Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?

Greg Palast
Monday, May 2, 2011
GregPalast.com

From Armed Madhouse, just so we don't forget:

So, Osama walks into this bar, see? And Bush says, "Whad'l'ya have, pardner?" and Osama says...

But wait a minute. I'd better shut my mouth. The sign here in the airport says, "Security is no joking matter." But if security's no joking matter, why does this guy dressed in a high-school marching band outfit tell me to take off my shoes? All I can say is, Thank God the "shoe bomber" didn't carry Semtex in his underpants.

I'm a bit nervous. It's a "YELLOW ALERT" day. That's a "lowered threat" notice. According to the press office of the Department of Homeland Security, lowered threat Yellow means that there will be no special inspections of passengers or cargo today. Isn't it nice of Mr. Bush to alert Osama when half our security forces are given the day off?

Hmm. I asked an Israeli security expert why his nation doesn't use these pretty color codes.

He asked me if, when I woke up, I checked the day's terror color.

"I can't say I ever have. I mean, who would?" He smiled.

"The terrorists." America is the only nation on the planet that kindly informs bombers, hijackers and berserkers the days on which they won't be monitored. You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to get a jump on George Bush's team.

And who will get us next? Don't assume they'll be clutching Korans. Another Hurricane Katrina and America won't need to look abroad for insurgents. Until September 11, 2001, the deadliest terror attack in American history was carried out by an all-American Gulf War veteran.

Outside the war zones we create, organized terror's power is diminishing, and for George Bush and Tony Blair, that is a political problem. That's why the attack by the loony London teenagers in 2005 was such a boon to the Al-Qaeda addicts in the White House and Downing Street: They needed a new terror fix. Even if it wasn't the real Al- Qaeda, it was enough for Bush and Blair to mainline into the body politic a big, fat dose of fear.

Once they had the world media all jumped up on a new fear high, Bush and Blair could resume their sales pitch for their two-barrel cure: less liberty, more weaponry.

Our leaders are counting on cowardice in the hearts of the heart- land. In 2004, the Republicans' unstated reelection campaign slogan was, "They are coming to get us." Americans, scared for their lives, soiled their underpants and waddled to the polls crying, "Georgie, save us!"

From his bunker, Mr. Cheney has created a government that is little more than a Wal-Mart of Fear: midnight snatchings of citizens for uncharged crimes, wars to hunt for imaginary weapons aimed at Los Angeles, DNA data banks of kids and grandmas, even the Chicken Little sky-is-falling Social Security spook-show.

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt calmed a nation when he said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Today, George Bush says, "We have nothing to sell but fear itself."
*
Fear is the sales pitch for many products: from war on the Euphrates to billion-dollar submarines. Better than toothpaste that makes your teeth whiter than white, this stuff will make us safer than safe. It's political junk food, the cheap filling in the flashy tube.

Real security for life's dangers—from a national health insurance program to protecting teachers' jobs, would take a slice of the profits of the owning classes, the Lockheeds, the Halliburtons, the JP Morgans. The War on Terror has become class war by other means.
*
Oh, hey, you never got the punch line. So Osama walks into this bar, see, and George Bush says, "Whad'l'ya have, pardner?" and Osama says, "Well, George, what are you serving today?" and Bush says, "Fear," and Osama says, "Fear for everybody!" and George pours it on for the crowd. Then the presidential bartender says, "Hey, who's buying?" Osama points a thumb at the crowd sucking down their brew. "They are," he says — and the two of them share a quiet laugh.

On us.

This is an excerpt from Greg Palast's New York Times bestseller, "Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and other Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild." Penguin 2006.

Detroit Rock City Population Drops Like Rock

How bad has the economic downturn hurt Detroit? Almost as bad as Hurricane Katrina has damaged New Orleans.
The city's population fell to 713,777 in 2010, down from 951,270 in 2000, a drop of 25 percent. In contrast, NOLA fell by 29 percent, though it only had half the population.

Flint, another Michigan city tied to the auto industry and the birthplace of General Motors, lost 18 percent of its population. All told, Michigan lost 0.6 percent of its population during the decade, making it the only state to have a population decline during the zeroes.

