Since some of the sludge has subsided in New Orleans and some survivor stories have begun to trickle in, it's possible to find a new perspective in some of the statements made during the worst of the disaster the government made of the rescue effort. I didn't see this particular briefing at the time it was made, but I was enraged and sickened when I came across it today. This is Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief, National Guard Bureau, who oversaw the National Guard response in NOLA, briefing the Department of Defense on Saturday, September 3rd, the day after Bush did his "tour" of the area. Remember that until the Friday (Sept 2) that Blum is talking about, no National Guard troops set foot in New Orleans. Here's why (emphasis mine):
Defense Department Briefing on Ongoing National Guard Response to Hurricane Katrina
GEN.
BLUM: Good morning gentlemen. I just got back late last evening from
New Orleans and the stricken areas in Mississippi along the Gulf Coast,
and if you want I’ll give you a quick assessment of what we’ve
seen--Dramatic changes in the last 36 hours. The security situation in
New Orleans continues to improve. The most contentious issues were
lawlessness in the streets, and particularly a potentially very
dangerous volatile situation in the convention center where tens of
thousands of people literally occupied that on their own. We had people
that were evacuated from hotels, and tourists that were lumped together
with some street thugs and some gang members that -- it was a
potentially very dangerous situation.
We waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming
force. Went in with police powers, 1,000 National Guard military
policemen under the command and control of the adjutant general of the
State of Louisiana, Major General Landreneau, yesterday shortly after
noon stormed the convention center, for lack of a better term, and
there was absolutely no opposition, complete cooperation, and we
attribute that to an excellent plan, superbly executed with great
military precision. It was rather complex. It was executed absolutely
flawlessly in that there was no violent resistance, no one injured, no
one shot, even though there were stabbed, even though there were
weapons in the area. There were no soldiers injured and we did not have
to fire a shot.
Some people asked why didn't we go in sooner. Had we gone in with less
force it may have been challenged, innocents may have been caught in a
fight between the Guard military police and those who did not want to
be processed or apprehended ["those" turned out not to even exist], and we would put innocents' lives at risk.
As soon as we could mass the appropriate force, which we flew in from
all over the states at the rate of 1,400 a day, they were immediately
moved off the tail gates of C-130 aircraft flown by the Air National
Guard, moved right to the scene, briefed, rehearsed, and then they went
in and took this convention center down.
Those that were undesirable ["Undesirable?" Who?]to re-enter the convention center were
segregated from the people that we wanted to provide water, shelter and
food. Those people were processed to make sure they had no weapons, no
illicit dugs, no alcohol, no contraband, and then they were escorted
back into the building. Now there's a controlled safe and secure
environment and a shelter and a haven as they await movement out of
that center for onward integration to their normal lives.
It's a great success story -- a terrific success story.
The hostility toward the people trapped at the convention center permeates this entire account, from the idea that the most "contentious" issue was "lawlessness" rather than the needs of people who'd been without water and food for days to the Iraq-esque characterization of the tens of thousands at the convention center as having "literally occupied that on their own," a "potentially very dangerous situation." Dangerous? Who exactly was this General worried about? It seems clear that he was worried about National Guardsmen, not Americans in need of help.
"We waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force."
As if the convention center were Fallujah. "....yesterday shortly after noon stormed the convention center, for lack of
a better term, and there was absolutely no opposition, complete
cooperation, and we attribute that to an excellent plan, superbly
executed with great military precision." Not because, as Dumas Carter, 30, eight-year veteran NOPD officer, one of six
local cops who stayed on duty at the Convention Center complex in the
days after Katrina put it:
Lots of people on the street were asking me where to go. I'm telling
them the truth, which is I don't know, they haven't told us anything.
They're telling us that somebody told them that they were told by
another person who was somebody in charge of something that the
Convention Center was being set up as a secondary evacuation point with
food and water. Those people went to the Convention Center, and there
was no food or water there for them. So now there's no water, there's
no police--everybody's left the city except for the six of us. And now
there's 20,000 people with no extra security down there.
We just told people that the National Guard was handling the
evacuation effort, and they're not talking to us. So we've got all
these people at the Convention Center, and now the captain is saying,
okay, you all got to get out of the hotel. They're going to riot and
they're going to burn the fucking hotel down. They're going to start
this big massive thing, they're going to start killing people on
Convention Center Boulevard, it's going to be a big massacre.
