'Racist' police blocked bridge and forced evacuees back at gunpoint

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 11 September 2005 - The Independent

A Louisiana police chief has admitted that he ordered his officers to block a bridge over the Mississippi river and force escaping evacuees back into the chaos and danger of New Orleans. Witnesses said the officers fired their guns above the heads of the terrified people to drive them back and "protect" their own suburbs.

Two paramedics who were attending a conference in the city and then stayed to help those affected by the hurricane, said the officers told them they did not want their community "becoming another New Orleans".

The desperate evacuees were forced to trudge back into the city they had just left. "It was a real eye-opener," Larry Bradshaw, 49, a paramedic from San Francisco, told The Independent on Sunday. "I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty."

Mr Bradshaw said the police blocked off the road on the Thursday and Friday after Hurricane Katrina struck on Monday 29 August. He and his wife Lorrie Slonsky, also a paramedic, had sheltered with others in the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter.

When food and water ran out they were forced to head for the city's convention centre, but on the way they heard reports of the chaos and violence that was taking place there and inside the Superdome where thousands of people were forced together without running water, toilets, electricity or air conditioning. So Mr Bradshaw spoke with a senior New Orleans police officer who instructed them to cross the Crescent City Connection bridge to Jefferson Parish, where he promised they would find buses waiting to evacuate them.

They were in the middle of a group of up to 800 people - overwhelmingly black - walking across the bridge when they heard shots and saw people running. "We had been hearing shooting for days. What was different about this was that it was close by," he said.

Making their way towards the crest of the bridge they saw a chain of armed police officers blocking the route. When they asked about the buses they were told their was no such arrangement and that the route was being blocked to avoid their parish becoming "another New Orleans". They identified the police as officers from the city of Gretna.

The following day Mr Bradshaw said they tried again to cross and directly witnessed police shooting over the heads of a middle-aged white couple who were also turned back. Eventually, late on Friday evening, the couple succeeded in crossing the bridge with the intervention of a contact in the local fire department.

Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna police department, said he had not yet questioned his officers as to whether they fired their guns.

He confirmed that his officers, along with those from Jefferson Parish and the Crescent City Connection police force, sealed the bridge and refused to let people pass. This was despite the fact that local media were informing people that the bridge was one of the few safe evacuation routes from the city.

Gretna is a predominantly white suburban town of around 18,000 inhabitants. In the aftermath of Katrina, three quarters of the inhabitants still had electricity and running water. But, Chief Lawson told UPI news agency: "There was no food, water or shelter in Gretna City. We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people. If we had opened the bridge our city would have looked like New Orleans does now - looted, burned and pillaged."

Mr Bradshaw and his wife were evacuated to Texas and have since returned to California. They condemned the authorities, adding: "This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary Texans.

"Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist... Lives were lost that did not need to be lost."

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Why the American dream is one of the biggest lies

The lessons of hurricane Katrina and its terrible aftermath are not about disaster management but about exposing the falsehoods at the very heart of modern America

By Muriel Gray

SINCE broadcasters precede any post watershed material that might shock, offend or disturb with a stern warning about content, it seems odd that this service is not extended to the news. Mind you, what would the reassuring voice of the female continuity announcer say? How about: “Viewers are cautioned that the following programme contains images that may cause them to despise the entire human race and look forward to its inevitable self destruction.”

Surely that’s not too far from the truth as we sit and watch a bewildering variety of individuals howling, wailing, weeping in agony, from Iraq to the streets of London, to tsunami-torn beaches to Beslan, to Africa to New Orleans, to anywhere really. Perhaps they’re not beating their breasts and clutching their hair in grief on the streets on Helsinki or Dunedin yet, but our rolling news makes us suspect it’s only a matter of time before some kind of apocalyptic suffering eventually visits everyone.

Long gone are the days when Angela Rippon would round up with the heart warming “… and finally” story about a skateboarding duck or a toddler who dialled 999 for a mother tumbled from a stepladder. Channels like the BBC’s News 24 are now devoted almost exclusively to reminding us what a nauseating species we are. Regardless of the latest tragedy or atrocity being brought to us in colour with subtitles, the commentators will almost always finish their lugubrious analysis with the question, “But what are the lessons to be learned from this?” The answer is that demonstrably we learn nothing and never have, which is why we continue to abuse both ourselves and our planet, but if we are forced to dissect disaster in this manner then the American hurricane crisis is as good a place as any to start.

So what are those lessons to be learned from a destroyed city with thousands dead, little or no relief for survivors, and lawlessness taking over from wind and water as the greatest threat to life? Not very nice lessons unfortunately. As the bodies of the poor, black, disenfranchised southerners bob to the surface of the rat-infested and sewage-infused waters, we’re reminded that America’s position as a big, safe, morally decent democracy with opportunity for all is one of the world’s biggest lies. The American dream that is being held up as the cause worth dying for in the Middle East is as rotten to the core as its demonic administration.




When Bush is temporarily propped up on two legs by his people, out of his natural position on all fours with knuckles resting gently on the White House carpet, to tell the world that his country’s values and people are worth fighting for, he omits to mention that he doesn’t mean poor people or black people. Not only is this huge slice of the American public kept largely invisible, in case it ruins the image of the culture which Bush’s administration demands countries in “the axis of terrorr” adopt, but even when such poverty is exposed to the world the US elite has little shame in publicly holding these stricken citizens in contempt.

Take the comments made to the press by Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. When quizzed on the probable death toll, which is now running into the thousands, Brown said: “Unfortunately that’s going to be attributable to a lot of people who did not heed the warnings. I don’t make judgements about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.”

