MIAMI - Tropical Storm Katrina formed Wednesday morning in the Bahamas and moved toward Florida, threatening to hit the state with winds of 70 to 75 mph and heavy rain when it makes landfall Thursday, the National Hurricane Center said.

A 200-mile stretch of Florida's east coast from the Seven Mile Bridge in the Keys north to Vero Beach was under a tropical storm watch, meaning tropical storm conditions were likely within 36 hours. The storm is expected to slowly cross the state and could cause flooding as it dumps a foot of rain or more in spots before heading into the Gulf of Mexico.

At 8 a.m. EDT, the season's 11th named storm had winds of 40 mph and was about 70 miles southeast of Nassau and about 250 miles east-southeast of Florida. It was moving to the northwest at 8 mph and was expected to strengthen and that it could reach hurricane strength of 74 mph.

Eric Blake, a hurricane center meteorologist, said Floridians in the watch area should consider putting up hurricane shutters, particularly in coastal and exposed areas. He said all residents should stock up on hurricanes supplies such as water, batteries and generator fuel.

"It's time for South Florida to start taking precautions," he said.

The Florida Panhandle was hit by Tropical Storm Cindy and Hurricane Dennis earlier in the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1, and four hurricanes last year, which caused $19 billion in insured wind damage. Actual damage was about double that, experts said.

In an average year, only a few tropical storms develop by this time in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic hurricane season ends Nov. 30.

Hurricane Katrina slammed into Florida's densely populated southeastern coast Thursday with sustained winds of more than 125 km/hour and lashing rain.

Two people were killed by falling trees.

The storm strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane just before it hit land between Hallandale Beach and North Miami Beach. Weather officials said flooding was the main concern as the storm dropped a 30 cm or more of rain in some spots.

There were no immediate reports of major damage or flooding as the storm passed through the area. It's estimated 5.9 million Florida residents were in Katrina's projected path.

Rain fell in horizontal sheets and wind gusts hit 147 km/h toppling trees and street signs. Florida Power & Light said more than 412,000 customers were without electricity.

"The message needs to be very clear. It's not a good night to be out driving around," said National Hurricane Center director May Mayfield.

The usually bustling streets of Miami Beach were largely deserted as the storm pounded the area. Celebrities and partygoers are in town for the MTV Video Music Awards. MTV called off its pre-awards festivities Thursday and Friday.

Tourists and others hoping to get out of town before the storm were stranded as airlines canceled flights at Miami and Fort Lauderdale airports, which both closed Thursday night.

Before the hurricane struck, Floridians wary of Katrina prepared by putting up shutters, stacking sandbags in doorways and stocking up on supplies.

Water management officials lowered canal levels to avoid possible flooding, and pumps were activated in several low-lying areas of Miami-Dade.

Katrina was the second hurricane to hit the state this year -- and the sixth since last August.

Katrina formed Wednesday over the Bahamas and was expected to cross Florida before heading into the Gulf of Mexico.

After crossing the Florida peninsula, the storm could turn to the north over the Gulf of Mexico and threaten the panhandle early next week.

Katrina is the 11th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1. That's seven more than normally form by mid-August in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The season ends Nov. 30.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Hurricane Katrina flooded streets, darkened homes and felled trees with wind gusts reaching 92 mph as it plowed through South Florida and emerged over the Gulf of Mexico early Friday. Four people were killed and 1.3 million customers were left without power.

Weather officials said flooding was the main concern as the storm dropped up to 15 inches on parts of Miami-Dade County. Katrina's plodding pace meant that strong wind and heavy rain would continue to plague throughout the day.

Rain fell in horizontal sheets, seas were estimated at 15 feet and sustained winds were measured at 80 mph as the hurricane made landfall Thursday night along the Miami-Dade and Broward line. Florida Power & Light said the vast majority of people without electricity were in the two counties.

In an oceanfront condominium in Hallandale, Carolyne and Carter McHyman said heavy downpours pelted their windows after the eye passed.

"It's been horrible," Carolyne McHyman said. "Basically all our windows are leaking. We just keep mopping up and taping the windows, mopping up and taping again."

Katrina weakened into a tropical storm while over land, but strengthened over the warm waters of the gulf Friday and became a hurricane again with top sustained winds of 75 mph. At 5 a.m. EDT, Katrina was about 50 miles north-northeast of Key West and emerging over the Gulf of Mexico, heading west at 5 mph.

Forecasters said Katrina would likely strengthen and perhaps make a second landfall in the Florida Panhandle early next week.

Gov. Jeb Bush urged residents of the Panhandle and northwest Florida - areas hit by Hurricane Ivan last year and Hurricane Dennis this year - to monitor the storm.

Katrina left a trail of mayhem in its wake along the southeast coast.

In Key Biscayne, dozens of families were forced to evacuate their homes after they became flooded under 3 feet of water.

Three mobile home parks in Davie sustained considerable damage, including lost roofs. One person was trapped inside a mobile home, but officials did not know whether the person was injured, according to the Broward Emergency Management Agency.

An overpass under construction in Miami-Dade County collapsed onto a highway, authorities said. No injuries were reported, but the freeway - a main east-west thoroughfare - was closed for 20 blocks.

In the Florida Keys, a tornado damaged a hanger and a number of airplanes at the airport in Marathon, according to Monroe County Sheriff's Office. Two nearby homes were also damaged. In Tavernier in the upper Keys, part of the roof of a lumber company collapsed, deputies said.

Three people were killed by falling trees: A man in his 20s in Fort Lauderdale was crushed by a falling tree as he sat alone in his car; a 54-year-old man was killed by a falling tree in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Plantation; and a woman who was struck by a tree died at a hospital in Hollywood.

A 79-year-old man in Cooper City also died when his car struck a tree, officials said.

Three storm-related trauma patients were being treated in Hollywood, including a driver in critical condition after a tree fell on his car, said Frank Sacco, CEO of Memorial Healthcare System. [...]

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana -- Parts of New Orleans are flooded with up to six feet of water Monday after some of the pumps that protect the low-lying city failed under the onslaught from Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin said.

Nagin said the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, on the east side of the city, was under five to six feet of rising water after three pumps failed.

WGNO reporter Susan Roesgen, who is with the mayor at the Hyatt hotel, said New Orleans police had received more than 100 calls about people in the area trapped on their roofs.

The National Weather Service reported the Industrial Canal, in the eastern part of the city, had breached a levee and three to eight feet of water could be expected.

The weather service reported "total structural failure" in some parts of metropolitan New Orleans, where Katrina brought wind gusts of 120 mph. While it offered no details, it said it had received "many reports."

Katrina came ashore Monday morning in southeastern Louisiana as a Category 4 storm, with winds topping 140 mph.

At 11 a.m. ET, the National Weather Service said Katrina had degraded to a Category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds near 125 mph.

New Orleans was prepared for a catastrophic direct hit from the powerful storm. About a million people fled the area, and about 10,000 people who couldn't leave hunkered in the mammoth Louisiana Superdome.

The National Hurricane Center said that the western eye wall was passing over the city at about 10 a.m. ET. (Watch video update on Katrina's path)

While the counterclockwise spin of a hurricane usually leaves the worst damage on its eastern edge, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers cautioned that "there's not really an easy side of a Category 4 storm" on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

CNN's John Zarella said that the wind was howling through the buildings in downtown New Orleans, ripping off chunks of debris and causing whiteout conditions.

He said that water was rushing down the street and had risen up to the wheel wells of parked cars.

Earlier, reporter Ed Reams from affiliate WDSU told CNN that Katrina ripped away a large section of the Superdome's roof. (See video of conditions within the darkened Superdome)

"I can see daylight straight up from inside the Superdome," Reams reported.

National Guard troops moved people to the other side of the dome. Others were moving beneath the concrete-reinforced terrace level.

About 70 percent of New Orleans is below sea level and is protected from the Mississippi River by a series of levees.

NHC deputy director Ed Rappaport told CNN that New Orleans could expect a storm surge of 15 to 20 feet.

That surge wouldn't top New Orleans' levees, but CNN's Myers noted that "there may be a 20-foot surge, but there may be a 20-foot wave on top of that."

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said it was too soon to feel any sense of relief.

"We don't know yet," she said. "We still have a long way to go throughout this day. We are watching. We are worried of course."

At 11 a.m. ET, the storm was centered about 35 miles east-northeast of New Orleans and 45 miles west-southwest of Biloxi, Mississippi. Hurricane force winds extended about 125 miles from the storm's center.

The storm was moving north at 15 mph.

The storm's eastern eye wall was approaching Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi.

Authorities in Gulfport told CNN that 10 feet of water cover downtown streets.

"There is intense damage," said CNN's Gary Tuchman from Gulfport. "We are watching the dismantling of a beautiful town."

"We are watching these building deteriorate and break down before our eyes," he said. "Because the water is so deep, boats are floating up the street. There is extensive damage here. This is essentially right now like hell on earth."

In Biloxi, CNN meteorologist Rob Marciano reported that wind gusts topping 100 mph were starting to pull the roofs off of nearby buildings. (Watch video report from Biloxi, Mississippi)

Hurricane warnings are posted from Morgan City, Louisiana, eastward to the Alabama-Florida state line, including New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. This means winds of at least 74 mph are expected in the warning area within the next 24 hours.

A tropical storm warning is in effect from the Alabama-Florida state line eastward to Destin, Florida, and from west of Morgan City to Intracoastal City, Louisiana. A tropical storm warning is also in effect from Intracoastal City, Louisiana, west to Cameron, Louisiana, and from Destin, Florida, eastward to Indian Pass, Florida.

A tropical storm warning means tropical storm conditions, including winds of at least 39 mph, are expected within 24 hours. [...]

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana - Hurricane Katrina claimed its first victims in Louisiana as it slammed into barrier islands while dumping torrential rain on a wide swath of the US Gulf of Mexico coast and threatened more death and massive destruction.

The hurricane made its first landfall as its northern eye crossed the coast near Grand Isle, one of Louisiana's barrier islands, at about 1000 GMT on Monday, said Martin Nelson, an official with the
National Hurricane Center.

"We may have a second landfall later on," Nelson said in a brief telephone interview.

Although slightly weaker than on Sunday, the monster storm has already forced hundreds of thousands of residents from New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi, to flee and seek refuge on higher ground. [...]

US President George W. Bush declared a state of emergency that clears the way for federal aid, and urged people to get out of the hurricane's path.

"We cannot stress enough the dangers this hurricane poses to Gulf Coast communities. I ask citizens to put their safety and the safety of their families first by moving to safe ground," Bush said from his Texas ranch. [...]

Authorities also ordered evacuations in neighboring Mississippi, which is also expected to be slammed by the monster storm.

Since Katrina raged dangerously close to offshore oil platforms, most of which have been evacuated, oil prices hit new record highs after crossing 70 dollars a barrel in Asia Monday and were expected to go higher.

The deadly storm wrought havoc in Miami and other areas of south Florida last week, killing seven people, uprooting trees and flooding entire neighborhoods.

About half a million people still had no electricity on Sunday.

Katrina is the 11th named Atlantic storm this year and among the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record. Records going back to 1851 show that only three category-five hurricanes have hit the United States in more than 150 years.

Of three category-five storms noted in history, Hurricane Andrew killed more than two dozen people when it slammed into south Florida in 1992, while Camille caused more than 250 deaths in Mississippi in 1969, and "Labor Day" killed about 600 people in the Florida Keys in 1935.

NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Katrina turned slightly to the east before slamming ashore early Monday with 145-mph winds, providing some hope that the worst of the storm's wrath might not be directed at this vulnerable, below-sea-level city.

Katrina, which weakened slightly overnight to a Category 4 storm, turned slightly eastward before hitting land, which would put the western eyewall - the weaker side of the strongest winds - over New Orleans.

But National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield warned that New Orleans would be pounded throughout the day Monday and that Katrina's potential 20-foot storm surge was still more than capable of swamping the city.

Katrina, which a day before had grown to a 175-mph, Category 5 behemoth, made landfall about 6:10 a.m. CDT east of Grand Isle in the bayou town of Buras.

The storm hammered the Gulf Coast with huge waves and tree-bending winds. Exploding transformers lit up the predawn sky in Mobile, Ala., while tree limbs littered roads and a blinding rain whipped up sand on the deserted beach of Gulfport, Miss.

Katrina's fury also was felt at the Louisiana Superdome, normally home of professional football's Saints, which became the shelter of last resort for about 9,000 of the area's poor, homeless and frail.

Electrical power at the Superdome failed at 5:02 a.m., triggering groans from the crowd. Emergency generators kicked in, but the backup power runs only reduced lighting and cannot run the air conditioning.

About 370,000 customers in southeast Louisiana were estimated to be without power, said Chenel Lagarde, spokesman for Entergy Corp., the main energy power company in the region. [...]

Mayor Ray Nagin said he believed 80 percent of the city's 480,000 residents had heeded an unprecedented mandatory evacuation as Katrina threatened to become the most powerful storm ever to slam the city.

"It's capable of causing catastrophic damage," Mayfield said. "Even well-built structures will have tremendous damage. Of course, what we're really worried about is the loss of lives.

"New Orleans may never be the same."

Crude oil futures spiked to more than $70 a barrel in Singapore for the first time Monday as Katrina targeted an area crucial to the country's energy infrastructure, but the price had slipped back to $68.95 by midday in Europe. The storm already forced the shutdown of an estimated 1 million barrels of refining capacity.

Terry Ebbert, New Orleans director of homeland security, said more than 4,000 National Guardsmen were mobilizing in Memphis and would help police New Orleans streets. [...]

For years, forecasters have warned of the nightmare scenario a big storm could bring to New Orleans, a bowl of a city that's up to 10 feet below sea level in spots and dependent on a network of levees, canals and pumps to keep dry from the Mississippi River on one side, Lake Pontchartrain on the other.

The fear is that flooding could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, as well as waste from ruined septic systems.

Nagin said he expected the pumping system to fail during the height of the storm. The mayor said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was standing by to get the system running, but water levels must fall first.

"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," he said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event."

Major highways in New Orleans cleared out late Sunday after more than 24 hours of jammed traffic as people headed inland. At the peak of the evacuation, 18,000 people an hour were streaming out of southeastern Louisiana, state police said. [...]

New Orleans has not taken a direct hit from a hurricane since Betsy in 1965, when an 8- to 10-foot storm surge submerged parts of the city in seven feet of water. Betsy, a Category 3 storm, was blamed for 74 deaths in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.

Evacuation orders also were posted all along the Mississippi coast, and the area's casinos, built on barges, were closed early Saturday. Bands of wind-whipped rain increased Sunday night and roads in some low areas were beginning to flood. [...]

Katrina hit the southern tip of Florida as a much weaker storm Thursday and was blamed for nine deaths. It left miles of streets and homes flooded and knocked out power to about 1.45 million customers. It was the sixth hurricane to hit Florida in just over a year.

NEW ORLEANS - When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans on Monday, it could turn one of America's most charming cities into a vast cesspool tainted with toxic chemicals, human waste and even coffins released by floodwaters from the city's legendary cemeteries.

Experts have warned for years that the levees and pumps that usually keep New Orleans dry have no chance against a direct hit by a Category 5 storm.

That's exactly what Katrina was as it churned toward the city. With top winds of 165 mph and the power to lift sea level by as much as 28 feet above normal, the storm threatened an environmental disaster of biblical proportions, one that could leave more than 1 million people homeless.

"All indications are that this is absolutely worst-case scenario," Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, said Sunday afternoon.

The center's latest computer simulations indicate that by Tuesday, vast swaths of New Orleans could be under water up to 30 feet deep. In the French Quarter, the water could reach 20 feet, easily submerging the district's iconic cast-iron balconies and bars.

Estimates predict that 60 percent to 80 percent of the city's houses will be destroyed by wind. With the flood damage, most of the people who live in and around New Orleans could be homeless.

"We're talking about in essence having - in the continental United States - having a refugee camp of a million people," van Heerden said.

Aside from Hurricane Andrew, which struck Miami in 1992, forecasters have no experience with Category 5 hurricanes hitting densely populated areas.

"Hurricanes rarely sustain such extreme winds for much time. However we see no obvious large-scale effects to cause a substantial weakening the system and it is expected that the hurricane will be of Category 4 or 5 intensity when it reaches the coast," National Hurricane Center meteorologist Richard Pasch said.

As they raced to put meteorological instruments in Katrina's path Sunday, wind engineers had little idea what their equipment would record.

"We haven't seen something this big since we started the program," said Kurt Gurley, a University of Florida engineering professor. He works for the Florida Coastal Monitoring Program, which is in its seventh year of making detailed measurements of hurricane wind conditions using a set of mobile weather stations. [...]

A Category 5 hurricane, the most severe type measured, Katrina has been reported heading directly toward the city of New Orleans. This would be a human catastrophe, since New Orleans sits in a bowl below sea level. However, Katrina is not only moving on New Orleans. It also is moving on the Port of Southern Louisiana. Were it to strike directly and furiously, Katrina would not only take a massive human toll, but also an enormous geopolitical one.

The Port of Southern Louisiana is the fifth-largest port in the world in terms of tonnage, and the largest port in the United States. The only global ports larger are Singapore, Rotterdam, Shanghai and Hong Kong. It is bigger than Houston, Chiba and Nagoya, Antwerp and New York/New Jersey. It is a key link in U.S. imports and exports and critical to the global economy.

The Port of Southern Louisiana stretches up and down the Mississippi River for about 50 miles, running north and south of New Orleans from St. James to St. Charles Parish. It is the key port for the export of grains to the rest of the world -- corn, soybeans, wheat and animal feed. Midwestern farmers and global consumers depend on those exports. The United States imports crude oil, petrochemicals, steel, fertilizers and ores through the port. Fifteen percent of all U.S. exports by value go through the port. Nearly half of the exports go to Europe.

The Port of Southern Louisiana is a river port. It depends on the navigability of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is notorious for changing its course, and in southern Louisiana -- indeed along much of its length -- levees both protect the land from its water and maintain its course and navigability. Dredging and other maintenance are constant and necessary to maintain its navigability. It is fragile.

If New Orleans is hit, the Port of Southern Louisiana, by definition, also will be hit. No one can predict the precise course of the storm or its consequences. However, if we speculate on worse-case scenarios the following consequences jump out:

- The port might become in whole or part unusable if levees burst. If the damage to the river and port facilities could not be repaired within 30 days when the U.S. harvests are at their peak, the effect on global agricultural prices could be substantial.

- There is a large refinery at Belle Chasse. It is the only refinery that is seriously threatened by the storm, but if it were to be inundated, 250,000 barrels per day would go off line. Moreover, the threat of environmental danger would be substantial

- About 2 percent of world crude production and roughly 25 percent of U.S.-produced crude comes from the Gulf of Mexico and already is affected by Katrina. Platforms in the path of Katrina have been evacuated but others continue pumping. If this follows normal patterns, most production will be back on line within hours or days. However, if a Category 5 hurricane (of which there have only been three others in history) has a different effect, the damage could be longer lasting. Depending on the effect on the Port of Southern Louisiana, the ability to ship could be affected.

- A narrow, two-lane highway that handles approximately 10,000 vehicles a day, is used for transport of cargo and petroleum products and provides port access for thousands of employees is threatened with closure. A closure of as long as two weeks could rapidly push gasoline prices higher.

At a time when oil prices are in the mid-60-dollar range and starting to hurt, the hurricane has an obvious effect. However, it must be borne in mind that the Mississippi remains a key American shipping route, particularly for the export and import of a variety of primary commodities from grain to oil, as well as steel and rubber. Andrew Jackson fought hard to keep the British from taking New Orleans because he knew it was the main artery for U.S. trade with the world. He was right and its role has not changed since then.

This is not a prediction. We do not know the path of the storm and we cannot predict its effects. It is a warning that if a Category 5 hurricane hits the Port of Southern Louisiana and causes the damage that is merely at the outer reach of the probable, the effect on the global system will be substantial.

Authorities along the shattered Gulf Coast searched Tuesday for survivors and worked to rescue residents stranded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which is blamed for dozens of deaths and the destruction of countless homes and businesses.

The storm ripped ashore in Louisiana Monday morning with winds topping 140 mph before scourging Mississippi and Alabama.

Katrina caused widespread flooding across the region, and floodwaters were still rising Tuesday in New Orleans after a hole opened in a levee protecting the city.

The storm is blamed for at least 68 deaths and that toll is almost certain to rise.

"We know we've had some loss of life. We really don't know how much. There are credible accounts of 50 to 80 in Harrison County. Those are not confirmed, but they're credible," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Tuesday.

"And I hate to say it, I think there are going to be more."

A man in Biloxi told CNN affiliate WKRG-TV he believed his wife was killed after she was ripped from his grasp when their home split in half.

"She told me, 'You can't hold me,' ... take care of the kids and the grandkids..."

While Louisiana officials have not confirmed any deaths there, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said there have been reports of bodies floating in the floodwaters. Two storm-related traffic fatalities were reported in Alabama.

The storm killed 11 people last week when it made its initial landfall in Florida.

'This is our tsunami'

In Mississippi, streets and homes were flooded as far as six miles inland.

Barbour plans to make a helicopter tour of the hardest hit areas today.

In Biloxi, a 25-foot storm surge crashed in from the Gulf of Mexico on Monday and inundated structures there. Up to 30 people are believed to have been killed when one apartment complex on the beach collapsed in the storm.

"This is our tsunami," Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway told the Biloxi Sun Herald newspaper, referring to the December 26, 2004, tsunami that killed more than 226,000 people in the Indian Ocean region.

In the daylight of Tuesday morning, the waters had receded in Biloxi, but debris littered the streets and the ground floors of several structures.

Cement trash cans used as barriers in front of buildings were strewn about like cardboard boxes, and paper scraps hung from the highest branches of the trees still standing.

CNN Correspondent Miles O'Brien, standing in front of the once-luxurious Beau Rivage casino, said at least a dozen gaming places were closed and damaged from Katrina -- costing the state $500,000 a day in lost tax revenues.

Charles Curtis, a Biloxi resident who works in a casino that is now split in half, said he and his wife stood on top of their refrigerator as the water rose around them.

"The Back Bay of Biloxi came through our front door," he said, referring to the shallow, marshy strip that borders the north of the city.

"We were ready to punch a hole through the ceiling if we had to" escape, Curtis said.

Hotel worker Suzanne Rodgers returned to her beachfront home near Biloxi, but, she told CNN, "there is nothing there. There's debris hanging from trees."

"All I found that belonged to me was a shoe," she said. "There's nothing left."

Separately, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency in Jackson confirmed five Katrina-related deaths, a spokeswoman said.

Water poured into New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain after a two-block-long breach opened overnight in a section of a levee that protects the low-lying city.

Nagin had said that about 80 percent of the city was flooded and that some areas were under 20 feet of water.

CNN's John Zarrella, in a hotel on Canal Street, said the water level was "much higher" than it had been during the height of Katrina's onslaught, rising all morning Tuesday and topping the sandbags meant to keep the water out of the building.

"Water has now filled the basement of the hotel," he said. "All of the entrances to our hotel are completely surrounded, and the water is slowly creeping up the side of the building.

"Yesterday during the hurricane, the water was no where near this high."

In the city's 9th Ward neighborhood, rescue efforts continued throughout the night, with authorities in boats plucking residents from submerged homes after water topped another levee.

CNN's Adaora Udoji, monitoring the rescue efforts, said authorities had ferried at least 500 people from their homes, flooded with as much as six feet of water. Some residents reported water rose so fast they did not have time to grab their shoes.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco told CNN Monday that a 50-inch water main was severed during the storm, cutting the supply of drinkable water.

In Mobile, Alabama, the storm pushed water from Mobile Bay into downtown, submerging large sections of the city, and officials imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

An oil drilling platform broke away from its moorings and lodged under a bridge that carries U.S. Highway 98 over the Mobile River.

The Alabama National Guard activated 450 troops to secure Mobile. Two other Alabama battalions, or about 800 troops, were activated to assist in Mississippi.

When can I go home?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing to house "at least tens of thousands of victims ... for literally months on end," the agency's director, Michael Brown, said Monday night.

Veteran FEMA staffers who have surveyed the destruction are reporting some of the worst damage they have ever seen, he said.

Louisiana and Mississippi officials urged evacuees as well as those stranded by flooding from the storm to stay put.

"It's too dangerous to come home," said Blanco, who ordered state police to block re-entry routes to all but emergency workers.

The American Red Cross said it is launching the largest relief operation in its history.

More than 75,000 people are being housed in nearly 240 shelters across the region, and Red Cross President Marty Evans told CNN, "We expect that to grow" as people who can't return home seek somewhere to stay.

More than 1.7 million homes and businesses in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida were without electricity, according to utility companies serving the region.

Katrina was downgraded to a tropical depression Tuesday. As of the 11 a.m. ET update from the National Hurricane Center, Katrina was about 25 miles south of Clarksville, Tennessee, moving north-northeast at 21 mph.

On Katrina's way north Monday night through Mississippi, its outer bands spawned tornados in Georgia. Three twisters were reported there, one in central Peach County and two in the northwest counties of Carroll and Paulding. One person in Carroll County was critically injured.

MIAMI - Hurricane Katrina may sting U.S. economic growth by choking energy supplies even as the damages caused by the storm spur massive rebuilding and emergency government spending.

Economists, while emphasizing that few concrete damage assessments have yet been made, said the major hurricane that struck the country's key Louisiana energy gateway would help sustain high oil, gasoline and natural gas prices.

A seasonal downturn in demand expected after next weekend and a higher-than-usual build-up in inventories ahead of the North American winter had led to forecasts energy prices might ease in coming months.

Some economists said U.S. gross domestic growth had been already showing signs of easing and may now slow more rapidly if fallout from Katrina boosts oil to $100 a barrel for a month, or U.S. gasoline prices to $3.50 a gallon, for a few months.

"The impact on the consumer spending in such a scenario would be very dramatic, cutting the growth rate by as much as 3 percent and push real GDP growth in the fourth quarter closer to zero," Global Insight said in a preliminary analysis.

The Lexington, Massachusetts, economics consultancy said that, if oil stayed at the current $65 to $70 level for a couple of more months because of energy flow disruptions, GDP growth would be cut 0.3 percent to 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter.

On Monday, at least two oil rigs were adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, where Katrina raged through offshore fields. Fearing the worst, oil companies had shut rigs and closed refineries along the coast. U.S. oil futures jumped nearly $5 a barrel in opening trade to touch a peak of $70.80 before settling back.

"It looks like the potential disruption has helped to further boost gasoline prices and that could be some additional headwind for the economy," said senior economist Patrick Fearon at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St. Louis.

Fearon said A.G. Edwards may later this week trim its forecast of a 4 percent annualized GDP rise in the third quarter.

The Economic Outlook Group in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, said Katrina's effect on energy prices would add to risks facing the U.S. economy and could prompt the Federal Reserve to skip a widely expected interest rate hike when it meets Sept 20.

"This is not to say they will not resume raising rates in November and December. It's just that Fed officials may want to evaluate the extent of Katrina's impact on business activity, consumer demand and on inflation pressures," Economic Outlook said.

Katrina, which last week hit south Florida, was expected to cause a total of $10 billion to $26 billion in insured damages, according to hurricane modeling firms. It could be the most expensive storm to ever hit the United States.

"There will be a lot of rebuilding that is going to need to occur. These things do spur GDP growth," said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics in Pepper Pike, Ohio.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago, said wages lost by workers and revenues missed at shops and other businesses would be generally short-lived and replaced by stepped-up demand for construction and other workers and higher sales at home-supplies outlets.

The storm may also have damaged the Port of Southern Louisiana, the world's fifth largest port by tonnage and the biggest in the United States, and may affect exports and imports of agricultural and other products, according to Swonk.

"Depending on the extent of damage, that will put pressure on other ports. A drought in the Midwest has slowed some barges and there could be some transitory impact on our GDP," Swonk said.

Freight railroads might pick up some of that transport business if the port is hobbled, she said.

Travel, leisure and gambling businesses in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama may lose some tourist visits to other U.S. destinations, such as Las Vegas and Florida, during the cleanup and rebuilding ahead, she said.

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.

But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.

From 1970 to 1994, the Atlantic was relatively quiet, with no more than three major hurricanes in any year and none at all in three of those years. Cooler water in the North Atlantic strengthened wind shear, which tends to tear storms apart before they turn into hurricanes.

In 1995, hurricane patterns reverted to the active mode of the 1950's and 60's. From 1995 to 2003, 32 major hurricanes, with sustained winds of 111 miles per hour or greater, stormed across the Atlantic. It was chance, Dr. Gray said, that only three of them struck the United States at full strength.

Historically, the rate has been 1 in 3.

Then last year, three major hurricanes, half of the six that formed during the season, hit the United States. A fourth, Frances, weakened before striking Florida.

"We were very lucky in that eight-year period, and the luck just ran out," Dr. Gray said.

Global warming may eventually intensify hurricanes somewhat, though different climate models disagree.

In an article this month in the journal Nature, Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote that global warming might have already had some effect. The total power dissipated by tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and North Pacific increased 70 to 80 percent in the last 30 years, he wrote.

But even that seemingly large jump is not what has been pushing the hurricanes of the last two years, Dr. Emanuel said, adding, "What we see in the Atlantic is mostly the natural swing."

Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush's Iraq war.

There were not enough helicopters to repair the breeched levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guards available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting.

The situation is the same in Mississippi.

The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fools mission in Iraq.

The National Guard is in Iraq because fanatical neoconsevatives in the Bush administration were determined to invade the Middle East and because the incompetent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to listen to the generals, who told him there were not enough regular troops available to do the job.

After the invasion, the arrogant Rumsfeld found out that the generals were right. The National Guard was called up to fill in the gaping gaps.

Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes.

The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops. The rising water overwhelmed the massive pumping stations, and New Orleans disappeared under deep water.

What a terrible casualty of the Iraqi war--one of our oldest and most beautiful cities, a famous city, a historic city.

Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the US government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katarina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corp of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.

Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corp of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.

Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Why can't the US government focus on America's needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?

How can the Bush administration be so incompetent as to expose Americans at home to dire risks by exhausting American resources in foolish foreign adventures? What kind of "homeland security" is this?

All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America's reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden's recruitment.

What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters. [...]

Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Problems Escalate To 'Another Level'

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is "very upset" that an attempt to fix the breach in the levee at the 17th Street canal has failed, and he said the challenges that the city is facing have "escalated to another level." [...]

Nagin said the sandbagging was scheduled for midday, but the Blackhawk helicopters needed to help did not show up. He said the sandbags were ready and all the helicopter had to do was "show up." He said after his afternoon helicopter tour of the city, he was assured that officials had a plan and a timeline to drop the sandbags on the levee breach.

He said he was told that the helicopters may have been diverted to rescue about 1,000 people in a church, but he is still not sure who gave the order.

He advised people still trapped in New Orleans to evacuate to the west bank area if they can safely get there.

"If they can't, (they should) seek higher ground," the mayor said.

He said the water that is flowing out of the breach, which is about a 2-block breach at the 17th Street canal, will continue to flow "unimpeded at an accelerated level within 12 to 15 hours." [...]

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken.

After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City.

But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence."

When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

Paramedic Rescue Operation

I have finally reconnected with my best friend who is a paramedic who was sent from Georgia 2 days ago to Gulf Port, Mississippi before the hurricane hit.

He just reached me within the last 10 mins via emergency cell phone to tell me he was alive.

Thousands of bodies have been discovered throughout Mississippi in Gulf Port, Waveland,Hancock County,Bay of St.Louis.

They are hanging in trees and they are pulling them out 30 at a time. Entire families found drowned in their homes and washing up on shore.

The stories he could tell me were brief. National Guard is on the scene and arresting anyone seen on the streets.

The numbers are staggering and what I have been told tonight will shake people to their foundation as the numbers will be coming out in the next 24-hours of just how many people have actually perished in these and 3 other beach communities.

For schoolteacher Jared Wood the scariest moment of Hurricane Katrina was not the killer winds or waters, it was the looter threatening to thrash him for trying to take his picture.

With most of New Orleans submerged and thousands of people trapped by waters strewn with bodies, authorities also fought an outbreak of plundering by locals taking away food, appliances, jewels, clothes and even guns.

But when their food ran out in Katrina's wake, the 29-year-old Wood and his companion Erin O'Shea, 28, both normally law-abiding teachers from upper New York State, judged it necessary to join the larcenous throngs.

"We looted a store because we had no food and we had to do something," Wood told AFP outside their French Quarter hotel while waiting for a ride to nearby Baton Rouge. "It was really scary while we were in there."

The pair said they leapt through a smashed window of a local Winn-Dixie supermarket and started to stock up on soup, power bars and soy milk while other looters gathered armfuls of soda and beer.

"We were trying to get stuff that would sustain us. Some people were going by and they had a plant," O'Shea said, shrugging in disbelief at the range of items hauled away.

She said that in the aftermath of Katrina, an intelligence network sprouted on the largely deserted streets of New Orleans letting looters know where the best pickings were.

"It's all hush hush, word of mouth thing. We've been finding out just by traveling around," O'Shea said.

But any camraderie among thieves stopped when Wood whipped out a camera and tried to take pictures of the looting in the Winn-Dixie shop.

"This guy was saying, 'Give me your camera or I'm going to beat the crap out of you,'" O'Shea said.

Wood also shuddered at the memory. "That guy wanted to kill me. It wasn't my smartest moment."

The pair saw one man scrounging among shelves of pharmaceuticals, apparently for drugs. But the teachers were more interested in getting their hands on O'Shea's favorite tabloid fare.

"So we took her Star magazine and we got out," Wood said.

Jeanette Brase, a 76-year-old retiree from the midwestern state of Iowa who was visiting New Orleans with her husband, said the looting was the only frightening part of her ordeal.

She never thought she would witness such behavior first-hand, Brase said after seeing looters stream in and out of a local pharmacy: "It's something you hear about and see on TV."

"It's actually kind of sickening. I don't know if they (the police) can stop them or if they just have too much to do."

Rosemary Rimmer-Clay, 51, a social worker from Brighton, England, who was here with her two grown sons, said Katrina made her trip "90 percent boredom and 10 percent sheer terror."

"The police said there was rioting and we saw people running with bags full of inappropriate items. It looked quite dodgy," she said. "It felt like a film set and we were in the middle of it."

Authorities sought to tighten security, with gangs of armed men reported roaming the city and one store emptied of its entire collection of weapons, according to the Times-Picayune newspaper.

One police officer was shot in the head but was expected to survive, the newspaper said.

In the Mississippi town of Biloxi, thieves were reported to have taken slot machines from devastated casinos.

Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco said looting was a growing problem but not the top priority. "We don't like looters one bit, but first and foremost is search and rescue," she said.

At least one looter, however, was feeling pangs of remorse.

O'Shea said she and Wood had to return home by Tuesday in time for the start of classes and "I plan on sending a check to the Winn-Dixie for 50 dollars when I get back."

Tuesday night, as water rose to 20 feet through most of New Orleans, CNN relayed an advisory that food in refrigerators would last only four hours, would have to be thrown out. The next news item from CNN was an indignant bellow about "looters" of 7/11s and a Walmart. Making no attempt to conceal the racist flavor of the coverage, the press openly describes white survivors as "getting food from a flooded store," while blacks engaged in the same struggle for survival are smeared as "looters."

The reverence for property is now the underlying theme of many newscasts, with defense of The Gap being almost the first order of duty for the forces of law and order. But the citizens looking for clothes to wear and food to eat are made of tougher fiber and are more desperate than the polite demonstrators who guarded The Gap and kindred chains in Seattle in 1999. The police in New Orleans are only patrolling in large armed groups. One spoke of "meeting some resistance," as if the desperate citizens of New Orleans were Iraqi insurgents.

Comment: Bryan Newbury wrote in an article for Counterpunch:

While I must admit the footage of two NOPD ladies looting a Wal-Mart was priceless, the sanctimonious and unmistakably racist tone of the correspondent (and Tucker himself) was apalling. This was certainly not confined to MSNBC, though.

A sidenote: During the shot inside the Wal-Mart, the correspondent hounded the looters, who were loading up on supplies and a few choice gifts for their children, one man said to him that no one was worried about their lives, so why in the bloody hell would he worry about Wal-Mart's profit-loss ratio? Though I don't endorse looting, he has a point there. Cable news focused sharply on the forgotten and abandoned of New Orleans while not mentioning once (I withstood it all for around 3.5 hours) that these were folks of our very own Third World, the most economically disenfranchised class in the States. Where was the bus convoy to guide them to safety. In state government and FEMA terms, that would've been a pennance.

Also on Tuesday night the newscasts were reporting that in a city whose desperate state is akin the Dacca in Bangladesh a few years ago, there were precisely seven Coast Guard helicopters in operation. Where are the National Guard helicopters? Presumably strafing Iraqi citizens on the roads outside Baghdad and Fallujah.

As the war's unpopularity soars, there will be millions asking, Why is the National Guard in Iraq, instead of helping the afflicted along the Gulf in the first crucial hours, before New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile turn into toxic toilet bowls with thousands marooned on the tops of houses?

As thousands of trapped residents face the real prospect of perishing for lack of a way out of the flooding city, Bush's first response was to open the spigots of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at the request of oil companies and to order the EPA to eliminate Clean Air standards at power plants and oil referiners across the nation, supposedly to increase fuel supplies--a goal long sought by his cronies at the big oil companies.

In his skittish Rose Garden press conference, Bush told the imperiled people of the Gulf Coast not to worry, the Corps of Engineers was on the way to begin the reconstruction of the Southland. But these are the same cadre of engineers, who after three years of work, have yet to get water and electrical power running in Baghdad for more than three hours a day.

It didn't have to be this bad. The entire city of New Orleans needn't have been lost. Hundreds of people need not have perished. Yet, it now seems clear that the Bush administration sacrificed New Orleans to pursue its mad war on Iraq.

As the New Orleans Times-Picayune has reported in a devastating series of articles over the last two years, city and state officials and the Corps of Enginners had repeatedly requested funding to strengthen the levees along Lake Pontchartrain that breeched in the wake of the flood. But the Bush administration rebuffed the requests repeatedly, reprograming the funding from levee enhancement to Homeland Security and the war on Iraq.

This year the Bush administration slashed funding for the New Orleans Corps of Engineers by $71.2 million, a stunning 44.2 percent reduction from its 2001 levels. A Corps report noted at the time that "major hurricane and flood protection projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. . . . Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now."

Work on the 17th Street levee, which breached on Monday night, came to a halt earlier this summer for the lack of $2 million.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana told the Times-Picayune in June of last year. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

These are damning revelations that should fuel calls from both parties for Bush's resignation or impeachment.

The greatest concern for poor people in these days has come from President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who ­ fresh from a chat with Fidel Castro, has announced that Venezuela will be offering America's poor discounted gas through its Citgo chain. He's says his price will knock out the predatory pricing at every American pump. Citgo should issue to purchasers of each tankful of gas vouchers for free medical consultations via the internet with the Cuban doctors in Venezuela.

No politician in America has raised the issue of predatory pricing as gasoline soars above $3. The last time there was any critical talk about the oil companies was thirty years ago.

Maybe the terrible disaster along the Gulf coast will awaken people to the unjust ways in which our society works. That's often the effect of natural disasters, as with the Mexican earthquake, where the laggardly efforts of the police prompted ordinary citizens to take matters into their own hands.

The men and women of the National Guard shouldn't be killing in Iraq. They should be helping in New Orleans and Biloxi.

The catastrophic hurricane was an act of God. But the U.S. war effort in Iraq is a continuing act of the president. And now, that effort is hampering the capacity of the National Guard to save lives at home.

Before the flooding of New Orleans drastically escalated on Tuesday, the White House tried to disarm questions that could be politically explosive. "To those of you who are concerned about whether or not we're prepared to help, don't be, we are," President Bush said. "We're in place, we've got equipment in place, supplies in place, and once the -- once we're able to assess the damage, we'll be able to move in and help those good folks in the affected areas."

Echoing the official assurances, CBS News reported: "Even though more than a third of Mississippi's and Louisiana's National Guard troops are either in Iraq or supporting the war effort, the National Guard says there are more than enough at home to do the job."

But after New Orleans levees collapsed and the scope of the catastrophe became more clear, such reassuring claims lost credibility. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday: "With thousands of their citizen-soldiers away fighting in Iraq, states hit hard by Hurricane Katrina scrambled to muster forces for rescue and security missions yesterday -- calling up Army bands and water-purification teams, among other units, and requesting help from distant states and the active-duty military."

The back-page Post story added: "National Guard officials in the states acknowledged that the scale of the destruction is stretching the limits of available manpower while placing another extraordinary demand on their troops -- most of whom have already served tours in Iraq or Afghanistan or in homeland defense missions since 2001."

Speaking for the Mississippi National Guard, Lt. Andy Thaggard said: "Missing the personnel is the big thing in this particular event. We need our people." According to the Washington Post, the Mississippi National Guard "has a brigade of more than 4,000 troops in central Iraq" while "Louisiana also has about 3,000 Guard troops in Baghdad."

National Guard troops don't belong in Iraq. They should be rescuing and protecting in Louisiana and Mississippi, not patrolling and killing in a country that was invaded on the basis of presidential deception. They should be fighting the effects of flood waters at home -- helping people in the communities they know best -- not battling Iraqi people who want them to go away.

Let's use the Internet today to forward and post this demand so widely that the politicians in Washington can no longer ignore it:

Bring the National Guard home. Immediately.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."

WASHINGTON - Hurricane Katrina is likely to have only a modest impact on the U.S. economy as long as the hit to the energy sector proves transitory, White House economic adviser Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday.

"Clearly, it's going to affect the Gulf Coast economy quite a bit," Bernanke told CNBC television. "That's going to be enough to have at least a noticeable or at least some impact on the aggregate (national) data.

"Looking forward ... reconstruction is going to add jobs and growth to the economy," he added. "As long as we find that the energy impact is only temporary and there's not permanent damage to the infrastructure, my guess is that the effects on the overall economy will be fairly modest."

He added that most indications suggested the effect on the energy sector would indeed be temporary.

Bernanke, chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, said the administration's decision to release oil from emergency stockpiles should be helpful.

"There are some petroleum refineries that don't have crude and by allowing them to draw from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve they will be able to produce more gasoline," he said.

Bernanke said the bond market's reaction to the hurricane, pushing market-set interest rates lower, showed more concern about the potential hit to growth than to the risk of a broad inflation surge due to soaring energy prices.

"I think that is a vote of confidence in the Federal Reserve," the former Fed governor said. "People are confident that inflation will be low despite these shocks to gasoline and oil prices."

WASHINGTON -- President Bush sought Thursday to reassure victims of Hurricane Katrina that the federal government was doing its best to send aid to the thousands of displaced and stranded people.

"I understand the anxiety of people on the ground," Bush told ABC's "Good Morning America." "... But I want people to know there's a lot of help coming."

Bush said he would visit the affected areas, but the trip was still being coordinated.

Bush surveyed Katrina's destruction from Air Force One on his way from Crawford, Texas, to Washington Wednesday.

Back at the White House, he announced a massive federal mobilization to help victims of the storm, but said recovery "will take years."

"We're dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation's history," Bush said in an address from the Rose Garden, surrounded by members of his Cabinet. "I can't tell you how devastating the sights were."

"The folks on the Gulf Coast are going to need the help of this country for a long time. This is going to be a difficult road. The challenges that we face on the ground are unprecedented, but there's no doubt in my mind that we're going to succeed." (Transcript)

He told communities affected by the storm, "The country stands with you" and pledged, "We'll do all in our power to help you."

Bush announced that he has created a Cabinet-level task force to coordinate hurricane relief efforts across federal agencies, headed by Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown, will be in charge of the federal response on the ground in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The White House also announced Wednesday that Bush has asked his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former President Bill Clinton to spearhead an international relief effort for hurricane victims, similar to the effort they undertook for victims of last year's tsunami in South Asia.

Bush said the federal government's first priority is to rescue those still trapped and provide medical assistance. FEMA, the Coast Guard and the Department of Defense have sent resources to help with the search-and-rescue effort, he said.

The federal government also will use more than 400 trucks from the Department of Transportation to bring food, water and supplies to those whose homes have been damaged or destroyed, and plans are being made to provide housing, education and health care for the displaced, he said.

The president said the federal government would also undertake a "comprehensive recovery effort" to rebuild devastated communities and restore infrastructure, including roads and bridges wiped out by Katrina, an effort he said would take years. [...]

Bush also braced the country for a coming surge in energy prices in the wake of the destruction Katrina wrought on oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Department of Energy is releasing supplies from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to limit disruptions of supplies to oil refineries, which "will help take some pressure off of gas prices," and the Environmental Protection Agency has waived rules requiring low-pollution blends in some areas in order to increase availability of gas and diesel, he said.

"But our citizens must understand this storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and distribute gasoline," the president said. [...]

Shippers on the Mississippi river are warning of disruption to supply chains and logistics across North America as the commercial impact of Hurricane Katrina extends far beyond initial worries about energy markets.

The port of New Orleans, a major gateway for commodities from grain to steel, remains closed while damage to navigational aids and debris also prevents larger ocean-going vessels from entering the Mississippi.

Rick Couch, president of Osprey shipping line, said: "This comes at a very bad time with the US agricultural harvest just a few weeks away. Some traffic can be diverted to Houston and ports upriver, but congestion is already building up."

Chemical plants and manufacturers have also warned that damage to local transport infrastructure could hinder recovery efforts after earlier shutdowns.

Big US retailers have been pushing to restock and resupply their stores in the hurricane-affected areas, with Wal-Mart and Home Depot setting up emergency centres at their headquarters to co-ordinate operations.

But the direct impact of the storm on sales at national chains will be offset by their comparatively limited exposure in Louisiana and Mississippi, whose combined population of around 7.5m is less than half the size of Florida's 17.4m. New Orleans itself is the 35th largest retail market in the US in terms of square footage of retail space, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Traditionally, hurricane damage has resulted in stronger sales for home improvement retailers.

"I see complete disaster with flooding prevalent, so while Home Depot and Lowes might benefit in the longer term, in the short term I don't think there's going to be much of anything going on," said Bill Sims, a retail analyst at Citigroup.

Higher fuel prices and operational disruptions resulting from the storm will add to problems faced by struggling US airlines such as Delta Air Lines and Flyi, the parent company of Independence Air.

"Delta is already bleeding cash and at near-term risk of insolvency. The added financial pressure may hasten an already likely bankruptcy filing, which will probably occur within weeks," said Standard Poors, the debt ratings agency. "Closure of refineries...is already raising gasoline prices significantly and is having an effect on jet fuel, as well," S&P said.

Airlines and oil companies are working on plans to supply jet fuel to at least ten U.S. airports that could be shut down due to a lack of jet fuel caused by refinery and pipeline shutdowns from hurricane Katrina. The airports in most jeopardy for closure include Atlanta, Charlotte, Ft. Lauderdale, Ft. Myers, Orlando, Tampa, Washington Dulles and West Palm Beach.

AAG has learned that ChevronTexaco and Shell had cargoes loaded prior to the shutdowns destined for Florida ports. However, with the Colonial and Plantation pipelines shutdown due to a lost of power it could be sometime for shipments to reach airports from Atlanta to Washington D.C.