Census: Detroit's population plummets 25 percent
3/22/2011
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42220834

No "Home Sweet Home"

Thu, 26 Aug 2010
Greg Palast
palast@gregpalast.net

No "Home Sweet Home"
Five years after Katrina

Matt Pascarella and I encountered Patricia Thomas while she was breaking into a home at the Lafitte Housing Project in New Orleans. It was her own home. Nevertheless, if caught, she'd end up in the slammer. So would we. Matt was my producer for the film, Big Easy to Big Empty, and he encouraged my worst habits. I'd worked for the New Orleans Housing Authority years back and knew they wanted the poor black folk out of these pretty townhouses near the French Quarter. Katrina was an excuse for ethnic cleansing, American style. Matt and I skipped cuffs on this shoot, but were charged later by Homeland Security (see below). While I recorded the story of hidden evils on film, Matt gathered a story which no camera can capture. Here it is. - Greg Palast

by Matt Pascarella
August 26th, 2010

Four years ago, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I sat with Patricia Thomas. Greg Palast and I had just helped her break into her home in the Lafitte Projects. She had been locked out for a year. She showed us her former home, her belongings scattered everywhere, and wrestled out endless stories of post-Katrina life: how she struggled to find shelter over the last year, how they came and put bars on her doors and windows and locked her out, how it was "man made."

I picked up a photo of her at Mardi Gras, taken a few years earlier, and compared it to what she looked like now. In the picture her hair was longer, her face younger, her smile deeper. Now her arms were wasted and thin, her eyes sunken into her face, and her bottom front teeth were gone. On most days, she told me, she wore her dead mother's dentures, but today she had forgotten to put them in. Her own teeth broke off when escaping the rising waters. She had fallen face first onto the concrete slab that was her front porch. The very spot where we were sitting was where it had happened. Over my left shoulder, running the length of the building, was a scar, a stain from the water line.

August in Louisiana is unbearably hot for a Northern boy. Beads of sweat poured from my face, down my neck. Patricia went inside, found an old roll of paper towels in a kitchen cabinet and brought me one. The quilted paper had a kitschy design - a giant heart with words that said, "Home Sweet Home."

I looked at her and wondered how this could happen in my country.

A few weeks before, I was in Mexico City with Palast covering the Presidential Election. A presidency had been stolen. People were on the streets screaming "Vota por Vota, Casilla por Casilla!" Count the votes! "Vote by Vote, box by box!" I had seen the aftermath of a massacre in a small village outside Mexico City. I had seen people from all over the country rise up in anger taking to the streets. I had seen the Zapatistas march and Subcomandante Marcos himself flanked by young women acting as a protective barrier. I had seen the house where Trotsky was stabbed in the back of the head with an ice pick.

When I finally left Mexico City, I remember being deeply confused. The kind of confusion that tears at the soul and has the ability to completely dismantle any preconceived notions of how to view the world. I was inspired to see so many people fighting for democracy, and yet a deep depression sunk in as the plane took off. I knew their efforts would not matter. I had seen the American 'consultants', the DC hacks, in the offices of the ruling party and I knew it was over.

Now, here I was - back home in the United States - outside a decimated house near the levees, trying to understand why a New Orleans native, Brod Bagert, was calling a friend who worked with the fire department. Brod was asking his old friend what the number "5" below the giant orange spray-painted X on the front of the house meant. But Brod already knew what it meant.

Here I was watching Brod, one year later, trying to convince himself that what had happened to his neighbors didn't actually happen. After many long days of hearing countless horrifying stories and walking through miles of destruction, I now stood next to a grown man who was desperately trying to lie to himself simply because the alternative was too painful. I couldn't hold back the tears. It was the first, and only, time in my professional life that I had to walk away from an interview. I hid out behind a smashed up, rotted out BMW and cried.

After a few minutes I returned to Brod. He hung up the phone, looked at Palast and me, and slowly choked, "Five people died here."

He finally gave in to what had happened here: the sprayed "9-16" above that X meant that those five bodies had been left to decompose for nearly 19 days before being discovered by rescue crews.

Brod rubbed his eyes and we went inside the house. His fathomless sadness hardened into anger. We walked through a sand dune littered with toys into what was once the living room. I tried not to imagine the mom and dad and kids as water crushed them against the ceiling; as they clawed for one more breath.

Brod took us down the street to his home, that is, the sticks that were left of his home. He was breathing hard, he was shaking. "Old ladies watched the water come up to their nose, over their eyes and they drowned in houses just like this, in this neighborhood, because of reckless negligence that is unanswered for."

I think back now, to those words, spoken four years ago and wonder if it will ever be answered.

We then met Stephen Smith. He worked at the Marriott hotel, but had no car and no way to get out when the Mayor said to get out. Stephen pulled a dozen neighbors to a bridge over the rising water for four days as helicopters whirled overhead. Four days in the humid sun. No food. An old man gave his grandchildren his only bottle of water; then the old man died of dehydration. Stephen now works in a grocery store in Houston where FEMA ultimately dumped him. His kids live in Baton Rouge.