So when those with cars left the city, leaving behind those with no transport, did that mean that every available coach, truck and helicopter was made available to get them out? Apparently not. Some of those who didn’t “heed the warnings” because they had no means of exit, included charity care homes for the elderly, hospitals, whole housing schemes of poor black residents, a children’s care home, and countless thousands of dispersed penniless people living on state benefits who were trapped and killed, not because they were wilful irresponsible risk takers, but because they were poor, powerless and vulnerable.

In a breathtaking display of racism, some white British students who were trapped in the hell of the city’s Superdome stadium, being used for refugees, were removed to a safer place in a basketball arena by a white policeman who one student described as having “broken all the rules” to help them. The students were young, healthy and in no immediate distress except for experiencing mildly aggressive taunts about their colour, and yet the stadium was full of dangerously ill people, highly distressed old people, young children at great risk of dehydration, but for whom nobody “broke all the rules” on account of the fact that they were black. Meanwhile the gangs of black youths stalking the city on orgies of raping, violence and looting are not the bogeymen Islamic “enemies of freedom” but products of their own “democratic” country’s polices of exclusion and division.

The lessons we’re learning from this horror are not about disaster management or speed of response, but about exposing the terrifying falsehoods at the heart of America’s relentless and belligerent quest for world domination. With Bush turning his gimlet eye to Iran, and linking his arm through that of our own dear Tony Blair as he does so, it’s never been more timely to be reminded so dramatically that the US is a deeply dysfunctional, decadent, declining society, imploding with its own prejudices, corruptions and hypocrisies.

John F Kennedy said: “I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.”

Yes that would be nice John, wouldn’t it? I’m sure that as soon as the honourable, honest, decent people who run the country work out who it was who really shot you, they’ll get right on with the job of bringing your vision about.

©2005 newsquest (sunday herald)

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The American illusion takes a dive - A view from across the ocean

By Siv O'Neall
Sep 3, 2005, 21:24

The abysmal negligence that led to the present catastrophe in the Gulf states has left the world aghast. The country once believed to be the world leader in terms of science and education, standard of living and general well-being has turned out to be an incompetent blundering colossus that can’t even take care of its own population, of their needs and their safety.

There has been all this bluster about security but when nature strikes, the president goes partying and playing golf – after the levees were already giving in to the water from Lake Pontchartrain. The reality of the criminal neglect doesn’t seem to seep through to the consciousness of anyone who is in a position of leadership.

George W. Bush says ‘No thank you, we don’t need your help’ to a world that’s stunned by the horror of all the innocent victims in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast and the mostly black and poor people who are dying in the streets and in the Superdome. The rest of the world is grieving, countries from all over the world offer to send help and resources and the president tells the American people to give charity money to the state of Louisiana. Charity money! Sure, the involvement of the government should be downplayed unless an invasion of a foreign and independent country is involved for the huge profit of the big corporations.

The great American dream has turned into the great American nightmare. Cracks have spread all over the surface of the country, and those cracks have been widening in a spectacular fashion after George W. Bush was installed in the White house by the Supreme Court. Cracks in terms of national security, cracks in terms of living standards, cracks in terms of job security, cracks in terms of the number of people living below the poverty level, cracks in terms of health insurance and the possibility of looking forward to an economically secure old age.

From the powerbrokers there is simply complete contempt for the individuals who make up the vast majority of the country’s population and this total neglect and indifference is now going to strike back at the conceit and the arrogance of the so-called leaders. Those self-proclaimed leaders are nothing but the CEOs of an enterprise that is foundering massively. America Inc. is broke morally and economically.

These dictatorial and conceited leaders are blind and totally indifferent as far as the well-being of the masses is concerned. Everything in the world stands or falls with the masses who produce the goods, but the leaders seem to think that they don’t need any legs to stand on. They are cutting themselves off from below and the great debacle that is in wait for all Americans, and maybe for the rest of the world as well, is going to strike like a thunderous G?tterd?mmerung.

The willingly blindfolded criminals at the top and the obediently hallelujah-singing mainstream media are in for a rough awakening. There will be no redemption of the evangelical fundamentalists, no angels are going to carry them up to heaven while the world lies smoldering in sin and ruin. We are going to be stumbling around in the ruins together, the righteous evangelical fundamentalists with the rest of us, with the Muslims, the Jews, the Hindus, the agnostics and whoever is left in the world, irrespective of the worldly possessions we have managed to accumulate.

The American illusion that ‘We are the greatest nation in the world, we are the best, we are the leaders of the civilized world’ will be the pall on the grave of the deceased country. An empire never lasts and this empire of ignorant leaders and an ignorant population is due for the great fall. The leaders have of course carefully cultivated this generalized ignorance, knowing well that an informed population would have rebelled long ago. A population which had learned the art of independent thinking would never have put up with being so abused, could never have been fooled into acceptance of the obscene lack of justice and respect for human beings.

Why did Americans insist so much on their belief that they were the center of civilization, that they had all the virtues and everybody else had all the vices? Because they were told so again and again. They were told, while all the time they were battling with economic precariousness, how lucky they were to be living in the greatest democracy on earth. Sure, the great democracy where the dead bodies are decomposing in the foul stench of the streets of New Orleans. We had to send the National Guard to Iraq, you see. And the money went to Halliburton. There are priorities in the life of America, Inc.

And just as it is almost impossible to believe that your father is a thief, for the same reason did the American population refuse to see the truth about their leaders of empty minds and unfeeling hearts. Blind megalomania is now going to be the end of the nation that is crumbling from within.

In all this talk about values from this bogus administration, the population totally lost sight of the fact that their values had long been lost, that individual accumulation of goods had replaced the true values of the heart, the hallelujah chorus had replaced the people of true feelings for any other beings than their own selves.

And the walls came tumbling down.

© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com

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