-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 24, 2007 7:11:15 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Bush Murdered 1500+ People in New Orleans
Hurricane George:
The White House Drowned New Orleans
BuzzFlash Fri, 08/24/2007
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1258
by Greg Palast
[Thursday, August 23] It's been two years. And America's media is
about to have another tear-gasm over New Orleans. Maybe Anderson
Cooper will weep again. The big networks will float into the
moldering corpse of the city and give you uplifting stories about
rebuilding and hope.
Now, let's cut through the crybaby crap. Here's what happened two
years ago -- and what's happening now. This is what an inside
source told me. And it makes me sick:
"By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. Monday night I was at
the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the
levees had breeched. Nobody."
The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White
House withheld from the state police the information that New
Orleans was about to flood.
From almost any other source, I would not have believed it. But
this was not just any source. The whistleblower is Dr. Ivor van
Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University
Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving
lives during Katrina.
I'd come to van Heerden about another matter, but in our talks, it
was clear he had something he wanted to say, and it was a big one.
He charged that the White House, FEMA, and the Army Corps hid, for
critical hours, their discovery that the levees surrounding New
Orleans were cracking, about to burst and drown the city.
Understand that Katrina never hit New Orleans. The hurricane swung
east of the city, so the state evacuation directors assumed New
Orleans was now safe -- and evacuation could slow while emergency
efforts moved east with the storm.
But unknown to the state, in those crucial hours on Monday, the
federal government's helicopters had filmed the cracks that would
become walls of death by Tuesday.
Van Heerden revealed: "FEMA knew at 11 o'clock on Monday that the
levees had breeched. At 2 p.m., they flew over the 17th Street
Canal and took video of the breach."
Question: "So the White House wouldn't tell you the levees had
breached?"
Dr. Van Heerden: "They didn't tell anybody."
Question: "And you're at the Emergency Center.'
Dr. Van Heerden: "I mean nobody knew. The Corps of Engineers knew.
FEMA knew. None of us knew."
I could not get the White House gang to respond to the charges.
That leaves the big, big question: WHY? Why on earth would the
White House not tell the state to get the remaining folks out of
there?
The answer: cost. Political and financial cost. A hurricane is an
act of God -- but a catastrophic failure of the levees is an act of
Bush.
Under law dating back to 1935, a breech of the federal levee system
makes the damage -- and the deaths -- a federal responsibility.
That means, as van Heeden points out, "these people must be
compensated."
The federal government, by law, must build and maintain the
Mississippi River levees to withstand known dangers -- or pay the
price when they fail.
Indeed, that was the rule applied in the storms that hit
Westhampton Dunes, New York, in 1992. There, when federal sea
barriers failed, the floodwaters wiped away 190 homes. The Feds
rebuilt them from the public treasury. But these were not just any
homes. They are worth an average of $3 million apiece -- the summer
homes of movie stars and celebrity speculators.
There were no movie stars floating face down in the Lower Ninth
Ward nor in Lakeview nor in St. Bernard Parish. For the 'luvvies'
of Westhampton Dunes, the federal government even trucked in sand
to replace the beaches. But for New Orleans' survivors, there's the
aluminum gulag of FEMA trailer parks. Today, two years later,
89,000 families still live in this mobile home Guantanamo -- with
no plan whatsoever for their return.
And what was the effect of the White House's self-serving delay?
I spoke with van Heerden in his university office. The computer
model of the hurricane flashed quietly as I waited for him to
answer. Then he said, "Fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the
bottom line."
They could have survived Hurricane Katrina. But they got no mercy
from Hurricane George.
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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