With future supply uncertain, airlines are working on plans to allocate jet fuel at critically short airports. While some airports may have up to five days of supply we have to expect that we won't receive additional shipments for some time. We either run down to flumes or we try to make it last as long as possible, said one airline fuel manager. Today, airlines are working on plans to allocate fuel in hopes of extending available supply at problem locations.

Initial reports vary as to the extent of damage to Gulf Coast refining. But a longer term problem may not be refining infrastructure but providing shelter for refinery workers.

"One of our refineries is scheduled to be back up soon but our real problem is finding housing for our workers. Most of their homes are destroyed or under water. Unless we can solve the housing problem we will not be fully operational for some time," said one major oil company representative.

Lines at Atlanta area gas pumps grew along with prices this afternoon as word spread of possible fuel shortages.

By noon today, several metro Atlanta gas stations had posted prices above $3.15 per gallon. Some metro area stations were charging as much as $4.75 a gallon, according to a Web site that keeps track of such things, www.atlantagasprices.com.

Prices were rising so fast in some areas that signs at gas stations no longer matched what was being charged at the pumps.

Declaring that there's "credible evidence" of price-gouging at the gas
pumps, Gov. Sonny Perdue late Wednesday signed an executive order threatening to impose heavy fines on gasoline retailers who overcharge Georgia drivers.

"When you prey upon the fears and the paranoia, it is akin to looting, and it is abominable," Perdue said at a hastily called, 6 p.m. press conference.

The anti-gouging law does not prevent retailers from selling gas at higher rates but bars them from charging what the governor called "unreasonable or egregious" prices. It was last used after Hurricane Ivan hit Georgia.

Perdue also urged motorists to limit Labor Day vacation travel if possible.

"There is no reason to panic. There is plenty of gas on the way. The only way we would have problems is if people rush out and try to horde and try to accumulate gasoline they won't need for a while," the governor said today.

As impacts of Hurricane Katrina affect both the production and transportation of fuel, gas stations in the Atlanta area today dramatically jacked up their prices, with one charging $5.87 a gallon.

WSB-TV in Atlanta confirmed to WND that a retailer in a rural area outside the city had priced its gas at $5.87, and the TV station indicated it had another unconfirmed report of $5.99. [...]

Most Atlanta stations that raised their prices placed them at between $3.50 and $4.

There were '70s-era gas lines at several stations.

Mike Brown, owner of Georgetown Chevron in Chamblee, Ga., said his station had run out of gasoline.

"People are just lined up,'' he told Bloomberg. "All of a sudden, people are panicking.'' [...]

Meanwhile, several gas stations in the Milwaukee area ran out of fuel for several hours at a time, having to post "Out of Gas" signs at their pumps. The outages were blamed more on logistical problems on the supply end than any increase in demand, Forbes.com reported.

As WorldNetDaily reported, many of the nation's truck drivers are encountering unprecedented fuel rationing at truck stops as they brace for a spike in prices.

Hurricane Katrina while only causing minor damage to NASA spaceport facilities along the Gulf Coast is surrounded by a region facing long term recovery problems that will impact the ability of work to be conducted in the New Orleans area.

Reports say that NASA will relocate critical External Tank work to Florida and aim for a May 2006 launch window as the earliest date for a return to flight.

Damaged roofs and water leaks were found throughout the 832-acre Michoud complex, where Lockheed Martin manufactures the shuttle's external fuel tank.

In Michoud's main manufacturing building, concrete roof panels were blown away by winds gusting to 125 mph, leaving a large hole, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Stennis Space Center is used by NASA to test rocket engines. That facility reported serious roof and water damage. Stennis is currently being used by state and federal officials as a shelter and base for relief operations.

If NASA is to meet its March 4-19 launch window, a newly redesigned fuel tank must leave Michoud by barge for Kennedy Space Center by mid-November. NASA officials say the chance of that occurring appears remote. The next launch window is May 3-22.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out, cops turned in their badges and the governor declared war on looters who have made the city a menacing landscape of disorder and fear.

"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said of 300 National Guard troops who landed in New Orleans fresh from duty in Iraq. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."

Comment: "Fresh" from duty in Iraq?? Given the situation in Iraq, including the deaths of countless innocent Iraqi civilians at the hands of US forces, we really have to wonder what is going on in the minds of Bush administration officials. Getting troops who are more than willing to shoot and kill into New Orleans doesn't seem to be a problem - but getting emergency supplies and enough helicopters and other equipment to evacuate stranded residents does seem to be an issue. As such, perhaps the plan was never to rescue anyone. Many people are beginning to speculate that the levees were intentionally sabotaged 9/11 style. In a SkyNews survey, 90% think that Bush's response to Katrina is entirely too slow. In the same broadcast, an American who lost his home stated that if the US can go into Iraq and rebuild the country as Bush claims, why isn't the same being done in the region ravaged by Katrina?

When we read that only seven helicopters were available to rescue an estimated 200,000 people stranded in the New Orleans area alone, and that the National Guard troops sent in just got back from Iraq, we have to wonder if perhaps US forces are stretched so thin that there simply aren't enough troops and equipment to conduct a full-scale rescue operation. If the Bush Reich knew this, they would certainly allow or help the levees to break, creating such a huge disaster that anarchy would result. They could then release a story about abandoned residents shooting at rescue helicopters, impose martial law, send in the big guns, and not really have to worry about actually saving anyone. Besides, the majority of those people stranded appear to be lower class citizens who are primarily African American, and the Powers that Be have been historically less than helpful to that portion of the population. As an added bonus, the US economy would crash, and the administration could blame Mother Nature.

So, what do US authorities have to say for themselves? Well, Bush urged the people of New Orleans to remain patient. Yesterday, an AFP article also reported the following:

With 80 percent of New Orleans submerged, authorities blamed the floods for their inability to get the relief operation into high gear.

"For those who wonder why it is difficult to get these supply and medical teams into place, the answer is, they are battling an ongoing dynamic problem with the water," said Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff.

This is the best explanation they could come up with?! An "ongoing dynamic problem with the water"?? Does this statement mean that the Office of Homeland Security and the military don't have any boats or helicopters available to rescue people? Most of the people stranded in New Orleans seem to still be surviving despite a lack of food, clean water, medicine, shelter, and the ongoing dynamic problem with the water - yet a massive collection of government and military agencies just stands around and watches helplessly.

We suspect that either Bush's Brain has made an extraordinarily huge miscalculation, or there is much more to Katrina than meets the eye...

Four days after Hurricane Katrina roared in with a devastating blow that inflicted potentially thousands of deaths, the fear, anger and violence mounted Thursday.

"I'm not sure I'm going to get out of here alive," said Canadian tourist Larry Mitzel, who handed a reporter his business card in case he goes missing. "I'm scared of riots. I'm scared of the locals. We might get caught in the crossfire."

The chaos deepened despite the promise of 1,400 National Guardsmen a day to stop the looting, plans for a $10 billion recovery bill in Congress and a government relief effort President Bush called the biggest in U.S. history.

Comment: Again, the primary focus is National Guard troops to stop the "looting". The hurricane victims having food, water, and medicine is not anywhere near as important as the "moral" question of whether or not taking such items for the survival of one's family is considered "wrong". Perhaps someone should ask Bush what he really expects stranded Americans to do since he can't seem to get any relief efforts started.

New Orleans' top emergency management official called that effort a "national disgrace" and questioned when reinforcements would actually reach the increasingly lawless city.

About 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New Orleans convention center grew ever more hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead. Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad of 88 officers that they retreated when they went in to check out reports of assaults.

"We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten," Compass said. "Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon."

Col. Henry Whitehorn, chief of the Louisiana State Police, said he heard of numerous instances of New Orleans police officers - many of whom from flooded areas - turning in their badges.

"They indicated that they had lost everything and didn't feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives," Whitehorn said.

Comment: All the better for the Bush gang... Now they'll just have to send in the marines!!

A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.

In hopes of defusing the situation at the convention center, Mayor Ray Nagin gave the refugees permission to march across a bridge to the city's unflooded west bank for whatever relief they could find. But the bedlam made that difficult.

"This is a desperate SOS," Nagin said in a statement. "Right now we are out of resources at the convention center and don't anticipate enough buses."

At least seven bodies were scattered outside the convention center, a makeshift staging area for those rescued from rooftops, attics and highways. The sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair.

"You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people," he added. "You can go overseas with the military, but you can't get them down here."

The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.

"They've been teasing us with buses for four days," Edwards said. "They're telling us they're going to come get us one day, and then they don't show up."

Every so often, an armored state police vehicle cruised in front of the convention center with four or five officers in riot gear with automatic weapons. But there was no sign of help from the National Guard.

At one point the crowd began to chant "We want help! We want help!" Later, a woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd ..."

"We are out here like pure animals," the Issac Clark said.

"We've got people dying out here - two babies have died, a woman died, a man died," said Helen Cheek. "We haven't had no food, we haven't had no water, we haven't had nothing. They just brought us here and dropped us."

Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, "'Go to hell - it's every man for himself.'"

"This is just insanity," she said. "We have no food, no water ... all these trucks and buses go by and they do nothing but wave."

FEMA director Michael Brown said the agency just learned about the situation at the convention center Thursday and quickly scrambled to provide food, water and medical care and remove the corpses.

Comment: Horse hockey. The situation at the convention center has been broadcast over every major news network for days. CNN has some other interesting remarks made by Brown:

The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands.

"Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN.

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.

"And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there.

"So, we've got to figure out some way to convince people that whenever warnings go out it's for their own good," Brown said. "Now, I don't want to second guess why they did that. My job now is to get relief to them."

FEMA isn't doing anything to save the mostly poor people trapped in New Orleans who couldn't get out of the city before Katrina because the agency certainly didn't help them get out then, either. Nevertheless, it's not FEMA's fault - it's the poor people themselves who are to blame. Spoken like a true psychopath...

Brown was upbeat in his assessment of the relief effort so far, ticking off a list of accomplishments: more than 30,000 National Guard troops will be in the city within three days, the hospitals are being evacuated and search and rescue missions are continuing. [...]

Within three days? Gee, that's only one week after the storm hit...

Asked later on CNN how he could blame the victims, many of whom could not flee the storm because they had no transportation or were too frail to evacuate on their own, Brown said he was not blaming anyone.

"Now is not the time to be blaming," Brown said. "Now is the time to recognize that whether they chose to evacuate or chose not to evacuate, we have to help them."

Note how Brown twists things to blame the victim at first, and when confronted with it, he blatantly lies. Again, spoken like a true psychopath...

Getting back to the original article:

Speaking on CNN's "Larry King Live," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the evacuation of New Orleans should be completed by the end of the weekend.

At the hot and stinking Superdome, where 30,000 were being evacuated by bus to the Houston Astrodome, fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething sea of tense, suffering people who waited in a lines that stretched a half-mile to board yellow school buses.

After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up, with a group of refugees breaking through a line of heavily armed National Guardsmen.

One military policeman was shot in the leg as he and a man scuffled for the MP's rifle, police Capt. Ernie Demmo said. The man was arrested.

Some of those among the mostly poor crowd had been in the dome for four days without air conditioning, working toilets or a place to bathe. An ambulance service airlifting the sick and injured out of the Superdome suspended flights as too dangerous after it was reported that a bullet was fired at a military helicopter.

Comment: On CNN, we read:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The evacuation of patients from Charity Hospital was halted Thursday after the facility came under sniper fire twice. [...]

"A single sniper or two snipers shouldn't have to shut down a hospital evacuation for two hours now," Dr. Ruth Berggren told CNN. "I look outside, I'm not seeing any military."

Berggren's husband, Dr. Tyler Curiel, witnessed both incidents.

"We were coming in from a parking deck at Tulane Medical Center, and a guy in a white shirt started firing at us," Curiel said. "The National Guard [troops], wearing flak jackets, tried to get a bead on this guy. "

One man in a white shirt fires twice at National Guard troops, and the entire operation is called off because of the "sniper"? Something simply doesn't add up here.

Perhaps the next step is to declare all those left in New Orleans to be "insurgents" with ties to al-Qaeda and send in the stealth bombers...

"If they're just taking us anywhere, just anywhere, I say praise God," said refugee John Phillip. "Nothing could be worse than what we've been through."

By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn. National Guard Capt. John Pollard said evacuees from around the city poured into the Superdome and swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town.

As he watched a line snaking for blocks through ankle-deep waters, New Orleans' emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert blamed the inadequate response on the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"This is not a FEMA operation. I haven't seen a single FEMA guy," he said. He added: "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

FEMA officials said some operations had to be suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, but are working overtime to feed people and restore order.

A day after Nagin took 1,500 police officers off search-and-rescue duty to try to restore order in the streets, there were continued reports of looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings - and not all the crimes were driven by greed.

When some hospitals try to airlift patients, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan said, "there are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, 'You better come get my family.'"

Outside a looted Rite-Aid drugstore, some people were anxious to show they needed what they were taking. A gray-haired man who would not give his name pulled up his T-shirt to show a surgery scar and explained that he needs pads for incontinence.

"I'm a Christian. I feel bad going in there," he said.

Comment: Is the National Guard really going to arrest people like this poor man for looting??

Earl Baker carried toothpaste, toothbrushes and deodorant. "Look, I'm only getting necessities," he said. "All of this is personal hygiene. I ain't getting nothing to get drunk or high with."

Several thousand storm victims had arrived in Houston by Thursday night, and they quickly got hot meals, showers and some much-needed rest.

Audree Lee, 37, was thrilled after getting a shower and hearing her teenage daughter's voice on the telephone for the first time since the storm. Lee had relatives take her daughter to Alabama so she would be safe.

"I just cried. She cried. We cried together," Lee said. "She asked me about her dog. They wouldn't let me take her dog with me. ... I know the dog is gone now."

While floodwaters in the city appeared to stabilize, efforts continued to plug three breaches that had opened up in the levee system that protects this below-sea-level city.

Helicopters dropped sandbags into the breach and pilings were being pounded into the mouth of the canal Thursday to close its connection to Lake Pontchartrain, state Transportation Secretary Johnny Bradberry said. The next step called for using about 250 concrete road barriers to seal the gap.

In Washington, the White House said Bush will tour the devastated Gulf Coast region on Friday and has asked his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former President Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign for victims.

The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness.

"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this - whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together."

Donald Dudley, a 55-year-old New Orleans seafood merchant, complained that when he and other hungry refugees broke into the kitchen of the convention center and tried to prepare food, the National Guard chased them away.

"They pulled guns and told us we had to leave that kitchen or they would blow our damn brains out," he said. "We don't want their help. Give us some vehicles and we'll get ourselves out of here!"

"Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. For suddenly the biggest problem in the world to be looting is really notable."
- Sec-Def Donald Rumsfeld 4-11-03; comments on the looting of Baghdad

The changes that are taking place in the military under the deceptive name of "transformation" have nothing to do with national defense. Rather, the military is being converted into a taxpayer-subsidized security apparatus for multinational corporations. Its primary task is to seize dwindling resources through force of arms and crush indigenous movements that resist US aggression.

On the home front, the changes brought on by transformation are equally dramatic. Traditional defenses provided by the National Guard have been substantially weakened to allow the Pentagon to insert itself into domestic affairs and establish an ongoing military presence within the United States. Donald Rumsfeld has already stated that the military will play a greater role in dealing with the aftereffects of any future terrorist attack. There's no doubt that he will honor that commitment.

The media has echoed the government line that transformation is simply intended to revamp the military for the wars of the next century. They have highlighted the effects of base closures on local economies and unemployment. They have also emphasized the Pentagon's intention to create smaller, more agile military units that can be quickly deployed anywhere around the world in less than 48 hours. But, the media have avoided analyzing the overall objectives of these changes or their effect on homeland security.

Rumsfeld has savaged the National Guard; 40% of who are now serving in Iraq. That means, that the American people are 40% "less safe" in the event of terrorist attack or a natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, regardless of how one looks at it. Instead of strengthening the damaged Guard, Rumsfeld is executing a plan that will wreak further havoc on domestic preparedness and expose the American public to even greater risk.

For example, "Rumsfeld called for 30 Air Guard units scattered around many states to lose their aircraft and flying missions." (Liz Sidot; Ass Press 8- 27-05) How can the states be expected to conduct routine patrols or reconnaissance missions if their planes have been taken by Washington? And, why would Rumsfeld want to take them when more terrorist attacks are expected in the future?

In Pennsylvania Rumsfeld tried to "dissolve the Pennsylvania Air National Guard division without the Governor's authority". (Ass Press)

Why?

The move was a conspicuous attempt to undermine Pennsylvania's defenses and put more power under the direct control of the Defense Dept.

Rumsfeld also tried to "transfer" all 15 "Pacific Northwest and Oregon National Guard fighter jets that patrolled Seattle's skies after 9-11"; leaving the region with no protection from aerial assault. (Northwest's F- 15's Should Stay Put" Seattle PI staff, 8-27-05) Consider the risk to a "target-rich" area like the Pacific Northwest, with its exposed industries, harbors and nuclear power plants, if it was stripped of its first line of defense?

Rumsfeld's behavior has been identical everywhere across the country. He is determined to undermine the National Guard and limit the states' ability to protect themselves against attack. His intention is to smash America's internal defenses, which are currently under control of the states' governors, and introduce the military into homeland security. It is a clear attempt to centralize authority and further militarize the country.

By weakening America's defenses, Rumsfeld has paved the way for deploying troops and aircraft within the country and setting the precedent for a permanent military presence within the nation. It is one giant step towards direct military rule.

There is no other conceivable reason for weakening national defense during a period when there is an increased likelihood of a terrorist incident.

Rumsfeld's conduct is hardly surprising. He has a long history of support for military regimes. Just months ago he was coaching South American leaders to resume their use of the military in domestic policing activities to undercut the Leftist political movements that are at the forefront of change throughout the region. It's clear that he has something similar in mind for the American people.

Are we talking about the possibility of martial law?

We only need to look at developments in England to know what Americans could be facing following another terrorist attack. Tony Blair has managed to manipulate the London bombings into a mandate for regressive "anti-terror" legislation that suspends habeas corpus, due process, and the presumption of innocence.

Blair is now claiming the right to deport Muslims without judicial review, suspend free speech, and use deadly force against terrorist suspects. At the same time, he has concealed his motives behind a public relations smokescreen that make his actions look like they are a reasonable response to a national security threat. In fact, Blair's actions are part of a broader strategy to eviscerate civil liberties for the Islamic community. The Prime Minister's "The rules of the game have changed" speech; was a carefully scripted declaration of martial law for Muslims.

The American people can expect similar edicts from Washington following the next terrorist attack at home.

Transformation and Foreign Policy

When the military is adapted to the narrow interests of elites it becomes little more than a resource-acquisition tool; a bloody-weapon to be used by private industry. We can see the effects of this in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military is providing security for the corporations that are extracting the regional resources. It's nothing more than massive "protections-racket" designed to legitimize theft.

The goal of transformation is to make the military conform to the corporate model; converting it into a top-down, highly-technological mechanism programmed for maximum efficiency and lethality. The Pentagon is no longer expecting to fight large territorial conflicts, but instead is developing a fighting force to "preemptively" attack those nationalist or revolutionary forces that may disrupt global commerce.

When Bush says, "We will confront emerging threats before they fully materialize," he is articulating the theory of aggression on which transformation is based. The new military is designed to initiate hostilities wherever America can expand its grip on vital natural resources. This is the only way that Washington can maintain its dominant position in the world economy.

The Cost of Global War

One official from the World Bank estimated that the US will spend in excess of $900 Billion per year to maintain the global military presence that the Bush administration has in mind; nearly double the current Pentagon budget.

This is probably accurate. The New World Order requires a gluttonous, iron-fisted military to maintain its supremacy and to preserve the existing economic paradigm.

So far, the dream of a transformed military has proved to be a dismal failure. The insufficient number of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq has spawned violent resistance-movements in both countries that show no sign of abating. Rumsfeld's dream of small groupings of elite warriors striking with lightening speed and subduing entire populations has turned out to be a catastrophic fantasy. America now has 8 battalions bogged-down in a desert maelstrom where high-tech wizardry is less help than a few more "boots on the ground". At home, the National Guard is in a shambles. The men who would normally be assisting the victims of America's greatest natural disaster are now hunkered-down in encampments outside Baghdad and Falluja unable to help in the task for which they were trained. As the costs and casualties of the Iraq debacle continue to mount, Rumsfeld's crazed vision of transformation will be exposed as one of the principle theories that led the country down this ruinous path.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

NEW ORLEANS - Dirty, fearful and exhausted, they pressed their faces against the metal gates, begging and pleading for the chance to board a bus and get away from a refuge that had become a nightmare.

After five days in the stinking, crowded and sweltering confines of the New Orleans Superdome, the thousands of people who emerged formed a slow-moving tide of desperation looking for escape and relief.

The Superdome was meant to be a hurricane refuge, but those who sought shelter there described a lawless "concentration camp" where two children were reportedly raped and other refugees terrorized by rioters.

Around 40 National Guard, armed with assault rifles, guarded the door to a shopping mall through which the packed crowds were being slowly filtered to buses waiting in ankle-deep flood waters outside.

"Make a hole!" one guardsman shouted, as he carried the limp and sweaty body of a woman -- one of many who collapsed from dehydration and exhaustion.

People held children and dogs over their heads to keep them from getting crushed, as babies were passed forward into the waiting arms of guardsmen who cradled them and fed them water.

Those lucky enough to get out told tales of rapes, child molestations, shootings, a man who jumped off the roof and a fire that broke out in the giant sport arena where up to 20,000 people had taken shelter from Hurricane Katrina.

The floors of the stadium were soaked from the rain that seeped in during the storm after part of the roof collapsed, and a pervading stench testifid to the overflowing toilets that had forced people to relieve themselves in hallways and stairwells.

"The odor from that place would knock you off your feet," said Lorraine Banks as she made her way past the dozens of police officers and soldiers trying to keeping order and handing out water in the shopping mall.

"They had bowel movements on the floor this high," the 53-year-old nurse said, as she gestured to her knee.

One 13-year veteran of the New Orleans police force said he and other officers who had been at the Superdome since Sunday were outraged at what they saw as a lack of preparation that allowed the situation in the covered stadium to deteriorate so badly and so quickly.

"This city knew something like this would happen a long time ago. They did nothing to prepare for this. They just rolled the dice and hoped for the best," said the officer who asked not to be identified.

"People were raped in there. People were killed in there. We had multiple riots," he said, adding there was no way to police the mass of up to 20,000 people suddenly thrown together in such a confined space and such horrific conditions.

"You can't be trapped in there for so long without going crazy. People were locked in the dome like prisoners," he said. "There was no ventilation. We had 80-, 90-year-old people who needed medication and couldn't get it."

According to Baron Duncan, the nights inside the arena were the worst, with the pitch darkness and debilitating humidity accentuating the rank smell from backed up toilets.

"The stench was unbearable. We were treated like animals," Duncan said. "There was shooting ... our lives were in danger. A seven-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy got raped."

Medics brought the worst cases out to a cordoned-off hallway for treatment before they were loaded onto the buses.

Latanya Howard, 34, was using a piece of cardboard to fan a woman who had collapsed against a wall.

"People have been passing out left and right and we had limited medical supplies," she said, describing the scene inside the arena. "Then we come out and they talk to us like dogs. No wonder they were fighting."

The evacuation of the Superdome began late Wednesday for those with serious health problems. Officials would not estimate how long it would take to empty the arena completely.

"People are still walking in here as fast as we can get them out," said Lieutenant Colonel Scott Elliot of the Texas National Guard.

The Superdome was opened Sunday as a refuge of last resort. After the flooding, thousands more came or were brought there in hopes of making it onto the first buses out of the city.

Maintaining order had been difficult, Elliot said as he surveyed the swarm of angry, shouting people pressing up against the barricades between the shopping mall and the buses.

Despite one guardsman being shot in the leg, he said the general feeling among the troops was that they were happy to be able to help.

"This is the most important thing they've ever done," Elliot said. "I just got back from Iraq last month. It's nothing like this. These are our people."

Comment: What does Bush's slow response say as to how he really feels about "our people"??

Much of the frustration voiced by the evacuees concerned the lack of information. People were prevented from leaving the arena because of the flooding and were desperate for news of what had happened to their friends, neighbors, family members and homes.

One woman, Judy Smith, sat sobbing in a chair in the mall with her four grandchildren sitting on the floor next to her.

"I've lost my children," Smith sobbed. "You've got to find my daughter, Ashley Smith .... You've got to tell her her babies are alright. One almost drowned but we saved him."

Many blamed the officials for failing to give them any updates on the situation.

"We didn't have anyone telling us anything," said Rosemary Atkins, 60, as she waited with her grandson for her daughter and other grandson to make their way through the barricades.

"We kept asking the guards (what was going on) and they said they didn't know."

Norma Blanco Johnson, waiting for a bus with her daughter and infant grandaughter, said her main concern was her three sons, who she hadn't seen since before the hurricane hit.

"I don't know what happened to them," Johnson said, adding that her anxiety and fear had only been multiplied by the experience of sheltering in the Superdome.

"This was no way to treat a human being. I lost everything and then I went through hell. I have no place left. I have nowhere to go and all I have are these," she said, pointing to her soiled clothes.

Audrey Jordan vented her anger at New Orleans officials, saying they had known for years that a hurricane of Katrina's intensity could cause a breach in the low-lying city's water defences.

"They wanted to pay millions of dollars to rebuild a stadium, but they couldn't even fix the levee," Jordan said.

"We were treated like this was a concentration camp," she said of the Superdome. "One man couldn't take it. He jumped over the railing and died."

The deplorable looting in New Orleans puts an ugly public face on a crisis that Bush administration policies have made worse.

Two things happened in one day that tell much about the abysmal failure of the Bush administration to get a handle on poverty in America. The first was the tragic and disgraceful shots of hordes of New Orleans residents scurrying down the city's hurricane-ravaged streets with their arms loaded with food, clothes, appliances, and in some cases guns, looted from stores and shops. That same day, the Census Bureau released a report that found the number of poor Americans has leaped even higher since Bush took office in 2000.

While criminal gangs who take advantage of chaos and misery did much of the looting, many desperately poor, mostly black residents saw a chance to grab items they can't afford. They also did their share of the looting. That makes it no less reprehensible, but it's no surprise. New Orleans has one of the highest poverty rates of any of America's big cities. According to a report by Total Community Action, a New Orleans public advocacy group, nearly one out of three New Orleans residents -- the majority of whom are black -- lives below the poverty level. A spokesperson for the United Negro College Fund noted that the city's poor live in some of the most dilapidated and deteriorated housing in the nation.

But New Orleans is not an aberration. Nationally, according to Census figures, blacks remain at the bottom of the economic totem pole. They have the lowest median income of any group. Bush's war and economic policies don't help matters. His tax cuts redistributed billions to the rich and corporations. The Iraq war has drained billions from cash-starved job training, health and education programs. Increased American dependence on Saudi oil has driven gas and oil prices skyward. Corporate downsizing, outsourcing and industrial flight have further fueled America's poverty crisis. All of this happened on Bush's watch.

The two million new jobs in 2004 Bush touts as proof that his economic policies work have been mostly smoke and mirrors number counting. The bulk of these jobs are low-paying jobs with minimal benefits and little job security in retail and service industries. A big portion of the nearly 40 million Americans who live below the official poverty line fill these jobs. They're the lucky ones. They have jobs. Many young blacks, such as those who ransacked stores in New Orleans, don't. The poverty crisis has slammed them the hardest of all. Even during the Clinton-era economic boom, the unemployment rate for young black males was double, and in some parts of the country, triple that of white males.

During the past couple of years, state and federal cutbacks in job training and skills programs, the competition for low- and semi-skilled service and retail jobs from immigrants, and the refusal of many employers to hire those with criminal records have further hammered black communities and added to the Great Depression levels of unemployment among young blacks. The tale of poverty is more evident in the nearly one million blacks behind bars, the HIV/AIDS rampage in black communities, the sea of black homeless persons, and the raging drug and gang violence that rips apart many black communities.

Then there are the children. One third of America's poor are children. Worse, the Children's Defense Fund found that nearly one million black children live in extreme poverty. That's the greatest number of black children trapped in dire poverty in nearly a quarter century.

Bush officials claim the poverty numbers do not surprise them. They contend that past trends show that poverty peaks and then declines a year after the jump in new job growth. But the poverty numbers have steadily risen for not one, but all five years of this administration. There has been no sign of a turnaround. For that to happen, Bush would have to reverse his tax and war spending policies, and commit massive funds to job, training and education programs, as well as providing tax incentives for businesses to train and hire the poor. That would take an active, national lobbying effort by congressional Democrats and civil rights and anti-poverty groups. That's not likely either. The poor are too nameless, faceless and numerous to target with a sustained lobbying campaign.

While the NAACP hammers Bush on the war and his domestic policies, poverty has not been their top priority. The fight for affirmative action, economic parity, professional advancement and busing replaced battling poverty, reducing unemployment, securing quality education, promoting self-help and gaining greater political empowerment as the goals of all African-Americans. That effectively left the one out of four blacks who wallow below the official poverty level out in the cold.

The looting in New Orleans, though deplorable, put an ugly public face on a crisis Bush administration policies have made worse. The millions in America who grow poorer, more desperate, and greater in number, are bitter testament to that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of 'The Crisis in Black and Black' (Middle Passage Press).

The effort to rescue as many as 200,000 people left stranded and hungry in the sinking city of New Orleans ran the risk of catastrophic breakdown last night, as under-prepared and under-resourced federal authorities faced the hostility of heavily armed residents seemingly bent on shooting their way out of town if necessary. [...]

Survivors grew increasingly panicky last night as the transport they had been promised out of the city failed to materialise. "We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help," an elderly pastor told the Associated Press outside the city's Convention Centre, where corpses were laid out directly in front of the living. From the centre, a line of buses could be seen along the interstate highway, but they were going nowhere. [...]

The Bush administration hurriedly sent a fresh consignment of 10,000 National Guardsmen into the disaster area to try to maintain order - bringing the total number of men in uniform to 28,000. President George Bush himself said he would adopt a "zero tolerance" attitude to lawlessness and urged people to work together. "I understand the anxiety of people on the ground," he told a television interviewer. "So there is frustration. But I want people to know there's a lot of help coming."

But the President found himself the target of an unusual degree of anger from across the political spectrum, as editorial writers demanded to know why he had sat out the first full day of the disaster, and present and former government officials detailed the numerous ways in which Congress and the White House has cut funding for the very emergency management programmes that the New Orleans area so desperately needs.

Despite the administration's efforts to catalogue the naval ships, helicopters, floating hospitals and essential supplies it was deploying, reports from along the Gulf Coast suggested it was not arriving nearly fast enough. "We're not getting any help yet," the fire chief in Biloxi, Mississippi, told the Knight-Ridder news service. "We need water. We need ice. I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."

Local officials already overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophe said they were particularly bewildered by the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to stem the gush of water pouring into New Orleans through broken levees protecting the city from both the Gulf to the south and Lake Ponchartrain to the north. "I'm extremely upset about it," said Louisiana's Governor, Kathleen Blanco.

The Army Corps, like every other authority charged with preventing the flooding of New Orleans, has had its budget cut repeatedly in recent years. The Federal Emergency Management Administration has had its resources diverted towards the Bush administration's "war on terror", and many of the National Guardsmen who might have been in place to intervene sooner have been diverted to Iraq.

The prospect of an ugly, elemental battle for survival in New Orleans was made worse by the fact that even before Hurricane Katrina it was the poorest urban area in the United States. The ghastly spectacle of overwhelmingly black residents caged in an unsanitary sports stadium and left almost entirely to their own devices could not but evoke memories of the darkest days of segregation and overtly racist Jim Crow laws in the American South. The potential for racial conflict has been quietly side-stepped in much of the US media coverage to date, but it is also impossible to ignore.

Tales of gun stores being looted and armed gangs roaming the streets were reminiscent of the opening salvos of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Police said their officers had been shot at, and news crews for at least one major national network let it be known that they had hired private security guards to guarantee their safety.

Looters raided shops and public buildings and used either rubbish bins or inflatable mattresses to float their takings down the water-filled streets.

The prospect of a major societal breakdown was not restricted to the disaster area. As the first evacuees were welcomed to their new temporary home, the Astrodome in Houston, officials felt obliged to deny that the dispossessed were being held in prison-like conditions. The Astrodome was "not a jail", the chief executive of Harris County, which encompasses Houston, insisted at a news conference.

Comment: An Associated Press report includes the following:

The Astrodome's new residents will be issued passes that will let them leave and return as they please, something that wasn't permitted in New Orleans. Organizers also plan to find ways to help the refugees contact relatives.

Officials from President Bush down to Marc Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans, said the impact of Katrina was worse than that of the 11 September attacks on New York, and so required an even more energetic response. "So many of the people who did not evacuate could not evacuate, for whatever reason," said Mr Morial. "They are people who are African-American, mostly but not completely, and people who were of little or limited economic means. They are the folks, we've got to get them out of there."

President Bush faced not only the fallout of Hurricane Katrina but also an intense political storm yesterday as relief experts, government officials and newspaper editorials criticised everything from his administration's disaster preparedness policies to the manner in which he made his public entry into the growing crisis on the Gulf coast.

The New York Times said of a speech he made on Tuesday: "Nothing about the President's demeanour yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."

No less trenchant - and more heartfelt - was the Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi which surveyed the disaster around its editorial offices and asked: "Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in south Mississippi been pressed into service?"

As when the Asian tsunami hit last year, Mr Bush found himself on holiday at his Texas ranch when disaster struck. As with the tsunami, he was soon in the firing line for reacting slowly - he spent Monday on a fundraising tour of the American West - and failing to provide adequate leadership. As survivors complained of a lack of water, food and medical supplies yesterday, fingers from across the political spectrum were pointed at the White House.

Experts on the Mississippi Delta pointed out that a plan to shore up the levees around New Orleans was abandoned last year for lack of government funding. They noted that flood-control spending for south-eastern Louisiana had been chopped every year that Mr Bush has been in office, that hurricane protection funds have also fallen, and that the local army corps of engineers has also had its budget cut. The emergency management chief for Jefferson parish told the Times-Picayune newspaper: "It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."

The torrent of criticism contrasted sharply to the reaction to the 11 September attacks, when political sniping was put on hold and dissenters were told their complaints were both unwelcome and unpatriotic. The change in tone partly suggests a growing disenchantment with Mr Bush.

The usually restrained New York Times said: "Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?"

While Katrina's dead have not yet been counted, it's not too soon to hammer home a point: government policies have real consequences in people's lives.

Like many of you who love New Orleans, I find myself taking short mental walks there today, turning a familiar corner, glimpsing a favorite scene, square or vista. And worrying about the beloved friends and the city, and how they are now.

To use a fine Southern word, it's tacky to start playing the blame game before the dead are even counted. It is not too soon, however, to make a point that needs to be hammered home again and again, and that is that government policies have real consequences in people's lives. This is not "just politics" or blaming for political advantage. This is about the real consequences of what governments do and do not do about their responsibilities. And about who winds up paying the price for those policies.

This is a column for everyone in the path of Hurricane Katrina who ever said, "I'm sorry, I'm just not interested in politics," or, "There's nothing I can do about it," or, "Eh, they're all crooks anyway." Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my life, nothing I can do about any of it. Look around you this morning. I suppose the NRA would argue, "Government policies don't kill people, hurricanes kill people."

Actually, hurricanes plus government policies kill people. [...]

It is a fact that the Clinton administration set some tough policies on wetlands, and it is a fact that the Bush administration repealed those policies -- ordering federal agencies to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands. Last year, four environmental groups cooperated on a joint report showing the Bush administration's policies had allowed developers to drain thousands of acres of wetlands.

Does this mean we should blame Bush for the fact that New Orleans is underwater? No, but it means we can blame Bush when a Class 3 or Class 2 hurricane puts New Orleans underwater. [...]

In fact, there is now a government-wide movement away from basing policy on science, expertise and professionalism, and in favor of choices based on ideology. If you're wondering what the ideological position on flood management might be, look at the pictures of New Orleans -- it seems to consist of gutting the programs that do anything.

Unfortunately, the war in Iraq is directly related to the devastation left by the hurricane. About 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is now serving in Iraq, where four out of every 10 soldiers are guardsmen. Recruiting for the Guard is also down significantly because people are afraid of being sent to Iraq if they join, leaving the Guard even more short- handed.

The Louisiana National Guard also notes that dozens of its high-water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators have also been sent abroad. (I hate to be picky, but why do they need high-water vehicles in Iraq?) This, in turn, goes back to the original policy decision to go into Iraq without enough soldiers and the subsequent failure to admit that mistake and to rectify it by instituting a draft.

The levees of New Orleans, two of which are now broken and flooding the city, were also victims of Iraq war spending. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, said on June 8, 2004, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."

This, friends, is why we need to pay attention to government policies, not political personalities, and to know whereon we vote. It is about our lives.

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush, facing blistering criticism for his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, said Friday "the results are not acceptable" and pledged to bolster relief efforts with a personal trip to the Gulf Coast.

"We'll get on top of this situation," Bush said, "and we're going to help the people that need help."

He spoke on the White House grounds just boarding his presidential helicopter, Marine One, with Homeland Security Department secretary Michael Chertoff to tour the region. The department, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been accused of responding sluggishly to the deadly hurricane.

"There's a lot of aid surging toward those who've been affected. Millions of gallons of water. Millions of tons of food. We're making progress about pulling people out of the Superdome," the president said.

For the first time, however, he stopped defending his administration's response and criticized it. "A lot of people are working hard to help those who've been affected. The results are not acceptable," he said. "I'm heading down there right now."

Bush hoped that his tour of the hurricane-ravaged states would boost the spirits of increasingly desperate storm victims and their tired rescuers, and his visit was aimed at tamping down the ever-angrier criticism that he has engineered a too-little, too-late response.

Four days after Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana, Bush was to get a second, closer look at the devastation wrought by the storm's 145 mph winds and 25-foot storm surge in an area stretching from just west of New Orleans to Pensacola, Florida. In all, there are 90,000 square miles under federal disaster declaration.

In Mobile, Alabama, the president was to get a briefing on the damage, followed by a helicopter survey of areas along the Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana coasts. He was to walk through hard-hit neighborhoods in Biloxi, Miss.

But Bush was avoiding an in-person visit to the worst areas of New Orleans, mostly drowned in rank floodwaters and descending in many areas into lawlessness as desperate residents await rescue or even just food and water. Instead, the president was taking an aerial tour of the city and making an appearance at the airport several miles from the center of town. [...]

So Bush has tried to respond to Katrina in a way that evokes the national goodwill he cultivated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- and that does not recall the criticism his father, former President Bush, endured after Hurricane Andrew slammed Florida in 1992.

But he began facing questions about his leadership in the crisis almost immediately. New Orleans officials, in particular, were enraged about what they said was a slow federal response.

"They don't have a clue what's going on down there," Mayor Ray Nagin told WWL-AM Thursday night.

Seeking to deflect the criticism, Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, asserted earlier Friday: "In this catastrophic event, everything that we had pre-positioned and ready to go became overwhelmed immediately after the storm." [...]

WASHINGTON--U.S. Spy satellites have been called into service to help federal emergency officials cope with the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, officials said Wednesday.

The little-known National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite images for the espionage community and combat troops, has provided scores of images of hard-hit areas, including New Orleans, before and after the storm struck.

The agency said one of its main aims is to survey damage to regional transportation for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which can then use the data to organize relief efforts. FEMA officials could not be reached for comment.

"NGA can determine the overall damage to a transportation network infrastructure--what bridges are out, what roads are flooded--which is critical for FEMA getting relief supplies into the disaster area," said NGA spokesman Stephen Honda.

The Pentagon agency, previously known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, joined the hurricane effort on Friday when it gave FEMA 100 graphic images showing the location of hospitals, police stations, highways, and schools in the storm's path along the Gulf coast.

After the storm, the agency gave FEMA its first cloud-free satellite image of downtown New Orleans. The image was snapped by a commercial satellite.

NGA, which once concentrated wholly on overseas targets, has become more involved in domestic security and relief efforts since the September 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.

NGA analysis has aided security efforts at large public events including the Super Bowl and the 2004 presidential conventions. Its satellite imagery has also provided assistance to Asian tsunami relief efforts and in fighting forest fires.

WASHINGTON - Hurricane Katrina's second wave -- soaring gasoline and home-heating prices -- may be less deadly and destructive than the storm itself but poses much greater risks to the world's biggest economy.

U.S. economic health is so dependent on keeping its increasingly indebted households shopping that another drain on their already-stretched budgets could batter the economy.

American consumers, whose spending on goods, services and houses accounted for 76 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in the second quarter, have shrugged off many shocks over the past decade -- most notably the dot.com bubble burst of 2000 and the September 11, 2001 attacks.

They have done so largely by accumulating more and more relative cheap debts.

But economists worry that a fresh, even temporary, spike in energy costs as a result of damage to the Gulf region's oil infrastructure may be a shock too many.

"This is a very delicate moment," said Nouriel Roubini, economics professor at New York University. "The economy is already very imbalanced. On top of that, we've had a massive oil shock and now we have a natural disaster that might be something of a tipping point."

WHISPERS OF RECESSION

As the loss of life and scale of the damage to local housing and commercial infrastructure becomes clear, muttering of recession was not far from the lips of some economists.

Policy-makers insist, with some justification, that with economic growth well above 3 percent so far this year, talk of a nationwide contraction is far-fetched. Income and jobs are rising, corporate profits are high and inflation and long-term borrowing costs are low.

President George W. Bush met with Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan on Thursday and, analysts reckon, will likely have heard that message from the central bank chief.

To be sure, the Gulf region will see a sudden sharp shock that will feel and look like one of the deepest recessions they have known.

Initial estimates of the cost of replacing insured property and goods in the area is as high as $26 billion, higher than the $22 billion of damage incurred by 1992's Hurricane Andrew -- America's costliest storm to date.

This huge bill has even more historical resonance when compared with the $32 billion of insured losses following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

And total damage from Katrina, including uninsured items, could be as high as $40 billion, according to Merrill Lynch.

Yet, the most affected states -- Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama -- account for less that 3 percent of overall U.S. gross domestic product.

Comment: The author seems to ignore the fact that Katrina also took out the largest shipping port in the US...

And, despite the huge losses, reconstruction and rebuilding will most certainly boost activity sharply there by yearend.

FUEL FEARS

But with gasoline prices set to soar and remain above $3 per gallon and amid pre-winter fears of rising home heating costs, the timing of this regional catastrophe could have massive ripple-effect.

If this new national energy shock -- crude oil prices had already doubled in 18 months prior to Katrina -- adds to growing fears of a housing bubble, rising short-term interest rates and swelling trade deficits, the nationwide horizon darkens significantly.

"The oil price impact will be the biggest for the national economy," economists at Goldman Sachs said in a research note.

Goldman estimates average U.S. crude oil prices of $70 per barrel for September -- close to Thursday's level of $69.45 -- could force a rise of $50-$60 billion annualized in energy spending that would force cutbacks in spending on other goods and knock half a percentage point off third-quarter GDP.

But they outlined a worst-case scenario of fuel rationing.

"Demand rationing, not seen in this country since 1979, would certainly lower consumer confidence and cause a much more widespread hit to the economy," they added, saying this could force the Fed to pause its campaign of raising interest rates.

Bush on Thursday urged Americans to not to buy gasoline if they do not need it but stopped short of raising the prospect of rationing.

Rationing or not, the soaring consumer oil bill remains the biggest national economic burden.

As the price of houses and equities held by many Americans continue to rise, families are saving nothing from their after-tax incomes and incurring greater amounts of debt to fuel seemingly insatiable consumption habits.

Figures released on Thursday show the national household saving rate, at minus 0.6 percent, was the lowest on record -- falling negative for only the second time ever.

With household debt now up 60 percent in just five years, rising short-term interest rates will already be crimping wallets. Consumer mortgage interest payments alone were up 14 percent in the last year.

And, as with the devastation on the ground, poorer Americans will take a disproportionate hit from the energy price spike.

Consumer spending on gas, fuel oil and natural gas accounts for just 2.4 percent of the income of the richest fifth of households but 11.2 percent of the poorest fifth, said David Kelly, Senior Economic Advisor at Putnam Investments

"Sadly, it is the poorest Americans in the regions and areas that have seen the weakest recovery from the recession of 2001 who are being hurt most by higher oil prices," he said.

Motorists were warned last night that petrol prices seem certain to pass £1 a litre within days after Hurricane Katrina wiped out many of the oil refineries on the US Gulf coast.

As US oil companies bought up 20 shiploads of European petrol yesterday, the wholesale price of petrol on the Rotterdam spot market soared to a record of $855 a tonne (more than $100 a barrel), up more than 20% in two days and something experts said would feed through to the forecourt within days.

Article continues The Petrol Retailers' Association calculated that the spot price rise could add almost 10p a litre to pump prices if it were passed on in full to consumers, something the oil companies may be reluctant to do.

Prices yesterday were around 92p a litre for unleaded and 96p for diesel. Wholesale diesel prices in Rotterdam also set record highs yesterday, so the £1 a litre diesel price could be seen by the weekend and by Monday at the latest, a PRA spokesman, Ray Holloway, said. [...]

Petrol prices in Britain are among the highest in Europe because of the duty and VAT charged on them but are still cheaper than Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands.

Pump prices in the US, where fuel taxes are much lower, have risen to over $3 a gallon (42p a litre) in many states.

A White House economic adviser, Ben Bernanke, said yesterday they would rise further but then fall back as the situation in Louisiana became more stable.

Hurricane Katrina forced the closure of about nine refineries in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, which together refine about 10% of America's gasoline. However, demand is slowing as the US holiday season ends.

Oil prices, by contrast, fell back slightly yesterday from record highs earlier in the week. US crude futures fell below $69 after setting a record just below $71.

Traders said oil supplies were not the big problem, especially as the US government on Wednesday promised to release some of the country's 700m barrel strategic petroleum reserve, some of which is stored in old salt mines in Louisiana. That was because of a disruption to crude production offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, where rigs were torn adrift by the storm. Some have since washed up onshore.

But the strategic reserve contains only oil, not gasoline or diesel, hence the scramble to buy from Europe.

The Treasury responded to the rising fuel price by stressing it had announced in July that a duty increase planned for yesterday would be scrapped because of high oil prices. Fuel duty, now 47.1p a litre, has not risen for two years.

WASHINGTON - Concerns grew Thursday that Hurricane Katrina could have wide-reaching effects on the nation's economy, causing record gasoline prices to surge even higher, key agricultural crops to rot in Midwestern fields and warehouses, and some of the nation's troubled airlines to collapse.

As estimates of the economic damage mounted, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan came under increasing pressure to scrap or delay further Fed interest rate increases. In a hastily arranged White House meeting, President Bush summoned the Fed chief to discuss what could be done to lessen the hurricane's economic toll.

Details of the meeting were not disclosed, but many experts predicted that Greenspan would work to avoid a possible economic slowdown.

