces remains to be seen. Indeed it may depend on whether Scotland Yard, in its attempts to uncover the truth, can prevail over MI6, which is trying to cover its tracks and in practice has every opportunity to operate beyond the law under the cover of national security.’

Michael Meacher is the Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton; he was environment minister from 1997 to 2003.
prisonplanet.com