The next day Palast and I drove up to Baton Rouge to confront the company that was contracted to come up with an evacuation plan for the City of New Orleans. They had refused all of our interview requests, so we showed up at their offices to request a copy of the plan in person. We were quickly thrown out, they threatened to call security. They knew what we knew: There was no plan.

We drove out to the town of Baker. There, we surreptitiously passed through a security checkpoint before funneling into a massive FEMA trailer park. Here we met Pamela Lewis who told us her story of escaping the flood. Despite having MS, she pushed a boat with her 86-year-old mother, other relatives and neighbors through the streets of New Orleans. When she got to a bridge, armed men yelled at her, called her a nigger, and commanded her to turn around. They didn't want a boat full of black people coming into their neighborhood. She then managed to make it to the Superdome where she was sprayed down by hoses, tossed on a bus, and then told to pay a fare and get off. She had no idea where she was.

We finished filming. Pamela stood in front of the car next to her trailer, and I locked eyes with her. I put the car in reverse and backed out, leaving her there, alone, not knowing what she was going to do with her life.

We drove back to New Orleans, passing an Exxon Oil Refinery - the only thing near Pamela's trailer park. Several weeks later, at the request of Exxon, Homeland Security would file a criminal complaint against me and Palast under the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act for filming "critical infrastructure." The only thing critical about that refinery was the pollution it was spewing near what had become a refugee camp.

Five years have gone by and it is rare if a week passes that I don't think of New Orleans. Nearly two thousand people lost their lives. An entire city was decimated. People were killed by the very police officers who were supposed to be protecting them. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes and livelihoods. To this day there are some still living in FEMA trailers. Patricia died a few years back in a horrible car accident; Lafitte, her home, has since been demolished.

My job was to go, to report, and then go home. My job was to leave Patricia, Pamela, Brod and countless others whom I had encountered, behind - to place them in a compartment in my mind, and to move on to the next story. Yet I never quite managed to do that with New Orleans. Maybe it was easier for me to cope in places like Mexico, but New Orleans was America. It happened in my country. All of the people I met in New Orleans - their images, their words - have, over the years, crystallized into a vivid sense of disenchantment with the romantic narrative of America I was taught as a child.

I sit here now, thumb through my old notebook that is labeled in black marker "NOLA" and find the paper towel Patricia gave me. It still reads, next to that big, faded heart, "Home Sweet Home."
*********
Matt Pascarella produced the Greg Palast investigation, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans.

Pascarella is currently a journalist with the Palast Investigative Fund which is offering the film as download FREE of charge during this week of commemoration. Or, for a donation, receive the DVD signed by Palast.

The Palast Fund requests your tax-deductible donations. We are returning to New Orleans to finish the investigation we started.

http://www.gregpalast.com/

New Orleans' Cuisine Crisis: Is It Safe to Eat the Po'Boy?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1996569,00.html

New Orleans' Cuisine Crisis: Is It Safe to Eat the Po'Boy?
By Steven Gray / New Orleans
Tuesday, Jun. 15, 2010

Not quite two weeks ago, on June 5, Sal Sunseri opened the first New Orleans Oyster Festival. Postponed a few years because of Hurricane Katrina, the affair, in the city's French Quarter, included contests for wine and oyster pairings as well as oyster shucking — basically, cracking open the shell to expose the slippery gray meat for slurping. On June 10, however, the Sunseri family business, P&J Oyster Co., which in 134 years had become the chief oyster purveyor to some of the city's most esteemed restaurants, effectively closed. Not only was it running short of the delicacies, but people were afraid to eat them. "We're mourning," Sunseri says.

Few cities treat seafood with the high reverence of New Orleans, where shrimp is often eaten for breakfast (with buttery grits), oysters for lunch (on a po'boy, or sandwich) and crawfish for dinner (étouffée). But those traditions may become a casualty of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The oil spill that has brought President Obama to the region for the fourth time in the past month has closed nearly one-third of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing. It is potentially catastrophic for Louisiana's core $2.4 billion seafood industry, which provides much of the nation's fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs.