Experts warned that gasoline prices - driven higher because of storm-related damage to the Gulf Coast's energy infrastructure - were the greatest concern and might be approaching levels that would soon ripple through the economy.

If that happens, prices of basic items could soar, pushing up inflation. The Gulf Coast accounts for about 20% of the nation's oil and natural gas supplies.

High gasoline costs - and accusations of gouging amid prices as high as $5 a gallon - also appeared to be fueling a consumer backlash. But the Bush administration took no immediate steps Thursday to halt the run-up in pump prices.

After a lunch with Greenspan, Bush warned of temporary gas shortages in the coming weeks and called on Americans to conserve energy.

"Don't buy gas if you don't need it," the president said at a White House appearance.

With eight major refineries incapacitated, Bush said, "It's going to be hard to get gasoline to some markets."

He did not elaborate, but oil industry experts said the Midwest, the South and perhaps the Atlantic seaboard would probably experience shortages.

Some economists said Katrina's toll could be more far-reaching than the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for example, because of its potential effects on trade and key sectors of the U.S. economy.

The U.S. is the world's biggest agricultural exporter. Most crop exports float down the Mississippi River on barges and then are transferred to ships at one of the Gulf Coast ports.

Massive damage to the region's ports would idle the barges that transport oil, sugar and grain along the Mississippi River.

That would mean that farmers in the South and Midwest who depend on the waterway to ship their goods to foreign markets would lose a cheap shipping route. On Thursday, many fully loaded barges drifted with nowhere to go.

Retailers who use Gulf Coast ports to receive their imports also have to scramble to find alternative docks.

Although they generally aren't predicting a recession soon, many economists have lowered their estimates for economic growth, in part because of Katrina. Experts who previously predicted that growth in the current quarter would exceed an annualized rate of 4% now expect the pace to fall below 3.5%. Others think growth could fall below 3%. The economy expanded by 3.3% in the April-June quarter.

Federal Reserve policymakers have raised their benchmark short-term rate 10 times, by a total of 2.5 percentage points, since June 2004 in an effort to control inflation.

Until recently, most analysts had thought the Fed would boost its key rate an additional three-quarters of a point before stopping. But now many traders are betting that there will be only one more quarter-point increase - from 3.5% to 3.75% - in the so-called federal funds rate, the interest banks charge each other for very short-term loans. The central bank's next rate-setting meeting is Sept. 20.

"What Katrina has done is shift the economic focus from inflation to growth," said David M. Jones, a Denver economic consultant and veteran Fed watcher.

"I think what you'll see is the Fed pausing at its next meeting, citing special circumstances," he said.

The crisis has hit the airlines particularly hard, with a surge in jet fuel prices and the loss of passenger traffic in the Gulf Coast region. Carriers such as Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines already were perilously close to filing for bankruptcy protection, and Northwest said Thursday that it now had even less time to slash costs if it hoped to avoid a filing.

Concerned about a possible economic slowdown triggered by high energy costs, investors have driven down bond interest rates this week. That also represents an immense bet that the Federal Reserve's rate-raising days are coming to a swift close as a result of the hurricane.

Greenspan had no comment after meeting with Bush. The central bank, however, joined other federal regulatory agencies late Thursday in issuing a plea that banks in the affected region help people get back on their financial feet by doing such things as waiving ATM fees, increasing the amount allowed for daily cash withdrawals and permitting people to get at their savings without having to pay penalties.

Comment: There's only one problem: most Americans don't have much - if anything - in the way of savings. Their spending is fueled by debt. The primary means of incurring this debt are credit cards and borrowing money on their houses. Unfortunately, their homes were wiped out by Katrina, and they don't have jobs any more with which they can earn money to service their debt. It's going to take a lot more than just waiving ATM fees to help Americans affected by Katrina to get back on their financial feet.

Although Greenspan is much praised as an economic crisis manager, his ability to cope with the current threat to growth may be much more limited than in such upheavals as the Mexican peso crisis, the Asian financial panic and the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

That's because in each of these previous events, the Fed chairman's primary focus was on the health of the nation's financial markets, something he could readily affect by announcing the Fed's readiness to open the spigot on credit.

By contrast, the key problem now is the physical condition of oil and gas drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as refineries and pipelines in Louisiana and Mississippi - something that no amount of money can immediately improve.

Analysts said again Thursday that it could be weeks before energy industry executives assessed the condition of their facilities. But these analysts warned that if the damage was substantial, it could have significant and long-lasting repercussions.

The biggest danger is that Katrina has seriously damaged Gulf Coast refineries, which account for 10% of U.S. refining capacity. Without these refineries, the oil being drawn from government stockpiles can't be turned into useable products for the areas they serve. [...]

There was some promising news. Valero Energy Corp. said power was restored to its big St. Charles, La., refinery, enabling employees to start repairs. Two of the major pipelines that distribute oil and gasoline from the gulf also were back up, but running well below their normal capacity.

The White House, in another step aimed at easing the crisis, waived rules requiring that only U.S.-flagged ships could carry oil between U.S. ports so that foreign vessels could help get products to refiners faster.

Bush also has temporarily lifted clean-air rules for gasoline and lent crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Valero, whose Gulf Coast refineries are low on crude.

Gasoline prices had been rising in California and nationwide because of tight supplies even before the hurricane hit. Hawaii had taken the unusual step of imposing caps on its gas prices.

Bernard Picchi, senior managing director at Foresight Research Solutions, said the surge in gas prices was causing "a huge drain in people's disposable incomes," and could soon become "exactly the kind of wake-up call" that would spark widespread conservation.

Gosselin reported from Washington, Peltz from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Richard Simon in Washington, Claire Hoffman in Los Angeles and special correspondent Dana Calvo in Houston contributed to this report.

An antigay activist group based in Philadelphia says that the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina reflects God's judgment on New Orleans for hosting the gay Southern Decadence party.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Repent America described "homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets" at the annual event, which draws some 125,000 revelers to the Big Easy each Labor Day weekend.

"Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city," said Repent America director Michael Marcavage. "May it never be the same."

Marcavage is a notorious foe of gays. He and three other Repent America members were charged with felonies last year connected with a demonstration they staged at Philadelphia's gay pride observance. A judge dismissed all charges in February.

The head of the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church responded to Marcavage's assessment of the tragedy. The Reverend Doctor Cindy Love said she doesn't believe God punishes anyone with natural disasters. "I really believe that the use of scripture in this way is an affront to the life and love of Jesus Christ," she said. (Sirius/OutQ)

In New Orleans, state officials have described the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a national disgrace.

And increasingly across the country, questions are being asked: "How could this happen?" "Why is help taking so long?" and "How can thousands of Americans be stranded?".

President George Bush was visiting some of the devastated areas of the south on Friday amid growing anger over the federal response to the disaster.

Officials insist their response has been effective - rejecting widespread criticism that the administration was too slow to react to the crisis. [...]

The head of the New Orleans emergency operations, Terry Ebbert, has questioned when reinforcements will actually reach the increasingly lawless city.

"This is a national disgrace. Fema has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," Mr Ebbert said.

"We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

One man, George Turner, who was still waiting to be evacuated, summed up much of the anger felt by the refugees.

"Why is it that the most powerful country on the face of the Earth takes so long to help so many sick and so many elderly people?" he asked.

"Why? That's all I want to ask President Bush."

And John Rhinehart, the administrator of a New Orleans hospital without power and water, said: "I'm beginning to wonder if the government is more concerned about the looting than people who are dying in these hospitals."

There is widespread agreement among commentators that somewhere there has been a breakdown in the system.

The Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi asked: "Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in south Mississippi been pressed into service?" [...]

President George Bush has conceded the initial response to Hurricane Katrina was "not acceptable" but has said every effort is being made to save lives.

Heavily-armed National Guardsmen have begun pouring into New Orleans, where thousands remain stranded without food or water amid rising lawlessness.

A large military convoy carrying aid also entered the city on Friday.

Visiting the region, Mr Bush said order would be restored and New Orleans would emerge from its "darkest days".

"My attitude is, if it's not going exactly right, we're going to make it go exactly right. If there's problems, then we'll address the problems," Mr Bush said.

"Every life is precious and so we are going to spend a lot of time saving lives, whether it be in New Orleans or on the coast of Mississippi. We have a responsibility to help clean up this mess."

Speaking in Mobile, Alabama, Mr Bush said a $10.5bn (£5.7bn) emergency aid approved by the Senate was "just a small down-payment" on the cost of helping people rebuild.

He went on to visit Biloxi, on the Mississippi coast, where he comforted a woman who wept as she described how she had lost everything. [...]

The BBC's Matt Frei, in New Orleans, says conditions in the convention centre, where up to 20,000 people are stranded, are the most wretched he has seen anywhere, including crises in the Third World.

"You've got an entire nursing home evacuated five days ago - people in wheelchairs sitting there and slowly dying," he says. [...]

The situation has been made worse by a lack of trust between the mainly poor, African-American population left behind in New Orleans and the predominately white police force, our correspondent adds.

Up to 60,000 people could still be stranded in the city, the US coastguard says. [...]

The muddy floodwaters are now toxic with fuel, battery acid, rubbish and raw sewage.

According to the White House, about 90,000 sq miles (234,000 sq km) have been affected by the hurricane.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a five-day, tabletop exercise last summer, emergency preparedness officials faced an imaginary "worst-case scenario" in which a hurricane hit the New Orleans, Louisiana, area.

A fictional Category 3 Hurricane Pam, with "winds of 120 mph, up to 20 inches of rain... and a storm surge that topped the levees," was the picture presented to officials from 50 federal, local and volunteer organizations, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency dispatch from July 23, 2004.

Participants drew up action plans for dealing with the storm's aftermath in which calls for evacuation were partially heeded, water pumps were overwhelmed, corpses floated in the streets and as many as 60,000 people died -- mostly by drowning.

FEMA Director Michael Brown told CNN's Larry King on Wednesday, "When I became the director of FEMA a couple of years ago, I decided it was time we did some really serious catastrophic disaster planning. So the president gave me money through our budget to do that. And we went around the country to figure out what's the best model we can do for a catastrophic disaster in this country? And we picked New Orleans, Louisiana."

Organizers said "Hurricane Pam" was based on weather and damage information developed by the National Weather Service and other agencies.

"Hurricane Katrina caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated," Brown said Wednesday. "So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

A Department of Homeland Security document described the resulting action plans from last year's exercise: Participants determined a need for 1,000 shelters for 100 days. They decided they already had 784 and would need to find the remainder.

The state of Louisiana had resources to operate shelters for three to five days, and plans were made for how federal and other sources could replenish those.

The document also lists the allocation of up to 800 searchers for search-and-rescue operations and plans for disposing of more than 30 million cubic yards of debris and hazardous waste. The group of participants also devised plans for immunization against diseases, the re-supplying of hospitals and establishment of triages at university campuses.

After the drill, FEMA concluded that progress had been made, and that hurricane planning would continue.

But one of the drill participants, Col. Michael L. Brown, then-deputy director of the Louisiana emergency preparedness department, told the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper that, in a worst-case scenario, there would be only so much government agencies could do.

"Residents need to know they'll be on their own for several days in a situation like this," Brown, who is not related to the FEMA director, told the paper.

(CNN) -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the slow pace of federal and state relief efforts in an expletive-laced interview with local radio station WWL-AM.

The following is a transcript of WWL correspondent Garland Robinette's interview with Nagin on Thursday night. Robinette asked the mayor about his conversation with President Bush:

NAGIN: I told him we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice. And that I have been all around this city, and I am very frustrated because we are not able to marshal resources and we're outmanned in just about every respect.

You know the reason why the looters got out of control? Because we had most of our resources saving people, thousands of people that were stuck in attics, man, old ladies. ... You pull off the doggone ventilator vent and you look down there and they're standing in there in water up to their freaking necks.

And they don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn -- excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed.

WWL: Did you say to the president of the United States, "I need the military in here"?

NAGIN: I said, "I need everything."

Now, I will tell you this -- and I give the president some credit on this -- he sent one John Wayne dude down here that can get some stuff done, and his name is [Lt.] Gen. [Russel] Honore.

And he came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving. And he's getting some stuff done.

They ought to give that guy -- if they don't want to give it to me, give him full authority to get the job done, and we can save some people.

WWL: What do you need right now to get control of this situation?

NAGIN: I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.

I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."

That's -- they're thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy.

I've got 15,000 to 20,000 people over at the convention center. It's bursting at the seams. The poor people in Plaquemines Parish. ... We don't have anything, and we're sharing with our brothers in Plaquemines Parish.

It's awful down here, man.

WWL: Do you believe that the president is seeing this, holding a news conference on it but can't do anything until [Louisiana Gov.] Kathleen Blanco requested him to do it? And do you know whether or not she has made that request?

NAGIN: I have no idea what they're doing. But I will tell you this: You know, God is looking down on all this, and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying and they're dying by the hundreds, I'm willing to bet you.

We're getting reports and calls that are breaking my heart, from people saying, "I've been in my attic. I can't take it anymore. The water is up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out." And that's happening as we speak.

You know what really upsets me, Garland? We told everybody the importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, "Please, please take care of this. We don't care what you do. Figure it out."

WWL: Who'd you say that to?

NAGIN: Everybody: the governor, Homeland Security, FEMA. You name it, we said it.

And they allowed that pumping station next to Pumping Station 6 to go under water. Our sewage and water board people ... stayed there and endangered their lives.

And what happened when that pumping station went down, the water started flowing again in the city, and it starting getting to levels that probably killed more people.

In addition to that, we had water flowing through the pipes in the city. That's a power station over there.

So there's no water flowing anywhere on the east bank of Orleans Parish. So our critical water supply was destroyed because of lack of action.

WWL: Why couldn't they drop the 3,000-pound sandbags or the containers that they were talking about earlier? Was it an engineering feat that just couldn't be done?

NAGIN: They said it was some pulleys that they had to manufacture. But, you know, in a state of emergency, man, you are creative, you figure out ways to get stuff done.

Then they told me that they went overnight, and they built 17 concrete structures and they had the pulleys on them and they were going to drop them.

I flew over that thing yesterday, and it's in the same shape that it was after the storm hit. There is nothing happening. And they're feeding the public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying down here.

WWL: If some of the public called and they're right, that there's a law that the president, that the federal government can't do anything without local or state requests, would you request martial law?

NAGIN: I've already called for martial law in the city of New Orleans. We did that a few days ago.

WWL: Did the governor do that, too?

NAGIN: I don't know. I don't think so.

But we called for martial law when we realized that the looting was getting out of control. And we redirected all of our police officers back to patrolling the streets. They were dead-tired from saving people, but they worked all night because we thought this thing was going to blow wide open last night. And so we redirected all of our resources, and we hold it under check.

I'm not sure if we can do that another night with the current resources.

And I am telling you right now: They're showing all these reports of people looting and doing all that weird stuff, and they are doing that, but people are desperate and they're trying to find food and water, the majority of them.

Now you got some knuckleheads out there, and they are taking advantage of this lawless -- this situation where, you know, we can't really control it, and they're doing some awful, awful things. But that's a small majority of the people. Most people are looking to try and survive.

And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders. People don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it.

You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will.

And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun.

WWL: Well, you and I must be in the minority. Because apparently there's a section of our citizenry out there that thinks because of a law that says the federal government can't come in unless requested by the proper people, that everything that's going on to this point has been done as good as it can possibly be.

NAGIN: Really?

WWL: I know you don't feel that way.

NAGIN: Well, did the tsunami victims request? Did it go through a formal process to request?

You know, did the Iraqi people request that we go in there? Did they ask us to go in there? What is more important?

And I'll tell you, man, I'm probably going get in a whole bunch of trouble. I'm probably going to get in so much trouble it ain't even funny. You probably won't even want to deal with me after this interview is over.

WWL: You and I will be in the funny place together.

NAGIN: But we authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick. After 9/11, we gave the president unprecedented powers lickety-quick to take care of New York and other places.

Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up -- you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.

You know, I'm not one of those drug addicts. I am thinking very clearly.

And I don't know whose problem it is. I don't know whether it's the governor's problem. I don't know whether it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now.

WWL: What can we do here?

NAGIN: Keep talking about it.

WWL: We'll do that. What else can we do?

NAGIN: Organize people to write letters and make calls to their congressmen, to the president, to the governor. Flood their doggone offices with requests to do something. This is ridiculous.

I don't want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can't even count.

Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.

WWL: I'll say it right now, you're the only politician that's called and called for arms like this. And if -- whatever it takes, the governor, president -- whatever law precedent it takes, whatever it takes, I bet that the people listening to you are on your side.

NAGIN: Well, I hope so, Garland. I am just -- I'm at the point now where it don't matter. People are dying. They don't have homes. They don't have jobs. The city of New Orleans will never be the same in this time.

WWL: We're both pretty speechless here.

NAGIN: Yeah, I don't know what to say. I got to go.

WWL: OK. Keep in touch. Keep in touch.

From a speech by Bush at the Rose Garden May 2004:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 - Faced with one of the worst political crises of his administration, President Bush abruptly overhauled his September schedule on Saturday as the White House scrambled to gain control of a situation that Republicans said threatened to undermine Mr. Bush's second-term agenda and the party's long-term ambitions.

In a sign of the mounting anxiety at the White House, Mr. Bush made a rare Saturday appearance in the Rose Garden before live television cameras to announce that he was dispatching additional active-duty troops to the Gulf Coast. He struck a more somber tone than he had at times on Friday during a daylong tour of the disaster region, when he had joked at the airport in New Orleans about the fun he had had in his younger days in Houston. His demeanor on Saturday was similar to that of his most somber speeches after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Comment: After four days of doing nothing, Bush finally sends in the troops to begin the relief effort. People are dead and dying in the aftermath of Katrina, and all the Leader of the Free World can talk about is how much fun he had in his younger days in Houston??

"The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," said Mr. Bush, slightly exaggerating the stricken land area. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."

The president was flanked by his high military and emergency command: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As Mr. Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser, listened on the sidelines, as did Dan Bartlett, the counselor to the president and Mr. Bush's overseer of communications strategy. Their presence underscored how seriously the White House is reacting to the political crisis it faces.

"Where our response is not working, we'll make it right," Mr. Bush said, as Mr. Bartlett, with a script in his hand, followed closely.

His speech came as analysts and some Republicans warned that the White House's response to the crisis in New Orleans, which has been widely seen as slow and ineffectual, could further undermine Mr. Bush's authority at a time when he was already under fire, endangering his Congressional agenda.

Mr. Chertoff said Saturday: "Not an hour goes by that we do not spend a lot of time thinking about the people who are actively suffering. The United States, as the president has said, is going to move heaven and earth to rescue, feed, shelter" victims of the storm.

The White House said Mr. Bush would return to Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday, scrapping his plans for a Labor Day address in Maryland. The rest of Mr. Bush's schedule next week was in flux.

The White House also postponed a major visit to Washington next week by President Hu Jintao of China. In a statement issued on Saturday, the White House said both Mr. Hu and Mr. Bush had agreed that "in the present circumstances, it was best not to have" the meeting, which would have demanded much of the president's attention over the next days on growing difficulties between the United States and China over trade frictions, North Korea's nuclear program and China's military buildup.

The last-minute overhaul of the president's plans reflected what analysts and some Republicans said was a long-term threat to Mr. Bush's presidency created by the perception that the White House had failed to respond to the crisis. Several said the political fallout over the hurricane could complicate a second-term agenda that includes major changes to Social Security, the tax code and the immigration system.

"This is very much going to divert the agenda," said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire Republican with ties to the White House. "Some of this is momentary. I think the Bush capital will be rapidly replenished if they begin to respond here."

Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Yale University, said: "The possibility for very serious damage to the administration exists. The unmistakable conclusion one would draw from this was this was a massive administration failure."

And Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, urged Mr. Bush to quickly propose a rebuilding plan for New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, arguing that an ambitious gesture could restore his power in Congress. [...]

The silence of many prominent Democrats reflects their conclusion that the president is on treacherous political ground and that attacking him would permit the White House to dismiss the criticism as partisan politics-as-usual, a senior Democratic aide said.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, disputed the notion that Mr. Bush's long-term political viability was endangered and said Saturday that he was confident the administration would be able to push ahead successfully with its second-term agenda. "There are a number of priorities, and we will address all of them," he said.

For all the enormity of the destruction and the lingering uncertainty about how many years it will take to "rebuild the great city of New Orleans," as Mr. Bush said in his remarks on Saturday, some Republicans suggested that the impact could prove fleeting in this age of fast-moving events, and that Mr. Bush's visit to the region on Friday had helped some in addressing concerns about his response.

"Next Tuesday the Roberts hearings start, and that's going to occupy a significant part of the daily coverage," said Richard N. Bond, a former Republican chairman, referring to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. [...]

But Mr. Bush, reflecting concern within the White House about the president's standing among blacks, notably said in his radio address that "we have a responsibility to our brothers and sisters all along the Gulf Coast, and we will not rest until we get this right and the job is done."

Both Republicans and Democrats noted that the reaction to the crisis has been nothing like what happened after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when both parties joined in a bipartisan show of unity in the face of a clear and identifiable outside threat.

Hurricane Katrina struck at a time, they said, when Mr. Bush was already in a weakened state, with his approval rating in many national polls at the lowest level of his presidency and his political capital in Washington diminishing. [...]

Charities and the federal government launched what aid agencies predicted could be the longest and costliest relief effort in U.S. history, as workers began arriving last night in states devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and as the U.S. military organized an intensive response by already stretched National Guard and active duty forces.

The American Red Cross, working in concert with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called its plan to house and feed tens of thousands of people its biggest response to a single natural disaster in the organization's 124-year history. With deep flooding that may not recede for weeks in areas across three states, charities said thousands could remain homeless for more than a year and that the rebuilding would probably take even longer.

"This disaster response is going to exceed our response to last year's back-to-back four hurricanes" in Florida, said Red Cross spokeswoman Devorah Goldburg. That effort included serving 16.5 million meals and providing the equivalent of 430,000 nights of shelter. "We're anticipating that Katrina will exceed those numbers."

The needs were as immense as they were varied, ranging from urgent search-and-rescue requests to pressing demands for shelter and clean water, and daunting longer-range challenges that were barely coming into focus last night.

The Air Force, Navy and Army began mobilizing troops and equipment to augment National Guard units, including helicopters with night-search gear and amphibious watercraft with civilian teams for rescuing stranded citizens. The Navy and U.S. Merchant Marine readied five ships in Norfolk and Baltimore: the hospital ship USNS Comfort, as well as helicopter-carrying vessels and ships that can carry landing craft, construction equipment, Humvees, forklifts, food, fuel and water-purification equipment.

'Sheer magnitude'

For the first time, the Pentagon yesterday created a joint domestic task force -- headed by a three-star general and based in Mississippi -- to coordinate emergency operations by Guard and active-duty forces across four states. Driving the U.S. military response was the realization of the "sheer magnitude" of the catastrophe once dawn broke, said Michael Kucharek, spokesman for U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs.

The Red Cross had opened more than 200 shelters yesterday in concert with FEMA, which mobilized before the storm when President Bush designated Louisiana and Mississippi disaster areas. That allowed FEMA rescue workers to bring in water, ice and ready-to-eat meals before Katrina hit.

While rescue units pulled stranded residents from floodwater yesterday, a 50-member FEMA team was in Louisiana, making plans to buy, order and move hundreds of thousands of mobile homes into the area. FEMA will reimburse flood victims for rental housing, FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule said. The need was made more urgent yesterday when Louisiana officials decided to evacuate the Superdome, a city-designated shelter damaged by wind and flooding and made miserable for its inhabitants by a lack of electricity and clean water. [...]

Floodwaters 'holding us back'

"We're getting phone calls asking for teams to rescue people still trapped in their homes," especially in New Orleans and the Mississippi cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, said Maj. George Hood, national community relations secretary for the Salvation Army. The charity was feeding and housing storm victims on the perimeters of the disaster. "We have a team 400 or 500 people in Jackson, Mississippi, [waiting for] the green light, but it's the floodwaters holding us back," Hood said. Accurate information about the disaster area was scarce, "because nothing is working," he said. [...]

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans began the gruesome task of collecting its thousands of dead on Sunday as the Bush administration tried to save face after its botched rescue plans left the city at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina.

Except for rescue workers and scattered groups of people, streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring Texas and other states.

Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger: "We have been abandoned by our own country, " Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press.

"It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," Broussard said. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitude that al Qaeda-linked Web sites called evidence of the "wrath of God" striking America, National Guard troops and U.S. marshals patrolled the city, stricken in the days after the hurricane by anarchic violence and looting. [...]

President George W. Bush, who in a rare admission of error, conceded on Friday that the results of his administration's relief efforts were unacceptable, said on Saturday he would send 7,200 more active-duty troops over three days.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured a medical facility at New Orleans' international airport on Sunday. He spoke and shook hands with military and rescue officials but walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was touring the Mobile, Alabama, area, in her native state.

A further 10,000 National Guard troops were being sent to storm-hit Louisiana and Mississippi, raising the total to 40,000. A total of 54,000 military personnel are now committed to relief efforts.

Lawmakers promised to allocate more relief money in coming weeks after Bush signed a $10.5 billion aid package for Gulf Coast areas hit by Katrina. [...]

'TWO CATASTROPHES'

Defending the administration's response and disaster planning, Chertoff said the hurricane and flood in New Orleans were "two catastrophes" that presented an unprecedented challenge.

"That perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners and maybe anybody's foresight," the homeland security chief said.

Critics have said the Federal Emergency Management Agency has lost its effectiveness since it became part of the Homeland Security Department in a post-September 11 reorganization.

Rice was slammed by critics on the Internet after she attended a New York performance of the Monty Python musical "Spamalot" on Wednesday, a day after New Orleans flooded.

After returning to Washington, she defended the administration against charges the slow government response and prolonged suffering of New Orleans' predominantly black storm victims were signs of racial neglect.

"That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I just don't believe it," said Rice, the administration's highest-ranking black official.

Comment: Condi is apparently unaware of the numerous instances in US history where minorities were treated as an inferior people. As an African-American woman, it is difficult to believe that she actually is so profoundly ignorant. She is clearly grasping at straws to defend Bush.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Bush administration officials were blaming state and local authorities for the disaster response problems. The newspaper said the administration was rebuffed in an effort to take control of police and National Guard units reporting to Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat.

Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans.

"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff said.

He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise."

But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail.

Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck the Gulf Coast on September 29.

Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina, Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Brown suggested FEMA -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- was carrying out a prepared plan, rather than having to suddenly create a new one.

Chertoff argued that authorities actually had assumed that "there would be overflow from the levee, maybe a small break in the levee. The collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the very fast flooding of the city was not envisioned."

He added: "There will be plenty of time to go back and say we should hypothesize evermore apocalyptic combinations of catastrophes. Be that as it may, I'm telling you this is what the planners had in front of them. They were confronted with a second wave that they did not have built into the plan, but using the tools they had, we have to move forward and adapt."

But New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture.

"We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported.

Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said.

In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city. (Read: "Times-Picayune" Special Report: Washing awayexternal link)

Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario. [...]

But Chertoff seemed unaware of all the warnings. [...]

Chertoff also argued that authorities did not have much notice that the storm would be so powerful and could make a direct hit on New Orleans.

"It wasn't until comparatively late, shortly before -- a day, maybe a day and a half, before landfall -- that it became clear that this was going to be a Category 4 or 5 hurricane headed for the New Orleans area."

As far back as Friday, August 26, the National Hurricane Center was predicting the storm could be a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, with New Orleans directly in its path. Still, storms do change paths, so the possibility existed that it might not hit the city.

But the National Weather Service prediction proved almost perfect. [...]

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster.

"I look at FEMA and I shake my head," said a furious Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday, calling the response "an embarrassment."

President Bush, after touring the Big Easy, said he was "not satisfied" with the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation.
And U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch predicted there would be hearings on Capitol Hill over the mishandled operation.

Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

"We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records," explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. "This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years," she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

"He was asked to resign," Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president's re-election campaign.

The White House last night defended Brown's appointment. A spokesman noted Brown served as FEMA deputy director and general counsel before taking the top job, and that he has now overseen the response to "more than 164 declared disasters and emergencies," including last year's record-setting hurricane season.

Les Evenchick, an independent Green who lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans in a 3-story walkup, reports that 90 percent of the so-called looters are simply grabbing water, food, diapers and medicines, because the federal and state officials have refused to provide these basic necessities.

Les says that "it's only because of the looters that non-looters -- old people, sick people, small children -- are able to survive."

Those people who stole televisions and large non-emergency items have been selling them, Les reports (having witnessed several of these "exchanges") so that they could get enough money together to leave the area.

Think about it:

- People were told to leave, but all the bus stations had closed down the night before and the personnel sent packing.

- Many people couldn't afford tickets anyway.

- Many people are stranded, and others are refusing to leave their homes, pets, etc. They don't have cars.

You want people to stop looting? Provide the means for them to eat, and to leave the area.

Some tourists in the Monteleone Hotel paid $25,000 for 10 buses. The buses were sent (I guess there were many buses available, if you paid the price!) but the military confiscated them to use not for transporting people in the Dome but for the military. The tourists were not allowed to leave. Instead, the military ordered the tourists to the now-infamous Convention Center.

How simple it would have been for the State and/or US government to have provided buses for people before the hurricane hit, and throughout this week. Even evacuating 100,000 people trapped there -- that's 3,000 buses, less than come into Washington D.C. for some of the giant antiwar demonstrations there. Even at $2,500 a pop -- highway robbery -- that would only be a total of $7.5 million for transporting all of those who did not have the means to leave.

Instead, look at the human and economic cost of not doing that!

So why didn't they do that?

On Wednesday a number of Greens tried to bring a large amount of water to the SuperDome. They were prevented from doing so, as have many others. Why have food and water been blocked from reaching tens of thousands of poor people?

On Thursday, the government used the excuse that there were some very scattered gunshots (two or three instances only) -- around 1/50th of the number of gunshots that occur in New York City on an average day -- to shut down voluntary rescue operations and to scrounge for 5,000 National Guard troops fully armed, with "shoot to kill" orders -- at a huge economic cost.

They even refused to allow voluntary workers who had rescued over 1,000 people in boats over the previous days to continue on Thursday, using the several gunshots (and who knows who shot off those rounds?) to say "It's too dangerous". The volunteers didn't think the gunshots were dangerous to them and wanted to continue their rescue operations and had to be "convinced" at gunpoint to "cease and desist."

There is something sinister going down -- it's not just incompetence or negligence.

How could FEMA and Homeland Security not have something so basic as bottled drinking water in the SuperDome, which was long a part of the hurricane plan? One police officer in charge of his 120-person unit said yesterday that his squad was provided with only 70 small bottles of water.

Two years ago, New Orleans residents -- the only area in the entire state that voted in huge numbers against the candidacy of George Bush -- also fought off attempts to privatize the drinking water supply. There have also been major battles to block Shell Oil's attempt to build a Liquid Natural Gas facility, and to prevent the teardown of public housing (which failed), with the Mayor lining up in the latter two issues on the side of the oil companies and the developers.

One of the first acts of Governor Kathleen Blanco (a Democrat, by the way) during this crisis was to turn off the drinking water, to force people to evacuate. There was no health reason to turn it off, as the water is drawn into a separate system from the Mississippi River, not the polluted lake, and purified through self-powered purification plants separate from the main electric grid. If necessary, people could have been told to boil their water -- strangely, the municipal natural gas used in stoves was still functioning properly as of Thursday night!

There are thousands of New Orleans residents who are refusing to evacuate because they don't want to leave their pets, their homes, or who have no money to do so nor place to go. The government -- which could have and should have provided water and food to residents of New Orleans -- has not done so intentionally to force people to evacuate by starving them out. This is a crime of the gravest sort.

We need to understand that the capability has been there from the start to drive water and food right up to the convention center, as those roads have been clear -- it's how the National Guard drove into the city.

Let me say this again: The government is intentionally not allowing food or water in.

This is for real.

MSNBC interviewed dozens of people who had gotten out. Every single one of them was white.

The people who are poor (primarily Black but many poor Whites as well) are finally being allowed to leave the horrendous conditions in the SuperDome; many are being bussed to the AstroDome in Houston.

Call them "People of the Dome."

If people resist the National Guard coming to remove them against their will, will New Orleans become known as the first battle in the new American revolution?

Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

NEW ORLEANS - People left homeless by Hurricane Katrina told horrific stories of rape, murder and trigger happy guards in two New Orleans centers that were set up as shelters but became places of violence and terror.

Police and National Guard troops on Saturday closed down the two centers -- the Superdome arena and the city's convention centre -- but then penned them in outside in sweltering heat to keep them from trying to walk out of the city.

Military helicopters and buses staged a massive evacuation to take away thousands of people who waited in orderly lines in stifling heat outside the flooded convention centre.

The refugees, who were waiting to be taken to sports stadiums and other huge shelters across Texas and northern Louisiana, described how the convention centre and the Superdome became lawless hellholes beset by rape and murder.

Several residents of the impromptu shantytown recounted two horrific incidents where those charged with keeping people safe had killed them instead.

In one, a young man was run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer, in another a man seeking help was gunned down by a National Guard soldier, witnesses said.

Police here refused to discuss or confirm either incident. National Guard spokesman Lt. Col Pete Schneider said "I have not heard any information of a weapon being discharged."

"They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told Reuters. "A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing lorry of them, and he jumped up on the truck's windscreen and they shot him dead."

Wade Batiste, 48, recounted another tale of horror.

"Last night at 8 p.m. they shot a kid of just 16. He was just crossing the street. They ran him over, the New Orleans police did, and then they got out of the car and shot him in the head," Batiste said.

The young man's body lay in the street by the Convention Center's entrance on Saturday morning, covered in a black blanket, a stream of congealed blood staining the street around him. Nearby his family sat in shock.

A member of that family, Africa Brumfield, 32, confirmed the incident but declined to be quoted about it, saying her family did not wish to discuss it. But she spoke of general conditions here.

"There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave," she said through tears.

People here said there were now 22 bodies of adults and children stored inside the building, but troops guarding the building refused to confirm that and threatened to beat reporters seeking access to the makeshift morgue.

People trying to walk out are forced back at gunpoint - something troops said was for their own safety. "It's sad, but how far do you think they would get," one soldier said.

"They have us living here like animals," said Wvonnette Grace-Jordan, here with five children, the youngest only six weeks old. "We have only had two meals, we have no medicine and now there are thousands of people defecating in the streets. This is wrong. This is the United States of America."

One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of punishment from his commanding officer said of the lack of medical attention at the centre, "They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here."

The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, "We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq."

Across town at the Superdome, where as many as 38,000 refugees camped out until Wednesday night when evacuation buses first came, the 4,000 still there were corralled outside, hoping to get on four waiting buses with seats for only 200.

The scene at the sports stadium was one of abject filth. Crammed into a small area after the building was shut to them last night, those remaining sat amid heaps of garbage, piled in places waist high. The stench of human waste pervaded the interior of the now vacant stadium.

One police officer told Reuters there were 100 people in a makeshift morgue at the Superdome, mostly people who died of heat exhaustion, and that six babies had been born there since last Saturday, when people arrived to take shelter.

At the arena, too, there was much talk of bedlam after dark.

"We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom," one National Guard soldier told Reuters. "Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death."

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, California -- Air-raid sirens, Frank Sinatra songs and Muhammad Ali trash talk blared over the Southern California desert in a demonstration of new acoustic technology for crowd control and disaster communications.

In mid-90's morning heat at Edwards Air Force Base, HPV Technologies and American Technology demonstrated prototypes of non-lethal sonic devices for a group of military and law enforcement guests, including representatives of the U.K. Home Office.

Representatives of both companies say that within days, they will ship some units of their respective products to areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, so authorities can use the tools for crowd control, aid distribution and rescue operations.

Costa Mesa, California-based HPV showed off three sizes of its Magnetic Acoustic Device, or MAD, a black square panel composed of multiple speakers. The units on display ranged from about 4 to 10 feet across.

The device uses magnets approximately 6 inches tall and 9.25 inches wide to convert electrical pulses into sound waves, and is capable of aiming sound precisely for thousands of feet -- like the sonic equivalent of a laser, or spotlight.

Its path and reach can be affected by environmental factors such as nearby flat surfaces, hills, bodies of water or strong bursts of wind.

A series of test sounds beamed out by MAD, including gunfire, music and instructional commands, were audible and intelligible at distances of up to a mile.

When a subject is at close range in MAD's sonic path, and it is set to high volume, the sound can be excruciating.

The ability to broadcast instructions or alerts at great distances with minimal distortion could be useful for authorities and rescue crews in areas where other communications systems are unavailable.

American Technology is donating four devices -- three MRADs (medium-range acoustic devices) and one LRAD (long-range acoustic device). The four devices will be shipped out Friday to a Marine military police unit that is deploying to the Gulf States area for disaster-relief efforts.

"We are donating the use of one of our most powerful prototypes, LTPMS-2, for use in Mississippi as soon as possible, because the governor of that state said that the biggest problem they have right now is the fact that they have no communications infrastructure to get information or instructions out to people," he said. "They can very easily put this on a truck and send sound out for a minimum of at least a mile in either direction."

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which hosted the event as a guest of the Air Force base, is considering using MAD to replace conventional public address systems and as a non-lethal "area denial option" -- a way to clear crowds in civil unrest without using chemical agents, rubber bullets or the like.

"You don't appreciate how powerful this stuff is until you stand a mile away and can't see the transmitter -- but can hear every word in a Queen song," said Cmdr. Sid Heal, who heads the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department technology exploration program. "At a quarter mile, it sounds as clear as a car radio; at a half a mile, you have to raise your voice to talk to the guy next to you; at three quarters of a mile, laborers raking up leaves were putting in music requests."

NEW ORLEANS - Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said on Saturday.

Some officers told their superiors they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm.

The absences come during a period of extraordinary stress for the New Orleans Police Department. For nearly a week, many of its 1,500 members have had to work around the clock, trying to cope with flooding, an overwhelming crush of refugees, looters and occasional snipers.

P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police, said most of his officers were staying at their posts. But in an unusual note of sympathy for a top police official, he said it was understandable that many were frustrated. He said morale was "not very good."

"If I put you out on the street and made you get into gun battles all day with no place to urinate and no place to defecate, I don't think you would be too happy either," Mr. Compass said in an interview. "Our vehicles can't get any gas. The water in the street is contaminated. My officers are walking around in wet shoes."

Fire Department officials said they did not know of any firefighters who had quit. But they, too, were sympathetic to struggling emergency workers.

W. J. Riley, the assistant superintendent of police, said there were about 1,200 officers on duty on Saturday. He said the department was not sure how many officers had decided to abandon their posts and how many simply could not get to work.

Mr. Riley said some of the officers who left the force "couldn't handle the pressure" and were "certainly not the people we need in this department."

He said, "The others are not here because they lost a spouse, or their family or their home was destroyed."

Police officials did not identify the officers who took their lives, one on Saturday and the other the day before. But they said one had been a patrol officer, who a senior officer said "was absolutely outstanding." The other was an aide to Mr. Compass. The superintendent said his aide had lost his home in the hurricane and had been unable to find his family.

Because of the hurricane, many police officers and firefighters have been isolated and unable to report for duty. Others evacuated their families and have been unable to get back to New Orleans.

Still, some officers simply appear to have given up.

A Baton Rouge police officer said he had a friend on the New Orleans force who told him he threw his badge out a car window in disgust just after fleeing the city into neighboring Jefferson Parish as the hurricane approached. The Baton Rouge officer would not give his name, citing a department policy banning comments to the news media.

The officer said he had also heard of an incident in which two men in a New Orleans police cruiser were stopped in Baton Rouge on suspicion of driving a stolen squad car. The men were, in fact, New Orleans officers who had ditched their uniforms and were trying to reach a town in north Louisiana, the officer said.

"They were doing everything to get out of New Orleans," he said. "They didn't have the resources to do the job, or a plan, so they left."

The result is an even heavier burden on those who are patrolling the street, rescuing flood victims and trying to fight fires with no running water, no electricity, no reliable telephones.

Police and fire officials have been begging federal authorities for assistance and criticizing a lack of federal response for several days.

"We need help," said Charles Parent, the superintendent of the Fire Department. Mr. Parent again appealed in an interview on Saturday for replacement fire trucks and radio equipment from federal authorities. And Mr. Compass again appealed for more federal help.

"When I have officers committing suicide," Mr. Compass said, "I think we've reached a point when I don't know what more it's going to take to get the attention of those in control of the response."

The National Guard has come under criticism for not moving more quickly into New Orleans. Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, the head of the National Guard Bureau, told reporters on Saturday that the Guard had not moved in sooner because it had not anticipated the collapse of civilian law enforcement. [...]

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."

"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."

"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."

They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.

Comment: No wonder Americans are forbidden from even visiting Cuba. They might find out just how bad their situation has become in the "Greatest Democracy on Earth"...

After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."

Our federal and local governments had more than ample warning that hurricanes, which are growing in intensity thanks to global warming, could destroy New Orleans. Yet, instead of heeding those warnings, Bush set about to prevent states from controlling global warming, weaken FEMA, and cut the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee construction in New Orleans by $71.2 million, a 44 percent reduction.

Bush sent nearly half our National Guard troops and high-water Humvees to fight in an unnecessary war in Iraq. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Paris in New Orleans, noted a year ago, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."

An Editor and Publisher article Wednesday said the Army Corps of Engineers "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain," which caused a slowdown of work on flood control and sinking levees.

"This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide," said Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the corps.

Unlike in Cuba, where homeland security means keeping the country secure from deadly natural disasters as well as foreign invasions, Bush has failed to keep our people safe. "On a fundamental level," Paul Krugman wrote in yesterday's New York Times, "our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on prevention measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice."

During the 2004 election campaign, vice presidential candidate John Edwards spoke of "the two Americas." It seems unfathomable how people can shoot at rescue workers. Yet, after the beating of Rodney King aired on televisions across the country, poor, desperate, hungry people in Watts took over their neighborhoods, burning and looting. Their anger, which had seethed below the surface for so long, erupted. That's what's happening now in New Orleans. And we, mostly white, people of privilege, rarely catch a glimpse of this other America.

"I think a lot of it has to do with race and class," said Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reached a breaking point Thursday night. "You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources we need? Come on, man!"

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had boasted earlier in the day that FEMA and other federal agencies have done a "magnificent job" under the circumstances.

But, said, Nagin, "They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying. Get off your asses and let's do something!"

When asked about the looting, the mayor said that except for a few "knuckleheads," it is the result of desperate people trying to find food and water to survive.

Nagin blamed the outbreak of violence and crime on drug addicts who have been cut off from their drug supplies, wandering the city, "looking to take the edge off their jones."

When Hurricane Ivan hit Cuba, no curfew was imposed; yet, no looting or violence took place. Everyone was in the same boat.

Fidel Castro, who has compared his government's preparations for Hurricane Ivan to the island's long-standing preparations for an invasion by the United States, said, "We've been preparing for this for 45 years."

On Thursday, Cuba's National Assembly sent a message of solidarity to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It says the Cuban people have followed closely the news of the hurricane damage in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and the news has caused pain and sadness. The message notes that the hardest hit are African-Americans, Latino workers, and the poor, who still wait to be rescued and taken to secure places, and who have suffered the most fatalities and homelessness. The message concludes by saying that the entire world must feel this tragedy as its own.

Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h o u t, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.

WHITE HOUSE -- President Bush heads back to America's Gulf Coast today (Monday) for an update on efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It will be his second visit to the storm-ravaged area in four days.

This is the Labor Day Holiday in the United States. But there is no celebration along the Gulf Coast, where many are focusing on surviving from one day to the next.

Soldiers and supplies have been pouring into the region, and the chaos that plagued so many communities has begun to ease.

But a week after the hurricane struck, search and rescue efforts are continuing, with stranded storm victims being plucked one by one off rooftops in the hard-hit city of New Orleans. Hundreds-of-thousands of people are displaced, and many towns are piles of rubble and debris. [...]

NEW ORLEANS - Police shot and killed at least five people Sunday after gunmen opened fire on a group of contractors traveling across a bridge on their way to make repairs, authorities said.

Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot at eight people carrying guns, killing five or six.

Fourteen contractors were traveling across the Danziger Bridge under police escort when they came under fire, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.

They were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to help plug the breech in the 17th Street Canal, Hall said.

None of the contractors was injured, Mike Rogers, a disaster relief coordinator with the Army Corps of Engineers, told reporters in Baton Rouge.

The bridge spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

No other details were immediately available.

Associated Press reports that at least five people shot dead by police as they walked across a New Orleans bridge yesterday were contractors working for the US Defence department.

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal. The contractors were on their way across the bridge to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to fix the 17th Street Canal, according to the spokesman.

The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, across a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River.

Early on Sunday, Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley of New Orleans said police shot at eight people, killing five or six.

No other details were immediately available.

NEW YORK Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."

The former First Lady's remarks were aired this evening on National Public Radio's "Marketplace" program.

She was part of a group in Houston today at the Astrodome that included her husband and former President Bill Clinton, who were chosen by her son, the current president, to head fundraising efforts for the recovery. Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama were also present.

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.

KBR was assigned the work under a "construction capabilities" contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to repair New Orleans' levees.

Imagine an America where everyone is displaced. It's survival of the fittest as all law and order has broken down. Martial law has been declared with 24 hr curfews, Posse Comitatus has been overturned and there are troops on the streets shooting anyone who disobeys their orders. Thousands and thousands of people are starving but the authorities will not allow aid in any significant amounts. Large crowds are quelled with the use of sonic lasers, whilst overhead drone aircraft monitor the area, checking for any anomalous activity.

Any form of Local and State government has been abandoned and officials have been forcibly removed against their wills. The elite infiltrators of the Federal Government watch on from afar, in control of everything, answering to no one and getting fat off the profits of their own corrupt inactivity which brought about the situation in the first instance. They like it that way, it suits them down to the ground, why should they do anything to improve the situation?

This is the nightmare situation of a New World Order takeover in America. It is what we have been warning the world about for years. It is no longer some distant possibility on the horizon that our children may have to endure and fight against, it is here, it is now. New Orleans is a testing ground for this exact scenario, all this is going on there now. We are witnessing in New Orleans, the construction of a microcosm for a "New America" and a New World Order.

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break

The overriding issue that is simply being ignored by the mainstream media is that it was the federal government itself that lowered the guard in cutting off key funding to protect Louisiana from natural disasters.

The New Orleans district of the US Army Corps of Engineers bore the brunt of a record $71.2 million reduction in federal funding for fiscal year 2006.

The Army Corps of Engineers sought $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans, while the White House slashed the request to about $40 million. Congress finally approved $42.2 million, less than half of the agency's request

A report from the Best of New Orleans news website outlines the details.

"...Among emergency specialists, 'mitigation' -- the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters -- is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half. Communities across the country must now compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars."

The Bush administration's move to merge FEMA with Homeland Security meant that the two had to compete for funding. Straightforward projects that would have massively reduced the devastation we are now seeing, such as raising houses, were cast aside in favor of anti-terrorism measures.

In early 2001, FEMA issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City!. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war.

Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana was quoted on June 8, 2004 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, as saying "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us".

Ultimately, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities here," Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the corps has said.

Much of the Netherlands lies below sea level and after the 1953 flood which killed 1,800 people, the Dutch launched a major flood prevention program called the Delta Plan. Engineers fortified dykes and bolstered other water defenses against a future disaster and there hasn't been one since. Had a similar project been in place for New Orleans and had Bush not cut the funding, the misery and turmoil being visited on that area would have been avoided.

Not only is the Bush Administration directly responsible for the ferocity of this disaster, the blame also lies with Clinton. 10 years ago, the Clinton administration cut 98 flood control projects, including one in New Orleans, saying such efforts should be local projects, not national.

A $120 million hurricane project, approved and financed annually from 1965 was killed by the Clinton administration after being approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was designed to protect more than 140,000 West Bank residents east of the Harvey Canal.

The New York Times has reported that there were vivid reasons to push for the greatest level of protection. One was Hurricane Betsy, a midgrade storm that swamped much of New Orleans in 1965. In 1969, Hurricane Camille, the second-most-powerful Atlantic storm recorded, passed within 60 miles and demolished the Mississippi coast.

Bob Sheets, a meteorologist who directed the National Hurricane Center until retiring in 1995, has said that he and other federal forecasters gave hundreds of talks about storm risks, and New Orleans was always the case study for catastrophe since the 1970s. He has said of the city officials: "Essentially they did nothing."

Furthermore, the mainstream media, despite several reports emerging to the contrary, republished Bush's comments. The New York Times declared that "The response will be dissected for years. But on Thursday, disaster experts and frustrated officials said a crucial shortcoming may have been the failure to predict that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of the city would be breached, not just overflow."

This April 2005 article in Popular Science proves that Bush's comments were grossly inaccurate. "At 20 feet below sea level, new Orleans is a prime target. An ambitious new levee system would decrease the risk."

As World Net Daily reported, a year ago, New Orleans reviewed its hurricane disaster plans after Hurricane Ivan gave the city a major scare forcing the evacuation of nearly 1 million people from the area. Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin both acknowledged after the Ivan near miss they needed a better evacuation plan.

Even the AP noted at the time, "New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are significant flaws in the Big Easy's civil disaster plans." The big flaws were that there simply were no civil disaster plans and FEMA had no intention of developing any.

So it is clear that Officials at the Army Corps of Engineers and emergency managers and hurricane experts knew for years, that the levees surrounding the New Orleans area were built to withstand only a relatively weak Category 3 hurricane. Hurricane Katrina, a Category 4 mega-storm, thus had devastating consequences. Still funding was slashed and the disaster was allowed to happen.

When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay

In the aftermath of the disaster it has become obvious that the Government has no interest in alleviating the suffering and helping to restore civility in the region.

In particular FEMA, which has endlessly drilled for such situations, has been a key hindrance. After the authorities in Baton Rouge had prepared a field hospital for victims of the storm, FEMA sent its first batch of supplies, all of which were designed for use against chemical attack, including drugs such as Cipro, which is designed for use against anthrax. The London Guardian reported, "We called them up and asked them: 'Why did you send that, and they said that's what it says in the book'," said a Baton Rouge official.

Yet don't think for one second that FEMA is simply incompetent. FEMA is criminally negligent. FEMA has done nothing to aid the situation, in fact there have been reports that FEMA has cut emergency communication lines and has been turning back fuel and water supplies being sent by outside agencies such as Wal Mart. This is because the Federal Government wants complete control over the situation.

Even American Red Cross officials have said that FEMA authorities would not allow them to deliver aid. "The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans," said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross.

Even Jack Cafferty, the CNN anchor known for his straight-talking, has declared: "I remember the riots in Watts. I remember the earthquake in San Francisco. I remember a lot of things. I have never seen anything as badly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can't sandwiches be dropped to those people in that Superdome down there? It's a disgrace. And don't think the world isn't watching."

Former FEMA officials have admitted that Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck. Ronald Castleman, the former regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said they were bewildered by the slow FEMA response.

We even have blogs from former New Orleans residents who have managed to get to safety. One exclaiming that:

"There are supplies sitting in Baton Rouge for the folks in New Orleans, but the National Guard has the city surrounded and is not letting anyone in or out. They are turning away people with s[QUOTE]upplies, claiming it is too dangerous...Our goverment is KILLING the people of New Orleans. This is the message I am now sending to all major media sources, national and worldwide, as well as posting to email lists, blogs, etc. The story is getting out that the people there are not getting supplies, but the truth of WHY is not. "

The LA Times interviewed a survivor who said, "The only thing the authorities have given us is a bunch of false hope,". she had survived Tuesday through Friday on scavenged scraps of food inside the cavernous hall. "They just left us here to die."

The Federal response was further criticised by New Orleans deputy police commander W.S. Riley who reported to AFP that Guardsmen 'played cards' as the chaos unfolded and many were dying. He stated that for three days there was no assistance. "The guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They drove their trucks in and went to sleep."

There have also been suggestions that part of the levee around N.O. was dynamited after the first section broke in an attempt to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater.

Reports and comments from officials today have indicated that President Bush's visit is nothing more than a staged photo op.

ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time. The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF. [War And Piece]

"2 minutes ago the President drove past in his convoy. But what has happened in Biloxi all day long is truly unbelievable. Suddenly recovery units appeared, suddenly bulldozers were there, those hadn't been seen here all the days before, and this in an area, in which it really wouldn't be necessary to do a big clean up, because far and wide nobody lives here anymore, the people are more inland in the city...The extent of the natural disaster shocked me, but the extent of the staging is shocking me at least the same way. With that back to Hamburg." [Daily Kos]

White House officials do not deny that they craft elaborate events to showcase Bush, but they maintain that these events are designed to accurately dramatize his policies and to convey qualities about him that are real.

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans has called for the firing of FEMA director Michael Brown and has heavily criticized the government for its awful response.

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard has charged that Federal bureaucrats have 'Murdered' the Flood Victims in New Orleans. Yet Broussard also stated that "FEMA needs more congressional funding. It needs more presidential support . . . FEMA needs to be empowered to do the things it was created to do."

FEMA is now simply a federalized front group for the corrupt money hoarding Department of Homeland Security, the Orwellian titled agency that has nothing to do with security and everything to do with limiting the freedoms of people all over the country. Local officials no longer have any authority and have been forcibly evacuated, even despite the fact that they wished to stay and oversee the recovery efforts.

Mayor Nagin has also said that the National Guard's Blackhawk helicopter carrying the sandbags to plug the hole in the levee on 17th St. Canal was intentionally diverted away. Nagin was quoted as demanding to federal officials "Get Off Your Asses And Do Something". Nagin is clearly paranoid about the whole situation, is running around playing the part of the good cop to FEMA's bad cop. This sets the table for FEMA to sweep in and heroically save the day at a later date. Nagin has also warned "If the CIA slips me something and next week you don't see me, you'll all know what happened."

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

Martial law was declared in New Orleans midday Tuesday 30th August. Posse Comitatus has been overturned and the National Guard has authorization to shoot and kill anyone they deem to be "hoodlums". Governor Kathleen Blanco has declared that "These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets,".

This is a microcosm of the New America. The LA Times reported that "their mission simply, is to turn New Orleans into a police State - to "regain the city" as 1st Sgt. John Jewell has said. Police have been ordered to stop saving lives and start saving property by shooting anyone who attempt to get food and water. The police are looting themselves to stay alive whilst the ordinary people are starving. This is the new police state America.

Some of the most sophisticated military equipment used in the Iraq war to quell the insurgency is now being used in New Orleans. We have continually highlighted how such equipment was developed specifically for domestic use and now this has come to pass. Five Silver Fox "unmanned aerial vehicles," or UAVs, equipped with thermal imaging technology to detect the body heat of storm survivors, have been deployed in New Orleans.

Also being deployed are acoustic devices for crowd control and disaster communications, sonic Laser equipment that is currently in use in Iraq. The device uses magnets approximately 6 inches tall and 9.25 inches wide to convert electrical pulses into sound waves, and is capable of aiming sound precisely for thousands of feet. This allows for the ability to blast out orders that can be heard for miles and allows for crowds to be fired upon and dispersed by soundwaves.

Those who fall in line with the curfews and the orders are still treated like criminals in this New America. Footage has shown that men women and even children are being separated and thoroughly frisked and searched before being rescued. It seems that survival comes second to being a civilian subject.

The ground troops have begun "combat operations" "to take this city back" in the aftermath from those they have termed "insurgents". These are terms also being used in Iraq, but now they fit perfectly here to describe anyone who disobeys or does not fall in line in the New America. The troops have declared their shock at having to shoot at US citizens and being shot back at, yet the majority of these people are deliberately being deprived of food and water by the federal authorities, they are desperate and have been forced into this situation.

Those who were grabbed in the immediate aftermath were shipped into the Superdome and simply left there without any aid. This represents nothing more than a concentration camp as starving and thirsty refugees were not allowed to leave, trapped until the authorities deemed it appropriate to move them.

The media covering the event have been appalled by this activity and the reality of the New America it seems is sinking in in some instances. Fox reporter Geraldo Rivera was filled with tears in his eyes and his voice fluttered with sorrow as he made an on-air plea to authorities to allow the estimated 30,000 storm victims at the center to be allowed to move to a safer, cleaner area. "Let them walk out of here, let them walk the hell out of here!"

Checkpoints have been set up throughout the area to make sure no one leaves and no one gets in without the say so of the federal authorities. It is clear that an emergency response should not be conducted this way. It is also clear that this is no ordinary emergency response. This is a blueprint, a litmus test for the New America, the police state, the New World Order.

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move

Whilst the disaster evolves it has already been decided who will restore order and who will reap the profits of the lucrative cleanup contracts. Dick Cheney affiliated Halliburton have again been rewarded that task as they have so many times. After 9/11, in Afghanistan and in Iraq Halliburton and the elite government infiltrators reap the rewards again and again. Last week Alex Jones joked on his how that Halliburton may get the contract to clean up - the sad reality is that even the things we joke about are now coming to pass every time.

The agenda is clear, they allow the disaster to happen, or they manufacture the disaster in the case of 9/11, and then they reap the financial rewards first and the control mechanism rewards that categorize their New America a little later.

It has also emerged that FEMA Outsourced the disaster plans to political cronies and major donors. They outsourced the hurricane recovery planning to the Baton Rouge-based consulting firm Innovative Emergency Management (IEM), Inc. IEM's team partners for the more than $500,000 contract are Dewberry of Arlington, VA, URS Corporation of San Francisco, and James Lee Witt Associates. Witt was FEMA Director under Bill Clinton. IEM's president is Madhu Beriwal. The company was founded in 1985. Dewberry and URS are engineering firms. IEM is also a Defense Department contractor and has contracts with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) along with team members Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin.

These people all have their hands in the honey pot, they benefit from such tragic events, wars and disasters every time

Going down... going down now... going down...

We have seen recently the precedent being set for the eventuality we now see unfolding. The constant ratcheting up of fear based control through the exploitation of terror attacks and terror alerts. The technology that we have monitored through its development stages is now being put into place.

Everything we have covered over the last few years is becoming an actuality in New Orleans at this time. We can only report it further and get the important information out in place of controlled mainstream media that refuse to or are prevented from reporting the real issues.

This is a major event in the agenda for a New America and a New World Order and it may be a make or break one.

This New America is being controlled by corrupt elite criminals who seek to achieve the degradation and enslavement of humanity through war, "revolution," sickness, starvation, depression, and now "natural" disaster. A disaster has been turned into a drill for martial law. This is not an accident. It is part of a relentless process of demoralization designed to make the people accept tyranny and excessive control over their lives.

One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina's potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control.

"At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans," Brendan Loy, who is 23 and has no formal meteorological training, wrote on Aug. 26 in his blog. "If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case."

Loy's posting that Friday afternoon came three days before the hurricane struck and two days before the mayor of New Orleans, Ray C. Nagin, issued an evacuation order. Posts over the next several days, in aggregate, seem now like an eerie rewriting of the tale of Chicken Little, in which the sky does in fact fall.

In the cooperative and competitive world of blogs, Loy's has gotten some serious praise. Mickey Kaus, whose kausfiles blog is featured on Slate.com, wrote on Friday that "Loy's blog for the past week is a pretty extraordinary document," adding that "it should maybe be in the Smithsonian, if you can put a blog in the Smithsonian."

Glenn Reynolds, who blogs at Instapundit.com, linked to Loy's Web site several times beginning on Aug. 26. That's the Internet equivalent of a northeaster, and all over, blogs started linking to Loy's. (Jeff Masters and Charles Fenwick, among others, also gave early and dire warnings about New Orleans on their highly trafficked weather blogs.)

According to Blog Pulse from Intelliseek, which measures blog links, Loy's was the most frequently cited nonnews source among hurricane-related blogs. On Aug. 28, it was ranked 14th among most frequently linked-to sites of all sorts.

That was more weight than Loy, who weighs 160 and is 6 foot 2, is accustomed to throwing around. A second-year law student at Notre Dame, he began blogging in 2002--writing about football (his blog's name combines Notre Dame's football team, the Fighting Irish, with that of his college team, the Trojans of the University of Southern California), his cats, his dog, his fiancee Becky, the Red Sox, politics, "The Lord of the Rings" and weather.

"Hurricane Hugo was the first storm that I paid attention to, when I was 7 or 8," he said in a telephone interview from South Bend, Ind. "I found them fascinating and became kind of a weather nerd, watching the Weather Channel religiously." Loy joined online discussions with other hurricane watchers, and monitored the National Hurricane Center's Web site, whose satellite pictures he regularly posts and analyzes on his blog.

He called for Mayor Nagin to issue an evacuation order days before the mayor issued one, and his posts on the subject grew increasingly agitated. "It's definitely true that I am more willing to pull the trigger," he acknowledged, "because I don't have to deal with the consequences if they had had an evacuation and the storm hadn't hit. It's easy for me to sit here and say, 'Everyone leave.'"

He derives little pleasure from being proved right. "The results are so dire, and I knew they would be so dire, that I was fervently praying that I'd be wrong. There's always some vindication that comes from being right, but I would much rather have been wrong and be getting 1,000 hits a day now instead of 25,000."

Classes started last week, and Loy has put an end to all-night blogging. Recent entries have been as likely to be about his cats or football as Katrina. He will keep chasing hurricane information, but he says that if a hurricane approached him, he would heed his own advice.

"As much as I'm enthralled by high waves and strong winds," he said, "I understand the powers of these things. I might leave the computer running and have a Webcam hooked up and hope the power didn't go out so I could see what was happening from a remote location, but I wouldn't stick around."

Racism in America doesn't dress up in a cowl and flowing white robes anymore. Instead, it dons an immaculate blue suit and tie and conceals itself behind the lofty language of democracy, freedom and human dignity; but, it's racism all the same.

We've seen an explosion of racism in America since George Bush took office. It started out after 9-11 and was aimed exclusively at Muslims; a vulnerable group with a paltry voice in government. The administration took full advantage of their political weakness by tossing whomever they chose in prison without due process and without concern for their personal health or safety. Many, of course, were brutalized and traumatized by a system that still boldly touted human rights from the presidential podium.

It was all lies.

The cruelty and inhumanity has steadily escalated over the last five years; the predictable outcome whenever sadism and arrogance replace the rule of law. The chronicle of abusive treatment at American facilities across the globe is vast and extensive, and stories abound of the imaginative and finely-detailed methods of maximizing human suffering. Although they may have failed at everything else, the Bush administration has proved to be an astute practitioner of torture.

The primary target of these crimes has been Muslims. There are no Christian or Jewish inmates at either Guantanamo nor Abu Ghraib. In fact, there are especially lenient laws for Israeli spies who steal top-secret information from the Pentagon and pass it on through their respective lobbies. Both of the indicted leaders of AIPAC, the American-Israeli lobby, have been released on bond while Muslims, who have been charged with no crime at all, continue to languish in Guantanamo Bay. This is the current state of America's apartheid judicial system.

New Orleans adds a new chapter to the Bush digest of calculated bigotry. While the wealthy white families were able to beat a hasty retreat out of doomed city, the poor and black were left to sink in the toxic stew unleashed by America's greatest natural disaster.

No one who saw the televised footage of the Convention center and the Superdome had any misgivings about what they were seeing. America's long-lost companion, racial-hatred, had stuck its ugly head up into the camera lens and was pouring out onto living rooms across the land.

Bush critic Michael Moore may have summarized the feelings of the nation best when he noted, "C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport"..."Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh!"

Moore's right; the brunt of the catastrophe was directed at society's cast-offs; the poor and black who couldn't simply load up the $40,000 SUV and take off. They were left to face the rising waters and the government neglect without any prospect of real assistance. When you can't buy your way out, you're left to rot; that's how the "invisible hand" of the free market operates. The message is clear; if you have nothing, you are nothing.

Americans have been patting themselves on the back for years about the great strides that have been made in civil rights and social justice. It's all rubbish. Just take a look at the faces of the people who were left to drown in the noxious soup of a force-4 hurricane. We all know who these people are; they are the "other America"; the America that is scrupulously kept out of the media so that the narrative of prosperity, equality and justice can flood the airwaves like the effluent coursing down Bourbon Street. Nothing has been accomplished in civil rights. Even the band-aid programs like bussing, welfare and affirmative action have been dismantled by people who believe that we all begin life on a level playing field.

What nonsense.

There's no level playing field anymore than there is "compassionate conservatism"; Bush proved that by withholding food and water from starving people for 3 days.

What we all saw last week on national TV was the moral equivalent of the Rodney King beating multiplied times 30,000; that's the number of people locked away in the feces-infected Superdome. It gave us a good look into America's dark-heart, where the evil secret we keep tucked-away in a vault can always be denied; racism.

Abandoning those people during a national tragedy was the most blatant, despicable act of racism I've seen in my 53 years of life. The beating of Rodney King pales by comparison.

Presently, the African Americans who were stranded in New Orleans are being trundled off to the four corners of the Western states where they'll be disposed of quietly in filthy encampments or religious facilities. Their rage and frustration sent shivers of distress through the body politic and put a hefty dent in our collective sense of self-esteem. Once again, Bush and his vindictive troupe have proved that it is always possible to sink ever-lower in the bottomless well of moral corruption.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

George, you call yourself a Christian. You claim that you invaded Iraq because I told you to. You say that you were anointed to lead America.

George, don't you remember that My greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself? I sent Hurricane Katrina to test you, so that you could show Me and the world that you truly are compassionate, as you claim, that you truly are a capable leader, as you claim, that you truly listen to Me and carry out My will.

Instead, you showed the world your callous indifference, and your inability or unwillingness to assume leadership in a time of crisis. Your failure has cost thousands of lives, people who could have been rescued and sustained. Your failure has further besmirched the reputation of your government, which has shown itself to be an unfeeling and incompetent bunch, caring only about enriching themselves and gathering power.

Do you not recall My words:

Trust not in oppression, and become not vain in robbery: if riches increase, set not your heart upon them.

But your response to My test, hurricane Katrina, was to ignore the victims and instead do some political fundraising, and then send in the Marines when law and order broke down.

You failed the test, George.

You blew it.

Carol Wolman, MD is a psychiatrist and antiwar activist. She can be reached at: cwolman@mcn.org

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.

But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.

Instead of secretive "Deep Throat" meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.

Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.

They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.

Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.

It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.

'Lies or ignorance'

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.

The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.

This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the "mainstream liberal media elite".

But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.

Comment: Speaking of looters, check out this video that shows New Orleans police officers "looting" a Wal-Mart alongside other residents.

On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.

As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.

And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.

Iraq concern

When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing "a heck of a job" and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.

The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.

It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury.

And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.

The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.

He and others are calling the debacle the "anti 9-11": "The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled," he wrote on Sunday.

"Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield."

Media emboldened

It is way too early to tell whether this really will become "Katrinagate" for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.

Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.

Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.

Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively.

The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.

People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.

Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.

Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.

The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: "We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.

"Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame."

As Americans began heading home from the Labor Day weekend, gasoline stations today continued to report spot shortages, but the country appeared, at least as of this afternoon, to have avoided the massive supply problems that some had feared.

Throughout the weekend, station attendants and analysts said they saw unrelenting demand from drivers who were worried they would find themselves stranded, were panicked by rumors about service stations closing early, or both.

Officials said they continued to make progress in resuming the production and distribution of gasoline and other fuels, which was severely disrupted by Hurricane Katrina last week. But they noted that most refineries and oil production in and along the Gulf of Mexico remained shut down for the seventh day in a row.

Gasoline demand was heaviest along busy thoroughfares between big population centers and vacation destinations, often knocking out several gasoline stations along heavy traffic routes for hours to days at a time.

"It could three or five stations on one stretch running out, that's a fairly real situation that is happening," said Justin McNaull, a spokesman for AAA, formerly known as the American Automobile Association.

Mr. McNaull added that his group had not received any reports of motorists stranded in tourist destinations unable to return home because they could not refuel. "The challenge that gas station operators are having now is not knowing when the next shipment is coming and how much they will be getting," he said. [...]

Nationally, the average retail price for gasoline was $3.057 a gallon this morning, up from $2.867 on Sunday and $2.307 a month ago, according to AAA.

In the New York region, prices seemed to range from $2.95 a gallon to $3.75 a gallon, according to a spot survey done by the staffs of Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and John Corzine, Democrat of New Jersey. Both politicians called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate gasoline price increases and suggested it might help to lift the federal gasoline tax at least temporarily.

Gasoline supplies will likely remain tight through much of the coming week if not longer, industry officials and analysts said, as refiners slowly resume operations in the gulf region. It can take several days to restart those facilities, because of the danger of explosions and other accidents.

Of the 10 refineries that were shut down by the storm initially, eight have not resumed operations, two are restarting and hope to be operational in the coming days, and three still do not have electricity, the Energy Department said on Sunday.

At least four refiners that produce about 5 percent of the nation's gasoline and other oil-based fuels have sustained significant damage and could be out of commission for a month or more for repairs, officials and analysts said. Among them are ConocoPhillips' Belle Chase, La. facility; Exxon Mobil's Chalmette, La. plant; and ChevronTexaco's large refinery in Pascagoula, Miss. [...]

Having repaired the breach in one of the main levees, workers under the orders of engineers yesterday began to pump out the waters that have been covering 80% of New Orleans. However, the residents and authorities alike know very well that what will be revealed will not be at all pleasant. "It'll be ugly and be another wakeup call for the nation," warned the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin. He said it would take three weeks to pump out the water and another few weeks to clear away the rubble caused by the hurricane.

United States President George W. Bush announced that he would be leading the inquiry into the way the disaster caused by Katrina was handled. "What I intend to do is to lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong, but the enquiry won't be pointing the finger at anyone. We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there's a WMD attack or another major storm."

Comment: That's funny - we seem to recall quite a bit of finger pointing on the part of the Bush administration. The Bush gang claimed that the lack of response was Democratic Louisiana governor Blanco's fault. Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff then claimed the government didn't know that Katrina could be so devastating. He also said that the National Guard took a long time to mobilize enough civilian soldiers to begin the relief efforts. Obviously, the only reason Bush said there will be no finger pointing from this point forward in an inquiry that he has decided to lead himself is that he does not want anyone pointing the finger at him again. Some major media outlets that had started to attack Bush at first now seem to be back in his corner.

Emergency teams continue to rescue people from their homes (in many cases from their apartments on the upper floors) and from the places used as some kind of shelter. "In some cases it's dead easy. They are sitting in front of their front doors clutching their bags. But some don't want to leave and we can't force them," said Joe Youdell, a member of the Kentucky Air National Guard. [...]

Britons returning from New Orleans have described the horrifying conditions there.

They were among the thousands forced to seek refuge from the floods that engulfed the city following Hurricane Katrina.

Some 96 Britons still remain unaccounted for. [...]

JENNY SACHS

Jenny Sachs, of Sheffield, told how soldiers had to smuggle her out of the Superdome in secret.

She was one of about 30 Britons who, realising they could not escape the city, had fled to the stadium for shelter.

"It has hit me more now I am at home, when you can have clean water, how bad it was," she said.

She said people had been raped and that others were beaten up.

"A guy was brought in who had seven stab wounds and was covered in blood."

The military told all non-US citizens to stay together for safety, Ms Sachs added.

They later told them they would be secretly smuggled out in groups of 10 under cover of darkness as it had become too dangerous for them to remain in the stadium, she told BBC News.

"When we were leaving, people were going 'Where are you going?' and giving us looks.

"But the military got us out, which we were all thankful for." [...]

MIKE BROCKEN

Radio Merseyside presenter Mike Brocken, from Chester, was on holiday in New Orleans with his wife and teenage daughter when the hurricane hit.

The family stayed in the hotel for the first few days and then decided to move to the Superdome, as looting was becoming widespread in the city.

"The situation was becoming more and more dangerous all the time - it was horrific really and by Wednesday dinnertime our hotel had run out of diesel for its generator so everything was closing down.

"We were going to go inside the Superdome. I approached two members of the National Guard and they said to stay outside because they knew it was hell in there."

Mr Brocken said members of the National Guard took him and his family "under their wing" and saw that they were placed in the baseball stadium.

"Everyone talks about the National Guard in rather derogatory ways historically, but I've got to say that but for them, and one man in particular, I may well have lost my family." [...]

Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Regan administration.

Roberts followed up his commentary Impeach Bush Now, Before More Die with an interview on The Alex Jones show on Monday 5th September 2005. The former Assistant Secretary had noted of the New Orleans disaster "If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history." and went on to spell out how the disaster was left to happen. He succeeded these comments on Monday by laying out the facts again and asserting that the Federal government has been criminally negligent and should be held up to accountability.

Mr Roberts believed that such comments would bring him much criticism from so called Patriots (the flag waving kind), yet he was surprised at the amount of people who agreed and even informed him that it was far worse then what he'd gone on record with.

Roberts reviewed the way in which the federal government had slashed funding for flood prevention schemes and pumped everything into the war in Iraq and the war on Terror. He also went on to admit that the military was turning on the people, treating them as subjects, overturning the Posse Comitatus Act.

Roberts agreed that FEMA has deliberately withheld aid, and cut emergency communication lines, and automatically made the crisis look worse in order to empower the image of a police state emerging to "save the day". He even insinuated that the shoot to kill policy was part of the overall operation in order get an awful precedence set to aid the military industrial complex takeover of America.

"The power of the Federal Government is now greater than at any time, it'll never go back and the Posse Comitatus Act has been eroding ever since it was passed in 1878..." Roberts asserted.

Roberts further commented "There is no excuse for this, we have never had in our history the federal government take a week to respond to a disaster...this is the first time ever that the help was not mobilized in advance. The proper procedure is that everything is mobilized and ready to go"

Mr Roberts commented that the American people are being "brainwashed" and no longer believe what the founding fathers said over and over, that your worst enemy is always your own government and never confuse Patriotism with support for the government. He asserted that the mentality is "like that of the brown shirts that followed Hitler" and that the government is deadly dangerous, "you can't let the military take over policing".

On the question of where this is all leading and what the government is gearing up for, Mr Roberts suggested that "It does look like there is a push coming from inside the bowels of the police authorities and it seems to be independent of whoever the President is or who or whatever party is in office. It just gets worse and it's hard to say that it's Bush doing it, he may not even know what's going on... it's enough for us to say that New Orleans demonstrated massive federal incompetence, if it were laid on private people would be tantamount to criminal negligence... some kind of accountability has to be exercised"

The private corporations own and run everything and are turning America into a third world police state, when questioned as to how we can stop this Mr Roberts stated:

"The longer it goes on it will be harder and harder to stop...It depends on how much resistance or what kind of resistance they meet, but I think one thing we can do is demand accountability for this failure, do not buy the Karl Rove lie that this was a failure of State and Local Government"

Roberts urged listeners to look at the Patriot Act, which suspends Habeas Corpus, where they can now suspend you indefinitely, a massive erosion of civil liberties. He was quick to point out though that we should not assign the government omnipotence, we can make people aware of the situation and try to explain illogical actions that have no reasonable explanation.

Comment: Indeed, the Patriot Act and the laws initially known as Patriot Act II have effectively turned the US into a police state. While a state of martial law does not exist, the laws themselves are in place. In fact, it may be that martial law will never be declared by the administration. It would be far more effective to manipulate the population into willingly relinquishing all their liberties instead of taking them away by force. A terrorist attack here, a crashed economy there, and a few carefully prepared pieces of propaganda fed to the people through a complicit media is all it would take. We note that in the aftermath of Katrina, the many in the media stood up alongside the people in demanding answers from Bush. When the media backed down, the people once again lost their voice. And with Katrina and the death of Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist capturing the headlines, no one even mentions the name "Cindy Sheehan" or questions the Iraq war anymore. In that respect, the Katrina debacle was a blessing for Bush. All eyes are now focused on his role in the relief efforts instead of his role in continuing to lead the nation in the occupation of Iraq.

Roberts read out an email from an emergency management official who said that the feds are involved in everything they do, everything has to be approved by the feds. FEMA sets the table, Mr Roberts suggested, every major agency in New Orleans has been federalized, the State and Local officials have no authority.

"They might screw up occasionally but why is it that NOTHING that was supposed to be done was done?" Roberts questioned.

"The whole problem is...failure, massive unacceptable failure, criminal negligence... it has caused the US it's largest and most strategic international Port through which 25% of all our oil and gas comes... look at the price of gasoline, this is a tremendous impact... I don't see how a recession can be avoided... We have lost our most influential port through what appears to be INTENTIONAL incompetence, it's very hard to understand"

Roberts went on to stress that this event is WORSE than 9/11 because it was announced days ahead of the event and contingency plans were intentionally ignored. The officials on the scene have said there was a complete stand down of the government and intentional incompetence. Furthermore they did nothing ON PURPOSE in order to provoke the resulting chaos and anarchy so they could say "look how out of control everything is - we have to have limits on freedom and troops on the streets."

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration was warned by congressional investigators this summer that some first responders were concerned that their training and equipment was tilting too much toward combatting terrorism rather than natural disasters.

It's too early to tell whether the shift affected the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina. But it led some emergency personnel to raise red flags.

The emphasis changed once the Federal Emergency Management Agency lost its independence and joined the 22-agency Homeland Security Department in March 2003.

The mammoth department was created in 2002 as a response to the lack of coordination prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and its emphasis clearly is terrorism. Officials developed an "all hazards" policy that used the same training exercises and equipment to prepare for two distinct types of disasters: a terrorist attack and an event of nature.

The agency in the past four years awarded $11.3 billion to state and local governments to prepare and respond to a terrorist attack.

Congress' Government Accountability Office reported in July that of 39 first responder departments surveyed, 31 disagreed that the training and grant funds worked for all types of hazards.

"In addition, officials from four first responder departments went on to say that DHS required too much emphasis on terrorism-related activities in requests for equipment and training," the GAO said. [...]

A visibly angry Mayor Daley said the city had offered emergency, medical and technical help to the federal government as early as Sunday to assist people in the areas stricken by Hurricane Katrina, but as of Friday, the only things the feds said they wanted was a single tank truck.

That truck, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency requested to support an Illinois-based medical team, was en route Friday.

"We are ready to provide more help than they have requested. We are just waiting for their call," said Daley, adding that he was "shocked" that no one seemed to want the help.

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he would call for congressional hearings into the federal government's preparations and response.

"The response was achingly slow, and that, I think, is a view shared by Democrats, Republicans, wealthy and poor, black and white," the freshman senator said. "I have not met anybody who has watched this crisis evolve over the last several days who is not just furious at how poorly prepared we appeared to be."

Response 'baffling'

The South Side Democrat called FEMA's slow response "baffling."

"I don't understand how you could have a situation where you've got several days' notice of an enormous hurricane building in the Gulf Coast, you know that New Orleans is 6 feet below sea level. ... The notion that you don't have good plans in place just does not make sense," Obama said.

Obama said he expects his counterparts in Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama will call for congressional hearings, but he is ready if they do not. "It's heartbreaking and infuriating and, I think, is embarrassing to the American people.''

Daley said the city offered 36 members of the firefighters' technical rescue teams, eight emergency medical technicians, search-and-rescue equipment, more than 100 police officers as well as police vehicles and two boats, 29 clinical and 117 non-clinical health workers, a mobile clinic and eight trained personnel, 140 Streets and Sanitation workers and 29 trucks, plus other supplies. City personnel are willing to operate self-sufficiently and would not depend on local authorities for food, water, shelter and other supplies, he said.

Flanked at a Friday press conference by a who's who from city government, religious organizations and business, the mayor also announced formation of the Chicago Helps Fund for storm victims.

"I'm calling upon every resident of Chicago to donate what they can afford, whether it's 50 cents or 50 dollars," the mayor said.

People can make tax-deductible cash or check donations at any of Bank One's 330 Chicago area branches or by check at Chicago Helps, c/o Bank One, 38891 Eagle Way, Chicago 60678-1388. A phone line to take credit card donations will be set up. [...]

WASHINGTON - The federal government's costs related to Hurricane Katrina could easily approach $100 billion, many times as much as for any other natural disaster or the $21 billion allocated for New York City after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"There is no question but that the costs of this are going to exceed the costs of New York City after 9/11 by a significant multiple," predicted Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

Administration officials said today that rescue and relief operations in Louisiana and Alabama are costing well over $500 million a day and are continuing to rise.

Less than four days after Congress approved $10.5 billion in emergency assistance, White House officials said they would be asking for an even bigger amount in the next day or two.

News agencies, quoting congressional officials, said President Bush is likely to ask for an additional $40 billion. But administration officials said that even their second request will itself be only a "stop gap" measure while officials try to make a comprehensive estimate.

Though it is still too early for specific estimates, the costs are all but certain to wreak havoc with Mr. Bush's plans to reduce the federal deficit and possibly his plans to further cut taxes.

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist hastily postponed plans to push for a vote on repealing the estate tax, a move that would benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of households but would cost more than $70 billion a year once fully implemented.

House and Senate leaders are also grappling with their pre-Katrina plan to propose $35 billion in spending cuts over the next five years for entitlement programs like Medicaid, student loans, food stamps and cash welfare payments to low-income families.

Those spending cuts could suddenly prove politically unpalatable to Mr. Bush and Republican lawmakers, who are trying to rebuff criticism that the federal government shortchanged the hurricane's poorest victims.

"Democrats think this is the worst possible time to be cutting taxes for those at the very top and cutting the social safety net of those at the very bottom," said Thomas S. Kahn, staff director for Democrats on the House Budget Committee.

Budget analysts said the magnitude and unique characteristics of Hurricane Katrina make it unlike any previous natural disaster. These are some of the extraordinary costs:

- Providing shelter for as many as 1 million people for months or even a year.

- Assuming a potentially high share of uninsured property losses that stem from flooding, which is not covered by private insurers.

- Providing education and health care to hundreds of thousands of people forced to live outside their home states. Medicaid, which pays for health care to very low-income people, is usually a cost shared by federal and state governments. But administration officials say they expect that the federal government will pick up the full bill for people who were evacuated and that eligibility standards will be relaxed.

"Katrina could easily become a milestone in the history of the federal budget," said Stanley Collender, a longtime Washington budget analyst. "Policies that never would have been considered before could now become standard."

US growth is likely to slow in the remaining months of this year because of Hurricane Katrina's destruction, US Treasury Secretary John Snow says.

Mr Snow forecast that as much as 0.5% may be knocked off the US's annual gross domestic product (GDP).

The US, the world's largest economy, had been expected to grow by close to 3.5% this year.

However, that was before Katrina blew ashore, killing thousands and causing damages of close to $100bn (£55bn).

Oil production facilities in the Gulf of Mexico were hit hard and the subsequent surge in crude and petrol prices are likely to brake US growth, Mr Snow said.

"It would seem to make sense to think that we could see a loss of GDP growth rate in the quarters ahead of a half a percent or so," Mr Snow said late on Tuesday.

See-saw effect

The concern is that consumers will spend less in shops as they have to pay more for fuel and heating, while companies will either have to pass on their higher costs or let them eat into their profits, analysts said.

Mr Snow's comments were echoing an earlier report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

According to the economic think-tank, high world oil prices are here to stay and the price shocks pose a threat to key economies such as the US, UK and Germany.

Growth in the US might "somewhat more subdued" in the second half of 2005, the OECD said.

Despite the concerns, the US is well placed for growth and any slowdown should be short-lived.

Mr Snow said that he expected growth to pick up again in 2006, adding that the reconstruction and repair effort following Katrina would prove to be a powerful economic stimulus.

GDP growth in 2006 should get a boost of 0.5% from rebuilding, Mr Snow estimated.

WASHINGTON -- Hurricane Katrina will reduce employment by 400,000 people in coming months while trimming economic growth by as much as a full percentage point in the second half of this year, according to a Congressional Budget Office assessment obtained by The Associated Press.

The CBO report said that Katrina's impact was likely to be "significant but not overwhelming" to the overall U.S. economy, especially if energy production along the Gulf Coast returns to pre-hurricane levels quickly.

"Last week, it appeared that larger economic impacts might occur, but despite continued uncertainty, progress in opening refineries and restarting pipelines now makes those larger impacts less likely," CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin said in a letter to congressional leaders.

The CBO assessment was in line with the predicted impact of Katrina being made by many private forecasters, who have also cautioned that the effects could be much worse if rising energy prices cause consumers to cut back on their spending.

The CBO report said that it expected economic growth in the second half of the year would be reduced by between 0.5 percentage point and 1 percentage point. It put total job losses at around 400,000.

CBO, the nonpartisan agency that provides economic and budget advice to Congress, said before Katrina struck the expectations were that the economy would grow at an annual rate of between 3 percent and 4 percent in the second half of the year with employment growing by 150,000 to 200,000 workers per month.

NEW ORLEANS - The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims.

An agency spokeswoman said space was needed on the rescue boats and that "the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect."

Comment: It's too bad the people weren't treated with any dignity or respect immediately after the storm hit. If they had been, there probably wouldn't have been a need to censor photographs of the thousands that are expected to be found dead in New Orleans alone.

"We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman said in an e-mailed response to a Reuters inquiry.

The Bush administration also has prevented the news media from photographing flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, which has sparked criticism that the government is trying to block images that put the war in a bad light.

The White House is under fire for its handling of the relief effort, which many officials have charged was slow and bureacratic, contributing to the death and mayhem in New Orleans after the storm struck on Aug. 29.

As the devastation of Hurricane Katrina continues to shock and sadden the nation, the question on many lips is, Who is to blame for the inadequate response?

As a former state legislator who represented the legislative district most impacted by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, I can fully understand and empathize with the people and public officials over the loss of life and property.

Many in the media are turning their eyes toward the federal government, rather than considering the culpability of city and state officials. I am fully aware of the challenges of having a quick and responsive emergency response to a major disaster. And there is definitely a time for accountability; but what isn't fair is to dump on the federal officials and avoid those most responsible--local and state officials who failed to do their job as the first responders. The plain fact is, lives were needlessly lost in New Orleans due to the failure of Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, and the city's mayor, Ray Nagin.

The primary responsibility for dealing with emergencies does not belong to the federal government. It belongs to local and state officials who are charged by law with the management of the crucial first response to disasters. First response should be carried out by local and state emergency personnel under the supervision of the state governor and his emergency operations center.

The actions and inactions of Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin are a national disgrace due to their failure to implement the previously established evacuation plans of the state and city. Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin cannot claim that they were surprised by the extent of the damage and the need to evacuate so many people.

Comment: Blanco and Nagin were not surprised by the extent of the damage. They were publicly surprised by the lack of federal response after the major news networks had broadcast their pleas for assistance. Nagin quite publicly complained that his efforts to strengthen the levees protecting New Orleans were shot down by a federal government that thought it best to divert funds to the occupation of Iraq. Furthermore, it seems that the author believes that Bush can successfully use excuses that Blanco and Nagin cannot.

Detailed written plans were already in place to evacuate more than a million people. The plans projected that 300,000 people would need transportation in the event of a hurricane like Katrina. If the plans had been implemented, thousands of lives would likely have been saved.

In addition to the plans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill 13 months ago, in which widespread flooding supposedly trapped 300,000 people inside New Orleans. The exercise simulated the evacuation of more than a million residents. The problems identified in the simulation apparently were not solved.

Comment: Of course not. The Bush government was too busy reallocating much-needed financial resources to their bogus war on terror.

A year ago, as Hurricane Ivan approached, New Orleans ordered an evacuation but did not use city or school buses to help people evacuate. As a result many of the poorest citizens were unable to evacuate. Fortunately, the hurricane changed course and did not hit New Orleans, but both Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin acknowledged the need for a better evacuation plan. Again, they did not take corrective actions. In 1998, during a threat by Hurricane George, 14,000 people were sent to the Superdome and theft and vandalism were rampant due to inadequate security. Again, these problems were not corrected.

The New Orleans contingency plan is still, as of this writing, on the city's Web site, and states: "The safe evacuation of threatened populations is one of the principle [sic] reasons for developing a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan." But the plan was apparently ignored.

Mayor Nagin was responsible for giving the order for mandatory evacuation and supervising the actual evacuation: His Office of Emergency Preparedness (not the federal government) must coordinate with the state on elements of evacuation and assist in directing the transportation of evacuees to staging areas. Mayor Nagin had to be encouraged by the governor to contact the National Hurricane Center before he finally, belatedly, issued the order for mandatory evacuation. And sadly, it apparently took a personal call from the president to urge the governor to order the mandatory evacuation.

The city's evacuation plan states: "The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas." But even though the city has enough school and transit buses to evacuate 12,000 citizens per fleet run, the mayor did not use them. To compound the problem, the buses were not moved to high ground and were flooded. The plan also states that "special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific lifesaving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed." This was not done.

Comment: And where were these "additional personnel" supposed to come from? The federal government, perhaps?

The evacuation plan warned that "if an evacuation order is issued without the mechanisms needed to disseminate the information to the affected persons, then we face the possibility of having large numbers of people either stranded and left to the mercy of a storm, or left in an area impacted by toxic materials." That is precisely what happened because of the mayor's failure.

Instead of evacuating the people, the mayor ordered the refugees to the Superdome and Convention Center without adequate security and no provisions for food, water and sanitary conditions. As a result people died, and there was even rape committed, in these facilities. Mayor Nagin failed in his responsibility to provide public safety and to manage the orderly evacuation of the citizens of New Orleans. Now he wants to blame Gov. Blanco and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In an emergency the first requirement is for the city's emergency center to be linked to the state emergency operations center. This was not done.

The federal government does not have the authority to intervene in a state emergency without the request of a governor. President Bush declared an emergency prior to Katrina hitting New Orleans, so the only action needed for federal assistance was for Gov. Blanco to request the specific type of assistance she needed. She failed to send a timely request for specific aid.

Comment: Here the author degenerates into blatant lies. Blanco and Nagin were on seen on TV by the entire world requesting help from the federal government for days. Bush finally responded after four days, even though he had ordered the preparation of manpower and equipment - and even declared the region a disaster area - before Katrina struck. In a situation as horrific as the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, are the Bush gang and its supporters really going to argue that an official request was not made, so they couldn't do anything?? Apparently so.

In addition, unlike the governors of New York, Oklahoma and California in past disasters, Gov. Blanco failed to take charge of the situation and ensure that the state emergency operation facility was in constant contact with Mayor Nagin and FEMA. It is likely that thousands of people died because of the failure of Gov. Blanco to implement the state plan, which mentions the possible need to evacuate up to one million people. The plan clearly gives the governor the authority for declaring an emergency, sending in state resources to the disaster area and requesting necessary federal assistance.

State legislators and governors nationwide need to update their contingency plans and the operation procedures for state emergency centers. Hurricane Katrina had been forecast for days, but that will not always be the case with a disaster (think of terrorist attacks). It must be made clear that the governor and locally elected officials are in charge of the "first response."

I am not attempting to excuse some of the delays in FEMA's response. Congress and the president need to take corrective action there, also. However, if citizens expect FEMA to be a first responder to terrorist attacks or other local emergencies (earthquakes, forest fires, volcanoes), they will be disappointed. The federal government's role is to offer aid upon request.

Comment: Again, the request was made publicly - and ignored for days while people died.

The Louisiana Legislature should conduct an immediate investigation into the failures of state and local officials to implement the written emergency plans. The tragedy is not over, and real leadership in the state and local government are essential in the months to come. More importantly, the hurricane season is still upon us, and local and state officials must stay focused on the jobs for which they were elected--and not on the deadly game of passing the emergency buck.

Mr. Williams is president of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a free market public policy research organization in Olympia, Wash.

BEIJING - China's most important state-run newspaper has accused US President George W. Bush and his administration of "negligence of duty" in its response to the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's mouthpiece, said there was no excuse for Bush's slow reaction to the unfolding tragedy.

"For the Bush administration, 'unexpected' perhaps can be a lame excuse, but it can never explain away the government negligence of duty," it said in an opinion piece carried on its English language website Thursday.

"As a matter of fact, ever since 'September 11', the Congress had cut anti-flood allocation to Louisiana, which later became a main reason for the slow rescue work this time," said the officially controlled paper.

"In the face of the hurricane, Americans accepted the challenge but failed to beat it off. This is really a shame on the United States."

It said the anarchy and chaos seen in New Orleans after the hurricane looked to the world like America was "fighting a city war at home".

"New Orleans has become Baghdad," it said.

"People have reason to feel disgusted: when Indonesia was hit by the tsunami last year, everybody lent a helping hand and nobody looted. But now this happened in the United States, showing people another side of this 'civilized country'.

"In fact, it revealed the fragility of American society, as well as despair and disorder in a state of anarchy."

Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and possibly thousands dead after it swept through the Gulf of Mexico coastal region on August 29, causing devastation to New Orleans.

Bush has been lambasted at home for a lag in dispatching troops and relief supplies to the afflicted region despite graphic television images of chaos and neglect.

He has acknowledged shortcomings and promised to lead an inquiry into "what went wrong."

Note: Bradshaw and Slonsky are paramedics frorm California that were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans. Larry Bradsahw is the chief shop steward, Paramedic Chapter, SEIU Local 790; and Lorrie Beth Slonsky is steward, Paramedic Chapter, SEIU Local 790. [California]

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.

On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute they arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

Comment: And who is the commander in chief of the US military...?

By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".

We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist.

There was more suffering than need be.

Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

WASHINGTON - He's been called an idiot, an incompetent and worse. The vilification of federal disaster chief Michael Brown, emerging as chief scapegoat for whatever went wrong in the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, has ratcheted into the stratosphere. Democratic members of Congress are taking numbers to call for his head.

"I would never have appointed such a person," said New York Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"Let's bring in someone who is a professional," urged Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.

A more visceral indictment came from closer to the calamity. Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish near New Orleans, said the bureaucracy "has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area."

"Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot," he told CBS. "Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, just back from a week surveying damage in his home state, allowed that "mistakes were made" but tried to counsel restraint Tuesday as calls for Brown's removal escalated. But even Lott displayed some of the potent emotions spawned by the horrific conditions on the Gulf Coast.

"If somebody said, 'You pick somebody to hammer,' I don't know who I'd pick," he told reporters. "I did threaten to physically beat a couple of people in the last couple of days, figuratively speaking."

