Posted on 09/01/2005 5:57:30 PM PDT by Uncle Joe Cannon
New Orleans in Anarchy With Fights, Rapes
Friday September 2, 2005 12:46 AM
AP Photo MSDP112
By ALLEN G. BREED
Associated Press Writer
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday, as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out and storm survivors battled for seats on the buses that would carry them away from the chaos. The tired and hungry seethed, saying they had been forsaken. ``This is a desperate SOS,'' mayor Ray Nagin said.
``We are out here like pure animals,'' the Rev. Issac Clark said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where he and other evacuees had been waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead.
``I'm not sure I'm going to get out of here alive,'' said tourist Larry Mitzel of Saskatoon, Canada, 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.''
Four days after Hurricane Katrina roared in with a devastating blow that inflicted potentially thousands of deaths, the frustration, fear and anger mounted, 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.
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 increasingly hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead. Police Chief Eddie Compass said he sent in 88 officers to quell the situation at the building, but they were quickly driven back by an angry mob.
``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.''
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.''
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.
``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.
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.
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.''
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. He said contractors had completed building a rock road to let heavy equipment roll to the area by midnight.
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!''
----
The gunman should have been shot full of lead right on the spot. Arresting people will not stop this violent revolt against the American people and their government.
I didn't say that he needed to do more I simply agreed with another poster who said that his rhetoric is useless unless it is backed up with action. The point being that, as of last night when I posted my remarks, it wasn't being backed up; either by action or by some clear order naming the consequences for lawlessness.
Neither the mayor nor the govenor has had any sense or cahones up to this point.
A point I also made. So, if the chief exec. of the city and the chief exec. of the state have both failed to meet the challenge who is left to take command of the situation? You seem to be saying that the President is impotent in that regard.
What I'd LIKE is to send a silent, elite squad in there to hunt the streets and clean it up.
I also suggested something quite similar to that. So, who has the authority to order that? Mayors and Governors don't have the authority to order the military into action and I don't think the Nat. Guard has elite squads of the kind you are suggesting.
FWIW I do know that it is being reported that the National Guard is 'pouring' (as the media phrase it) into NO this morning. I wonder what their ROEs are? Trying to chase down goblins in this swamp city to arrest and detain them is going to be nearly impossible. Too many places to hide, too hard to get around. A few dead goblins would produce a very quick silence to 'the troubles.'
read later
Speaking of State Sovereignty; how's that 'abortion on demand' thing going?
Plus the mayor, city council and power holders of New Orleans have been basically Rats since the Civil War days.
What we are seeing is what happens to a blue city, blue county and blue state when something bad is happening.
The a$$holes in charge of the blue cities, counties and states are incapable of good leadership. All they can do is blame our president who didn't cause the problems they allowed to grow during their reign of power.
New Orleans is probably just the first such implosion of Blue Cities, Counties and their blue states in the coming decade.
Yep, lived just north of 8 mile for 20 years, the place Coleman Young told the criminals(he helped to propagate)to go, remember?
I don't remember which President it was but didn't he order the Army to break up the Bonus Marcher's camp and shoot a few of them? I know that was in D.C. but...
Hmm, now you are seeing the unconstitutionality of Roe vs. Wade...
It isn't a national Emergency - Which would involve the entire United States.. This is a STATE Emergency...
DC..Think about it and google Posse Comitatus
http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/articles/Trebilcock.htm
This talks about its erosion and interprets it in regards to a terror attack..
DC was excluded from the act
I do not know the circumstances involving Kent State, I thought the Governor had the National Guard on that case...
It was President Hoover. Below is an excellent Historical summary of the bonus march. I don't believe that DC has a National Guard and as such is under the protection of the local police and our military.
http://www.thebonusarmy.com/smithsonian.php
MARCHING ON HISTORY
When a “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans converged on Washington in 1932 to demand a promised payment, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton were there to meet them
BY PAUL DICKSON AND THOMAS B. ALLEN
WASHINGTON, D.C., Chief of Police Pelham D. Glassford was driving south through New Jersey the night of May 21, 1932. Suddenly, a sight appeared in his headlights that he later described as “a bedraggled group of seventyfive or one hundred men and women marching cheerily along, singing and waving at the passing traffic.” One man carried an American flag and another a banner that read, “Bonus or a Job.” Glassford pulled over to have a word with the ragtag group. Atop one of the marchers’ pushcarts, he noted, an infant girl lay sleeping, nestled amid one family’s clothes, oblivious to the ruckus.
Glassford, who had been the youngest brigadier general in the Army in World War I, understood almost immediately who these wayfarers were. For two weeks or so, newspapers across the nation had begun carrying accounts of marchers bound for the nation’s capital. The demonstrators were part of a growing delegation of veterans and their families heading to Washington to collect payment of the “bonus,” promised eight years before, in 1924, to soldiers who had served in the Great War. (That year, wrangling over the federal budget had ordained that this compensation be deferred until 1945.) Now in 1932, the men, who called themselves the Bonus Army, were dubbing the deferred payment the “Tombstone Bonus,” because, they said, many of them would be dead by the time the government paid it. Glassford drove on to Washington.
By the time he got there, morning newspapers were carrying stories about the progress of the Bonus Army. The Washington Star reported that “One hundred unemployed World War veterans will leave Philadelphia tomorrow morning on freight trains for Washington” and that other vets were converging from as far away as “Portland, Oregon and the Middle West.” The chief was quick to grasp the logistical nightmare he faced. What he could not have seen was that the Bonus Army would help shape several figures who would soon assume larger roles on the world stage—including Douglas A. MacArthur, George S. Patton, Dwight D. Eisenhower and J. Edgar Hoover. The Bonus Army would also affect the presidential election of 1932, when the patrician governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, squared off against incumbent President Herbert Hoover, widely blamed for the Great Depression then roiling the country.
In 1932, nearly 32,000 businesses failed. Unemployment had soared to almost 25 percent, leaving roughly one family out of every four without a breadwinner. Two million people wandered the country in a futile quest for work. Many of the homeless settled in communities of makeshift shacks called “Hoovervilles” after the president they blamed for their plight. Glassford knew he would have to create a sort of Hooverville of his own to house the Bonus Army. But where? In the end he chose a tract of land known as Anacostia Flats, at the outer reaches of the District of Columbia, which could be reached from Capitol Hill only by a wooden drawbridge spanning the Anacostia River.
Glassford oversaw the establishment of the camp as best he could, making sure that at least a certain amount of building materials—piles of lumber and boxes of nails—were supplied. The chief solicited food from local merchants and later added $773 out of his own pocket for provisions. The first contingent of Bonus Army marchers arrived May 23. Over the next two months, an estimated 25,000 more, many with wives and children, arrived to stake their claim to what they felt was their due.
Excerpted: The rest of this great write up can be read at the site/link:
http://www.thebonusarmy.com/smithsonian.php
Wow! That was like a nukeyooler bomb going off in my brain. ;^)
It was the National Guard.
In that case the Governor of the State call them out. The DOD has jurisdiction to order the NG as well as the Governor of that state, not the President.
The Governor is in charge of National Guard requests..
Has anybody contrasted the response of the Mayor of NYC and 9/11 to the response of the mayor of New Orleans? Leadership?
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