At this point it's like four days into it, and we're trying to
explain to the captain, these people are so tired and thirsty and
hungry they couldn't flip over a lawn chair if they wanted to riot. I
won't say anything bad about my captain. My captain was making good
decisions based on bad information. And my captain had to realize that
he had to run a district of a hundred [officers], not all of whom had
the testicular fortitude to stick this all out. So to keep morale up,
he moves them out of the line of fire so they can sleep in a car
somewhere. Whatever. That's what he had to do. When he got the proper
information, he said we didn't have to leave the hotel. He said, just
do the right thing. I trust you all. Do what you need to do.
So we hunkered down again. Our hotel was at the corner of Gaiennie
and Convention Center. If you walk into a door 40 feet over, there's
20,000 people. And they were not staying inside the Convention Center
because of the murders and robberies going on inside there. They were
all on the neutral ground staring at us. We don't have many supplies,
so we're not passing shit out. We barely have enough for us to get by
the next two days. Occasionally another police car would drive by and
stop and ask if we were all right, then drive on. No patrol presence
whatsoever.
The majority of the people were staying outside. We were hearing all
kinds of horror stories from inside, murder to rape to robberies to
shootings to beatings. There was no way to verify any of that stuff.
Ninety-seven percent of these people were behind us. They wanted us to
be the police and they loved that we were still there. We were the only
police they saw for four or five days. The majority of the
conversations were, "Baby, I know you're being left here just like
we're being left here and you don't know anything, but if you find out
something, could you tell us?" My response was, you've got the
radio--you tell us what's going on. And these people would come over
and give us bulletins as they heard it from the news.
I talked to lots and lots of those people there. Ninety-nine percent
of the conversations were people coming up to us asking, Where's the
food? Where's the water? When are the buses coming? Where are they
taking us? People were coming up with dying children, with elderly
people who were dying and needed medical attention. We need diabetes
medication, we need heart medication. Where can I get medical
assistance? We don't know, we don't know, we don't know.
Where did all this garbage about riots come from? Why was the National Guard outside of town preparing an armed assault in force on 20,000 Americans trying to survive the worst hurricane in the history of the US? General Blum: "As soon as we could mass the appropriate force, which we flew in from
all over the states at the rate of 1,400 a day, they were immediately
moved off the tail gates of C-130 aircraft flown by the Air National
Guard, moved right to the scene, briefed, rehearsed, and then they went
in and took this convention center down." Took the convention center down? Wow, just like
Fallujah.
UPI, reporting on Blum's "storming" of an American city, makes the Iraq mentality even more explicit:
On Friday, 1,000 National Guard troops and police executed a 'clear
and hold' mission on the New Orleans convention center. Once host to
the 1988 Republican National Convention, the convention center was now
unofficial host to thousands of refugees - squatters all - who were
mixed in with criminals and thugs. There was no official government
presence there.
Clear and hold is a tactic being used across Iraq as troops come
across recalcitrant neighborhoods or cities rife with insurgents or
terrorists where there is no effective U.S. presence. It`s a way to
start from scratch.
About 12 hours before the National Guard was clearing the convention
center, the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment began a clear and hold
operation in the town of Tall `Afar.
Recalcitrant neighborhoods or cities rife with insurgents or
terrorists! Squatters!? Squatters?! Every American should be questioning why language like that is used in the press without challenge. The UPI article goes on, and it becomes more difficult to distinguish whether the author is writing about the US or Iraq:
Like in New Orleans, the military hope in Tall `Afar was to avoid blood
shed. A battalion commander told UPI that, ideally, the entire
troublesome southern neighborhood [9th Ward?] would clear out. This would allow a
thorough search and destroy mission for weapons and bomb-making
equipment. Those who wanted to come back into the city when the
operation -- still ongoing -- was finished would be registered and
issued ID cards. The ID cards, mandatory at all times, will allow U.S.
and Iraqi troops to stop people in the streets
during future patrols and check the names against the evolving list of
insurgent suspects gleaned from interrogations and tips. It`s a
surprisingly effective tactic, if low-tech. Counter-insurgency is
mostly long, slow leg work.
The complete disregard for the people as independent actors in both Baghdad and New Orleans, as if they are but impediments in the way of efficient military operations is chilling. Over and over we see in Iraq that the concept of people having wills of their own let alone basic human rights is absent from military and state rhetoric or planning. Now we see Americans being subjected to the same thinking and approach, with no reason to assume that it's temporary - indeed it seems to be standard operating procedure now, ingrained in the culture of the state's agents of force - yet another Mission Accomplished for the Warfare State.