It's not uncommon for the Federal Emergency Management Agency - and whoever is in charge at the time - to catch blame in the messy aftermath of disaster.

It happened after Hugo hit South Carolina in 1989 and Andrew struck Florida in 1992.

After Andrew, Mikulski slammed the agency for a "pathetically sluggish" response, and on the ground, Dade County emergency director Kathleen Hale famously summed up the frustration felt throughout the stricken areas when she cried, "Where the hell is the cavalry?"

"There is nothing more powerful than the urge to blame," said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management consultant who helps corporate leaders and other prominent figures try to repair tattered images. "It happens every time. It is a deeply embedded archetype in the human mind."

He said the Brown episode is playing out in classic fashion.

"You can follow the steps," he said. "First, outrage. Second, the headline: 'What went wrong?' Third, the telltale memo that supposedly suggests somebody knew and did nothing. I just don't find this to be unique at all."

Comment: So should we all just pretend that federal officials aren't incompetent in order to avoid being labeled as someone who is reacting based on "a deeply embedded archetype in the human mind"? If FEMA has historically been rather inadequate at dealing with disasters, then why are they still around? Perhaps their recent incorporation into the Department of Homeland Security and their increasing focus on responding to "terrorist attacks" can give us a clue...

Brown, a 50-year-old lawyer, in some ways is an easy target.

The former head of the International Arabian Horse Association, Brown had no background in disaster relief when old college friend and then-FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh hired him to serve as the agency's general counsel in 2001.

"There is a Jay Leno-esque comic undertone to his background," said Dezenhall. "It sort of conjures up a who's-on-first kind of thing."

But the dim view of Brown's qualifications by senators seems to have emerged only in hindsight. Members of both parties seemed little troubled by his background at 2002 Senate hearings that led to his confirmation as deputy FEMA chief.

Indeed, Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who led those hearings, called Brown's long-ago stint as assistant city manager in Edmond, Okla., a "particularly useful experience" because he had responsibility for local emergency services.

As FEMA chief, Brown has pressed for greater attention to natural disaster planning, including strategies for a major hurricane in New Orleans, and he has had to contend with cuts to FEMA's operating budget while more attention was paid to fighting terrorism.

But as the enormity of the Gulf Coast damage gradually came into clearer focus, Brown did not help his case with a number of comments seen as insensitive or ill-advised. For example, he acknowledged last week that he didn't know there were some 20,000 evacuees enduring heinous conditions at the New Orleans convention center until a day after their difficulties had been widely reported in the news.

ABC's Ted Koppel was incredulous as he asked Brown, "Don't you guys watch television? Don't you guys listen to the radio?"

"Forgive me for beating up on you there," Koppel later told Brown, "but you are the only guy from the federal government who is coming out to take your medicine."

The doses keep getting stronger. But, for now at least, President Bush is standing by his embattled FEMA chief.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," the president told him last week.

Comment: The president then continued, "...taking all the blame for me."

And Brown, for his part, is trying to shrug off the criticism.

"People want to lash out at me, lash out at FEMA," he told reporters. "I think that's fine. Just lash out, because my job is to continue to save lives."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has done it again.

Already under fire for its woeful response to Hurricane Katrina, the federal disaster agency appears to have turned hurricane relief donations into a political payoff - until it was challenged.

All last week, FEMA bureaucrats gave prominent placement on the agency's Web site to Operation Blessing, the Virginia-based charity run by controversial right-wing evangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

For anyone wishing to donate only cash, the agency's site listed the names and phone numbers of three groups: the Red Cross, Operation Blessing and America's Second Harvest, a national coalition of food banks.

That first list was followed by a second, longer list of several dozen religious and nonsectarian charities. This second list was for anyone who wanted to give either cash or noncash gifts.

Just as in an ordinary election, however, top ballot position makes it far more likely you'll get noticed and chosen.

The same FEMA list was then disseminated by state and local governments throughout the country. Both Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, for example, placed the same top three FEMA charities on their Hurricane Katrina press releases and Web sites last week.

Those familiar with Robertson and his charity were flabbergasted.

Operation Blessing, with a budget of $190 million, is an integral part of the Robertson empire. Not only is he the chairman of the board, his wife is listed on its latest financial report as its vice president, and one of his sons is on the board of directors.

Back in 1994, during the infamous Rwandan genocide, Robertson used his 700 Club's daily cable operation to appeal to the American public for donations to fly humanitarian supplies into Zaire to save the Rwandan refugees.

The planes purchased by Operation Blessing did a lot more than ferry relief supplies.

An investigation conducted by the Virginia attorney general's office concluded in 1999 that the planes were mostly used to transport mining equipment for a diamond operation run by a for-profit company called African Development Corp.

And who do you think was the principal executive and sole shareholder of the mining company?

You guessed it, Pat Robertson himself.

Robertson had landed the mining concession from his longtime friend Mobutu Sese Seko, then the dictator of Zaire.

Investigators concluded that Operation Blessing "willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements ..."

After the investigation began, Robertson placated state regulators by personally reimbursing his own charity $400,000 and by agreeing to tighten its bookkeeping methods.

Separating Operation Blessing from Robertson's many politically oriented endeavors is not that easy, however.

The biggest single US recipient of the charity's largess, according to its latest financial report, was Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. It received $885,000 in the fiscal year ended March 2004.

Robertson uses that Christian network for some markedly unchristian purposes.

A few years back, he repeatedly defended Charles Taylor, the former brutal dictator of Liberia who is under indictment by a UN tribunal for war crimes.

As with Mobutu in the Congo, Robertson had a personal stake in the matter: He had millions invested in a Liberian gold mine, thanks to Taylor, according to press reports.

Recently, Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Those who know Robertson's record raised such an uproar that on Sunday FEMA suddenly rearranged its entire Web site for hurricane donations.

Gone was Operation Blessing's name and choice location. Replacing it was an alphabetical list of nearly 50 national relief organizations.

At FEMA, they take a while to get things right.

NEW ORLEANS, United States - The prospect of Hurricane Katrina survivors being dragged from their homes loomed larger while lawmakers in Washington locked horns over probing the federal response to the disaster.

With officials saying anywhere between 10,000 to 15,000 people remained in New Orleans, police and soldiers faced some difficult choices in enforcing a mandatory order to empty the city.

Mayor Ray Nagin authorised the use of force on Tuesday but, with a number of residents still awaiting voluntary evacuation, rescue teams have so far postponed physical confrontations with those determined to stay.

Eventually, however, only the diehards will be left.

"Once all the volunteer evacuations have taken place, then we'll concentrate our efforts and our forces to mandatorily evacuate individuals," New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said, promising that his officers would use "the minimal amount of force necessary."

Federal troops have joined in the house-to-house search for survivors, but senior military officers made it clear they would stand back if it came to manhandling people out of their homes.

"When this turns into a law enforcement issue, which we perceive forced evacuation is, regular troops would not be used," said Major General Joseph Inge, deputy commander of the US Northern Command.

As of Wednesday, there were 18,000 active-duty soldiers and 45,000 National Guard troops in the area of the US Gulf coast devastated by Hurricane Katrina on August 29.

The decision to authorise forced evictions was clearly taken reluctantly, with officials anxious to avoid traumatic scenes involving people who have already suffered extreme deprivations since Katrina hit.

In giving the order, Nagin cited the growing threat of disease posed by the putrid waters surrounding the wooden homes of many of the holdouts.

Health authorities said five people evacuated from the Katrina disaster zone had died as a result of contact with contaminated water.

The five had been killed by vibrio vulnificus, "a bacteria that can enter somebody through a cut, a scratch or a wound," said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Other medical officials said the deaths should not be seen as presaging an epidemic, as the bacteria preys mostly on the very old or those already suffering from a chronic illness.

The floodwaters in low-lying New Orleans have receded as US Army engineers have brought more of the city's damaged pumps back in operation.

The drainage process is expected to take close to three months and Nagin warned the country to brace for some "awful" revelations as the dropping water levels reveal more of Katrina's human cost.

The mayor said as many as 10,000 people may have died in the city and a Louisiana health official revealed Wednesday that some 25,000 body bags had been brought into the area.

The city's official death toll currently stands at 83, but that number is certain to rise over the coming week.

In Washington, President George W. Bush asked lawmakers for a further 51.8 billion dollars in emergency funding to cover costs tied to the hurricane relief and recovery effort.

Bush, who has come under fire for the federal response to one of the worst natural disasters in US history, had signed an initial emergency package totalling some 10.5 billion dollars last week.

"We are sparing no effort to help those who have been affected by Katrina and are in need of help," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Congressional leaders, meanwhile, battled over the question of who should handle the inquiry into how the Katrina crisis was managed.

Democrats are demanding an independent probe like the one, at first resisted by Bush, that looked into the September 11, 2001 attacks. They have also started a petition to sack the much-criticised head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown.

Bush's majority Republicans only agreed Wednesday to a joint Senate-House of Representatives investigation to look into the actions of "all levels of government."

After promising to lead his own inquiry, Bush would not say whether any aides would be fired over the slow response that he has admitted was "unacceptable."

A USA Today survey released Wednesday said 42 percent of Americans felt Bush had done his job handling Katrina "badly" or "very badly". Thirty-five percent backed the president's effort.

Comment: In other words, a majority of Americans believe that Bush is at fault - not local officials.

Twenty-five percent criticised local authorities and 18 percent the Louisiana state for the chaos.

Meanwhile Germany dispatched a team of disaster relief workers Thursday to help hurricane victims, the Technisches Hilfswerk (THW) agency said.

The 54-member THW team left the Ramstein US military airport in western Germany bound for New Orleans early Thursday in a C-17 Globemaster transport plane loaded with water pumps and trucks.

A second contingent of 40 aid workers was to leave from Ramstein later Thursday.

The move came as The Washington Times reported that nearly 900 foreign nationals, many of them French and British, are still missing in the areas devastated last week by Hurricane Katrina.

While consular officials consulted by the daily reported some 160 French citizens and 96 Britons missing, Mexicans, especially illegal immigrants, were expected to outnumber all other nationalities, the daily said.

The US State Department Wednesday afternoon told the newspaper that, based on numbers provided by various embassies, 883 foreign nationals were still unaccounted for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

WASHINGTON - The federal government plans to hand out debit cards worth $2,000 each to families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff, under fire for his agency's response to the disaster, held a conference call with governors of states with evacuees and described the plan. While many details remained to be worked out, the plan was to quickly begin distributing the cards, starting with people in major evacuation centers such as the Houston Astrodome.

Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency which is administering the novel card program, said it is aimed at those with the most pressing needs.

"The concept is to get them some cash in hand which allows them, empowers them, to make their own decisions about what do they need to have to start rebuilding," Brown said.

Comment: $2000 won't get them very far in rebuilding anything, especially with the housing bubble...

Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who participated in the conference call, said the cards will be offered "to people in shelters as well as people who are not in shelters but who have evacuated the area and need help." He said the hope is the cards will encourage people to leave shelters voluntarily.

Other FEMA officials warned not all families that fled their homes will be eligible.

"For instance you may have some people who have insurance and insurance is meeting their living expenses while they have been displaced," said Ed Conley, a FEMA spokesman in Houston. "You have some people who may be looking at an option such as a cruise ship where all of their needs are going to be met. It is going to vary by family."

The cards are to be used to help victims purchase food, transportation and other essentials.

It's unclear how much the debit card program will cost the government, but it could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars since hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. [...]

HOUSTON - Three truckloads of fashion clothing seized by government agents for violating import quotas arrived at Houston's Astrodome on Wednesday so Hurricane Katrina refugees there can put it to use.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection delivered about 100,000 items of summer clothing, with an estimated value of $2.3 million, and said much more is on the way to evacuees elsewhere.

"We normally would either sell this merchandise or destroy it," said Robert Trotter, the agency's director of field operations. "Or we would donate it on a smaller scale."

Some of the items are fakes, but Trotter said most are legitimate.

The hurricane relief operation, aimed at the more than 1 million Gulf Coast residents displaced by Katrina last week, will involve a total of $168 million worth of clothing.

The items delivered on Tuesday, much of it with designer labels like Fubu and Code Blue, were handed to the Red Cross and local church officials who were to distribute it.

"They will be able to tell us specifically what they want and a personal shopper will go back and get it for them," said Mike Firenza of St. Luke's Methodist Church. "It will be one of the finest-dressed shelters that there's ever been."

The Astrodome, a 40-year-old sports stadium that had fallen into disuse recently, housed about 16,000 refugees on Tuesday. Three other major shelters in Houston housed a total of 10,000.

FIRST ASSESSMENT: Hurricane Katrina will cause national employment to drop by 400,000 jobs, the Congressional Budget Office predicted. Such a loss would wipe out recent jobs gains achieved under the Bush administration.

ADDED WOES: The storm's havoc may also slow economic growth by as much as a full percentage point this year and cause gasoline prices to jump 40 percent this month.

UNCLEAR FUTURE: With economists and politicians forecasting varying outcomes, the hurricane's long-term impact remains uncertain.

WASHINGTON - Barbara Bush was making "a personal observation" when she said poor people at a relocation center in Houston were faring better than before Hurricane Katrina struck, President Bush's spokesman said Wednesday.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, did not answer directly when asked if the president agreed with his mother's remarks.

Mrs. Bush, after touring the Astrodome complex in Houston on Monday, said: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." She commented during a radio interview with the American Public Media program "Marketplace."

McClellan, at the White House briefing, said: "I think she was making a personal observation on some of the comments that people were making that she was running into. ... But what we're focused on is helping these people who are in need."

Asked if Bush agreed with his mother, McClellan said: "I think that the observation is based on someone or some people that were talking to her that were in need of a lot of assistance, people that have gone through a lot of trauma and been through a very difficult and trying time. And all of a sudden, they are now getting great help in the state of Texas from some of the shelters."

If you believe the oil industry's response to Katrina, you'd think demanding environmentalists are to blame for $3 per gallon gasoline because the tree huggers shut down refineries with tough new rules. President Bush even mimicked the industry excuse by waiving environmental standards in the wake of Katrina. Well, the industry's own internal memos show the intentional shrinking of American refinery capacity in the 1990s was the oil companies' own idea to pump up profits.

Take this internal Texaco strategy memo:

"[T]he most critical factor facing the refining industry on the West Coast is the surplus of refining capacity, and the surplus gasoline production capacity. (The same situation exists for the entire U.S. refining industry.) Supply significantly exceeds demand year-round. This results in very poor refinery margins and very poor refinery financial results. Significant events need to occur to assist in reducing supplies and/or increasing the demand for gasoline."

The memo went on to discuss a sucessful campaign in Washington State to shrink refined supply by removing other additives in the gasoline that filled gas volume.

Another Mobil memo shows the company promoted tough regulations in California to shut down an independent refiner. A Chevron memo acknowledged the industry wide need to shutter refineries and discussed how refiners were responding in kind.

Large oil companies have for a decade artificially shorted the gasoline market to drive up prices. Oil companies know they can make more money by making less gasoline. Katrina should be a wakeup call to America that the refiners profit widely when they keep the system running on empty. It's time for government to regulate the industry's supply. The fact that President Bush received $2.6 million from the oil industry for his reelection in 2004 should make regulation of the nation's gas supply one of the Democrats' most important talking points.

"How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home."

Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"

Let's be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened in the past week -- the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to death, chaos and disease ­ will change the Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. The Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal policies; its Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House; the national Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as before.

One proof of this can be found in the first polls coming out after the disaster, which show that a full 46 percent of the American people approve of Bush's handling of the relief effort. It seems inconceivable that any sentient being could witness the agonizing results of the Bush team's dithering, dilatory response ­ an agony played out in the full glare of non-stop media coverage ­ and not come away with a sense of towering anger at this criminal incompetence. But it's obvious that nearly half the American people have now left the "reality-based community" altogether; they see only what they want to see, a world bathed in the hazy, golden nimbus of the Leader. The fact ­ the undeniable truth ­ that behind this carefully-concocted mirage lies nothing more than a steaming pile of rancid, rotting offal means nothing to these true believers. The Lie is better, the Lie is more comforting, the Lie lets them keep feeding on the suffering of others without guilt or shame.

This painful split between obvious reality and popular perception is nothing new, of course. Today we look at old footage of Adolf Hitler and wonder how on earth such a pathetic and ludicrous creature could ever have commanded the adoration and obedience of tens of millions of people. Yet he did. As Eliot said, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

The fact that a few conservative commentators and politicians are making mild criticisms of Bush means nothing. There has been much trumpeting of the remarks by David Brooks of the New York Times that Bush's manifest failures in the Delta ­ coming after the debacle of the Iraq occupation, the torture revelations, etc. ­ could be a "watershed" moment when the nation loses faith in its institutions, a situation Brooks likened to the 1970s. But even in making these comments on one hand, Brooks was taking them back with the other, saying clearly that he might "get over" his disappointment with Bush soon enough. Think of it: Brooks has watched people literally dying before his very eyes after being abandoned to their fate for days by Bush's criminal negligence ­ and he thinks he can "get over" that at some point, and give his full-throated approval to the Leader once again.

This is the general mind-set (if you want to dignify the inch-deep shallowness of Brooks' intellect with the word "mind") of all the conservative critics: gosh, Bush really dropped the ball on this one! He'd better turn the PR thing around, or he might lose some of the "political capital" he needs to "advance his second-term agenda." That's it. That's as far as it goes.

After all, they fully support the "agenda" ­ more war, more tax cuts for the rich, more impunity for big corporations, more welfare for the oil barons, the coal barons, the nuke barons, more coddling of elite investors, more state power for Christian extremists, more media consolidation, more graft, more kickbacks, more easy money for greasy palms. And now that Karl Rove has finally figured out his response ­ employing brazen lies to smear state and local officials ­ you will very quickly see the conservative critics, especially in Congress, fall into lockstep with the porcine counsellor's program.

By the time Congress holds hearings into the disaster, they'll be singing love songs to the Leader; the hearings themselves will doubtless turn into a pageant of heroic tableaux -- glittering stories of the heroic federal effort to rescue the perishing, all of it driven by the calm and steady hand of the Commander-in-chief. Oh, there might be a scapegoat or two for the Congressmen to pummel with puff-cheeked righteous rage for the cameras. But anyone hoping for a fearless, presidency-shaking probe will be disappointed.

Just as the media have always overhyped Bush's popularity, they are now overhyping the "political crisis" he is supposedly facing. There is no political crisis whatsoever, if by "political crisis" you mean something that will cause Bush to alter his policies. The war in Iraq will go on. The war against the poor will go on. The slow destruction of middle-class security and stability will go on. The long and ferocious rightwing campaign against the very idea of a "common good" will go on, unabated ­ perhaps even strengthened as it faces a backlash from the half of the American public that actually accepts the reality of what they saw in New Orleans and all along the ravaged Gulf Coast.

This is what you must understand: Bush and his faction do not care if they have "the consent of the governed" or not. They are not interested in governing at all, in responding to the needs and desires and will of the people. They are only interested in ruling, in using the power of the state to force their radical agenda of elitist aggrandizement and ideological crankery on the nation, and on the world.

They have a large, hard core of true believers who will countenance ­ even applaud ­ any crime, any corruption, any incompetence of the Leader and his minions. With this base, and with all of the branches of government already in their hands, the Faction need only procure the reluctant support of just a small percentage of the rest of the population ­ through fearmongering, through smears and lies, and, as we saw in 2000 and 2004, through the manipulation of election results via politically connected voting-machine corporations and politically partisan election officials.

None of this will change because of what happened in New Orleans. If these people could be touched by suffering and injustice, by death and destruction, by corruption and incompetence, then they would not be where they are today. If there was a viable opposition in the American Establishment to Bush's policies, it would have stood up long ago. Like the people left behind in New Orleans, we're all on our own ­ "with no direction home."

How does it feel?

Chris Floyd is a columnist for The Moscow Times and regular contributor to CounterPunch. A new, upgraded version of his blog, "Empire Burlesque," can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.

WASHINGTON - The anonymous donor turned up at a U.S. diplomatic office and presented an envelope with 1,000 euros, about $1,200, for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

It was a way of repaying a debt to the United States for being liberated by American soldiers from a concentration camp and treated more than 60 years ago, Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said Wednesday in relating the incident.

The donor was 90 years old, but that is all McCormack would say by way of identification, although it was learned later the donor was a woman. "This is a person who is not seeking any publicity for this act - which in the time we live makes it even more extraordinary," he said.

"This is a selfless act by somebody who is repaying what they felt was a deeply felt debt of gratitude to the United States," the spokesman said.

This is one of many stories from around the world of individuals being very generous with the American people at a time of need, McCormack said.

"It's extraordinary," he said.

The dog opened his mouth to get the other bone, and as he did, the bone he already had fell into the water.
- Aesop

All our seeming wakings are but the debris of evening waters.
- Edward Dahlberg

Still water is like glass.
- Chuang Tzu

Welcome to Bantustan, Louisiana, where the first stage of creating a large, armed, New World Order fortress, complete with gated communities and an Israeli wall against the sea and the riffraff, has begun. It is the inevitable course of human history, playing like a bad rerun of humanity's medieval nightmares.

In the meantime, the chief sephardic rabbi in Jerusalem declared that the hurricane that obliterated New Orleans was God's punishment because President Bush supported the eviction of Israeli settlers from Gaza.

Take a taste, a gargantuan, thirst-quenching slug of that delicious elixir brewed by humanity's most successful citizens, that Cajun cabernet of pesticide-fouled Mississippi River water curdling in the backwater blender of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, spiced by fragrances from all across the periodic table of toxic elements and spiced with a disease-bearing melange of decomposing dead animals.

Savor the bouquet. See how it tinkles on your tongue and wafts into your hairy nostrils. Close your eyes and you can envision the perfect portrait of human civilization.

They say we are 89 percent water. The quality of the water within us is directly correlative to the ingredients of the potion in the cauldron of New Orleans.

Note the bloated black man, floating face down in the brew. Boats rush past, to and fro, hoping to pry decomposing remains from dank attics, and occasionally, with luck, find some terrified child shivering in the stinking darkness, while National Guardsmen play cards at a nearby truckstop.

If there is a legitimate vision of hell in this life, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is it (although this act has also been seen recently in Fallujah, Kigali, Port-au-Prince and many other locations as well).

Where your last breath, to last you for all eternity, is the fetid stench of humanity's caustic creations, what kind of hope could there be for anyone? Why did four people last week die suddenly simply by breathing the air? Must be a new government test.

The two major conspiracy angles on the New Orleans disaster are (1) the hurricane was directed toward the city by artificial means, and (2) the rescue efforts were deliberately inept to increase the death toll among indigent African-Americans.

Culling the herd. That would be the neocon phrase, slurred out as humor by people like Barbara Bush.

But when you observe who keeps getting it in the face, without even perusing the obvious evidence all across history, you realize there is and has always been a continuing war on blacks, on the dark-skinned peoples of the world, and New Orleans is - whether deliberately contrived or not - a genuine manifestation of this nasty and pointless insanity.

Because so many ordinary people have tried to help New Orleans storm victims and been thwarted by bureaucratic officialdom, one can only draw the conclusion that the government has severely limited its rescue efforts because there is no place in corporate society for these people, and they need to be eliminated.

I thought it was very cool that so many of those like DU activist Dennis Kyne and others who went to Texas to support antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan smoothly moved their operation to New Orleans to help out.

This small remaining segment of morally decent Americans knows - much more authentically that the government could ever pretend to know - that when people are dying you don't argue about causes or rules. Perhaps that is the true test of being human.

9/11 taught us that our government will sacrifice 3,000 of its own best and brightest without blinking an eye. New Orleans is the message that the number eligible in this category, especially if they're black, is much, much higher.

And it is a confession that a real population control program is moving into high gear.

Good numbers in Indonesia, good numbers in New Orleans. Could a West Coast quake be far behind? Heck, they have already caused several of those in Iran.

And it's way past time for the government, after many decades of trying, to develop a really effective biological agent - the new flu as an expression of love in the New World Order world - and you begin to get some sense of how twisted we have become as a species.

Which leads to an examination of how twisted we have always been. Kind of like ... on the bridge at twilight, a man with a flashlight falls off a bridge, and what you can remember was the rhythmic flailing of his arms as he fell. I dunno. Maybe I'm thinking about 9/11 again...

Now the new images are of floating, inert, face down in poison after rummaging through spoiled and flooded supermarkets looking for clean water. I found it heartwrenching that a top choice of New Orleans looters was disposable diapers.

How far? How far distant is the realization in the minds of everyone that we have created a monster, and that monster is what we do to ourselves and the planet.

Did you ever notice how the Andaman Island indigenents were not harmed by the tsunami, or how animals are never killed in these storms? I don't mean to point out faults in those who were caught in the floodtide, but as regards our fitness to survive as a society.

In our sparkling delusions, our high-minded ideals and low-flying scams, we have abandoned the planet. Soon the planet, which has gone out of its way to help us for millions of years, will abandon us.

Where will your dreams be then? Floating on the bayou, baby, with all the other dead birds.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on a part of the Gulf Coast of Florida that for some reason Hurricane Katrina inexplicably swerved around on its way to New Orleans. He is the author of "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001." http://www.johnkaminski.com/

WASHINGTON - The US military reportedly failed to respond quickly to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina as advisers weighed whether
President George W. Bush should take over relief operations from state authorities.

At the heart of the dispute was a US law preventing military troops from intervening in states where there is risk of armed conflict without the approval of state authorities, The New York Times said.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's August 29 strike on the US Gulf coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, massive flooding in New Orleans created a humanitarian nightmare punctuated by looting and gunfire.

While Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco had authority over the National Guard (state military forces), which arrived in the crippled city a week ago -- four days after Katrina struck, Navy and Coast Guard search and rescue teams had arrived on the scene two days two days earlier.

Those troops, however, could not intervene in New Orleans before Bush requested Blanco to surrender control of the National Guard, by invoking the Insurrection Act, federal and state officials told the daily.

Bush aides presumed Blanco would refuse to surrender her authority, and Louisiana officials agreed that the governor would not have given up control of the National Guard, the daily said.

However, Blanco, who on August 31 asked for 40,000 federal soldiers, said in an interview with the daily she was unaware she had to specifically give up control of the National Guard.

"Nobody told me that I had to request that," Blanco said. "I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then."

The prospect of Bush taking over military control of a state run by a governor of the rival political party -- Bush is a Republican, Blanco, a Democrat -- also posed a political dilemma to his aides, officials told The New York Times.

"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official who asked not to be identified.

I'm extremely depressed to report that things seem to only be getting sadder concerning the people so devastatingly affected by Katrina last week. Two car loads of us headed over to Falls Creek, a youth camp for Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma that agreed to have its facilities used to house Louisiana refugees. I'm afraid the camp is not going to be used as the kind people of the churches who own the cabins believe it was going to be used.

Jesse Jackson was right when he said "refugees" was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It's not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees.

Falls Creek is like a small town that is closed down about 9 months out of the year. It is made up of cabins that range from small and humble to large and grandiose, according to how much money the church who owns the cabin has. Each cabin has full kitchen facilities, bathrooms and usually have two large bunkrooms - one for women and one for men. The occupancy of the cabins varies according to the church. This past week the Southern Baptist association of Oklahoma offered the facility as a place to house refugees from the Katrina disaster. Each church owning a cabin was then called to find out if they would make their cabin available. Churches across the state agreed.

I started my journey by loading six large trash bags full of clothes in the back of my beetle buggy. I then went to the local Dollar General and purchased various hygiene products, snacks and even a set of dominoes and a deck of cards. I had my daughter take her own shopping cart and go and select her own items that she wanted to take. I told her to imagine herself without anything in the world and then select what she would need to live every day.

We then met up with my elderly parents who had gone to the Dollar Store themselves, and to the grocery store and had spent WAY too much of their limited social security on the venture. But that's okay. We ended up having to take both vehicles on the 150 mile round trip because they were both pretty full. My son showed up and wanted to go. He drove my parents while my daughter and I rode in my car.

To say we all left with excitement would be appropriate. My 78 year old mother is a "fixer". She loves to help people and she absolutely needs someone to dote over. That she was about to be able to help some people who had lost all in their lives had her feeling physically healthier than I've seen her in days. I was glad to get the chance to actively do something other than donate what little I can to some faceless charity hoping it would get to the people who needed it. I felt glad I could do some small something that might cut through the helplessness I've felt over this situation. Both of my kids were eager to assist.

The only odd thing that occurred prior to setting off happened while I was gassing up in our small town. My daughter was pumping the gas and a lady she knew pulled up to an adjacent pump. My daughter started telling her where we were going and that we were taking things to the refugees. The lady told my daughter that she had been told the Red Cross was not allowing any one to deliver supplies. When I returned to the car from paying for the gas my daughter informed of this. I told her that the Red Cross would not be preventing the members of our church from entering our own cabin, so it really didn't matter. It was at that point we decided to stop back by the house and get my daughter's camera so that she could take pictures if required.

From the moment I heard about Falls Creek being scheduled to receive refugees I had two thoughts run through my mind:

1. What a beautiful place to be able to stay while trying to get your life back in order.

2. What a terrible location to be when you're trying to get your life back in order.

The first thought is because Falls Creek is nestled in the Arbuckle Mountains of south central Oklahoma. One of the more beautiful regions of the state. It would be a peaceful and beautiful place to try to start mending emotionally, and begin to figure what you're going to do next.

The second thought comes because Falls Creek is very secluded and absolutely nowhere near a population center. The closest route from Falls Creek to a connecting road is three miles on a winding narrow road called "High Road" (It gets that name for two reasons - it's goes over the mountain instead of around it like "Low Road" does, and it's where the teenagers of the area go to party). The road has not a single home on it for over 3 miles. After battling that 3 miles over mountains, you'll find yourself about 5 miles from the nearest town, Davis, Oklahoma, population ca. 2000. This is no place to start a new life.

A few pictures headed toward Falls Creek over High Road to give you a feel of the seclusion.

All of sudden the landscape changed from picturesque mountainous rural America, to something foreign to me as we approached the rear gate of the camp. Two Oklahoma State Patrol vehicles and four Oklahoma Troopers guarded the gate. We started through and they stopped us.

"Can I help you, ma'am?"

I informed him we're here to deliver supplies to *our church's name* cabin. He stood silent and stared at me. My daughter turned and snapped a picture of his vehicle - very conspicuously.

I smiled at him and he asked, "Do you know where that cabin is located?"

I informed him I did. He looked at me a bit longer and then said, "Ok" and stepped away from the car. They stopped my parents' vehicle as well, but I assume my son informed them he was with us. They let them pass.

We made our way through the narrow streets toward our church's cabin.

We noticed that the various church cabins had numbered placards on them that normally weren't there.

We arrived at our cabin and started toting the clothes in. We finally found a group of men upstairs in the dorms trying to do something alien to them - make beds. They had almost completed the room of bunk beds and told us we could go over to the ladies' dorm room and start on it. We lugged our sacks of clothes back down the stairs. Then we got the first negative message. "You can't bring any clothes in. FEMA has stated they will accept no more clothes. They've had 30 people sorting clothes for days. They don't want anymore." My mind couldn't help but go back over the news articles that have accused FEMA of refusing water in to Jefferson Parrish, or turning fuel away.

We lugged the bags of clothes back to the car. We then turned to bringing in our personal hygiene products. That's when we learned our cabin had been designated a "male only" cabin. Approximately 40 men, ranging from age 13 on up would be housed there. We started resacking the female products and sorted out everything that would be useful for men.

We lugged the bags of female products back to the car. We asked if they knew of a cabin that had been designated for women. The "host" (the hosts are Oklahoma civilians who have been employeed??? by FEMA to reside at each cabin and have already gone through at least one "orientation" meeting conducted by FEMA at "BASE" which is some unknown but repetitively referred location within the camp) told us he believed McAlester cabin was dedicated to females. He then explained there were male, female and family cabins designated.

We then started lugging in our food products. The foods I had purchased were mainly snacks, but my mother - God bless her soul - had gone all out with fresh vegetables, fruits, canned goods, breakfast cereals, rice, and pancake fixings. That's when we got the next message: They will not be able to use the kitchen.

Excuse me? I asked incredulously.

FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the "host" goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won't allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs - and...

It could cause a riot.

It gets worse.

He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and "a sum of money" and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.

My son looks at me and mumbles "Welcome to Krakow."

My mother then asked if the churches would be allowed to come to their cabin and conduct services if the occupants wanted to attend. The response was "No ma'am. You don't understand. Your church no longer owns this building. This building is now owned by FEMA and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. They have it for the next 5 months." This scares my mother who asks "Do you mean they have leased it?" The man replies, "Yes, ma'am...lock, stock and barrel. They have taken over everything that pertains to this facility for the next 5 months."

We then lug all food products requiring cooking back to the car. We start unloading our snacks. Mom appeared to have cornered the market in five counties on pop-tarts and apparently that was an acceptable snack so the guy started shoving them under the counter. He said these would be good to tide people over in between their two meals a day. But he tells my mother she must take all the breakfast cereal back. My mother protests that cereal requires no cooking. "There will be no milk, ma'am." My mother points to the huge industrial double-wide refrigerator the church had just purchased in the past year. "Ma'am, you don't understand...

It could cause a riot."

He then points to the vegetables and fruit. "You'll have to take that back as well. It looks like you've got about 10 apples there. I'm about to bring in 40 men. What would we do then?"

My mother, in her sweet, soft voice says, "Quarter them?"

"No ma'am. FEMA said no...

It could cause a riot. You don't understand the type of people that are about to come here...."

I turn and walk out of the room...lugging all the healthy stuff back to the car. My son later tells me the man went on to say "We've already been told of teenage girls delivering fetuses on buses." My son steps toward him and says "That's because they've almost been starved to death, haven't had a decent place to get a good night's sleep, and their bodies can't keep a baby alive. I'm not sure that's any evidence some one should be using to show these are 'bad people'."

We then went to the second dorm room and made up beds. When we got through and were headed outside the host says to me and my daughter, "How did you get in here?" I told him we came in through the back gate. He replies, "No, HOW did you get in here? No one who doesn't have credentials showing is supposed to be in here." (I had noticed all the "hosts" had two or three badges hanging around their necks.) I told him it might have had something to do with the fact my daughter was snapping pictures of the OHP presence at the gate. He then tells us, "Well, starting in the morning NO ONE comes in. So if you have further goods you want to donate you will have to take them to your local church. They will collect them until they have a full load and then bring them to the front gate."

Me and my two kids then walked over the hill to the camp's amphitheater.

First - just another OHP car...

The amphitheater is full of clothes (but I'm not sure I'm seeing enough for 5000 people for 5 months).

But there was more...an Oklahoma Department of Safety truck and a military vehicle...

and a cell phone tower (which fretling didn't get a pic of...grrr). Falls Creek, because it sits in a "bowl" surrounded by mountains, is notorious for no cell phone coverage.

There were buses coming in the front gate at about a rate of 1 every 2 or 3 minutes. We could hear them below us as we walked back up the hill. We could also see their white tops through the trees. We figured these were busloads of refugees arriving, but we never saw these buses in the camps, nor were any refugees visible at the camp while we were there.

We then loaded back into our vehicles and headed toward the cabin we had been told was for women so that we could off-load our appropriate products. When we arrived there was no one in the cabin so we preceded to unload our vehicles and take the merchandise in to the cabin. A horde of "hosts" who had been hovering at a nearby cabin head toward us.

"Can we help you?"

I explained to them what we were doing.

"Uhh... you can't just leave donated goods in the cabins. FEMA has stated they want all supplies to go to their central warehouse. They said they have had far too many supplies come in and they need to handle them. You can't leave ANY clothes."

I just stared at them.

One chubby-checker, after several moments of pregnant pause broken only by the sound of my 82 year old dad continuing to shuffle boxes out of the back of his car (GO DAD!), says "I'll call 'BASE' and confirm what should happen here."

I continue to stare.

He pounds out the number on his cell phone and when some one picks up he chickens out and just asks "I need to verify that cabin 11 is a female only facility." When he hangs up he says that it is and I respond, "Well, good, we'll get on with this then." It's at that point my son pulls me aside and says, "Every damned one of them have the same phone. That's what the comm tower is for at the amphitheater. Now we know how FEMA runs through billions, they've given every one of these people a Cingular phone when walkie-talkies would have worked just fine."

We off-load our goods into the McAlester cabin. Fretling takes pics of the buckets of toys that have been donated by citizens for the kiddos coming this way.

And a dorm room:

We then start out of the camp. I tell my daughter I want to go out the main gate this time. Here is what we saw on the way out:

Just another OHP car...

This cabin was apparently commandeered by a group of people in navy blue jumpsuits with insignias all over them. You can see them in the left side of this pic. But they were standing all over the place on both sides of the narrow street.

This is just one OHP car in a long line of them parked along the side of the street.

Three firetrucks parked along the river.

Talk about a surreal moment...troops (unknown if Regular or National Guard) have taken up residency in the Durant First Baptist Church cabin very near the main gate of the camp.

Two things to point out in the pictures above...we passed a row of about 6 or 8 ambulances parked in the street just in front of the troop cabin, and the large tent on the top of the hill...we have no idea what that is for.

Main gate completely blocked by OHP vehicles as we approach:

More OHP vehicles parked at the rear gate as we pass by:

Now I'm starting to understand why it doesn't matter that this location is not conducive to starting a new life.

[edit on 9-6-2005 by Valhall]

U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones remembers attending an emergency training session in August 2001 with the Federal Emergency Management Agency that discussed the three most likely catastrophes to strike the United States.

First on the list was a terrorist attack in New York. Second was a super-strength hurricane hitting New Orleans. Third was a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

Now that the first two have come to pass, she and other earthquake experts are using the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to reassess how California would handle a major temblor.

Jones, scientist-in-charge for the geological survey's Southern California Earthquake Hazards Team, and other experts generally agree that California has come a long way in the last two decades in seismic safety.

In Los Angeles, all but one of 8,700 unreinforced masonry buildings - considered the most likely to collapse in a major quake - have been retrofitted or demolished. The state spent billions after the 1994 Northridge quake to retrofit more than 2,100 freeway overpasses, reporting this week that only a handful remain unreinforced.

Despite these improvements, however, officials believe that a major temblor could cause the level of destruction and disruption seen over the last week on the Gulf Coast.

More than 900 hospital buildings that state officials have identified as needing either retrofitting or total replacement have yet to receive them, and the state recently agreed to five-year extensions to hospitals that can't meet the 2008 deadline to make the fixes. More than 7,000 school buildings across the state would also be vulnerable during a huge temblor, a state study found, though there is no firm timetable for upgrading the structures.

And four Los Angeles Police Department facilities - including the Parker Center headquarters in downtown - worry officials, because they were built to primitive earthquake standards and might not survive a major temblor. Only two of the LAPD's 19 stations meet the most rigorous quake-safe rules.

"We could be dealing with infrastructure issues a lot like New Orleans," Jones said. "Our natural gas passes through the Cajon Pass…. Water - three pipelines - cross the San Andreas fault in an area that is expected to go in an earthquake." Railway lines are also vulnerable, she said.

A catastrophic temblor at the right spot along the San Andreas could significantly reduce energy and water supplies - at least temporarily, she and others said. Researchers at the Southern California Earthquake Center said there is an 80% to 90% chance that a temblor of 7.0 or greater magnitude will strike Southern California before 2024.

"We aren't anywhere close to where I wish we were" in terms of seismic safety, Jones said.

Seismologists are particularly concerned about a type of vulnerable building that has received far less attention than unreinforced masonry.

There are about 40,000 structures in California made from "non-ductile reinforced concrete," a rigid substance susceptible to cracking. This was a common construction ingredient for office buildings in the 1950s and '60s, before the state instituted stricter standards. Few such structures have been seismically retrofitted, officials said.

Seismic safety advocates have also recently lost some major battles in Sacramento. The state rejected a proposal from the Seismic Safety Commission in the wake of the 2003 San Simeon earthquake to force owners of unreinforced masonry buildings to post warning signs. In that quake, two women died when the roof slid off of a two-story Paso Robles brick building where they worked.

Last week, the Legislature sent to the governor's desk a bill that encourages local governments to develop retrofitting programs for "soft story" wood-frame apartment buildings.

There are an estimated 70,000 such structures in the state, and experts worry that they could sustain major quake damage, because they often have tuck-under parking and lack solid walls at their bases.

The danger of this kind of construction was illustrated in the 1994 collapse of the Northridge Meadows apartment complex, in which 16 residents were killed.

There are other potential safety gaps as well.

Although Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena and several other cities have reinforced almost all their masonry buildings, about a third of such structures across the state remain unprotected, said Frank Turner, an engineer with the Seismic Safety Commission.

A state study published last year on hazard reduction paints a sobering picture of California's earthquake danger. About 62% of the population lives in a zone of high earthquake danger, including 100% of the population of Ventura County, 99% of Los Angeles County and 92% of Riverside County.

Since 1971, there have been at least 13 earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater in the state, and research conducted after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in the Bay Area found a 62% probability that at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or more would strike the Bay Area before 2032.

"We're pretty confident we have some of the best buildings in the world here, but … there are always going to be losses, because these are extraordinary events," Turner said.

Still, Southern California's geography could help prevent a catastrophe on the scale of that in New Orleans.

Because the Los Angeles region is so much larger than the Louisiana city, it is difficult to conceive of a disaster - "short of an A-bomb" - that would blanket the whole city, let alone the whole county, in ruin, said Lee Sapaden, a spokesman for Los Angeles County's Office of Emergency Management.

Earthquakes tend to do the most damage closest to the epicenters. The 1994 Northridge quake, for example, damaged a large swath of the San Fernando Valley as well as parts of Hollywood and the Westside. But areas farther to the east and south, such as Long Beach and Orange County, saw little damage.

A large quake in the Valley would probably still allow emergency supplies and rescuers to reach the area from other locations such as the San Gabriel Valley and South Bay, Sapaden said.

Emergency crews would have better mobility than those in New Orleans, he added, because even if freeways were wrecked, aid would probably be able to get through the vast majority of areas on surface streets. "Here in Southern California, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and Santa Barbara counties would help us out, just like we would help them," he said.

One of the biggest concerns of seismic safety officials is the fate of hospitals.

The 1971 Sylmar earthquake pushed Olive View Medical Center a foot off its foundation, causing the first floor to collapse, killing three patients and a hospital worker. The 1994 Northridge quake knocked 23 hospitals temporarily out of service.

After that quake, the Legislature passed a law requiring that hospitals retrofit buildings to withstand a major temblor or replace them with new ones. About 78% of hospitals have at least one building deemed at risk, said Jan Emerson, spokeswoman for the California Hospital Assn.

But hospitals, many of which are fighting budget problems, have balked at the price tag - estimated at $24 billion for 2002-2030 - and in many cases have successfully pushed Sacramento to delay the retrofitting deadline. The state has already granted about 200 requests for extensions to make the necessary repairs by 2013, according to a state document.

Safety officials said more work is also needed at schools.

A 2002 state study found that more than 7,500 school buildings across California are expected to "perform poorly" in a major temblor.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has completed seismic upgrades to nearly 2,000 buildings, spending $222 million on the effort, according to Richard Luke, director of design for the district.

But the district has not finished upgrades on 600 portable buildings and will look at an additional 239 buildings identified by the Division of State Architect as possibly performing poorly during a major quake.

Jones of the geological survey and Turner of the Seismic Safety Commission believe that one worst-case scenario would involve a massive temblor on the San Andreas fault around where major utility lines run, possibly compromising water and power supplies.

"We should not be at all surprised if something similar to Hurricane Katrina mirrors itself in California," Turner said. "There have been lots of articles written about the failure of levees in the [Sacramento-San Joaquin] Delta, the loss of drinking water in California. This is just the tip of the iceberg."

About 60% of Southern California's water is imported from outside the region in three major aqueducts that cross the San Andreas fault, making them particularly vulnerable to major earthquake damage.

One branch of the 444-mile California Aqueduct, which carries water from the delta, virtually sits on top of the fault for a few miles near Palmdale. A second aqueduct from the Colorado River crosses the fault near Beaumont. And the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which transports snowmelt from the eastern Sierra, runs across the San Andreas in a mountain tunnel between Lancaster and Santa Clarita.

Southern California water managers say they've made progress in recent years building local reserves they could turn to if they lost water from one or more of the transport systems.

With such efforts, "we feel even more confident we are able to provide sufficient water to sustain us during an earthquake," said Debra Man, chief operating officer of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the region's main water wholesaler.

Jim McDaniels, chief operating officer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's water system, said that if disaster struck, the DWP could double its groundwater pumping within the basin and draw from its four big local reservoirs.

Major gas lines also come into Southern California over the San Andreas at several points, including at Indio, Palmdale, the Cajon Pass and the Tejon Ranch. Still, officials at the Southern California Gas Co. expressed confidence that the system could withstand a strong earthquake, noting they have been upgrading the pipeline for years.

Another open question is whether the major quake would cause damage to fire stations, police headquarters and facilities of other emergency agencies, possibly slowing their response. A state study found that many of the 1,300 emergency operations buildings were constructed before strict quake building standards were enacted in 1986, and that only a portion of those had been retrofitted.

At the LAPD, the only four facilities to meet the most recent and rigorous "essential building" standards are the department's newest: the West Valley and Mission police stations and two 911 dispatch centers.

Yvette Sanchez-Owens, head of the department's facilities management office, said she is most concerned about three stations built in the 1960s: Rampart, Hollenbeck and Harbor. Police officers at the Harbor station in San Pedro have been relocated to trailers while a new station is built; officers could be moved out of the Hollenbeck station in Boyle Heights sometime this fall as preparation for construction of a new station begins.

As for Parker Center, it already sustained significant damage during the Northridge earthquake. It is also scheduled to be replaced, but not for several years.

"It could be in real trouble," Sanchez-Owens said. "It's definitely not built up to standard."

SAN ANTONIO, Texas - A Mexican army convoy of nearly 200 people crossed the border into the United States on Thursday to bring aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina, becoming the first Mexican military unit to operate on U.S. soil since 1846.

Mexico's first disaster aid mission to the United States was greeted in San Antonio by honking car horns, welcome signs and cheering people wrapped in or waving Mexican flags.

"San Antonio is probably the most Mexican city in the entire United States," councilman Richard Perez said. Of the city's 1.2 million residents, roughly 500,000 identify themselves as being of Mexican descent, according to the U.S. Census.

Earlier, dignitaries from both Mexico and the United States greeted the soldiers at the Laredo border crossing.

The unarmed soldiers, physicians, nurses and dentists aboard the convoy wore green uniforms with yellow armbands that said "Humanitarian Aid" in Spanish.

Daniel Hernandez Joseph, the Mexican consul in Laredo, said the cooperation was understandable since the United States has helped Mexico following natural disasters, including the Mexico City's earthquake in 1985.

"We know what it is like to be on the other side of this, because of that we are saying thank you by responding in kind," he said.

The convoy includes two mobile kitchens that can feed 7,000 people a day, three flatbed trucks carrying mobile water treatment plants and 15 trailers of bottled water, blankets and applesauce.

After the convoy entered the former Kelly Air Force base, soldiers began setting up the kitchen to feed about 500 people Thursday night.