The region's angst is understandable. New Orleans' main highway, Interstate 10, is lined with billboards showing mounds of fried seafood. Castnet Seafood, a shop in the largely residential New Orleans East section, is still teeming with customers buying shrimp, fish and oysters to store in their freezers. But the owner, Kent Bondi, fears that soon, "that rush is going to come to a complete end." And there is the vexing question: Is the seafood safe to eat? A recent Castnet customer returned with a bag of fish, saying, "It smelled like oil," and demanded a refund. Bondi told her flatly that the catfish was farm-raised, so there was no chance it had been tainted by oil. "It's psychological," he says of the fear.

But people can be forgiven for their questions. The images — thousands of gallons of oil spewing each day from the Gulf of Mexico, plus oil-soaked fish, turtles and pelicans — are hard to ignore. It's scaring even some of the most ardent seafood devotees. "We won't be able to turn around our brand perception for five years or more," predicts Ashley Roth, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Seafood and Marketing Board. The board has launched a multipronged ad campaign in major newspapers boasting that Louisiana's seafood is indeed safe to eat because most of the state's waterways remain untouched by oil. Meanwhile, a delegation of local chefs is being sent to Washington State and even Finland to evangelize about Louisiana's seafood cuisine; a crawfish boil is scheduled for Dijon, France, this summer.

The challenge isn't just one of perception but supply. There are a couple of reasons for this. While an estimated 70% of Louisiana's coastline remains open to fishing, many shrimpers, oystermen and fishermen have signed up to be among the 13,000 people hired by BP or its contractors to clean up the spill. By one estimate, only 1% of the men who usually harvest oysters are actually doing so — mainly because the cleanup jobs can be lucrative (some pay $2,000 a day).

Meanwhile, many of the oyster beds have been closed as a precaution against the arrival of the oil. Some of the beds, however, have become victims of caution. Shortly after the spill began, authorities opened some of the vent-like structures built by the Army Corps of Engineers in order to push freshwater out toward the Gulf and keep the oil from entering the river and surrounding marsh. That meant sharply decreasing salinity in some of the waters where oysters are harvested — killing the beds.

Cliff Hall, co-owner of the New Orleans Fish House, one of the city's largest suppliers, is buying West Coast oysters and more imported shrimp than he'd like. "We want to support our local fishermen," he says, "but there's no other choice." Many seafood suppliers had depleted their stock, anticipating a robust fishing season, which typically begins in May. So the crisis, he says, "couldn't have come at a worse time." The pinched supply has driven up the price of oysters about 25% in the past week. "It's going to hit a stopping point of what the consumer will tolerate," says Hall.

For another sense of how the crisis is playing out, consider one of New Orleans' premier restaurants, Commander's Palace. The restaurant's shrimp costs have soared 40%, to about $9.50 per lb., since the oil crisis began. So far, the executive chief, Tory McPhail, has not passed along the added expense to consumers. The higher cost, he says, "forces us to look at our menus, be more value-conscious and do things we wouldn't normally do." One example: maximizing the use of shrimp. It is broken into two parts: the head and tail. McPhail's team breads and then fries the tail, which is the meatier half. The head is roasted at 400°, to dehydrate it, at which point it is ground into a powder. The powder is then used to significantly strengthen the flavor of seafood in a bisque, even with the decrease of shrimp tails in the stock.

So, the bottom-line question: Is it safe to eat seafood in New Orleans? Managers of restaurants, grocery stores and markets quickly point out that their livelihoods depend on serving safe food. Much of the seafood is carefully inspected using one of the most powerful tools: the human nose. And if the seafood looks odd, the chefs don't bother with the ingredient. Robert Buchannan, director of the Center for Food Safety and Security at the University of Maryland at College Par, offers a simple piece of advice: "If the seafood tastes like a petroleum product, it'd be smart not to eat it." The good news is, New Orleans offers a range of po'boy substitutes, like the muffuletta, with salami (cotto and Genoa), smoked ham, mozzarella and an oily olive salad stuffed into a thick round of bread. Sadly, it isn't diet-friendly. But not much in New Orleans is.

Family of Secrets

From Amazon.com:

Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years
Russ Baker
Paperback: 592 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (November 10, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608190064
ISBN-13: 978-1608190065

How did the deeply flawed George W. Bush ascend to the highest office in the nation, what forces abetted his rise, and—perhaps most important—have those forces really been vanquished by Obama’s election? Award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker gives us the answers in Family of Secrets, a compelling and startling new take on the Bush dynasty and the shadowy elite that has quietly steered the American republic for the past half century and more. Baker shows how this network of figures in intelligence, the military, oil, and finance enabled—and in turn benefited handsomely from—the Bushes’ perch at the highest levels of government. As Baker reveals, this deeply entrenched elite remains in power regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

Family of Secrets offers countless disclosures that challenge the conventional accounts of such central events as the JFK assassination and Watergate. It includes an inside account of George W.’s cynical religious conversion and the untold real background to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Baker’s narrative is gripping, sobering, and deeply sourced. It will change the way we understand not just the Bush years, but a half century of postwar history—and the present.