The Mexican government already was planning another 12-vehicle aid convoy for this week. It has sent a Mexican navy ship toward the Mississippi coast with rescue vehicles and helicopters.

Mexico has sent disaster relief aid missions to other Latin American nations, but not to the United States.

In 1846, Mexican troops briefly advanced just north of the Rio Grande in Texas, which had then recently joined the United States. Mexico, however, did not then recognize the Rio Grande as the U.S. border.

The two countries quickly became mired in the Mexican-American War, which led to the loss of half of Mexico's territory in 1848.

GULFPORT, United States - US Vice President Dick Cheney was confronted by an irate heckler when he toured the US Gulf coast region devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Cheney, who was sent to the region by President George W. Bush amid intense criticism of the federal response to the disaster, was briefing reporters in Gulfport, Mississippi, on his impressions of the relief work when he was interrupted by a bystander.

"Go f--- yourself Mr. Cheney!" the unidentified man shouted. The man then repeated: "Go f--- yourself!"

Asked by a reporter if had encountered similar protests during his tour, Cheney replied: "That's the first time I've heard it."

Returning to the issue at hand, Cheney said the hurricane relief and recovery effort had made "significant" progress over the past week.

"I think the performance in general, at least, in terms of the information I have received from the locals is definitely very impressive," he said.

Cheney visited the region with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has been one of the principal targets of anger over the sluggish reaction of federal disaster agencies as the extent of the catastrophic destruction wrought by Katrina first became apparent.

"I'm here to help Mike and do everything I can to avoid interference back in Washington if help's needed with related agencies," Cheney said.

"I have enormous confidence in the secretary as does the president," he added.

Later on in his tour, as he watched army engineers working to block one of the breaches in the system of flood-prevention levees around New Orleans, Cheney insisted that the city would emerge from the devastation stronger than ever.

"If there is a place on the face of the earth to have the resources to deal with this problem, it is the United States," he said.

Cheney, Chertoff and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales later accompanied Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco to the state's emergency operations center in Baton Rouge for talks with state and federal officials coordinating disaster aid.

The vice president said he would return to the affected region on Saturday.

DETROIT, United States - Even before Hurricane Katrina tore through the southern United States, hampering a big chunk of the US oil industry, consumers were having second thoughts about gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles.

Katrina could now hasten the demise of the SUV, at least in its current guise, after years in which it has ruled the roost over the world's biggest auto market, analysts believe.

With gasoline prices surpassing three dollars a gallon (3.78 liters), it now costs 100 dollars to fill up the tanks of large SUVs such as the Chevrolet Suburban used by President George W. Bush's Secret Service escort.

"Potentially, Katrina could signal the death knell of the SUV in as much as consumers are going to find themselves once burned, twice shy to buy such vehicles," Wachovia economist Jason Schenker said.

"High gas prices and the perceived fragility of the US energy sector are all likely to weigh on consumers' choices for years," he said.

Sales of big SUVs dropped dramatically in August, hurting both American and Japanese manufacturers, which have been trying to edge into the segment over the past five years.

The decrease came despite a fierce price war among the Detroit Big Three -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler -- which have offered customers the same price on autos that their own employees pay.

"Hurricane Katrina was definitely a catalyst for gas prices but even before that we were facing an upward trend in prices," said Mike Chung, market analyst at auto website Edmunds.com.

"In response to that, consumers were beginning to look at other vehicles outside of large SUVs. The SUV boom has definitely changed. The whole segment has thinned out into several different segments," he said.

GM reported that despite its elite credentials, the Chevrolet Suburban saw sales drop 28 percent during August. Ford said sales of the full-size Ford Expedition plunged 40 percent.

Toyota Motor said sales of its heavily promoted Sequoia dropped 32 percent in August. Nissan reported sales of the Armada, which is built in a portion of Mississippi spared by Hurricane Katrina, fell seven percent.

Reviewing the August sales figures, analysts at Merrill Lynch said that Katrina could accelerate "consumers' natural migration away from large SUVs".

The big auto makers can see the writing on the wall. Ford plans to halt production of the giant Ford Excursion at the end of September.

"There is no question that the demand for traditional sport utility vehicles has been affected by rising gas prices," Steve Lyons, group vice president in charge of Ford sales and marketing in North America, said recently. [...]

Some people have referred to it as the "secret government" of the United States. It is not an elected body, it does not involve itself in public disclosures, and it even has a quasi-secret budget in the billions of dollars. [...]

Not only is it the most powerful entity in the United States, but it was not even created under Constitutional law by the Congress. It was a product of a Presidential Executive Order. No, it is not the U.S. military nor the Central Intelligence Agency, they are subject to Congress.

The organization is called FEMA, which stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Originally conceived in the Richard Nixon Administration, it was refined by President Jimmy Carter and given teeth in the Ronald Reagan and George Bush Administrations.

FEMA had one original concept when it was created, to assure the survivability of the United States government in the event of a nuclear attack on this nation. It was also provided with the task of being a federal coordinating body during times of domestic disasters, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. Its awesome powers grow under the tutelage of people like Lt. Col. Oliver North and General Richard Secord, the architects on the Iran-Contra scandal and the looting of America's savings and loan institutions. FEMA has even been given control of the State Defense Forces, a rag-tag, often considered neo-Nazi, civilian army that will substitute for the National Guard, if the Guard is called to duty overseas.

The Most Powerful Organization In The United States

Though it may be the most powerful organization in the United States, few people know it even exists. But it has crept into our private lives. Even mortgage papers contain FEMA's name in small print if the property in question is near a flood plain. [...]

FEMA was created in a series of Executive Orders. A Presidential Executive Order, whether Constitutional or not, becomes law simply by its publication in the Federal Registry. Congress is by-passed. Executive Order Number 12148 created the Federal Emergency Management Agency that is to interface with the Department of Defense for civil defense planning and funding. An "emergency czar" was appointed. FEMA has only spent about 6 percent of its budget on national emergencies, the bulk of their funding has been used for the construction of secret underground facilities to assure continuity of government in case of a major emergency, foreign or domestic. Executive Order Number 12656 appointed the National Security Council as the principal body that should consider emergency powers. This allows the government to increase domestic intelligence and surveillance of U.S. citizens and would restrict the freedom of movement within the United States and grant the government the right to isolate large groups of civilians. The National Guard could be federalized to seal all borders and take control of U.S. air space and all ports of entry.

Here are just a few Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 allows the government to seize and control the communication media.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has broad powers in every aspect of the nation. General Frank Salzedo, chief of FEMA's Civil Security Division stated in a 1983 conference that he saw FEMA's role as a "new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis."

FEMA's powers were consolidated by President Carter to incorporate:

* the National Security Act of 1947, which allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities;

* the 1950 Defense Production Act, which gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy;

* the Act of August 29, 1916, which authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war, to take possession of any transportation system for transporting troops, material, or any other purpose related to the emergency; and

* the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national.

These powers were transferred to FEMA in a sweeping consolidation in 1979.

Hurricane Andrew Focused Attention On FEMA

FEMA's deceptive role really did not come to light with much of the public until Hurricane Andrew smashed into the U.S. mainland. As Russell R. Dynes, director of the Disaster Research Center of the University of Delaware, wrote in The World and I, "...The eye of the political storm hovered over the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA became a convenient target for criticism." Because FEMA was accused of dropping the ball in Florida, the media and Congress commenced to study this agency. What came out of the critical look was that FEMA was spending 12 times more for "black operations" than for disaster relief. It spent $1.3 billion building secret bunkers throughout the United States in anticipation of government disruption by foreign or domestic upheaval. Yet fewer than 20 members of Congress , only members with top security clearance, know of the $1.3 billion expenditure by FEMA for non-natural disaster situations. These few Congressional leaders state that FEMA has a "black curtain" around its operations. FEMA has worked on National Security programs since 1979, and its predecessor, the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency, has secretly spent millions of dollars before being merged into FEMA by President Carter in 1979.

FEMA has developed 300 sophisticated mobile units that are capable of sustaining themselves for a month. The vehicles are located in five areas of the United States. They have tremendous communication systems and each contains a generator that would provide power to 120 homes each, but have never been used for disaster relief.

FEMA's enormous powers can be triggered easily. In any form of domestic or foreign problem, perceived and not always actual, emergency powers can be enacted. The President of the United States now has broader powers to declare martial law, which activates FEMA's extraordinary powers. Martial law can be declared during time of increased tension overseas, economic problems within the United States, such as a depression, civil unrest, such as demonstrations or scenes like the Los Angeles riots, and in a drug crisis. These Presidential powers have increased with successive Crime Bills, particularly the 1991 and 1993 Crime Bills, which increase the power to suspend the rights guaranteed under the Constitution and to seize property of those suspected of being drug dealers, to individuals who participate in a public protest or demonstration. Under emergency plans already in existence, the power exists to suspend the Constitution and turn over the reigns of government to FEMA and appointing military commanders to run state and local governments. FEMA then would have the right to order the detention of anyone whom there is reasonable ground to believe...will engage in, or probably conspire with others to engage in acts of espionage or sabotage. The plan also authorized the establishment of concentration camps for detaining the accused, but no trial.

Three times since 1984, FEMA stood on the threshold of taking control of the nation. Once under President Reagan in 1984, and twice under President Bush in 1990 and 1992. But under those three scenarios, there was not a sufficient crisis to warrant risking martial law. Most experts on the subject of FEMA and Martial Law insisted that a crisis has to appear dangerous enough for the people of the United States before they would tolerate or accept complete government takeover. The typical crisis needed would be threat of imminent nuclear war, rioting in several U.S. cities simultaneously, a series of national disasters that affect widespread danger to the populous, massive terrorist attacks, a depression in which tens of millions are unemployed and without financial resources, or a major environmental disaster. [...]

On July 5, 1987, the Miami Herald published reports on FEMA's new goals. The goal was to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad. Lt. Col. North was the architect. National Security Directive Number 52 issued in August 1982, pertains to the "Use of National Guard Troops to Quell Disturbances."

The crux of the problem is that FEMA has the power to turn the United States into a police state in time of a real crisis or a manufactured crisis. Lt. Col. North virtually established the apparatus for dictatorship. Only the criticism of the Attorney General prevented the plans from being adopted. But intelligence reports indicate that FEMA has a folder with 22 Executive Orders for the President to sign in case of an emergency. It is believed those Executive Orders contain the framework of North's concepts, delayed by criticism but never truly abandoned. [...]

Comment: With all the post-9/11 powers given to Bush, we doubt any secret Executive Orders would even be necessary...

The first targets in any FEMA emergency would be Hispanics and Blacks, the FEMA orders call for them to be rounded up and detained. Tax protesters, demonstrators against government military intervention outside U.S. borders, and people who maintain weapons in their homes are also targets. Operation Trojan Horse is a program designed to learn the identity of potential opponents to martial law. The program lures potential protesters into public forums, conducted by a "hero" of the people who advocates survival training. The list of names gathered at such meetings and rallies are computerized and then targeted in case of an emergency.

The most shining example of America to the world has been its peaceful transition of government from one administration to another. Despite crises of great magnitude, the United States has maintained its freedom and liberty. This nation now stands on the threshold of rule by non-elected people asserting non-Constitutional powers. Even Congress cannot review a Martial Law action until six months after it has been declared. For the first time in American history, the reigns of government would not be transferred from one elected element to another, but the Constitution, itself, can be suspended.

The scenarios established to trigger FEMA into action are generally found in the society today, economic collapse, civil unrest, drug problems, terrorist attacks, and protests against American intervention in a foreign country. All these premises exist, it could only be a matter of time in which one of these triggers the entire emergency necessary to bring FEMA into action, and then it may be too late, because under the FEMA plan, there is no contingency by which Constitutional power is restored.

Written by Harry V. Martin with research assistance from David Caul

New Orleans - Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details of the former head of the US occupation, L. Paul Bremer and the former US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte.

"This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental United States)," a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. "We're much better equipped to deal with the situation in Iraq."

Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.

What is most disturbing is the claim of several Blackwater mercenaries we spoke with that they are here under contract from the federal and Louisiana state governments.

Blackwater is one of the leading private "security" firms servicing the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has several US government contracts and has provided security for many senior US diplomats, foreign dignitaries and corporations. The company rose to international prominence after 4 of its men were killed in Fallujah and two of their charred bodies were hung from a bridge in March 2004. Those killings sparked the massive US retaliation against the civilian population of Fallujah that resulted in scores of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees.

As the threat of forced evictions now looms in New Orleans and the city confiscates even legally registered weapons from civilians, the private mercenaries of Blackwater patrol the streets openly wielding M-16s and other assault weapons. This despite Police Commissioner Eddie Compass' claim that "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons."

Officially, Blackwater says its forces are in New Orleans to "join the Hurricane Relief Effort." A statement on the company's website, dated September 1, advertises airlift services, security services and crowd control. The company, according to news reports, has since begun taking private contracts to guard hotels, businesses and other properties. But what has not been publicly acknowledged is the claim, made to us by 2 Blackwater mercenaries, that they are actually engaged in general law enforcement activities including "securing neighborhoods" and "confronting criminals."

That raises a key question: under what authority are Blackwater's men operating? A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, Russ Knocke, told the Washington Post he knows of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security. "We believe we've got the right mix of personnel in law enforcement for the federal government to meet the demands of public safety." he said.

But in an hour-long conversation with several Blackwater mercenaries, we heard a different story. The men we spoke with said they are indeed on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and the Louisiana governor's office and that some of them are sleeping in camps organized by Homeland Security in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. One of them wore a gold Louisiana state law enforcement badge and said he had been "deputized" by the governor. They told us they not only had authority to make arrests but also to use lethal force. We encountered the Blackwater forces as we walked through the streets of the largely deserted French Quarter. We were talking with 2 New York Police officers when an unmarked car without license plates sped up next to us and stopped. Inside were 3 men, dressed in khaki uniforms, flak jackets and wielding automatic weapons. "Y'all know where the Blackwater guys are?" they asked. One of the police officers responded, "There are a bunch of them around here," and pointed down the road.

"Blackwater?" we asked. "The guys who are in Iraq?"

"Yeah," said the officer. "They're all over the place."

A short while later, as we continued down Bourbon Street, we ran into the men from the car. They wore Blackwater ID badges on their arms.

"When they told me New Orleans, I said, 'What country is that in?,'" said one of the Blackwater men. He was wearing his company ID around his neck in a carrying case with the phrase "Operation Iraqi Freedom" printed on it. After bragging about how he drives around Iraq in a "State Department issued level 5, explosion proof BMW," he said he was "just trying to get back to Kirkuk (in the north of Iraq) where the real action is." Later we overheard him on his cell phone complaining that Blackwater was only paying $350 a day plus per diem. That is much less than the men make serving in more dangerous conditions in Iraq. Two men we spoke with said they plan on returning to Iraq in October. But, as one mercenary said, they've been told they could be in New Orleans for up to 6 months. "This is a trend," he told us. "You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."

If Blackwater's reputation and record in Iraq are any indication of the kind of "services" the company offers, the people of New Orleans have much to fear.

Jeremy Scahill, a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, and Daniela Crespo are in New Orleans. Visit www.democracynow.org for in-depth, independent, investigative reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Email: jeremy@democracynow.org.

NEW YORK - Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said an inquiry like that which probed the September 11 attacks may need to investigate the slow official response to Hurricane Katrina.

But Giuliani, who was widely hailed for his handling of the attack on New York's World Trade Center, quickly added that any probe should be deferred until after rescue and recovery operations end.

"Plenty of people have had their opportunity to explain what they think went wrong. People responding are in the middle of it and they need all the help we can get," the former New York Mayor told NBC's "Today Show" on the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

"We're going to learn alot from Katrina ... That'll be the key thing that comes out of this, which is maybe we'll figure out how to respond to these things better," Giuliani said.

He added that unlike the current barrage of criticism of the federal government, the public and politicians, for the most part, held their fire after 9/11.

"The criticisms came later and many of them were correct ones, many of the things that were done right on September 11, things that were done wrong, and the September 11 Commission ...gave us a very, very interesting and helpful critique. That's what we should do here," Giuliani said.

The Nation -- Finally, we have discovered the roots of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism."

On the heels of the president's "What, me worry?" response to the death, destruction and dislocation that followed upon Hurricane Katrina comes the news of his mother's Labor Day visit with hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston.

Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees -- cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases -- former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

"Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them," Mrs. Bush told American Public Media's "Marketplace" program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.

On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles audibly as she observes just how great things are going for families that are separated from loved ones, people who have been forced to abandon their homes and the only community where they have ever lived, and parents who are explaining to children that their pets, their toys and in some cases their friends may be lost forever. Perhaps the former first lady was amusing herself with the notion that evacuees without bread could eat cake.

At the very least, she was expressing a measure of empathy commensurate with that evidenced by her son during his fly-ins for disaster-zone photo opportunities.

On Friday, when even Republican lawmakers were giving the federal government an "F" for its response to the crisis, President Bush heaped praise on embattled Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown. As thousands of victims of the hurricane continued to plead for food, water, shelter, medical care and a way out of the nightmare to which federal neglect had consigned them, Brown cheerily announced that "people are getting the help they need."

Barbara Bush's son put his arm around the addled FEMA functionary and declared, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Like mother, like son.

Even when a hurricane hits, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

The last couple of weeks we’ve been learning some truly awful, unbearable lessons. But one of the lessons has been perversely prosaic: PR only goes so far. Not only have we been parsing anew the limits of public relations, but the limits of people who have become perilously, mindlessly dependent on PR in place of action. Their leadership limits, their moral limits.

When George Bush made his first, belated stop in New Orleans, touching down at the city’s airport, he actually viewed his visit as an appropriate occasion for a little light comedy. Here’s the official White House transcript: “I believe that the great city of New Orleans will rise again and be a greater city of New Orleans. (Applause.) I believe the town where I used to come, from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself -- occasionally too much (Laughter.) -- will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to. That’s what I believe. I believe the great state of Louisiana will get its feet back and become a vital contributor to the country.”

It was, of course, just the latest highlight in his career as chief marketing officer for the Rove/Cheney/Rumsfeld neo-con agenda. It’s a job that entails always sticking to a breezy, upbeat storyline.

It’s no surprise that Bush took this PR-trumps-action tack for Katrina. For much of his five years in office, he’s seen that putting a faux-cheerful, faux-hopeful spin on even the worst calamities (see also: the war in Iraq) meant that a cheerful, hopeful spin would automatically float to the top of the memepool, at least momentarily. If he kept repeating these faux-cheerful, faux-hopeful things ad nauseum, he’d have a great shot of at least partially obscuring all the actual rotting nastiness lurking below the surface.

Of course, the problem post-Katrina is that, unlike Iraq -- where journalists are no longer in the thick of things (with most abandoning the idea of embedded reporting) -- New Orleans had real journalists showing us the reality behind the rhetoric. And enough of them were sufficiently appalled at the government inaction that they basically ended up begging the feds, on the air, to come to the rescue. (Of course, that didn’t stop FEMA from issuing an absurd directive last week that journalists avoid showing dead bodies during the recovery process. Anybody who’d seen Oprah Winfrey’s Sept. 6 show, which offered devastating close-ups of victims’ bodies being left to rot, will feel outrage at the agency’s hapless, belated attempt at covering up just how murderous its glacial response was.)

On the very day the levees were about to give way in New Orleans, the buzz in medialand was about a Miami Herald article linked on Jim Romenesko’s media site. Romenesko summed it up thusly: “Is journalism in danger of losing its young idealists to PR? Edward Wasserman says young people want to do something ‘active’ -- to make things happen instead of reacting to events the way they do in newsrooms. ‘Students come back from summer PR internships with exciting tales of scanning the next day’s papers for stories they helped bring about,’ he wrote."

That’s where our heads have been in this country, and that’s where the president’s head is: PR is considered action, while actual action is an afterthought. Which is why Bush was able to publicly say to FEMA Director Michael Brown, with a straight face, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Whereas Bush & Co. have mostly been able to explain away troop shortages and strategic errors in Iraq (by simply denying shortages and errors), the troop shortages in New Orleans -- and the calamitous lack of federal strategy and response -- could not be dismissed by the president’s cheerful quips.

Still, all he knew to do was keep up the PR talk, as if leadership were made up solely of spin as opposed to, say, actually leading. And so he continued with the PR-ification of life post-Katrina, uttering this gem from Mobile, Ala.: “Out of the rubbles (sic) of Trent Lott’s house -- he’s lost his entire house -- there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”

Sure, as Nicholas D. Kristof noted in The New York Times, the deeper scandals are New Orleans’ grinding poverty, and the fact that nationally “the number of poor people has now risen 17% under Mr. Bush,” after having declined sharply under Clinton Administration.

But from the Bush P.O.V., there’s a simple solution for that hateful reality: Sell ‘em something else. Here’s the pitch: close your eyes and imagine Lott, in an SUV, driving to the nearest Home Depot to pick up some TimberTech all-weather composite decking. It’ll be grey. With white railings. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t you, too, like to sit on a porch like that?

NEW ORLEANS, United States - President George W. Bush went into storm-wrecked New Orleans for the first time, as the heavily-criticised head of the federal agency overseeing disaster relief quit.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina turned the city into a festering swamp, the gruesome job of recovering bodies gathered pace and the confirmed death toll rose above 500.

Seeking to counter criticism of his handling of the disaster, Bush toured parts of the flooded city in the back of a military truck and from the air in a helicopter.

Bush had previously flown over New Orleans but not seen the devastation from the ground. He later went to a suburb that was badly hit by the August 29 storm and to visit Gulfport in Mississippi.

The mounting criticism has seen Bush's approval ratings slump to their worst levels since he took office in January 2001.

And yielding to intense pressure over criticism of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's slow response to Katrina, agency chief Michael Brown quit, US media reported.

Bush appeared not to know about the resignation. "I can't comment on something that you may know more about than I do," he told reporters while visiting the disaster zone.

But critics were delighted.

"Michael Brown's departure from FEMA is long overdue, and his resignation is the right thing for the country and for the people of the Gulf Coast states," said Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the Senate.

Brown had been called back to Washington on Friday and replaced as the pointman on the ground by Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen. Bush had stood up for under-fire Brown in the immediate aftermath of the disaster telling him: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

But it was Brown's replacement who on Monday briefed Bush and local and military officials about efforts to find temporary housing for survivors.

Bush has refused to identify any specific failures in Washington's response to Katrina but flatly dismissed critics who have noted that most of those unable to flee the city were black.

"The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort," he said, also rejecting reported comments by National Guard Lieutenant General Steven Blum that a day of response time was "arguably" lost due to deployments in Iraq.

"It is preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there wasn't enough troops here. It's pure and simple," he added. "We've got plenty of troops to do both."

On the ground, more pumps came online and other signs emerged of attempts to bring life back to New Orleans.

Passes to cross a security cordon around the city were to be issued to help small businesses hoping to reopen.

Owners of small shops, restaurants, hotels, gasoline stations and supermarkets were to be allowed to visit their properties to assess damage, said Louisiana state police spokesman Johnnie Brown.

The city Louis Armstrong International Airport, which has handled only humanitarian and military flights since Katrina struck, was gearing up to reopen to commercial flights on Tuesday.

Despite the progress, the city's infrastructure is wrecked, and reconstruction will take many years and cost billions of dollars.

Many districts, especially in east New Orleans, remain under deep brown floodwaters up to two metres (six-feet) deep and covered with a floating sludge of trash and debris.

Teams fished out bloated corpses from the stinking, trash-strewn mess, and urged residents who have not done so to leave for safe shelter, although they were not using force to apply an order to quit town.

In dry streets, skeletal dogs roamed for food, sometimes gnawing at the carcasses of dead pets. An animal rescue official said she had seen dogs eating human cadavers on one highway exit ramp.

The confirmed death toll was certain to rise, although officials have said they are confident that it will be less than the 10,000 dead estimated last week for New Orleans alone.

But the number of evacuees forced to seek refuge in homeless shelters was down significantly, the Department of
Homeland Security said, with the number of people displaced by Katrina now 141,000, down from 208,000.

To help the effort, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were crafting a multi-billion-dollar economic recovery bill aimed at luring business back to the disaster zone, including tax incentives and a huge bond issue, a Louisiana official said.

A fresh storm -- this time poised off the US east coast -- continued to worry weather-watchers.

With winds receding on Monday morning, Ophelia was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. But the center said the storm could pick up force on Tuesday and become a category one hurricane again.

NEW ORLEANS - The bodies of more than 40 mostly elderly patients were found in a flooded-out hospital in the biggest known cluster of corpses to be discovered so far in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

The exact circumstances under which they died were unclear, with at least one hospital official saying Monday that some of the patients had died before the storm, while the others succumbed to causes unrelated to Katrina.

The announcement, which could raise Louisiana's death toll to nearly 280, came as President Bush got his first up-close look at the destruction, and business owners were let back in to assess the damage and begin the slow process of starting over.

Meanwhile, encouraging signs of recovery were all around: Nearly two-thirds of southeastern Louisiana's water treatment plants were up and running. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport planned to open to limited passenger service Tuesday. A plane carrying equipment to rebuild the city's mobile phone networks took off from Sweden. And 41 of 174 permanent pumps were in operation, on pace to help drain this still half-flooded city by Oct. 8.

In Washington, Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown announced he was resigning "in the best interest of the agency and best interest of the president." Brown has been vilified for the government's slow and unfocused response to a disaster that is already being called the nation's costliest hurricane ever.

The bodies were found Sunday at the 317-bed Memorial Medical Center, but the exact number was unclear. Bob Johannesen, a spokesman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals, said 45 patients had been found; hospital assistant administrator David Goodson said there were 44, plus three on the grounds.

Also unclear was exactly how the patients died.

Goodson said patients died while waiting to be evacuated over the four days after the hurricane hit, as temperatures inside the hospital reached 106 degrees. "I would suggest that that had a lot to do with" the deaths, he said of the heat.

Family members and nurses were "literally standing over the patients, fanning them," he said.

Steven Campanini, a spokesman for the hospital's owner, Tenet Healthcare Corp., said some of the patients were dead in the hospital's morgue before the storm arrived, and none of the deaths resulted from lack of food, water or electricity to power medical equipment. Campanini said many of the patients were seriously ill before Katrina hit.

Police Chief Eddie Compass declined to answer any questions, including whether officers received any calls for help from those inside the hospital after it was evacuated.

Dr. Jeffrey Kochan, a Philadelphia radiologist volunteering in New Orleans, said he spoke with members of the team that recovered the bodies from the hospital in the city's Uptown section. He said they told him they found 36 corpses floating on the first floor.

"These guys were just venting. They need to talk," he said. "They're seeing things no human being should have to see."

Bush, in his third visit to New Orleans since the storm, made his first foray to the streets Monday and toured the city for 45 minutes aboard the back of a truck, forcing him at times to duck to avoid low-hanging electrical wires and branches. [...]

Insurance experts have doubled to at least $40 billion their estimate of insured losses caused by Katrina. Risk Management Solutions Inc. of Newark, Calif., put the total economic damage at more than $125 billion. [...]

"The really positive thing long-term is, the core of our infrastructure of the $5 billion to $8 billion tourism industry remained intact," Perry said. "As odd as it may sound right now, we are optimistic that this recovery is not only going to happen, its going to happen well and we're going to have a great city going again."

The discovery at Memorial Medical Center was not the first where workers have recovered a group of bodies from a health care facility.

Saturday, a recovery team found eight bodies inside Bethany Home, an assisted-living center near City Park. On Monday, mortuary workers removed human remains from Lafon Nursing Home of the Holy Family, but authorities would not disclose the exact number of victims.

One side of the entrance to Lafon was spray-painted with the date "9-2" and the words "59 live" and "16 dead," while the other side was spray-painted with the date "9-9" and the notation "14 dead."

Inside the nursing home, the pale-brown water mark on the first floor was about 2 1/2 feet up the wall. On the second floor, spray-paint markings indicated where some bodies had been found: one under a hallway bulletin board, one in a community room, two beside an elevator.

Individual rooms were filled with personal belongings - pictures of friends, personal cards, flowers. In one room was a neatly folded copy of The Times-Picayune with the headline, "Katrina Takes Aim."

Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analysed. "Inept political hacks" running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work.

His intervention came as President Bush's approval ratings fell below 40 per cent for the first time. Yesterday, Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, turned the screw by criticising the US President's opposition to the Kyoto protocol on global warming. He compared New Orleans to island nations such as the Maldives, which are threatened by rising sea levels. Other US sources spelt out the extent of the danger from one of America's most polluted industrial areas, known locally as "Cancer Alley". The 66 chemical plants, refineries and petroleum storage depots churn out 600m lb of toxic waste each year. Other dangerous substances are in site storage tanks or at the port of New Orleans. No one knows how much pollution has escaped through damaged plants and leaking pipes into the "toxic gumbo" now drowning the city. Mr Kaufman says no one is trying to find out.

Few people are better qualified to judge the extent of the problem. Mr Kaufman, who has been with the EPA since it was founded 35 years ago, helped to set up its hazardous waste programme. After serving as chief investigator to the EPA's ombudsman, he is now senior policy analyst in its Office of Solid Wastes and Emergency Response. He said the clean-up needed to be "the most massive public works exercise ever done", adding: "It will take 10 years to get everything up and running and safe."

Mr Kaufman claimed the Bush administration was playing down the need for a clean-up: the EPA has not been included in the core White House group tackling the crisis. "Its budget has been cut and inept political hacks have been put in key positions," Mr Kaufman said. "All the money for emergency response has gone to buy guns and cowboys - which don't do anything when a hurricane hits. We were less prepared for this than we would have been on 10 September 2001."

He said the water being pumped out of the city was not being tested for pollution and would damage Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, and endanger people using it downstream.

New Orleans provides us with a reliable template for judging what the Bush administration will do in the event of a massive "casualty-producing" terrorist attack. However depressing, this is useful information.

Special military units will be deployed to the affected areas to patrol the streets in heavily-armored vehicles; conducting house-to-house searches according to their own discretion.

The cities will be placed under martial law; invoking shoot to kill orders for anyone either looting or out of doors after the designated curfew.

Heavily-armed mercenaries and paramilitaries will be used on various assignments that require secrecy or additional security. We assume they will be used to protect dignitaries, perform harsh and illegal interrogations, intimidate dissidents, and subvert efforts by the media to provide accurate information from the region.

A massive media campaign will be mounted to create a narrative of an "involved and compassionate government" providing security to their people in times of crisis.

Is this a fair description of what is taking place in New Orleans?

There's little doubt that the Bush administration capitalized on the hurricane to activate its strategy to militarize the city. There's ample evidence that they had extensive knowledge of the magnitude of the disaster, and yet, chose to do nothing. In fact, for more than 3 days they prevented food, water or medicine from entering the stricken city. Here are just a few of the headlines that illustrate this point, although there are numerous others:

"FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations.''
"FEMA turns away experienced firefighters.''
"FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks.''
"FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel.''
"Homeland Security won't let Red Cross deliver food.''
"FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans.''
"FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid.''
"FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board.''
"FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck.''
"FEMA turns away generators.''
"FEMA first responders urged not to respond.''

The administration's criminal negligence in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of New Orleans occupants is not in doubt, nor is their predictable response in countering the bad press. Michael Brown said it best when he noted that he wanted "to convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizers, and the general public." Brown's "positive image" of the catastrophe has been left to the usual Bush media-operatives, who have deftly shifted the national dialogue away from "criminal negligence" to the more benign-sounding "government unresponsiveness" or "failure of leadership." Neither of these have anything to do with the facts as we now understand them. Many of the people who died in the disaster were murdered by their government just as surely as if Bush had personally held their heads under water himself.

Now, the city is a fully-militarized war-zone no different than Baghdad or Kabul. Already, reports are coming in of doors being kicked down by armed soldiers and terrified residents being shunted off to special detention camps in hand cuffs.

We should not expect a different scenario when America's major cities come under terrorist attack sometime in the not-to-distant future.

A great deal has been written about the ethnic-cleansing operation of New Orleans poor and black, that has paved the way for America's flagship corporations to set up shop in the Big Easy.

What more can I add to the volumes that have been transcribed about this global project? Americans have been warned that they would be treated no differently than anyone else, and that the masters of new world order claim no regional loyalties. New Orleans merely adds an exclamation point to what everyone should already know.

It should be instructive to die-hard supporters of the commander-in-chief that the military deployment was accompanied by orders for all residents to "surrender all legally-registered firearms" to the authorities. I can only imagine the fidgeting at the next NRA meeting when the membership conducts an open forum on the governments' plan to disarm the nation in the event of a terrorist attack. I am reminded of George Washington's sage advice:

"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government".

Or, Thomas Jefferson:

"The constitutions of most of our states assert that all power is inherent in the people. That it is their right and duty to be at all times, armed."

That, of course, was before the reign of George 2 and the hasty rescinding of the Bill of Rights. Did gun-lovers really believe they would be spared Bush's terrible swift sword?

The "disarming" of America is a similar ruse to the WMD-scare that was used to invade Iraq. The New American Century is predicated on the belief that only the overlords will have weapons. A careful comparison of Haiti to Iraq provides an interesting contrast in the benefits of self-defense.

The deployment of mercenaries to the region should be of particular concern to Americans. Currently, more than 40,000 National Guardsman from Louisiana and Mississippi are serving in Iraq. It would have been quite simple to return them to their home states to meet the needs of the tragedy. Instead, the Bush administration chose to use exorbitantly-paid mercenaries.

Why? Is it because pacification on a large scale cannot be accomplished without a well-paid, elite-corps of corporate-warriors who are free to carry out orders with complete impunity? Are mercenaries imperative for neutralizing resistance, or is there another motive; perhaps, covert or illegal operations directed against American citizens that require additional secrecy?
In any event, paid killers should never be used on American soil.

New Orleans is looking more and more like a dress rehearsal for an ambitious cross-country strategy. It is unlikely that any plan for militarizing the country will evolve at a "snail's pace" of one city at a time. The administration would have to take advantage of massive "casualty-producing" events occurring in many strategically important cities at the same time. (Coordinated terrorist attacks?) This would provide the necessary cover for the same scenario we see presently unfolding in New Orleans.

It's worth thinking about.

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Tuesday that "I take responsibility" for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and said the disaster raised broader questions about the government's ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks.

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.

"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said.

The president was asked whether people should be worried about the government's ability to handle another terrorist attack given failures in responding to Katrina.

"Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That's a very important question and it's in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond," Bush replied.

He said he wanted to know both what went wrong and what went right.

As for blunders in the federal response, "I'm not going to defend the process going in," Bush said. "I am going to defend the people saving lives."

He praised relief workers at all levels. "I want people in America to understand how hard people worked to save lives down there," he said.

Bush spoke after R. David Paulison, the new acting director of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, pledged to intensify efforts to find more permanent housing for the tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors now in shelters.

It was the closest Bush has come to publicly finding fault with any federal officials involved in the hurricane response, which has been widely criticized as disjointed and slow. Some federal officials have sought to fault state and local officials for being unprepared to cope with the disaster.

Bush planned to address the nation Thursday evening from Louisiana, where he will be monitoring recovery efforts, the White House announced earlier Tuesday.

Paulison, in his first public comments since taking the job on Monday, told reporters: "We're going to get those people out of the shelters, and we're going to move and get them the help they need."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff introduced Paulison as the Bush administration tried to deflect criticism for the sluggish initial federal response to the hurricane and its disastrous aftermath.

Chertoff said that while cleanup, relief and reconstruction from Katrina is now the government's top priority, the administration would not let down its guard on other potential dangers.

"The world is not going to stop moving because we are very focused on Katrina," Chertoff said.

Paulison, named to the post on Monday, said he was busy "getting brought up to speed."

He replaced Michael Brown, who resigned on Monday, three days after being removed from being the top onsite federal official in charge of the government's response.

Paulison said Bush called him Monday night and "thanked me for coming on board."

Bush promised that he would have "the full support of the federal government," Paulison said.

Chertoff said the relief operation had entered a new phase.

Initially, he said, the most important priority was evacuating people, getting them to safety, providing food, water and medical care.

"And then ultimately at the end of the day, we have to reconstitute the communities that have been devastated," Chertoff added.

He said the federal government would look increasingly to state and local officials for guidance on rebuilding the devastated communities along the Gulf Coast.

"The federal government can't drive permanent solutions down the throats of state and local officials," Chertoff said. "I don't think anyone should envision a situation in which they're going to take a back seat. They're going to take a front seat," he said.

Chertoff said that teams of federal auditors were being dispatched to the stricken areas to make sure that billions of dollars worth of government contracts were being properly spent. "We want to get aid to people who need it quickly, but we also don't want to lose sight of the importance of preserving the integrity of the process and our responsibility as stewards of the public money," Chertoff said.

"We're going to cut through red tape," he said, "but we're not going to cut through laws and rules that govern ethics."

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that some military aircraft and other equipment may be able to move out of the Gulf Coast soon.

"We've got to the point where most if not all of the search and rescue is completed," said Rumsfeld, who is attending a
NATO meeting in Berlin. "Some helicopters can undoubtedly be moved out over the period ahead."

He also said there is a very large surplus of hospital beds in the region, so those could also be decreased. The USS Comfort hospital ship arrived near the Mississippi coast late last week. Rumsfeld added that nothing will be moved out of the area without the authorization of the two states' governors, the military leaders there and the president.

Elsewhere, workers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren't finding many sick people, even though the specter of diseases has alarmed relief and rescue figures. Instead, between 40 and 50 percent of patients seeking emergency care have injuries. The CDC has counted 148 injuries in just the last two days, Carol Rubin, an agency hurricane relief specialist, said by telephone from the government's new public health headquarters in New Orleans' Kindred Hospital.

While she couldn't provide a breakdown, Rubin said chain saw injuries and carbon monoxide exposure from generators are among them. Those are particularly worrisome because they're likely to become more common as additional hurricane survivors re-enter the city in coming days, she said.

The message: Those injuries are preventable, if people take proper precautions, Rubin stressed.

WASHINGTON - A spate of bills to cut federal red tape and otherwise make it easier to get aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina has hit a slow patch as lawmakers wrestle over how to shape their response.

Congress zipped through bills providing $62 billion in emergency aid to hurricane victims but the broader legislative response is a work in progress.

Included in this second phase are proposals to provide Medicaid health benefits to those made homeless by Katrina, lift work rules for welfare recipients, and implement tax changes to help hurricane victims and charitable donors. More comprehensive bills are to follow.

Republicans are starting to voice complaints that Democrats are seeking to seize upon the tragedy to pass more ambitious legislation than they otherwise could expect to achieve in the GOP-dominated Congress.

"In some instances, (Democrats are) trying to up the ante and use this crisis to accomplish goals that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise been able to accomplish without a natural disaster,"
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said. Grassley is at the center of the storm as he negotiates over taxes, welfare and Medicaid.

For example, a House-passed bill to temporarily ease rules requiring that welfare recipients work 30 hours a week for their benefits and extend the welfare program is still pending before the Senate, despite a big push by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to clear it for President Bush's signature. Democrats are pressing for a more generous approach.

For their part, outgunned House Democrats have settled on a far-reaching Katrina response plan, including housing vouchers, increases in unemployment insurance payments and full Medicaid coverage for hurricane victims.

Grassley has formally introduced a bipartisan tax break plan costing up to $7 billion that would let hurricane victims tap their retirement accounts, assist businesses and encourage charitable donations. A House plan is still taking shape. [...]

On Wednesday, Congress was to begin investigating the government's readiness and response to Katrina at a Senate
Homeland Security Committee hearing. Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, said the inquiry would investigate the sluggish response at all levels of government.

"It's going to be an in-depth, extensive review," Collins said.

Democrats continue to press for an independent, bipartisan panel modeled after the Sept. 11 Commission and they say congressional inquiries should not be controlled by Republicans. [...]

Overlooked in many news reports about the unfolding storm disaster in the southern United States, especially in the City of New Orleans, in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, is a potentially dramatic pollution issue related to a toxic landfill that sits under the flood waters right in the city's downtown, according to map overlays of the flooded area. The situation could exacerbate the already dire threat to human health and the environment from the flood waters.

The Agriculture Street Landfill (ASL) is situated on a 95-acre site in New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana. The ASL is a federally registered Superfund site, and is on the National Priorities List of highly contaminated sites requiring cleanup and containment. A few years ago the site, which sits underneath and beside houses and a school, was fenced and covered with clean soil. However, three feet or more of flood waters could potentially cause the landfill's toxic contents – the result of decades of municipal and industrial waste dumping – to leach out.

Houses and buildings that were constructed in later years directly atop parts of the landfill. Residents report unusual cancers and health problems and have lobbied for years to be relocated away from the old contaminated site, which contains not only municipal garbage, but buried industrial wastes such as what would be produced by service stations and dry cleaners, manufacturers or burning. The site was routinely sprayed with DDT in the 1940s and 50s and, in 1962, 300,000 cubic yards of excess fill were removed from ASL because of ongoing subsurface fires. (The site was nicknamed "Dante's Inferno" because of the fires.)

The ASL can be thought of a sort of Love Canal for New Orleans -– and now it sits under water.

The ASL site is three miles south of Lake Pontchartrain and about 2.5 north-northeast of the city's central business district (roughly halfway between the old French Quarter and the shore of Lake Pontchartrain).

Disturbingly, the site is also very close to the Industrial Canal Levee, a section of which collapsed and allowed flood waters to pour in, almost directly in the direction of the ASL site.

Government reports describe ASL as being "bounded on the north by Higgins Boulevard and south and west by Southern Railroads right-of-ways. The eastern boundary of the landfill extends from the cul-de-sac at the southern end of Clouet Street, near the railroad tracks to Higgins Boulevard between Press and Montegut Streets."

Locate that site on a map (see websites below), and then overlay published maps of New Orleans flooding, and one finds the old toxic landfill is situated right in the middle of a huge area of three-foot flooding. That industrial area is almost continuously connected with water to the downtown and northern areas of the city. It's not outlandish to consider the possibility that toxic waste from the landfill may mix with floodwaters and spread far beyond the old landfill site.

Although the humanitarian rescue operation must take precedence at the current time, authorities and the public must not overlook this pollution situation, which in both the near and long-term may be dangerous to human health and the environment. We must hope that emergency responders will investigate this site as soon as possible and take steps to mitigate potential off-site migration of hazardous materials. It may be that sandbag walls are required here, as well as on the broken levees.

This magazine will update the situation as more information becomes available.

Story prepared by Guy Crittenden, editor. Contact 705-445-0361 or gcrittenden@solidwastemag.com (See useful websites below.)

Useful websites:

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/PHA/agriculturestreet/asl_p3.html

This website offers the Appendix to the government Public Health Assessment and further technical details about the site, plus a small map at the end.

http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/Jones/agstreet.htm

Environmental Justice Case Study website offers a detailed description of the Agriculture Street Landfill, and the history of pollution problems and residents seeking to relocate:

http://www.nbc17.com/hurricanes/4887230/detail.html

NBC-17.com website offers interactive map of New Orleans flooded areas. (Look near top of blue sidebar at right beside main story for "Interactive: New Orleans' Damage.")

http://maps.google.com

Google map of New Orleans can be pulled up at this website. Enter "Higgins Blvd., New Orleans" to get the approximate location of the landfill, then compare this with the NBC-17 map. (Note: you can zoom in and out, and toggle around this Google map, and also hit "satellite" in the upper right to switch from map view to a satellite view of the terrain.)

At a speech to the Heritage Foundation yesterday, Laura Bush disclosed more about the White House's unorthodox information-gathering methods. Speaking about the good that has come from Katrina's aftermath, she said, "Maybe the media hasn't shown us that much, but we've read about it and we do know about it." Of course -- they subscribe to the same relentlessly optimistic paper -- The Bullshit Express -- as the Chertoff household. "Gulf Evacuees Say Group Showers the Least Humilating Experience Yet" was the headline the day after it told them "New Orleans Dodged the Bullet." And later, special guest columnist Barbara Bush observed many evacuees "were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them." Yes, the Bullshit Express has been a font of stellar coverage, almost as good as their Alternate Universe Pultizer Prize-winning series, "Iraq in 2003: Mission Accomplished."

Peter Berkowitz is a staff attorney at a Massachusetts prison. He was traveling in New Orleans with his wife Bruni & son Ernesto when the hurricane hit. They were there because Ernesto was planning to start his freshman year at Loyola of New Orleans. What follows is his letter to his 80-something mother. It was forwarded to the PEACE-LIST at Syracuse University by Carole Resnick <CaroleRes@msn.com> on Wednesday, September 14, 2005.

9\5\05

Dear Mom:

This is pretty much what happened to us as far as I can remember it. Some of it is probably off because we lost track of time and days and nights blended. I'm still feeling very angry and sad. Watching the news outrages me. I see "Dr. Phil" opining on why people didn't evacuate New Orleans. He says they didn't believe there would be a hurricane, or they didn't want to leave, etc. Well there was no way to leave. We had no way out. People with families and no resources had no way out. There were no buses coming for people, or shelters to take people to. Just announcements to leave. So naturally, the poorest, sickest, etc. were left behind. No one, as far as I could see, wanted to be there or elected to be there. No one really allowed them to get out!

Anyway, we began hearing hurricane news on the television. By Saturday, we were hearing insanely frightening news of a direct category 5 hurricane hit and projections of massive flooding and deaths of up to 30,000 people. Despite being through several hurricanes, this seemed worse than imaginable. We were pretty scared. Bruni and I had tickets out for Sunday, 8\28 at 2 pm so we weren't worried. I called all the airlines and finally got Ernesto a ticket to Chicago for 1 pm the next day.

Sunday morning we sent Ernesto back to school to get his things. I called to check on my reservation and was told the flight was cancelled. Bruni and I had no way out. Ernesto's flight was never cancelled, but there were no taxis, buses, etc., or any way to get to the airport.

So we bought some wine and canned goods and waited out the storm in the hotel. With all the dire predictions, it was pretty nerve-wracking to wait. I don't remember the storm too well. The winds picked up at night and really roared during the day Monday morning. The electricity went, but we had water. We watched the hurricane from our room and from the lobby of our hotel. The two restaurants attached to the hotel made coffee and sandwiches for the guests. The bar was opened. Everyone cooperated, so it was not nearly as bad as predicted. Being in the city, the hotel was pretty well protected by other buildings. It was not nearly as bad (or impressive) as the hurricanes we passed in Cupey.

So everything was fine and we were just waiting for the next day to see when the airport would open and when we could get out. It was quite a relief.

Tuesday morning at about 8 am, the hotel people knocked on our door to say we were evacuating the hotel immediately for their sister hotel the Saint Marie. The wanted to get all the guests together for protection from looters at nighttime, because the Saint Marie had a generator, and because it was 5 stories high, and there was lots of talk of floods of up to 20 feet. So we left for the Saint Marie, two blocks away. When we got there, we were herded into the ballroom and told to stay there. As I kept inquiring about our room, I was finally told there were no rooms, that we could stay in the ballroom if we wanted as the flood waters poured in, or we could go to the official evacuation center at the Convention Center. We were effectively kicked out of the hotel.

So we left with about 15 other guests and walked through the streets, about 10 blocks to the Convention Center. Water was clearly coming down the streets from the direction of Lake Ponchartrain, and the flood news was terrible. At the front door, the workers there told us to go around to the side. At the side, we were informed that the Convention Center was not an evacuation center, and that no one was permitted inside.

There was no one else there except for our group. Our concern at the moment was not to be caught up in the flood. Behind the Convention Center ran the "Riverwalk", a Mall and outside walkway along the Mississippi. Right on the side of the Convention Center was an escalator that ran up to a maybe 100 foot long covered walkway that led into the Mall. The walkway was about thirty feet high. We decided that it was the best place for now to ride out the flood.

So we all went up and put down our bags. Ernesto and I walked to the mall entrance, but the doors were locked. We thought maybe moving into the mall might be better and safer. At the very corner of the front windows to the entrance to the Mall, we found a window shattered on the bottom by the storm. I broke the rest of the window out so we could walk in. The Mall was full of shops and food and drink kiosks. We showed it to the other people with us. Since it was hot inside the Mall and the people were still afraid of getting in trouble for "trespassing", they elected to camp outside.

We decided to stay all together as a group. Since we had no food or water and no way to get any, we went into the Mall and began "looting", gathering food and water for our survival.

At this point, there was no communication with anyone. No one knew what was happening. There were no police. There was nothing other than news of terrible floods. Everyone was on their own.

So now, with some food and water, we sat down to wait. The entrance to the Riverwalk had part of the roof still intact, so we were able to wait in the shade.

Shortly after, we noticed a man with a rifle and duffel bag walk up to the door to the Mall. We see him try the door and find it locked. Then he simply smashed out the door with the butt of his rifle and walked in. We, of course, decided to not enter again until he left. Maybe half an hour later, he marched past us and was gone. His duffel seemed a bit fuller.

We went in again and explored more, located where the food was, found stores on a lower floor, etc. Some time passed, and then the person with the rifle returns again. This time we notice he is a cop, and he is with four other cops, and they all have arms and duffel bags. And their only purpose is to get whatever they can.

That really opened up the Mall for us. We gathered food, drinks, and explored the stores. Some other tourists appeared and joined us. We took chairs and tables out of the mall. The police had "opened up" Footlocker and other stores, so there were shoes and clothes available for the taking. I wandered through looking for bedding and ways to set up camp. I took the covers off of some kiosks to use as a bed. Bruni found some semi-cushioned furniture and we took cushions. One day we found pillows in a store.

Our group grew as new people came looking for ways to get out of the expected flooding. At some point, I started to walk back to our hotel to find out if we could stay there. On the way, I ran into an employee of the hotel and her family who had also been kicked out of the hotel. They came up and joined us as well.

The first night, there were about thirty of us up on the bridge. The next day, some others arrived. I think the second day, Wednesday, might be when the Convention Center opened, because one family decided to move down there. I think it was one of the families of the hotel employees. They had been enjoying the provisions of the Mall with us. Once they moved down to the Convention Center, word spread, and there was a steady stream of people coming up and sacking the Mall. People came out with everything, as did we. More stores were broken into, and people came out with bags and bags of goods. And it spread and spread. We went in systematically all day long taking out food and provisions.

During all of this, there were no police around. There were no authorities around. There was no food. There was no water. There was no information, other than the hysteria and rumors from the radio. No one knew how long we'd be there. No one knew when the floods would reach us. The news indicates that the airport is under ten feet of water, that the main shelter, the Superdome, has lost part of its roof and is flooding, that there is killing, and looting, and who knows what else. Everything is rumor. No one knows anything. If you see a cop, they are on their own. They are also homeless, and if they talk to you, it is to say you are on your own.

By Wednesday, the streets were filled with people who are at the Convention Center. There are thousands of people in the streets. No one has food or water. It is hot and miserable. It was maybe Wednesday or Thursday that some people on the street began yelling about dead bodies, and tossed a body wrapped in a sheet on the side of the Convention Center just below us. A little later a wheelchair with a dead woman appears there as well. Again, everything is rumor. People are saying that the dead woman in the wheelchair was bludgeoned to death in the Convention Center. At the same time, hordes of people are coming up the steps past us and into the Mall. They are breaking into all the stores, smashing cash registers, etc. There is desperation all around. And anger. And violence.

Our group is about 50. We are mostly tourists from the US, Australia, England etc. There are also several families from New Orleans who were flooded out who have joined us. Two of the people are nurses. The bathrooms in the mall have overflowed. There has been no water since Tuesday night. Food is rotting. Everything smells, as do we. But we are organized. We have set up buckets behind broken pieces of zinc roofing as bathrooms. We have sodas and water stacked up in our kitchen. While there is still ice in the Mall, we have some hams buried there. We have umbrellas and trash cans and trash bags ... even disposable gloves to help avoid disease. We also have dead bodies, dead rats, and shit and stink all around. And we have no idea how long we are here for.

Our group is mostly white and from Middle America. They decide that the blacks (the Convention Center is 99% black obviously) are planning to murder us to get attention and help). There is mass hysteria in the group, and racism is rampant. People don't know where to flee. Rumors are everywhere about murder, rape, etc. There are shots during the night Thursday or Friday. At 2 am, there is a huge explosion across the river, and a huge fire. Smoke pours in from fires in every direction.

There is some nasty racism in our group. One day, when the hysteria is greatest, a black man stands up and says, "Why do you think these people want to kill you? They are surviving just the same as you. Struggling just the same. Just as desperate as you. They don't care anything about you. They are concentrating on surviving, etc." That calmed people a bit and made them feel particularly foolish.

At the same time, more and more families from the Convention Center were moving up to the walkway with us. Our group grew to about 80. Each morning, people began to bag the garbage. Others swept the walkway. Some set out breakfast for everybody. Two women who were home care workers for the elderly emptied and cleaned the shit buckets. A group would go into the Mall and forage for provisions. Then we would sit all day and wait.

I think on Friday the helicopters began to arrive dropping water and MRE rations in the parking lot in front of us. It was the first and only food and water ever to arrive -- three days after the hurricane. And it was just tossed from the helicopter for people to run after and gather. The old and the sick had nothing. Again, no one knew what was happening. Fires were burning all around. Everyone was desperate and frightened. Everyone was just trying to survive. And everyone, other than us tourists, was there because they had been completely wiped out -- had lost their homes and every possession and had young kids and elderly parents to feed.

As the helicopters arrived, we also ran down and gathered what we could. We began to survive on the army rations. Ernesto and I became friendly with the man who had given the speech chastising our group. He invited me to go with him to the Convention Center and distribute whatever Army rations we could pick up from the next helicopter to the disabled there, since they had no way to get rations. We gathered about 30 meals off of the next drop.

The drops were scandalous -- throwing food and water out of a hovering helicopter -- people scrambling for food to survive. Reduced to animals foraging -- when the copters could have landed, imposed order with guards, and distributed food with some respect and humanity.

Anyway, we walked through the Convention Center distributing food. The Center takes up about eight city blocks. There must have been 25,000 people camped out there without provisions, without bathrooms, without water or electricity ... with no means of survival. Families with little kids. Old people. People in wheelchairs. There was no medicine. No nurses or doctors. There was filth and garbage everywhere. Some people asked for food, and we gave it. Others said they were fine and had eaten. Some pointed out others who needed food. Like our group, they were doing their best to survive, and sharing whatever they had. We kept walking. The crowds went on and on. People with nothing. Every one of them had lost everything. Abandoned. Not knowing how they would eat, how they would survive. It was the most disgraceful, sad, infuriating thing I had ever seen in my life. Poor people discarded like garbage because they were poor people.

Everybody was waiting for the promised buses to evacuate us. Every day there were rumors of buses. Every day we waited and watched. Nothing ever came. Every day there was more filth. More people fainting from dehydration. Children were getting sick. Disease was becoming a bigger worry.

Our community on the walkway was interesting. One day a reporter came by and asked me if we had a "mayor" ... we didn't. Everyone worked. Everyone joined in. Everyone did the job that made them most comfortable. And everything functioned. And as people joined us, they automatically joined in the work. There were differences, but everyone worked. When there was talk about leaving or looking for ways out, it was discussed collectively. There was always a sense of staying together and getting out as a group. There was also nastiness, and racism, and comments about "the people down there" in the Convention Center. We intervened with a lot with people in our group who were blaming all the "people down there" for the violence. We intervened when reporters started to come and were told that "the people down there" were looting and killing. We told them that they were doing just what we were doing -- doing what was necessary to survive in desperate circumstances.

I don't know what else to say. We were anxious all the time. The nights were the worst ... partly because nights are generally more frightening, but also because there were often shots or explosions. There was always a surprise, and it was always bad news. It seemed like it would never get better. We just waited and scavenged. We worried that things would get more violent as they got more desperate. We also made incredible friends and saw amazing acts of kindness.

One morning, we woke and packed at 3 am because of a rumor that the buses were coming early in the morning. We waited and hoped. No buses came. We cleaned up camp and sat down to wait again, hoping to get through another day without tragedy.

It was Friday or Saturday that we heard the news that Bush was coming to view the disaster. That was when I first thought we would be getting out. I knew that New Orleans was another stage, and that the president wasn't going to show up unless the troops were coming and the mess was going to be cleaned up. Here was a chance to improve his ratings. Here was a place where an appearance without an immediate success would be a political disaster. Here was another excellent political stage. And of course we looked down the next day at noon and there were the troops. And a perimeter was set up. And piles of water and food were set up in the parking area. And that was the beginning of the evacuation. By the next day, the buses arrived. I think we finally left at around 4 pm on Saturday.

Once the troops arrived, the general anxiety level went down. Now it was just a question of getting out. Fires were burning. When the wind shifted it was hard to breathe, but we knew if no other disaster hit, we would get out soon. As always, they told us the buses were coming. We didn't believe it for a minute. The National Guard told us we had to vacate the walkway and go down onto the street to await the buses. Of course we refused. We told them we had a community here that was self sufficient. There was no need for us to be on the street and in the sun for nothing. That here, we were supplying food, medical services, etc to ourselves and to anyone who had a need. By this time, we had about five or six elderly and incapacitated people in our group. They had been left behind by a hospital when they evacuated. They were with a nurse who had been abandoned with them. We pointed out that our sick could not go down. We had another nurse in our group who was very well-spoken, and helped convince the National Guard that we had to stay for reasons of the health of the children and the elderly. So we stuck together and stayed on the walkway. Nobody left until we finally saw the buses, and were assured that everyone would get out. And then we marched out together as a group, with much of the group still intact.

In convincing the National Guard to let us stay, one of the more hateful and delusional of our group argued to the Guard that we should be left on the walkway because of "racial tensions". This was the same woman who had been telling everyone who would listen that the blacks would slaughter us to gain media attention so they would be evacuated. Anyway, between all the arguments, we were allowed to stay. And it also resulted in one of the most shameful moments of our stay. When the meals were distributed in the parking lot, several distribution lines were formed. We were given a separate line. Our line was escorted to and from the food by Guardsmen. No one from our group was ever able to walk alone. As always, it is the racist hysterical argument that prevails. It was better not to get food then to pass through that disgrace.

We were amazed when we walked down to the corner where the bus was supposed to be that there was actually a bus. It took an hour to get out of the city. The driver did not know where we were going. As usual, we knew nothing. At some point, the cop leading the line of evacuating buses informed us that we were going to Fort Chafee, Arkansas. All we wanted was an airport, but there was no way off a moving bus. Later, we were told we were going to Fort Smith, Arkansas, even farther away. We demanded to be let off. The cop told us that we would stop to eat in Shreveport, Louisiana and we could get off there. Of course the bus didn't stop. It did stop just across the Texas border, where a group of people had voluntarily set up tables to distribute food and help to the refugees.

We grabbed our bags and decided to find a ride into Shreveport. There was no good reason for us to go to Fort Smith. Ernesto found a volunteer to take us to a motel by the airport. Our first priority was to bathe by this point. An airplane was next. Of course no motels were available. So we decided to spend the night at the airport. Another man offered to take us. As we were getting in his car, he also offered us a shower at his house. We took him up on it and headed off. We showered, chatted, etc. I made plane reservations for 7 am the next morning. They invited us to stay and sleep for the hour and a half that remained of the night. They gave us food and little presents, a tee-shirt from their local high school baseball team, etc. They were kind, concerned, and really wanted to help and do the right thing. As we talked it was also clear that they were religious conservatives, racist, homophobic, etc. East Texas ... kindness and hatefulness on the same plate.

Anyway, we're home. We're still angry and anxious. Writing all this makes me relive it. Reading it makes Bruni cry. What we saw was just too raw. Poor people abandoned because they were poor. Poor people treated as trash. Poor people being branded as looters and thieves for trying to survive. Our own country treating us just as we treat the Iraqis, Palestinians, and every other country that we exploit or invade. How can we ever deny class warfare?

The other thing that struck me were the contradictions in people ... how the kindest people in our group who gave aid and compassion individually to blacks and whites, rich and poor, also painted all those people at the Convention Center with the same brush -- animals, looters, ignorants.

And it is no wonder when all the papers write and all the news reports is looting and violence -- as if there was no need or reason to "loot". Sure, there were some violent people there. There are everywhere. But this handful gets turned into "those people", and everyone gets branded. So no compassion is needed for the poor. After all, "they brought it on themselves ... they wouldn't let the government help, even though the government tried so hard". And that becomes what this country believes. And then of course the government can "morally" do nothing for the poor -- which is what it intended in the first place.

That's all I have for now. After you read this, give me a call and we can talk.

Love,
Peter

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.

The first few nights there was a large, free community barbecue at a neighborhood bar called The Country Club. People brought food and cooked and cooked and drank and went swimming (yes, there's a pool in the bar).

Emily Harris and Richie Kay, from Desire Street, traveled out on their boat and brought supplies and gave rides. They have been doing this almost every day since the hurricane struck. They estimate that they have rescued at least a hundred people. Emily doesn't want to leave. She is a carpenter and builder, and says, "I want to stay and rebuild. I love New Orleans"

Emily describes a community working together in the first days after the hurricane. She also describes a scene of abandonment and disappointment. "A lot of people came to the high ground at St. Claude Avenue. They really thought someone would come and rescue them, and they waited all day for something - a boat, a helicopter, anything. There were helicopters in the sky, but none coming down"

So people started walking as a mass uptown to Canal Street. Along the way, youths would break into grocery stores, take the food and distribute it evenly among houses in the community.

"Then they reached Canal Street, and saw that there was still no one that wanted to rescue them. That's when people broke into the stores on Canal Street"

I asked Okra, in his house off of Piety Street, what the biggest problem has been. He said, "It's been the police - they've lost the last restraints on their behavior they had, and gotten a license to go wild. They can do anything they want. I saw one cop beat a guy so hard that he almost took his ear off. And this was someone just trying to walk home"

Walking through the streets, I witnessed hundreds of soldiers patrolling the streets. Everyone I spoke to said that soldiers were coming to their house at least once a day, trying to convince them to leave, bringing stories of disease and quarantine and violence. I didn't see or speak to any soldiers involved in any clean up or rebuilding.

There are surely reasons to leave - I would not be living in the city at this point. I'm too attached to electricity and phone lines. But I can attest that those holdouts I spoke to are doing fine. They have enough food and water and have been very careful to avoid exposing themselves to the many health risks in the city.

I saw more city busses rolling through poor areas of town than I ever saw pre-hurricane. Unfortunately, these buses were filled with patrols of soldiers. What if the massive effort placed into patrolling this city and chasing everyone out were placed into beginning the rebuilding process?

Some neighborhoods are underwater still, and the water has turned into a sticky sludge of sewage and death that turns the stomach and breaks my heart. However, some neighborhoods are barely damaged at all, and if a large-scale effort were put into bringing back electricity and clearing the streets of debris, people could begin to move back in now.

Certainly some people do not want to move back, but many of us do. We want to rebuild our city that we love. The People's Hurricane Fund - a grassroots, community based group made up of New Orleans community organizers and allies from around the US - has already made one of their first demands a "right of return for the displaced of New Orleans.

In the last week, I've traveled between Houston, Baton Rouge, Covington, Jackson and New Orleans and spoken to many of my former friends and neighbors. We feel shell shocked. It used to be we would see each other in a coffee shop or a bar or on the street and talk and find out what we're doing. Those of us who were working for social justice felt a community. We could share stories, combine efforts, and we never felt alone. Now we're alone and dispersed and we miss our homes and our communities and we still don't know where so many of our loved ones even are.

It may be months before we start to get a clear picture of what happened in New Orleans. As people are dispersed around the US reconstructing that story becomes even harder than reconstructing the city. Certain sites, like the Convention Center and Superdome, have become legendary, but despite the thousands of people who were there, it still is hard to find out exactly what did happen.

According to a report that's been circulated, Denise Young, one of those trapped in the convention center told family members, "yes, there were young men with guns there, but they organized the crowd. They went to Canal Street and looted,' and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. When the police rolled down windows and yelled out the buses are coming,' the young men with guns organized the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back,just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first" But the buses never came. "Lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. Cops passing by, speeding off. We thought we were being left to die"

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, paramedics from Service Employees International Union Local 790 reported on their experience downtown, after leaving a hotel they were staying at for a convention. "We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told ...that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City...

"We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. ...As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions...

"Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

"All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleanians were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hot wired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become"

Media reports of armed gangs focused on black youth, but New Orleans community activist, Black Panther, and former Green Party candidate for City Council Malik Rahim reported from the West Bank of New Orleans, "There are gangs of white vigilantes near here riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed" I also heard similar reports from two of my neighbors - a white gay couple - who i visited on Esplanade Avenue.

The reconstruction of New Orleans starts now. We need to reconstruct the truth, we need to reconstruct families, who are still separated, we need to reconstruct the lives and community of the people of New Orleans, and, finally, we need to reconstruct the city.

Since I moved to New Orleans, I've been inspired and educated by the grassroots community organizing that is an integral part of the life of the city. It is this community infrastructure that is needed to step forward and fight for restructuring with justice.

In 1970, when hundreds of New Orleans police came to kick the Black Panthers out of the Desire Housing Projects, the entire community stood between the police and the Panthers, and the police were forced to retreat.

The grassroots infrastructure of New Orleans is the infrastructure of secondlines and Black Mardi Gras: true community support. The Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs organize New Orleans' legendary secondline parades - roving street parties that happen almost every weekend. These societies were formed to provide insurance to the Black community because Black people could not buy insurance legally, and to this day the "social aid is as important as the pleasure.

The only way that New Orleans will be reconstructed as even a shadow of its former self is if the people of New Orleans have direct control over that reconstruction. But, our community dislocation is only increasing. Every day, we are spread out further. People leave Houston for Oregon and Chicago. We are losing contact with each other, losing our community that has nurtured us.

Already, the usual forces of corporate restructuring are lining up. Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has begun work on a $500 million US Navy contract for emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and marine facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Blackwell Security - the folks that brought you Abu Ghraib - are patrolling the streets of our city.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the rich white elite is already planning their vision of New Orleans' reconstruction, from the super-rich gated compounds of Audubon Place Uptown, where they have set up a heliport and brought in a heavily-armed Israeli security company. "The new city must be something very different, one of these city leaders was quoted as saying, "with better services and fewer poor people. Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically"

While the world's attention is focused on New Orleans, in a time when its clear to most of the world that the federal government's greed and heartlessness has caused this tragedy, we have an opportunity to make a case for a people's restructuring, rather than a Halliburton restructuring.

The people of New Orleans have the will. Today, I met up with Andrea Garland, a community activist with Get Your Act On who is planning a bold direct action; she and several of her friends are moving back in to their homes. They have generators and supplies, and they invite anyone who is willing to fight for New Orleans to move back in with them. Malik Rahim, in New Orleans' West Bank, is refusing to leave and is inviting others to join him. Community organizer Shana Sassoon, exiled in Houston, is planning a community mapping project to map out where our diaspora is being sent, to aid in our coming back together. Abram Himmelstein and Rachel Breulin of The Neighborhood Story Project are beginning the long task of documenting oral histories of our exile.

Please join us in this fight. This is not just about New Orleans. This is about community and collaboration versus corporate profiteering. The struggle for New Orleans lives on.

Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org). He is not planning on moving out of New Orleans. He can be reached at: anticapitalist@hotmail.com

Editor's Note: A Bay Area man goes to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and finds a war zone of floating bodies, armed and angry survivors and threatening policemen.

I just returned this past weekend from my first trip to Louisiana since Katrina. It's beyond what you can imagine -- it's hell on Earth.

I flew into Baton Rouge, which sits about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, and the city is destroyed, but not by the storm. There are hundreds of thousands of refugees from New Orleans in Baton Rouge. People are camping on the side of the roads, in their cars if they have them, and all over the LSU campus. The first thing you notice is how outraged everyone is.

The people of Baton Rouge don't want us here, and you can't blame them. There seems to be no plan for the New Orleaneans once they are dropped off in Baton Rouge, and locals are confused, horrified or worse. They know this is potentially a permanent situation, or at least the way it will be for the next several months. It's safe to say they're as scared as the homeless and exhausted refugees that litter their streets.

We rented four houses in Houma, La., which is about 50 miles south of Baton Rouge or about 30 miles west of New Orleans. We spent the weekend moving our family there, then our friends, and then people we met who had no other options. When I left, we had perhaps 40 people and another 20 on the way. It's an amazing thing to see -- your best friends, family and everyone in between huddled on floorboards, makeshift beds and sleeping bags. It's truly like a nuclear bomb hit our city, and we are doing everything we can just to keep everyone housed, fed and with clean water.

I decide to go into New Orleans as there are far too many people from our home unaccounted for. It's Saturday, September 3.

There is no way to get into the city. The roads that are open are being used to bring people out, and no traffic is headed in. I drive a rental car 30 miles on backroads that I guess won't be flooded. I make it about half way until can no longer get into the city by car. With a backpack loaded with as much water as I can carry, two packs of breakfast bars, three canisters of bug spray, and an extra pair of shoes, I start walking.

First, there's the climate. It's almost 90 degrees, and the humidity and the still water have made the swamp come alive with bugs. The mosquito swarms and other bugs make sound like a blizzard. I have to wear long-sleeve shirts and pants, and I'm drenched with sweat.

The first group of people I meet are very friendly. I trade my ipod for a kid's dirt bike so I can make better time, and they give me extra water. They try to warn me it isn't safe to head into the city. They warn me about what neighborhoods to avoid, and that above everything else, it was critical to stay away from the police. They'll force you to leave by putting you on a bus destined for who knows where, and if you resist, they'll arrest you. It's the first time I sense that the police and government are seen as enemies by Katrina survivors. At first, I simply consider that shortsighted, but over the next two days, I start to understand why they think that way.

I get to the outskirts of the city by about 2 p.m. -- an upscale neighborhood called Metaire, where most of the money of New Orleans lives. To get that far already involved about half a mile of swimming. Everything is destroyed. The area isn't just underwater, it's more that the swamps have risen over New Orleans. There are snakes and alligators everywhere, and the more you see, the more you realize the city isn't going to be livable for who knows how long.

Then there are the bodies. I first start seeing them as I cross from Metaire into what is called Midcity, the neighborhood you drive through to get to Jazz Fest and the fairgrounds. Until now, I've only seen a few dead bodies in my entire life. Some have been pushed against dry spots by, I presume, rescue workers. Others are just floating in the water. There are houses with red marks on them, meaning there's someone dead inside. The most horrifying part of all is what happens when a body is floating in the water for two or three days. It's barely recognizable as a person. When you see one, it's riddled with mosquitoes and who knows what else.

The city is not at all empty as the news says it is. I find hundreds if not thousands of people in all the different neighborhoods, and they have no intention of leaving. First and foremost, they have nowhere to go. Many people don't want to leave. They don't trust they'll ever be let back in, and they certainly aren't going to allow their homes to be pillaged by people crafty enough not to get kicked out. Finally, they just don't believe the argument that the city will be unsafe and infested with disease.

They're armed and angry. They have already survived five straight days of no food and no water, and they don't believe those who haven't gotten them food or water are going to find a place for them to live.

I grew up in the 9th Ward, one of the lowest income areas in the city and the site of the first levee break. To get to my childhood home, I would have to dive underwater just to get to the roof. I go to the second house we lived in. Its roof has been torn off and there's a body floating not 50 feet away from the front porch. I wish I can say my friends' houses fared better. Most were either completely submerged in 10 to 15 feet of water or just not standing anymore. I find three people I know, and they set off for Houma that afternoon.

People are furious. They feel they've been abandoned. You have to understand, there's no power anywhere. The rescue crews are going through New Orleans proper but not all the neighborhoods where people live. Most people don't even think there's a rescue effort underway at all. It becomes clear to me the one thing people need is communication; without it fear takes over. There's nothing more important to restoring order than giving the leaders an ability to get messages to everyone.

I know everyone has heard about people firing on helicopters. I'm certainly not saying it is right, but after being there, I understand. For five days, helicopters are flying overhead, but none of them are dropping water or food down for anyone. They fly by using load speakers saying that anyone found looting or stealing will be arrested, and those are the helicopters that are followed by gunshots, from what I see.

The only government group anyone has seen are the police with sawed-off shotguns threatening to arrest everyone who is walking around on the streets.

Everyone is fearful for his future, and fear leads people to do amazing, extraordinary things. It's a state of war. People don't even know who they're fighting, but they know they're at war. Twice, I bike away at full speed from people that come at me. Before I leave the city, my cash, backpack loaded with food and change of clothes and my camera are stolen. The final time, two people robbed me of my water. They didn't even ask for cash or my watch, just my water. It is desperation, and the last thing I could ever feel is anger.

I'll never forget this weekend. I'll probably spend years wishing I could. You just can't describe what it's like to see the hometown that you love, that's a part of everything you are, littered with floating dead bodies, and to see "your people" firing guns at strangers and hating everyone and everything. It's one of the worst things I've ever felt or seen. It's a war being fought against no one.

Bush has bitten the bullet and realised that the only way out of the watery grave into which his political fortunes were washed by Katrina is by the time-honoured means of throwing money at the problem. However, he is still George W., and that means that the money will be heading into the pockets of his friends, cronies, and puppet masters. His apology appears directed at the recipients of this new government largesse: "Sorry I took so long to figure out another way to steal from the poor and homeless. That Sheehan woman must have rattled me more than I thought."

In the tradition of some of Bush's most memorable media events, the somewhat mistimed "Mission Accomplished" banner weeks into the Iraq invasion and occupation comes to mind, the wag the dog specialists dressed the stage of the royal master's mea culpa:

Bobby DeServi and Scott Sforza were on hand as we drove up about 8 p.m. or so EDT handling last-minute details of the stagecraft. Bush will be lit with warm tungsten lighting, but the statue and cathedral will be illuminated with much brighter, brighter lights, along nothing like the candlepower that DeServi and Sforza used on Sept. 11, 2002, to light up the Statue of Liberty for Bush's speech in New York Harbor. Here's a quote from DeServi on the lit up cathedral: "Oh, it's heated up. It's going to print loud.'' Bush will be hidden from street view by a large swatch of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung up on poles, if I remember correctly. (Elisabeth Bumiller NYT, Cited by Wonkette)

Bush's speech to the victims was sorely missing the purported audience -- those left homeless by the devastation. Rather than face their wrath in the Astrodome or one of the detention camps into which they have been herded, Bush was carefully hidden behind military camouflage in the city his storm troopers had been fighting to empty of the hold-outs, the ones who suspected that were they to leave, they might never be allowed back in. As New Orleans' mayor Ray Nagin announced that certain neighborhoods would be open next week, we wonder about the real reason behind driving out those who wished to stay? Has FEMA suddenly become so efficient and effective that the threat of disease has ceased?

A report from Houston says that according to a poll, 44% of those evacuated don't want to return. They plan to stay where they are. That's one way to rid the city of its poor.

Behind the heart-felt manipulation of last night's speech lies a major political operation meant to save his administration and his political testament. So before we get all teary-eyed at the compassion Bush is showing for the victims, let's look at some thoughts on how the money is going to be spent...

First, the majority of those stranded in New Orleans were poor and black. So the first thing Bush does is to declare that the federal legislation requiring that minimum wage be respected during the reconstruction, the Davis-Bacon Act, does not apply. Is the logic that it will be better to poorly pay more people?

Will the contractors be forgoing part of their profit margins in the name of a humanitarian cause?

The next few articles look at what may be in store over the next months and years, and how the disaster will be turned into an opportunity to further entrench the neocon, neoliberal vision.

There are important questions, of which one of the most evident is how the reconstruction will be financed? Bush is promising $200 billion. Will he cut on the war in Iraq? Yeah, right! But it will have to come from somewhere, and the US economy is already in trouble with the huge deficits the war is imposing.

Drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, suspend environmental regulations including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, suspend prevailing wage labor laws, promote vouchers and school choice, repeal the estate tax and copiously fund faith-based organizations. These are just some of the recommendations a trio of hearty Heritage Foundation senior management officials are making to best facilitate the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.

Just as the Iraq War has been a Petri Dish for the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, rebuilding the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could prove to be the mother of all testing grounds for a passel of active Heritage Foundation's domestic policy initiatives.

Washington, DC's most prestigious and influential right wing think tank has been rocking and rolling since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

In a WebMemo entitled "President's Bold Action on Davis-Bacon Will Aid the Relief Effort," Senior Research Fellow Ronald D. Utt applauded Bush for suspending provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act applying "to federally funded construction projects in the Gulf Coast areas hit by Hurricane Katrina."

Utt wrote that the president "is to be commended for showing the courage to take this important but controversial stand... eliminating the 'prevailing wage' clause [which] should lead to a more efficient and lower cost recovery." Finally, without a hint of irony as to which entities will actually capitalize on the disaster, Utt praises the president for showing courage "in denying the politically powerful labor unions the unfair benefits they would otherwise have reaped from others' misfortune."

Two Heritage Press Room commentaries warned against playing the "blame game":

In her September 9, commentary entitled "Preventing future catastrophes," Helle Dale, the director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the foundation, deflects blame from President Bush while praising him for "the creation of an investigatory committee to look into 'what went right and what went wrong,' as the president put it."

James Carafano's September 13, Press Room commentary entitled "The Limits of Relief," provides a litany of so-called reasonable hypotheses as to why it took so long for the government to provide relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

It will be interesting to see how the foundation's commentators spin President Bush's remarks on Tuesday, September 13, when he said that he "take[s] responsibility" for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina.

A far more impressive Heritage Foundation document, however, says it all: An expansive Special Report written by Ed Meese, Stuart Butler, and Kim Holmes, lay out the foundation's cross-pollinated all-encompassing plan for rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Entitled "From Tragedy to Triumph: Principled Solutions for Rebuilding Lives and Communities," the Special Report provides a set of guidelines and recommendations which come from the foundation's two-plus decade playbook.

Meese and comrades maintain that it is imperative "that taking action swiftly does not lead to steps that cause dollars to be used inefficiently or unwise decisions that will frustrate rather than achieve long term success."

The Heritage Foundation's "Guidelines" for rebuilding the Gulf Coast include:

• The federal government should provide support and assistance only in those situations that are beyond the capabilities of state and local governments and the private sector. State and local governments must retain their primary role as first responders to disasters. The federal government should avoid federalizing state and local first response agencies and activities.
• Federal financial aid, when necessary, should be provided in a manner that promotes accountability, flexibility, and creativity. In general, tools such as tax credits and voucher programs, which allow individuals and families to direct funds, should be utilized to encourage private-sector innovation and sensitivity to individual needs and preferences.
• Consistent with genuine health and safety needs, red tape should be reduced or eliminated to speed up private-sector investment and initiative in the rebuilding of facilities and the restoration of businesses. Regulations that are barriers to putting people back to work should be suspended or, at a minimum, streamlined.
• Congress should reorder its spending priorities, not just add new money while other money is being wasted. Now is the time to shift resources to their most important uses and away from lower-priority uses to use taxpayer dollars more effectively. It is critical that America focus on building capabilities for responding to a catastrophic disaster, not on catering to the wish lists of cities, parishes or counties, states, and stakeholders.
• Private entrepreneurial activity and vision, not bureaucratic government, must be the engine to rebuild. New approaches to public policy issues such as enhanced choice in public school education should be the norm, not the exception...The critical need now is to encourage investors and entrepreneurs to seek new opportunities within these cities...The key is to encourage private-sector creativity -- for example, by declaring New Orleans and other severely damaged areas "Opportunity Zones" in which capital gains tax on investments is eliminated and regulations eliminated or simplified.
• Funding from the federal government for homeland security and disaster response and relief activities should focus on national priorities, better regional coordination and communication, and capitalizing federal assets.
• Catastrophic disasters will require a large-scale and rapid military response that only the National Guard can provide. The National Guard needs to be restructured to make it both more effective and quicker to take action.

According to Meese, Butler and Holmes the key to successfully rebuilding the Gulf Coast is to "encourage creative and rapid private investment through incentives and reduced regulation, and to channel long-term education, health, and other assistance directly to the people and areas affected so that they can control their future."

The report suggests that, "New Orleans and other affected areas" be declared "Opportunity Zones." In these areas, "the President should direct an Emergency Board, drawn from federal, state, and local agencies and the private sector, to identify regulations at all levels that impede recovery and should propose temporary suspension or modification of these rules."

Suspending Davis-Bacon "would significantly reduce the cost of reconstruction and provide more opportunities for displaced Americans who are without jobs to work on federal projects to restore their neighborhoods." They do not detail the putting in place of any mechanisms aimed at preventing the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast from turning into an Iraq-like rip off. In addition, they do not explain how workers, many of whom have lost everything, can possibly afford to rebuild their homes and their lives by working for wages at, or close to, the minimum wage.

They recommend "repeal[ing] or waiv[ing] restrictive environmental regulations that hamper rebuilding a broad array of infrastructure from refineries to roads and stadiums." They also advocate "substantial changes in environmental laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act" which they charge "have contributed to Katrina's damage,"

They believe the best way to get the energy infrastructure up and running is to "waive or repeal Clean Air Act (CAA) regulations that hamper refinery rebuilding and expansion," "waive or repeal gasoline formulation requirements under the Clean Air Act so as to allow gasoline markets to work more flexibly and efficiently and reduce costs to the American consumer," and "increase the production of oil in the United States" by drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

As an indication of how out of touch the Heritage Foundation is with the vast majority of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, they are offering a so-called tax relief package that will have little to no effect on most of the victims' lives. Front and center are recommendations to: "streamline or suspend" parts of the federal tax code in the so-called Opportunity Zones; repeal the estate tax in order to prevent the victims of the disaster from being "hounded by the IRS"; "postpone payment of 2004 and 2005 individual and business income taxes for Katrina's victims," and "waive penalties for withdrawals from tax-advantaged savings such as IRAs and 401(k) plans."

How many of the folks that you saw on the roofs of their houses and stuffed into the crumbling Superdome have IRAs and 401(k) plans, Mr. Meese?

The report goes on to propose "refundable tax credits for the purchase of the kind of health insurance that best meets their personal needs," voucherizing public school education, and encouraging public/private partnerships "through leasing" instead of constructing new public schools.

Finally, the report advocates the elimination of any-and-all barriers that prevent "charitable and faith-based groups, as well as uncertified or non-union individuals," from participating fully in the reconstruction.

Let's all be clear about one thing.

As we suggested last night, and as President Bush has now put us on notice, the Gulf Coast reconstruction effort is going to be run as a patronage and political operation.

That's not spin or hyperbole. They're saying it themselves.

The president has put Karl Rove in charge of the reconstruction, with a budget of a couple hundred billion dollars.

They've announced this in various ways over the last few days. But here's another, from today's Times ...

Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development.

Karl Rove runs political operations and manages coalitions through patronage. That's what he does. And that's what this is about.

Everybody realizes that. Don't expect much if any discussion of this point in the major papers or on the networks.

It's shameless. But that's beside the point.

This is a time when the country needs an opposition party. Every Democrat should be hitting on this. Take the politics out of the reconstruction effort. He put his chief spin-doctor in charge of the biggest reconstruction and refugee crisis the country's probably ever faced. That tells you all you need to know about his values. Nothing that happened in the last couple weeks meant anything to him. And nothing has changed. Same as Iraq. Same stuff.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Brandy Farris is house hunting in New Orleans.

The real estate agent has $10 million in the bank, wired by an investor who has instructed her to scoop up houses - any houses. "Flooding no problem," Farris' newspaper ads advise.

Her backer is a Miami businessman who specializes in buying storm-ravaged property at a deep discount, something that has paid dividends in hurricane-prone Florida. But he may have a harder time finding bargains this time around.

In some ways, Hurricane Katrina seems to have taken a vibrant real estate market and made it hotter. Large sections of the city are underwater, but that's only increasing the demand for dry houses. And in flooded areas, speculators are trying to buy properties on the cheap, hoping that the redevelopment of New Orleans will start a boom.

This land rush has long-term implications in a city where many of the poorest residents were flooded out. It raises the question of what sort of housing - if any - will be available to those without a six-figure salary. If New Orleans ends up a high-priced enclave, without a mix of cultures, races and incomes, something vital may be lost.

"There's a public interest question here," said Ann Oliveri, a senior vice president with the Urban Land Institute, a Washington think tank. "You don't have to abdicate the city to whoever shows up."

For now, though, it's a seller's market, at least for habitable homes.

Two months ago, Steve Young bought a two-bedroom condo in New Orleans' Garden District as an investment for $145,000. Last month, he was transferred by Shell Oil to Houston. Last week, he put the condo on the market.

In a posting on Craigslist, an Internet classified advertising site, Young asked $220,000. He got a dozen serious expressions of interest - enough so he's no longer actively pursuing a buyer.

"I'm pretty positive the market's going to move up from here," he said.

So, to their surprise, are many others.

"I thought this storm was the end of the city," said Arthur Sterbcow, president of New Orleans-based Latter & Blum, one of the biggest real estate brokerages on the Gulf Coast.

"If anyone had told me two weeks ago that I'd be getting the calls and e-mails I'm getting, I would have thought he was ready for the psychiatric ward."

Messages from those wanting to buy houses - whether intact or flooded - and commercial properties are outrunning those who want to sell by a factor of 20, said Sterbcow, who has set up temporary quarters in his firm's Baton Rouge office.

"We're pressing everyone into service just to answer the phones," he said.

These eager would-be buyers may be drawing their inspiration from Lower Manhattan, which proved a bonanza for those smart enough to buy condos there immediately after the Sept. 11 attack.

Of course, in southern Louisiana, everything is hypothetical for the moment. The storm destroyed many property records and displaced buyers, sellers, agents and title firms, so no deals are actually being done. Insurance companies haven't started to settle claims yet, much less determine how, or whether, they will insure New Orleans in the future. The city hasn't even been drained.

But people are thinking ahead, influenced by a single factor: the belief that hundreds of billions of dollars in government aid is going to create a boomtown. The people administering that aid will need somewhere to live, as will those doing the rebuilding. So will employees of companies lured back to the area, and the service people that attend to them.

All this will lead to what Sterbcow delicately calls a "reorientation" of the city.

"Everyone I talked to has said, 'Let's start with a clean sheet of paper, fix it and get it right,' " he said. "Some of the homes here were only held together by the termites."

What the owners of the city's estimated 150,000 flooded houses will get out of "reorientation" is unclear, especially if the houses were in bad shape and uninsured.

Some black New Orleans residents say dourly that they know what's coming. Melvin Gilbert, a maintenance crew chief in his 60s, stood outside an elegant hotel in the French Quarter this week and recalled how the neighborhood had been gentrified.

He remembered half a century ago when the French Quarter had a substantial number of black residents.

"Then the Caucasians started offering them $10,000 for their homes," he said. "Well, they only bought the places for $2,000, so they took it and ran."

The white residents restored the homes, which rose quickly in value. Gilbert said he expected the same dynamic when the floodwaters receded in the heavily black neighborhoods east of downtown.

The question of who should own New Orleans is already sparking tension. The first posting seeking New Orleans property "in any condition or location" was placed on Craigslist on Aug. 29, while the storm still raged. With small variation, it was repeated numerous times over the next week.

Some readers were infuriated. "Do you read/watch/understand any of the news broadcasts coming from the city? Or do you just go to 'Cashing in on Desperation, Despondency, and Depression: How to Make a Zillion Dollars investing in Disaster Area Real Estate' seminars. Sheeeeeesh!" wrote one.

The process of tracking down owners of deluged houses is greatly slowed by the absence of records. It's not going to be easy to find these people, said Farris, the Baton Rouge real estate agent.

What would she pay for a ruined house?

Farris demurred, saying it was too early to tell, but probably only the value of the land, if that. Though the French Quarter may be back to life within months, outlying districts such as North Bywater and the Lower 9th Ward will take years, if they ever do. Investors might hope this is the equivalent of buying land on the outskirts of a boomtown, but it's not a guarantee.

For one thing, there are already proposals to convert certain flooded areas - including some water-logged neighborhoods - into parks. Under the Supreme Court's recent ruling broadening the definition of eminent domain, speculators could be forced to sell their properties to the government.

That would be a great outcome for many homeowners in the parishes south and east of New Orleans that bore the brunt of the storm.

Six months ago, Todd La Valla, a Re/Max real estate agent, bought a four-unit apartment building for $59,000 in the community of Buras, an unincorporated hamlet in Plaquemines Parish 55 miles southeast of New Orleans.

The tenants evacuated in the storm, or at least La Valla hopes they did. He's sure the building is gone too, like just about everything else in the area. La Valla had no insurance, which means his $10,000 investment is probably a complete loss.

Yet where there's disaster, there's opportunity.

"I've had calls from investors in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York looking to buy property," La Valla said. "This is going to be hard for the poor, the elderly, those that didn't have insurance. But it's going to be great for some people."

At first, Lucia Blacksher thought she was in the bad news group. In June, she and her boyfriend put their entire savings, about $35,000, into their dream house - a century-old shotgun Victorian in the New Orleans neighborhood of Mid-City. When the storm came, they fled to Blacksher's parents' house in Birmingham, Ala.

The house, which cost $225,000, is partially flooded. Her boyfriend, a Virginian who figures he's seen enough of hurricanes to last him the rest of his life, wants to move. The insurance company won't return calls.

Last week, Blacksher was worried she would lose her beloved house either to foreclosure or a forced sale. One of those bottom-feeders would get it.

She was more optimistic Wednesday. Somehow, she would get through this.

"Because the house survived the storm, it will be even more valuable," she said. "You could offer me $300,000 and I wouldn't take it. No way."

WASHINGTON (AP) - Fewer than half of the hurricane Katrina evacuees living in shelters in the Houston area want to go home again, according to a poll by the Washington Post and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Forty-three per cent said they wanted to move back home when they can. About the same number of evacuees - 44 per cent - said they wanted to permanently relocate, and most of them wanted to stay in Houston, said the poll published Friday.

The slow response to the storm strained faith in government. Six in 10 said the experience had made them feel that the government didn't care about people like them.

But their religious faith has been strengthened, eight in 10 said. And 90 per cent were hopeful about the future.

The evacuees polled, all from New Orleans or elsewhere in Louisiana, also said:

- More than half of their homes had been destroyed. Two-thirds were renters and a third were homeowners.

- Almost 75 per cent didn't have insurance to cover their losses.

- More than half didn't have health insurance, a usable credit card with them, or a bank or chequing account from which they could withdraw money.

- More than two-thirds said they didn't evacuate because they didn't realize how bad the storm and its aftermath would be. More than half - 55 per cent - said one factor was that they didn't have a car or a way to leave.

The survey of 680 randomly selected evacuees at Houston-area shelters was conducted Sept. 10-12 by ICR. The margin of error was said to be plus or minus four percentage points. The Harvard School of Public Health collaborated on the project.

As a consequence of the catastrophe that occurred in New Orleans, people in the US and throughout the world have started to re-examine the record of the present leaders of the first world superpower. A shift in opinion has taken place almost overnight. History, throwing us all back into our seats, suddenly opened its throttle.

Katrina - everyone refers to the hurricane by her name as if she were some kind of avatar - revealed that there is dire and increasing poverty in the US, that black people are typically treated as unwanted second-class citizens, that the systematic cutting of government investment in public institutions has produced widespread social disequilibrium and destitution (40 million Americans live without any aid if they fall ill), that the so-called war against terrorism is creating administrative chaos, and that within and against all this, voices of protest are being raised loud and clear.

All this though was evident before Katrina to those living it, and to those who wanted to know. What she changed was that the media were there for once, showing what was actually happening, and the fury of those to whom it was happening. With her terrible gesture she wiped the opaque screens clean for a little while.

In some gnomic way the as-yet-innumerable dead on the Gulf coast spoke not for but with the 100,000 Iraqis who have died as a consequence of the ongoing disastrous and criminal war. Time and again in the US press, Katrina and Iraq are being mentioned together. Yet Katrina was regular. She belonged to the familiar weather conditions which affect the Gulf of Mexico. She was not hiding in Afghanistan. And merciless as she was, she did not belong to any axis of evil. She was simply a natural threat to American lives and property, and she was heading for Louisiana.

It was in the self-interest (as well as the national interest) of the president and his chosen colleagues to meet the challenge she threw down, to foresee the needs of her victims and to reduce the ensuing pain and panic to the minimum possible. If they, the government, happened to fail to do this, they would be able to blame nobody else, and they themselves would be blamed. A child could foresee this. And they failed utterly. Their failure was technical, political and emotional. "Stuff happens," murmurs Donald Rumsfeld.

Is it possible that this administration is mad? Let us try to define the variant of madness, for it may be that it has never occurred before. It has very little to do, for example, with Nero when he fiddled while Rome burned. Any madness, however, implies a severe disconnection with reality, or, to put it more precisely, with the existent.

The variant we are considering touches upon the relationship between fear and confidence, between being threatened and being supreme. There is no negotiation between the two. Their "madness" operates like a switch which turns one off and the other on. And what is grave about this is that it is in the long periods of negotiating between fear and confidence that the existent is normally surveyed and observed in its multitudinous complexity. It is there that one learns about what one is facing.

Five days after Katrina had struck, when President Bush finally visited the devastated city, he astounded journalists by saying: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." On the same day, in the wrecked small town of Biloxi, the president's flying visit was preceded by a team who quickly cleared the rubble and corpses from the route his cortege would take. Two hours later the team vanished, leaving everything else in the town exactly as it was.

The calculations of the present US government are closely related to the global interests of the corporations, and what has been termed the survival of the richest, who today also vacillate abruptly between fear and confidence.

The lobbyist Grover Norquist, who is a talking head for corporate interests and to whom Bush and co listened when planning their tax reforms for the benefit of the rich, is on record as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

All political leaders sometimes parry with the truth, but here the disconnections are systematic and crop up not only in their announcements but in their every strategic calculation. Hence their ineptness. Their operation in Afghanistan failed, their war in Iraq has been won (as the saying goes) by Iran, Katrina was allowed to produce the worst natural disaster in US history, and terrorist activities are increasing.

An ignorance about most of what exists, and an abdication from the very minimum of what can be expected of government - are we not approaching disconnections which amount to what can be called madness when found in the minds of those who believe they can rule the planet?

Yesterday city councillor Lynne Pope woke up to find 191 emails waiting for her.

Now she is trying to figure out what to say to the family from New Orleans who, after watching police shoot a family member, pinned a note to his body - but now can't find him.

And how does she reply to the mother looking for her 22-year-old son who is autistic and can't communicate, or to the mother who asked to have her eight-year-old daughter's name taken off the missing person's list because the child's body has been found.

Pope, along with Peter Koch in Switzerland and Texan Jonathan Cutrer are the core of a group of volunteers who have set up a website, Katrina Evacuee Help Center at www.disastersearch.org, to help those affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Pope, who runs an internet design business, was participating in an international software development forum, online, when a pastor from Louisiana, who is in charge of the shelters in his area, posted a message asking for help with his website, Pope said. "When Peter got talking to him we found the problem wasn't his website, but that there was not a centralised unified database for people to use. We actually thought that the Federal Government disaster agency would have set something up before the disaster . . . so as nobody had done it, we did."

In the first 24 hours more than 500 people visited the site and by the time it was launched 12 families had made contact with each other for the first time since the hurricane struck, she said.

"We didn't even get to develop the site and test it before people were using it.

"The need is so urgent."

The site contains the names of more than 300,000 people still missing after the hurricane.

While Pope receives a couple of emails a day asking to have names removed from the list because people have been found, she receives "dozens and dozens" asking to remove names because their bodies have been found, she said.

"There have been many tears."

The team members, who do not get paid, have had hundreds of volunteers from all around the world, including web designers and software programmers, helping out and have been working hard out for 18 to 20 hours a day for the past 11 days, she said.

A big problem is getting word out to people on the ground that there is a large website worth looking at, she said.

As well as missing persons, other features of the site include downloadable government aid forms, a volunteer register, morgue listings and a job registry. The database can be searched via cellphone and one volunteer group has been distributing cellphones around the shelters and others have been setting up internet booths at the shelters.

Pope said they are now getting support from US senators and many agencies were contacting them to add their databases to one central location.

"It's getting bigger by the day."

WASHINGTON - President Bush is urging Congress to approve a massive reconstruction program for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast and promising that the federal government will review the disaster plans of every major American city.

The government failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina, Bush said Thursday night from storm-damaged New Orleans as he laid out plans for one of the largest reconstruction projects ever. The federal government's costs could reach $200 billion or beyond.

The president, who has been dogged by criticism that Washington's response to the hurricane was slow and inadequate, said the nation has "every right to expect" more effective federal action in a time of emergency such as Katrina, which killed hundreds of people across five states, forced major evacuations and caused untold property damage.

Disaster planning must be a "national security priority," he said, while ordering the Homeland Security Department to undertake an immediate review of emergency plans in every major American city.

"Our cities must have clear and up-to-date plans for responding to natural disasters and disease outbreaks or a terrorist attack, for evacuating large numbers of people in an emergency and for providing the food and water and security they would need," Bush said.

He acknowledged that government agencies lacked coordination and were overwhelmed by Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans. He said a disaster on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces. He ordered all Cabinet secretaries to join in a comprehensive review of the government's faulty response.

"When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I as president am responsible for the problem, and for the solution," Bush said, looking into the camera that broadcast his speech live on the major television networks from historic Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter. "This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina."

Bush faced the nation at a vulnerable point in his presidency. Most Americans disapprove of his handling of Katrina, and his job-approval rating has been dragged down to the lowest point of his presidency also because of dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and rising gasoline prices. He has struggled to demonstrate the same take-charge leadership he displayed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks four years ago.

In his speech, the president called for a congressional investigation besides the administration's self-examination. [...]

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., speaking after the president's address, acknowledged that the recovery programs would add to the nation's debt. GOP leaders are open to suggestions from lawmakers to cut government spending elsewhere, but the task is urgent, he said.

"For every dollar we spend on this means a dollar that's going to take a little bit longer to balance the budget," Hastert said.

Congress already has approved $62 billion for the disaster, but that is expected to run out next month.

Even before Bush spoke, some fiscal conservatives expressed alarm at the prospect of such massive federal outlays without cutting other spending.

"It is inexcusable for the White House and Congress to not even make the effort to find at least some offsets to this new spending," said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. "No one in America believes the federal government is operating at peak efficiency and can't tighten its belt."

Bush repeated a hotline number, 1-877-568-3317, for people to call to help reunite family members separated during the hurricane. Moments later, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., criticized Bush, saying "Leadership isn't a speech or a toll-free number."

"No American doubts that New Orleans will rise again," Kerry said. "They doubt the competence and commitment of this administration."

Bush proposed establishment of worker recovery accounts providing up to $5,000 for job training, education and child care during victims' search for employment. He also proposed creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama offering tax breaks to encourage businesses to stay in the devastated region and new businesses to open.

Bush said the goal was to get evacuees out of shelters by mid-October and into apartments and other homes, with assistance from the government. He said he would work with Congress to ensure that states were reimbursed for the cost of caring for evacuees.

He also said he would ask Congress to approve an Urban Homesteading Act in which surplus federal property would be turned over to low-income citizens by means of a lottery to build homes, with mortgages or assistance from charitable organizations.

WASHINGTON - Former US president Bill Clinton sharply criticised George W. Bush for the Iraq War and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and voiced alarm at the swelling US budget deficit.

Breaking with tradition under which US presidents mute criticisms of their successors, Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq "virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction."

The Iraq war diverted US attention from the war on terrorism "and undermined the support that we might have had," Clinton said in an interview with an ABC's "This Week" programme.

Clinton said there had been a "heroic but so far unsuccessful" effort to put together a constitution that would be universally supported in Iraq.

The US strategy of trying to develop the Iraqi military and police so that they can cope without US support "I think is the best strategy. The problem is we may not have, in the short run, enough troops to do that," said Clinton.

On Hurricane Katrina, Clinton faulted the authorities' failure to evacuate New Orleans ahead of the storm's strike on August 29.

People with cars were able to heed the evacuation order, but many of those who were poor, disabled or elderly were left behind.

"If we really wanted to do it right, we would have had lots of buses lined up to take them out," Clinton.

He agreed that some responsibility for this lay with the local and state authorities, but pointed the finger, without naming him, at the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

FEMA boss Michael Brown quit in response to criticism of his handling of the Katrina disaster. He was viewed as a political appointee with no experience of disaster management or dealing with government officials.

"When James Lee Witt ran FEMA, because he had been both a local official and a federal official, he was always there early, and we always thought about that," Clinton said, referring to FEMA's head during his 1993-2001 presidency.

"But both of us came out of environments with a disproportionate number of poor people."

On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.

"What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," he said.

"We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."

Clinton added: "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."

It has been one month and one week since I sat in a ditch in Crawford, Tx. I can hardly believe it when I think of it myself. So much has happened in that time, and really, so little.

I got to Camp Casey III in Covington, La today, after getting up at 3am to head for the airport. Now it is 3am the next day and we are driving in a car to try and find a hotel to sleep anywhere around Jackson, Miss. I was prepared to be shocked by what I saw in Louisiana, but I guess one can never really fully prepare for such devastation and tragedy. After living in a country your entire life it is so difficult to see such callous indifference on an immense scale. When I reflect on how the mother of the imbecile who is running our country said that the people who are in the Astrodome are happy to be there, it angers me beyond comparison. The people in LA who were displaced have nice, if modest homes that are perfectly fine. I wonder why the government made them leave at great expense and uproot families who have been living in their communities for generations.

After we arrived at Camp Casey III, we took the Veterans for Peace "Impeachment Tour Bus" into New Orleans after stopping at the distribution center to pick up some supplies in Covington. The stench and the destruction are unbelievable. I saw some hurricane zones in the panhandle of Florida last year that were pretty bad but that couldn't have prepared me for this.

I saw in the paper that George Bush said the recovery in the Gulf States would be "hard work." That's what he said about sending troops to Iraq and looking at the casualty reports everyday: "It's hard work." That man has never known a day of hard work in his life. The people on the ground in Covington scoffed at George's little junket to Louisiana yesterday. He stayed in the French Quarter and a Ward that weren't even damaged a bit. The VFP took me to the city of Algiers on the West Bank. The part of Algiers we went to was very poor and black. The people of Algiers know what hard work is.

Algiers had no flooding. All of the damage was from winds. There are trees knocked over and shingles off of roofs. There are signs blown over and there was a dead body lying on the ground for 2 weeks before someone finally came to get it. Even though Algiers came through Katrina relatively unscathed, our federal government tried to force (mostly successfully) the people out of the community. Malik Rahim, a new friend of ours and resident of Algiers, told us stories of the days after the hurricane. The government declared martial law, but there was no effective police presence to enforce it. Malik said the lawlessness was rampant. People were running out of food and water and they were being forced to go to the Superdome. They didn't want to go to the Superdome, because their homes were pretty intact: they wanted to stay and have food and water brought to them. A town of 76,000 people dwindled down to 3,000. The die hards were rewarded last Wednesday when the VFP rolled into town with food and water. The Camp Casey III people were the first ones to bring any relief to Algiers. The people who were supposed to look after its citizens, our government, failed them.

In Algiers, in the space of 2 short weeks, Malik and his community has opened a clinic which also doubles as a food and supply distribution center. We need more help in Algiers. Malik and the other dozens of fine volunteers are planning on opening 2 more clinics in Algiers and Malik would dearly love someone to give him a flat bottomed boat so he can go to the flood drenched poor communities that still have not been helped and bring them food, supplies, and medical attention. Medical professionals are dearly needed. Malik has also set up a communications center in an apartment next to his house which is for the community to use. The aid that is being given in Algiers is completely driven by the needs of the community. They have a saying in Algiers: Not Charity, Solidarity.

The citizens of Algiers desperately needed help and hope before the hurricane. When I think of how many other poor neighborhoods are being decimated and made so desperate and hopeless by the failed policies of the Bush administration, it makes me so angry. But when I see what the people of Algiers are doing to help themselves and the people of America are doing to help them help themselves, it gives me hope. I think Algiers can be a model for all of our communities.

One thing that truly troubled me about my visit to Louisiana was the level of the military presence there. I imagined before that if the military had to be used in a CONUS (Continental US) operations that they would be there to help the citizens: Clothe them, feed them, shelter them, and protect them. But what I saw was a city that is occupied. I saw soldiers walking around in patrols of 7 with their weapons slung on their backs. I wanted to ask one of them what it would take for one of them to shoot me. Sand bags were removed from private property to make machine gun nests.

The vast majority of people who were looting in New Orleans were doing so to feed their families or to get resources to get their families out of there. If I had a store with an inventory of insured belongings, and a tragedy happened, I would fling my doors open and tell everyone to take what they need: it is only stuff. When our fellow citizens are told to "shoot to kill" other fellow citizens because they want to stay alive, that is military and governmental fascism gone out of control. What I saw today in Algiers lifted up my spirits, but what I also saw today in Algiers frightened me terribly.

The people who are running the clinic in Algiers gave me a list of desperately needed supplies:

- Blood pressure medication---properly packaged.
- Allergy medication---properly packaged
- Vitamin B
- Pens, paper, sharpies, index cards
- Glucometers and test strips
- Full O2 tanks
- Power strips and extension cords
- Non-DEET insect repellent
- Mini bottles of Hand Sanitizer
- A copy machine is urgently needed
- People: Call: 512-297-1049

Send supplies to:
Fed Ex or UPS
Veterans for Peace Ch 116
C/O 645 Kimbro Dr.
Baton Rouge, La. 70808

Mark them: For the Medical Clinic in Algiers

The children in Algiers have also been out of school. Malik would like to open a school and they need school supplies and teachers.

I have a testimony from a doctor that came to Louisiana to help that I will post tomorrow. The failure in every level of our government is criminal negligence. Tens of thousands of families in our country have been devastated because of the incompetence and callousness of our so-called leadership. America is stepping up to the plate to help Americans. America stepped up to the plate to hold George accountable for the abomination in Iraq. One thing George has taught us is that we are self-sufficient and we have a country that is worth fighting for and we are not going away.

I was told that Pat Boone was on a conservative radio talk show in San Francisco (yes they do exist) with Melanie Morgan (who has a vendetta against me) and he told the listeners that after we "stole the supplies" from the Red Cross, we gave them to the "enemies of America who are like the people who want to fly airplanes into our buildings." Boone says that we were giving them to enemies of America, because we were distributing the supplies from a Mosque. First of all, accusing me of stealing is slander, I think, and second of all: we were helping Americans. Just because their government abandoned them, we shouldn't feed them and give them medicine and supplies? I thought Pat Boone was supposed to be a Christian man? Thirdly, isn't Freedom of Religion one of our Constitutional guarantees?

It is a Christ-like principle to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. That's what is happening in Algiers and other places in Louisiana...but by the people of America, not the so-called "Christians" in charge. If George Bush truly listened to God and read the words of the Christ, Iraq and the devastation in New Orleans would have never happened.

I don't care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don't care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don't care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power. The only way America will become more secure is if we have a new administration that cares about Americans even if they don't fall into the top two percent of the wealthiest.

WASHINGTON - President Bush's push to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina could lead to a loosening of legal limits on the use of federal troops on U.S. soil.

Pentagon officials are reviewing that possibility, and some in Congress agree it needs to be considered.

Bush did not define the wider role he envisions for the military. But in his speech to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday, he alluded to the unmatched ability of federal troops to provide supplies, equipment, communications, transportation and other assets the military lumps under the label of "logistics."

The president called the military "the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."

At question, however, is how far to push the military role, which by law may not include actions that can be defined as law enforcement - stopping traffic, searching people, seizing property or making arrests. That prohibition is spelled out in the Posse Comitatus Act of enacted after the Civil War mainly to prevent federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states.

Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, "I believe the time has come that we reflect on the Posse Comitatus Act." He advocated giving the president and the secretary of defense "correct standby authorities" to manage disasters.

Presidents have long been reluctant to deploy U.S. troops domestically, leery of the image of federal troops patrolling in their own country or of embarrassing state and local officials.

The active-duty elements that Bush did send to Louisiana and Mississippi included some Army and Marine Corps helicopters and their crews, plus Navy ships. The main federal ground forces, led by troops of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., arrived late Saturday, five days after Katrina struck.

They helped with evacuations and performed search-and-rescue missions in flooded portions of New Orleans but did not join in law enforcement operations.

The federal troops were led by Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. The governors commanded their National Guard soldiers, sent from dozens of states.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is reviewing a wide range of possible changes in the way the military could be used in domestic emergencies, spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said Friday. He said these included possible changes in the relationship between federal and state military authorities.

Under the existing relationship, a state's governor is chiefly responsible for disaster preparedness and response.

Governors can request assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If federal armed forces are brought in to help, they do so in support of FEMA, through the U.S. Northern Command, which was established in 2002 as part of a military reorganization after the 9/11 attacks.

Di Rita said Rumsfeld has not made recommendations to Bush, but among the issues he is examining is the viability of the Posse Comitatus Act. Di Rita called it one of the "very archaic laws" from a different era in U.S. history that limits the Pentagon's flexibility in responding to 21st century domestic crises.

Another such law, Di Rita said, is the Civil War-era Insurrection Act, which Bush could have invoked to waive the law enforcement restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act. That would have enabled him to use either National Guard soldiers or active-duty troops - or both - to quell the looting and other lawlessness that broke out in New Orleans.

The Insurrection Act lets the president call troops into federal action inside the United States whenever "unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages - or rebellion against the authority of the United States - make it impracticable to enforce the laws" in any state.

The political problem in Katrina was that Bush would have had to impose federal command over the wishes of two governors - Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi - who made it clear they wanted to retain state control.

The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was in 1992 when it was requested by California Gov. Pete Wilson after the outbreak of race riots in Los Angeles. President George H.W. Bush dispatched about 4,000 soldiers and Marines.

Di Rita cautioned against expecting quick answers to tough questions like whether Congress should define when to trigger the president's authority to send federal troops to take charge of an emergency, regardless of whether a governor agreed.

"Is there a way to define a threshold, or an anticipated threshold, above which a different set of relationships would kick in?" Di Rita asked. "That's a good question. It's only been two weeks, so don't expect us to have the answers. But those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking."

NEW ORLEANS - The mayor of New Orleans has set up an "extremely problematic" timeline for allowing residents to return to the evacuated city, which is still threatened by a weakened levee system, a lack of drinkable water and heavily polluted floodwaters, the head of the federal relief effort said Saturday.

Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen said federal officials have worked with Mayor Ray Nagin and support his vision for repopulating the city, but he called Nagin's idea to return up to 180,000 people to New Orleans in the next week both "extremely ambitious" and "extremely problematic."

"Our intention is to work with the mayor ... in a very frank, open and unvarnished manner," Allen told The Associated Press in an interview at Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Baton Rouge.

Nagin has announced that the city's Algiers section, the Garden District and the French Quarter would reopen over the next week and a half, bringing back more than one-third of the city's half-million inhabitants. All the areas to be reopened were spared Katrina's flooding. Electricity and clean water have been restored to some sections.

Allen said a prime public health concern is the tap water, which in most of the city remains unfit for drinking and bathing. He said he was concerned about the difficulties of communicating the risk of using that water to people who return and might run out of the bottled water they brought along.

"The water that's there is only good for firefighting and flushing," he said.

Another concern, Allen said, was the risk of another storm hitting the region, threatening an already delicate levee system and possibly requiring residents to be evacuated again.

"Something less than a Category 4 storm is going to present significant issues that might require the evacuation of the general population. You want to make sure you have your arms around how you will do that," he said.

Allen called on the mayor to be "mindful of the risks" and said he would inform Nagin of his concerns when they meet on Monday.

Allen was not the only official with doubts about the mayor's plans.

The mayor's homeland security director, Terry Ebbert, backed away from Nagin's promise on Friday, saying only that the city would assess the situation in the French Quarter from "day to day." Asked repeatedly whether that meant it could open sooner or later than Sept. 26, he declined to elaborate.

Ebbert said the city's recovery depends on getting businesses reopened, but he said the repopulation of the city was being done "in a progressive manner" to ensure the safety and health of residents. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was planned.

Meanwhile, some business owners were being allowed back into the city Saturday to get a head start on opening the rollicking bars, stores and restaurants that keep the good times rolling in New Orleans.

Margaret Richmond stood watching, tears streaming down her face, as members of the 82nd Airborne Division used a crowbar to try to pry open the door of her looted antiques shop on the edge of the city's upscale Garden District.

The store, Decor Splendide, had been looted in the chaotic days after Katrina struck. Antique jewelry, a cement angel with one wing broken off and lamps were lying scattered on the floor. Someone had wedged a piece of metal in the door to jam it closed, hoping to deter other looters.

"What they didn't steal they trashed," Richmond said, gazing through a window of her shop, before the soldiers were able to break open the door. "They got what they could and ruined what they left."

Business owners, facing damage that could take months to repair, said hopes for a quick recovery may be little more than a political dream.

"I don't know why they said people could come back and open their businesses," said Richmond, whose insurance policy will cover the lost merchandise. "You can't reopen this. And even if you could, there are no customers here." [...]

These neighborhoods were the lucky ones. They never flooded. Still, nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, about 40 percent of the Big Easy was under water.

But that is down from 80 percent after the storm, and engineers say water is dropping rapidly. While water in some low-lying areas had been as deep as 20 feet, the deepest water in the city Friday was 5 feet, exposing still more of the dead.

The death toll along the Gulf Coast rose to 816, including 579 in Louisiana.

Security will be tight in the reopened neighborhoods, with Nagin and others vowing never again to let New Orleans slip into the lawlessness that gripped the city in the days after the storm. This week, he warned potential looters that soldiers carry M-16 rifles "and they might have a few bazookas we're saving for spec people."

NEW YORK - British Prime Minister Tony Blair has complained privately to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch that the BBC's coverage of Hurricane Katrina carried an anti-American bias, Murdoch said at a conference here.

Murdoch, chairman of the media conglomerate News Corporation, recounted a conversation with the British leader at a panel discussion late Friday hosted by former president Bill Clinton.

"Tony Blair -- perhaps I shouldn't repeat this conversation -- told me yesterday that he was in Delhi last week. And he turned on the BBC world service to see what was happening in New Orleans," Murdoch was quoted as saying in a transcript posted on the Clinton Global Initiative website.

"And he said it was just full of hate of America and gloating about our troubles. And that was his government. Well, his government-owned thing," he said of the publicly owned broadcaster.

Murdoch went on to say that anti-American bias was prevalent throughout Europe.

"I think we've got to do a better job at answering it. And there's a big job to do. But you're not going to ever turn it around totally," said Murdoch, one of three media magnates who spoke at Clinton's "Global Initiative" forum on peace and development.

The former US president, who held his conference to coincide with the United Nations summit in New York, agreed that the BBC's coverage was lacking.

While the BBC's reports on the hurricane were factually accurate, its presentation was "stacked up" to criticize President George W Bush's handling of the disaster, Clinton said.

"There is nothing factually inaccurate. But ... it was designed to be almost exclusively a hit on the federal response, without showing what anybody at any level was doing that was also miraculous, going on simultaneously in a positive way," Clinton said.

Blair's remarks, as reported by Murdoch, are sure to aggravate the already difficult relations between the prime minister's government and the BBC. [...]

A former BBC foreign correspondent and MP, Martin Bell, defended the BBC's coverage of the hurricane and alleged that Blair was trying to curry favor with a powerful media owner who controls important British newspapers.

"Tony Blair was telling Murdoch what he wanted to hear because he needs Murdoch's support," Bell was quoted as saying by British media.

The BBC said it had received no complaint from Downing Street about its coverage.

Blair's office declined to comment.

HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned.

US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees.

Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

And unless the bureaucratic mess is cleared up soon it could be sent for incineration.

One British aid worker last night called the move "sickening senselessness" and said furious colleagues were "spitting blood".

The food, which cost British taxpayers millions, is sitting idle in a huge warehouse after the Food and Drug Agency recalled it when it had already left to be distributed.

Scores of lorries headed back to a warehouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, to dump it at an FDA incineration plant.

The Ministry of Defence in London said last night that 400,000 operational ration packs had been shipped to the US.

But officials blamed the US Department of Agriculture, which impounded the shipment under regulations relating to the import and export of meat.

The aid worker, who would not be named, said: "This is the most appalling act of sickening senselessness while people starve.

"The FDA has recalled aid from Britain because it has been condemned as unfit for human consumption, despite the fact that these are Nato approved rations of exactly the same type fed to British soldiers in Iraq.

"Under Nato, American soldiers are also entitled to eat such rations, yet the starving of the American South will see them go up in smoke because of FDA red tape madness." [...]

"Everyone is revolted by the chaotic shambles the US is making of this crisis. Guys from Unicef are walking around spitting blood.

"This is utter madness. People have worked their socks off to get food into the region.

"It is perfectly good Nato approved food of the type British servicemen have. Yet the FDA are saying that because there is a meat content and it has come from Britain it must be destroyed.

"If they are trying to argue there is a BSE reason then that is ludicrously out of date. There is more BSE in the States than there ever was in Britain and UK meat has been safe for years."

The Ministry of Defence said: "We understand there was a glitch and these packs have been impounded by the US Department of Agriculture under regulations relating to the import and export of meat.

"The situation is changing all the time and at our last meeting on Friday we were told progress was being made in relation to the release of these packs. The Americans certainly haven't indicated to us that there are any more problems and they haven't asked us to take them back."

Food from Spain and Italy is also being held because it fails to meet US standards and has been judged unfit for human consumption.

And Israeli relief agencies are furious that thousands of gallons of pear juice are to be destroyed because it has been judged unfit.

The FDA said: "We did inspect some MREs (meals ready to eat) on September 13. They are the only MREs we looked at. There were 70 huge pallets of vegetarian MREs.

"They were from a foreign nation. We inspected them and then released them for distribution."

In a September 3rd press release, Louisiana's Senator Mary Landrieu said the following about the Bush administration and the "relief effort":

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.

It seems that Landrieu was a first hand witness to the extreme cynicism of the Bush administration when it comes to honesty and respect for human life. What is patently obvious is that people like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove care only for appearances and ensuring that the public continues to think their leaders are decent human beings when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

How many more acts of unmitigated callousness will it take before people start to accept the fact that the idea that our leaders actually give a damn about the life of the average citizen is simply not true, and never was.

A 64-year-old Alabamian frets about frayed race relations. A Utah software programmer ponders the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina and decides he'll turn to his church first in a disaster created by nature or terrorists.

A woman scraping by on disability pay in northern Virginia puts her house on the market because of surging post-storm gas and food prices. Cheaper to live in Pennsylvania, she figures.

As the Gulf Coast braces for another monster storm, a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll shows Katrina prompted a rethinking of some signature issues in American life - changing the way we view race and our safety, how we spend our money, even where we live.

The poll shows that issues swirling around Katrina trump other national concerns.

Asked to rank eight topics that should be priorities for President Bush and Congress, respondents placed the economy, gas prices and Iraq high.

Comment: Despite the Bush administration's assurances that the economy is doing so well, it is quite obvious that for the average American, nothing could be further from the truth.

But when Katrina recovery was added to the list, it swamped everything else.

Like bands of the storm itself, Katrina's reach in American life is vast: 1 in 3 Americans believes the slow response will harm race relations. Two-thirds say surging gas prices will cause hardship for their families. Half say the same of higher food prices.

Comment: For the power elite, high food and fuel prices are no big deal. The problem is that the majority of Americans are not rich. When two thirds of Americans say that gas and food prices are causing them financial difficulties, we might suspect that the economic bubble will pop rather soon. Even if Rita completely fizzles out and causes no damage at all, Katrina's wallop seems to have had effects that are more far-reaching than the administration would like to admit. Even if Bush's "Plunge Protection Team" can keep the illusion of a healthy economy going for a little while longer, the contrast between Bush's positive words on the US economic outlook and the reality of an ever-growing lower class will be hard to bury.

In Las Cruces, N.M., Ariana Darley relies on carpools to get to parenting classes, or to make doctor's appointments with her 1-year-old son, Jesse. Before, she chipped in $5 for gas. Now, she pays $10 to $15.

"I didn't think it would affect me," she says by telephone, with Jesse crying in the background. "But it costs a lot of money now. I have to go places, and now it adds up."

After a crisis with indisputable elements of race and class - searing images of mostly poor, mostly black New Orleans residents huddled on rooftops or waiting in lines for buses - some Americans worry about strains in the nation's social fabric. [...]

The poll underscores the literal reach of Katrina as well: 55 percent of Americans say evacuees from Katrina have turned up in their cities or communities, raising concerns about living conditions for the refugees, vanishing jobs for locals and - among 1 in 4 respondents - increased crime.

Among respondents with incomes under $25,000 per year, 56 percent were concerned about living conditions for refugees in shelters; that was higher than among those who make more money. And the poll indicates people in the South, which has absorbed huge masses of evacuees, are most concerned about the costs to their local governments.

Ann McMullen, 52, of Killeen, Texas, who works as a school administrator at Fort Hood, says she worries about gang violence, simply because of the prodigious numbers of people flowing into Texas communities.

"They can't even locate the sex offenders," she says. "And every population has gang members. It's theft, it's murder, it's more chaotic crimes in the community. Hopefully we'll be able to put these people back to work."

The poll also exposes a divide among Americans in how the government should respond when disasters strike areas particularly prone to catastrophe - landslides, earthquakes, hurricanes. Half say the government should give people in those zones money for recovery, but almost as many say those people should live there at their own risk.

About 4 in 10 say the government should prohibit people from building new homes in those endangered areas in the first place. As McMullen puts it: "You're asking for another disaster to happen."

Katrina has also raised grave doubts among Americans about just who will protect them in the aftermath of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

Only about a quarter of Americans believe the federal government was as prepared as it should have been to cope with a disaster of Katrina's magnitude. Only slightly more than half, 54 percent, are confident in the federal government's ability to handle a future major disaster. [...]

For Pam Koren, the storm's impact has been more immediate - and more drastic.

Suffering from low blood sugar, spasms of the esophagus and nerve damage, she exists now on disability pay and contributions from her daughter, who attends college and works as an assistant youth minister.

With gas and food prices rising after the storm, she says, she was forced to put her house in Burke, Va., on the market. She is considering east-central Pennsylvania, and a less expensive home.

"I'm a wreck because I'm not sure I'm making the right decision," she says. "I didn't want to have to do this, but things have become so tight I have not had a choice. I did not expect things were going to get this bad."

The poll of 1,000 adults conducted by Ipsos, an international polling company, had a margin of potential sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Major contracts for the Hurricane Katrina clean-up have been awarded without bidding or with limited competition, prompting controversy in the United States.

The devastating storm created contracts worth more than $1.5bn awarded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) alone.

Most are for the clearing of debris, trees and shattered homes across the ravaged Gulf coast.

But more than 80% of those awarded by FEMA were reportedly handed out with limited competition.

Two major companies in particular have raised questions – the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"When you do something like this, you do increase the vulnerability for fraud, plain waste, abuse and mismanagement," Richard Skinner, inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, told the New York Times.

"We are very apprehensive about what we are seeing."

He said many deals appeared to have been clinched with little more than a handshake and that shortcuts may have resulted in a lot of waste.

Various industry and government officials have questioned the costs of debris-removal contracts, claiming that the Army Corps of Engineers allowed a rate that was too high, the newspaper reports.

It cites government records which show that more than 15 contracts exceed $100m, including five of $500m or more.

Congressional investigators are reportedly investigating the $568m awarded to AshBritt, a Florida-based company that was a client of the former lobbying firm of Republican Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.

It also notes considerable price disparities, for example trailers costing anything between $15,000 and $23,000 and house inspection services that could cost $15 to $81 per home.

Several companies awarded valuable contracts have attracted controversy for similar work elsewhere.

Among them, Kellogg, Brown & Root – which has been given contracts worth $60m – was rebuked by auditors for unsubstantiated billing for reconstruction work in Iraq.

The company will perform more than $45m in repairs to levees in New Orleans and military facilities in the region. A spokesperson was unavailable for comment.

By now, I think everyone has fully catalogued the multitude of ways in which Katrina will change everything. Ornery contrarian that I am, I've become pretty convinced that Katrina will change nothing (except, well, New Orleans, Gulfport, etc.) in the long term. That said, the strongest candidate for Katrina Makeover so far has been: The media. The rise of a "new," "adversarial" media is the most viral meta-meme making the rounds. I predict it'll be dead before New Orleans is dry. I'll explain why, but first, a quick survey:

New York magazine: "In many ways, [Anderson] Cooper and [Brian] Williams defined a fork in the road for the future of broadcast journalism."

The New York Times (9/5/05): "CNN…and National Public Radio…both found their voices amidst the chaos."

The New York Times ("Reporters Turn From Deference To Outrage" 9/5/05): "...it is clear that television is having a major mood swing."

USA Today "Katrina Rekindles Adversarial Media" (9/5/05): "Reporters covering Hurricane Katrina on the scene showed their human - and often angry and frustrated - face as they questioned the slow response over the weekend…

"Says Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson, 'The media rose to the occasion, shone their light on the desolation and the needy, and kept it focused there until the cavalry finally began to arrive.'

"...some observers say that Katrina's media legacy may be a return to a post-Watergate-like era of tougher scrutiny of the federal government and public policy issues.

"'If any good comes from the catastrophe, it will be that it signaled the beginning of the media's reassertion of aggressive, in-your-face reporting, in which it confronts government wrongdoing, rather than just swallowing the government's public-relations handouts,' Levinson says."

USA Today (also Peter Johnson, but later in the day): "...experts and journalists predict that mounting questions about U.S. government preparation, policies and response to Hurricane Katrina will result in intense news coverage for months.

"Katrina 'doesn't just have legs, it has tentacles,' says Bob Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. 'Its implications reach into hot-button controversies involving race, poverty, economics and partisan politics. The reach of this story will make the O.J. Simpson case look like a news brief.'"

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (9/6/05): "...reporters and anchors have been asking tough questions in combative and even angry tones."

SF Indymedia (9/6/05): "Not for decades has there been such merciless questioning of the president and his administration by the U.S. media."

Reuters (9/7/05): "American TV reporters and newscasters are covering Hurricane Katrina and problem-plagued relief efforts with a sense of outrage and antagonism many thought had long gone out of fashion in broadcast journalism."

Chicago Tribune "A Cronkite Moment in the Gulf Story" (9/9/05): "...we might be witnessing something no one thought was possible in this age. This may be a Cronkite Moment."

Boston Phoenix (9/9/05): "...it took a hurricane to wake up the press, raise the issue of race and class, and redefine the political landscape.

"Hurricane Katrina did not simply destroy physical infrastructure, social fabric, and countless lives on America's Gulf Coast. It blew away the ground rules that had defined post-9/11 American politics and protected the most polarizing administration in recent history…

"All the elements that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had exploited for political gain - a timid and kowtowing mainstream media, a deafening silence about America's growing underclass, the fear that criticizing the White House in the era of Al Qaeda was tantamount to treason, and Bush's can-do, cowboy image - were shattered by the same winds and rains that savaged casinos in Biloxi and homes in Jefferson Parish."

USA Today (9/11/05): "ABC News executive Paul Slavin [says] 'Katrina has uncovered grave weaknesses in this country's ability to handle a crisis, and we need to make sure we hold officials accountable and investigate as best we can both what happened and what might happen.'"

Salon even posted a "Reporters Gone Wild" compilation reel.

So, what does the post-Katrina news media look like? In condensed form, the storyline goes like this: Their "timid and kowtowing" nature "shattered" by Katrina, the "rekindled" media are "asking tough questions," shining "their light on the desolation and the needy" with "merciless questioning of the president and his administration" in "a return to a post-Watergate-like era of tougher scrutiny of the federal government and public policy issues" "with a sense of outrage and antagonism many thought had long gone out of fashion" and "aggressive, in-your-face reporting, in which it confronts government wrongdoing;" "something no one thought was possible in this age... a Cronkite moment," complete with "reporters gone wild."

Wow. That's amazing. And indicative of a grave misunderstanding of some elemental forces that shape news media's editorial judgment. This mistake about the media will, very quickly, come to be seen just as ironically as we now consider the post-9/11 obituaries for irony itself.

Katrina became a media storm for a very simple reason: Its sheer magnitude overwhelmed the fundamentally flawed media levee known by the misnomer of "objectivity." My personal theory is that Watergate, rather than inspiring investigative journalism, inspired a generation of people who became journalists not to challenge power, but to gain the fame that comes with journalism's podium.

Look past the headlines of the stories I've posted above, and you'll see in them the seeds for the return of old-time, useless "journalism." Here are a couple important points SF Indymedia made, though I think the author missed the meaning of the former:

"Never before, say some observers, have US reporters been so emotionally involved in a story to the point of being enraged."

"They are not just telling a story, they have become part of it."

"'Has Katrina saved the US media,?' asked BBC reporter Matt Wells who sees the shift in tone as a potentially historic development."

"A number of US journalists who cover federal politics, especially television presenters, had become part of the political establishment, says Wells."

"'They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties. Their television companies are owned by large conglomerates who contribute to election campaigns.'"

"It's a 'perfect recipe' for fearful, self-censoring reportage, he says, but thinks 'since last week, that's all over'."

No, it's not. And the reason is that after Katrina, the same reporters who were emotionally engaged, and outraged, will return to their desks and their bureaus. And their suburbs. And their parties.

The emotional root of The New Adversarialism is just one reason it will be short-lived; such high-pitched feelings can't and won't last (and shouldn't: Journalists who really cared about Katrina's victims would have wept less afterward and done more boring, public-policy stories beforehand). Nikki Finke in the LA Weekly attributes the death of The New Adversarialism to corporate politics. But even more profoundly at work here is the dynamic of how the media engage not with emotion but with the nature of reality itself.

Yes, this was the first time many of these reporters and journalists saw such conditions on U.S. soil, but the reason that translated into outrage had to do not with emotion, but fact and objectivity. This was the first story in which a critical mass of high-level, decision-making media were on the ground to witness X and have government officials tell them to their face "-X."

It was the first time they were directly, personally cognizant of the Bush administration's willingness to lie to their face about matters they could verify instantly with their own eyes.

This was a shocking event. It was an outrage. Look at who was outraged: Primarily reporters on the ground. The schism at Fox News was not between secret liberals and true conservatives, it was between Shepard Smith knee-deep in reality and Bill O'Reilly back in the studio.

Katrina changed the nature of media coverage because it overcame the media not emotionally but epistemologically. If human suffering were the sole trigger for media outrage, why have the past few years' rising poverty rate - casting millions of Americans into squalor and despair - not unleashed the same fury Katrina did? It's because the causal nature of the former is more elusive than the latter. That cognitive distance between cause and effect guarantees the old media will return far too soon.

Why? Media decision-makers don't understand very well themselves why Bush budget policies are factually, objectively, inarguably biased toward the rich: Hence, they won't articulate, let alone explain, that position to their viewers. Media decision-makers don't understand very well themselves not just why evolution is real but must be real: Hence, they wrongly assume they're fulfilling their responsibilities by presenting "both" "sides," when they're actually abdicating their responsibilities by treating one "side" as though it's credible. A journalist's job is not merely to say, "He said/She said." A good journalist says, "He said/She said, but our investigation/analysis revealed that Her numbers have a greater claim to factuality and He has a history of twisting facts." Katrina did the journalism for them by literally swamping journalists with irrefutable, unmistakeable facts.

Without a hurricane at their doorstep, the flow of facts fueling The New Adversarialism will dry up. Don't believe me? It's already happening. Ask Larry Johnson. Already, and on the issue of Katrina itself, he's allegedly been informed by MSNBC that verifiable, quantifiable, empirical matters of fact are actually matters of "opinion" and "perspective."

On the Daily Show, one of the newest and last TV outlets of genuine journalism, Brian Williams, The Transformed Man, was asked who was at fault. "I'm gonna let that one go," he said. "I don't do opinions, I'm going to leave it to others." But Brian, dude, it's not an opinion. It's a matter of law and statute and the performance of public officials under same. Williams mistakes it for opinion because he'd have to convey it in the same way he would an opinion: Not with video of a starving flood survivor, but with nothing more than his assertion that, yes, NBC has assessed applicable laws and statutes and determined that Agency X bore primary responsibility for evacuation coordination and State Department Y was legally in charge of initial law-enforcement response and X only provided 72.3% of buses needed and Y failed to implement maximum-response measures. It feels like an opinion because it can be disagreed-with (out of dishonesty or ignorance) but that doesn't obligate Williams to treat it like an opinion.

The ultimate evidence that this is not a Cronkite moment comes from the simple fact that Cronkite's moment was his declaration of U.S. woes in Vietnam. It became a Cronkite moment because Cronkite did not have the luxury of video proving him right but put his credibility on the line to warn America what the reality was even though Americans could, out of ignorance or ideology, reject his assessment in a way they could not reject video. Katrina gave American media the safety net of objectively indisputable, immediately verifiable reality. Vietnam did not. Katrina will actually prove to be the anti-Cronkite moment. If today's media wants a Cronkite moment, they already have had several years of opportunity to claim that moment: In Iraq.

That they have failed to do so, that they still embrace and mistake omni-subjectivity as objectivity, indicates that we're already returning to the "who-knows-what's-true" school of anti-journalism journalism that nurtured the growth of neglectful government that made possible the post-Katrina woes over which those same journalists wept. And already it makes those fleeting days of early September - of direct confrontation and confident assertion of fact - seem positively antediluvian.

New GNN contributor Jonathan Larsen helped launch Air America Radio, co-creating and producing "Morning Sedition" and "The Rachel Maddow Show." Previous credits include "Anderson Cooper 360," "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and ABC's "World News Now." His blog, Petty Larseny, can be found here.

WASHINGTON - A combative Michael Brown blamed the Louisiana governor, the New Orleans mayor and even the Bush White House that appointed him for the dismal response to Hurricane Katrina in a fiery appearance Tuesday before Congress. In response, lawmakers alternately lambasted and mocked the former FEMA director.

House members' scorching treatment of Brown, in a hearing stretching nearly 6 1/2 hours, underscored how he has become an emblem of the deaths, lingering floods and stranded survivors after the Aug. 29 storm. Brown resigned Sept. 12 after being relieved of his onsite command of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response effort three days earlier.

"I'm happy you left," said Rep. Christopher Shay, R-Conn. "Because that kind of, you know, look in the lights like a deer tells me that you weren't capable to do the job."

"You get an F-minus in my book," said Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss.

At several points, Brown turned red in the face and slapped the table in front of him.

"So I guess you want me to be the superhero, to step in there and take everyone out of New Orleans," Brown said.

"What I wanted you to do is do your job and coordinate," Shays retorted.

Well aware of President Bush's sunken poll ratings, legislators of both parties tried to distance themselves from the federal preparations for Katrina and the storm's aftermath that together claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Freudian Slip: actual Sky News tagline in aftermath of hurricane Rita.

Brown acknowledged making mistakes during the storm and subsequent flooding that devastated the Gulf Coast. But he accused New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, both Democrats, of fostering chaos and failing to order a mandatory evacuation more than a day before Katrina hit.

"My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional," Brown told a special panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the catastrophe. Most Democrats, seeking an independent investigation, stayed away to protest what they called an unfair probe of the Republican administration by GOP lawmakers.

"I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences and work together," Brown said. "I just couldn't pull that off."

Brown also said he warned Bush, White House chief of staff Andrew Card and deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin that "this is going to be a bad one" in e-mails and phone conversations leading up to the storm. Under pointed questioning, he said some needs outlined to the White House, Pentagon and Homeland Security Department were not answered in "the timeline that we requested."

Blanco vehemently denied that she waited until the eve of the storm to order an evacuation of New Orleans. She said her order came on the morning of Aug. 27 - two days before the storm - resulting in 1.3 million people evacuating the city.

"Such falsehoods and misleading statements, made under oath before Congress, are shocking," Blanco said in a statement.

In New Orleans, Nagin said that "it's too early to get into name-blame and all that stuff" but that "a FEMA director in Washington trying to deflect attention is unbelievable to me."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan urged Congress to undertake "a thorough investigation of what went wrong and what went right and look at lessons learned."

Brown, who remains on FEMA's payroll for two more weeks before he leaves his annual $148,000 post, rejected accusations that he was inexperienced for the job he held for more than two years during which he oversaw 150 presidentially declared disasters. Before joining FEMA in 2001, he was an attorney, held local government posts and headed the International Arabian Horse Association.

"I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it," he said.

He said FEMA coordinates and manages disaster relief, but the emergency first response is the job of state and local authorities. Brown also said the agency was stretched too thin to respond to a catastrophe of Katrina's size. "We were prepared but overwhelmed is the best way I can put it," he said.

Brown described FEMA as a politically powerless arm of Homeland Security, which he said had siphoned more than $77 million from his agency over the past three years. Additionally, he said Homeland Security cut FEMA budget requests - including one for hurricane preparedness - before they were ever presented to Congress.

Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., who oversees House spending on homeland security operations, said Congress has approved spending levels for FEMA and other preparedness programs far above requests.

In Miami, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters that Brown "speaks for himself and he's entitled to his point of view, and I don't have anything to add."

Brown's defiant demeanor Tuesday mirrored his comments after being dismissed from overseeing the Katrina response, when he accused the news media of making him a scapegoat and blamed local officials for the uncoordinated response.

He had been "just tired and misspoke" when a television interviewer appeared to be the first to tell him that there were desperate residents at the New Orleans Convention Center, and testified he had already learned the day before that people were flocking there.

No longer needing to maintain a cordial relationship with Congress, Brown didn't hesitate to punch back at lawmakers who questioned whether the government would learn from mistakes before the next disaster strikes.

"I know what death and destruction is and I know how much people suffer," Brown told Taylor. "And it breaks my heart. I pray for these people every night. So don't lecture me about knowing what disaster is like."

Yet Brown struck a conciliatory tone with Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, who chastised him for not seeking fiscal or oversight help from Congress before the storm.

"I don't know how you can sleep at night," Granger said. "You lost the battle."

Brown, his voice dropping slightly, responded: "I probably should have just resigned my post earlier and gone public with some of these things because I have a great admiration for the men and women of FEMA and what they do, and they don't deserve what they've been getting."

NEW ORLEANS - Police Superintendent Eddie Compass stepped down from his post four weeks after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city where he grew up and spent 26 years policing, saying he knew in his heart it was time to walk away.

His resignation follows the storm's turbulent aftermath, during which looters ransacked stores, evacuees pleaded for help, rescue workers came under fire and nearly 250 police officers left their posts.

"Every man in a leadership position must know when it's time to hand over the reins," he said at a news conference Tuesday. "I'll be going on in another direction that God has for me."

Compass, 47, gave no reason for leaving, saying only that he would be transitioning out of the job over the next six weeks. Neither he nor Mayor Ray Nagin would say whether Compass had been pressured to leave his job.

Nagin, who appointed Compass chief in 2002, said it was a sad day for the city of New Orleans but that the departing chief "leaves the department in pretty good shape and with a significant amount of leadership."

On the streets of the Algiers neighborhood, the first in Orleans Parish to be open to residents, some said Compass' resignation was a loss for the city.

"He was stretched beyond the limits of human endurance," said Ruth Marciante, pausing outside a Winn-Dixie supermarket. "Under the circumstances I think he did a superhuman job. I wish the next guy who takes that job a lot of luck."

But another Algiers resident, Donald De Bois Blanc, said he had complained to police about looting in the hurricane's aftermath, and gotten only shrugs in return.

"I don't think Compass did a terribly good job," he said. "The department was inept."

Lt. David Benelli, president of the union for rank-and-file New Orleans officers, said he was shocked by Compass' resignation.

"We've been through a horrendous time," Benelli said. "We've watched the city we love be destroyed. That is pressure you can't believe."

Benelli would not criticize Compass.

"You can talk about lack of organization but we have been through two hurricanes. There was no communications, problems everywhere," he said. "I think the fact that we did not lose control of the city is a testament to his leadership."

As the city slipped into anarchy during the first few days after Katrina, the 1,700-member police department suffered a crisis. Many officers deserted their posts, and some were accused of joining in the looting that broke out. Two officers Compass described as friends committed suicide.

Gunfire and other lawlessness broke out around the city. Rescue workers reported being shot at. Compass publicly repeated allegations that people were being beaten and babies raped at the convention center, where thousands of evacuees had taken shelter. The allegations have since proved largely unsubstantiated.

Earlier in the day Tuesday, the department confirmed that about 250 police officers - roughly 15 percent of the force - could face discipline for leaving their posts without permission during Katrina and its aftermath.

Even before Katrina hit, Compass had his hands full with an understaffed police department and a skyrocketing murder rate. Before Katrina, New Orleans had 3.14 officers per 1,000 residents - less than half the ratio in Washington, D.C.

The mayor has named Assistant Superintendent Warren Riley as acting superintendent.

On Tuesday, the state Health Department reported that Katrina's death toll in Louisiana stood at 885, up from 841 on Friday.

It also was the second day of the official reopening of New Orleans, which had been pushed back last week when Hurricane Rita threatened. Nagin welcomed residents back to the Algiers neighborhood on Monday but imposed a curfew and warned of limited services.

Nagin also invited business owners in the central business district, the French Quarter and the Uptown section to inspect their property and clean up. But he gave no timetable for reopening those parts of the city to residents.