About the Author

Russ Baker is an awardwinning investigative journalist. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, and Esquire, and has served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization, operating at www.whowhatwhy.com.

Praise for Family of Secrets:

“One of the most important books of the past ten years.”
— Gore Vidal

“A tour de force … Family of Secrets has made me rethink even those events I witnessed with my own eyes.”
— Dan Rather

“Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a first historic portrait in full of the Bush dynasty and the era it shaped. From revelation to revelation, insight to insight—from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to the oil and financial intrigues that lie behind today's headlines—this is a sweeping drama of money and power, unseen forces, and the emblematic triumph of a lineage that sowed national tragedy. Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is sure to take its place as one of the most startling and influential works of American history and journalism.”
— Roger Morris, former senior staff member, National Security Council, and author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America

“Left-wing paranoia? Baker, a solid investigative journalist, works hard to back up his claims – a reader could choke on the complex, interwoven details in Family of Secrets. He's a man on a mission, desperate to stop the “methods of stealth and manipulation that ... reflect a deeper ill: the American public's increasingly tenuous hold upon the levers of its own democracy.”
— San Diego Union-Tribune

“Prodigiously industrious investigative journalist Russ Baker…. connects the dots between the Bushes and Watergate.” —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine

Praise for Russ Baker:

“In an era dominated by corporate journalism and an ideological right-wing media, Russ Baker’s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy…A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn’t know.”
— Bill Moyers, author and host, Bill Moyers’ Journal (PBS)

“Russ Baker has the three most important attributes of any great investigative reporter: He is skeptical, he is fearless, and he is indefatigable. Whenever he examines anything—including the most allegedly wellcovered topics—he breaks important new ground.”
— David Margolick, author and contributing editor, Vanity Fair

Who Dat? Dat's the Super Bowl Champs!

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/527623/who_dat_dat_s_the_super_bowl_champs

Who Dat? Dat's the Super Bowl Champs!
by Dave Zirin

The New Orleans Saints won Super Bowl 44. I can’t believe I’m even typing the words. Five years ago this was the team considered most likely to be moved to Los Angeles. Four and a half years ago, after the levies broke, the concern was not whether there would be a Saints, but whether there would even be a New Orleans. Remember that after Hurricane Katrina, the Speaker of the House, Republican Rep. Dennis Hastert said, "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” But now Hastert is on the political scrap heap and New Orleans is the home of the Super Bowl champs. I’m not sure whether it feels like a dream or positively preordained. If nothing else, it’s an emotional release from all the idiocy that surrounded the big game. From the military cheerleading, to Tim and Pam Tebow’s vapid Focus on the Family ad, to the Who’s halftime act which clearly violated the Geneva accords: none of it matters now. We’ll go back to building resistance to Obama’s wars. Tim Tebow will go back to being the next Eric Crouch. And the Who will go back to Madame Tussaud’s. For right now, it just doesn’t matter because the New Orleans Saints won the damn Super Bowl.

Quarterback Drew Brees will get a lot of love after a 32-for-39 MVP performance. But this was no one-man-band. This was about a head coach in Sean Payton who, with his team down 10-6, exercised a wicked sense of daring and ordered the first non-fourth quarter onside kick in Super Bowl history. This was about a Saints defense that bent but didn’t break, freezing Peyton Manning's Colts at 17 points. This was about an offense that was crisper than potatoes at the bottom of a deep fryer. This was also about a stadium in Miami that sounded nearly as loud as the Louisiana Superdome. But most of all this was about a Crescent City that refuses to die.

As Leigh, a friend and blogger from New Orleans, said to me, “The energy in this entire town is incredible. People here have been ready for this for decades...but the way the media is treating the Saints as underdogs isn't a surprise to any of us. The people of New Orleans have been subjected to those attitudes for a long time ourselves, and we still are in too, too many ways, but we're still here. And those who are still unable to return here due to the displacement caused by the storm, or the recession, or other circumstances - they'll return in one way or another, because this is a town that can teach the rest of this country how to live. It always has, and it always will, despite it all.”

Leigh’s pride runs across NOLA tonight. The same week that Education Secretary Arne Duncan outrageously called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans", the city has delivered a counterpunch to Duncan as well as any and all doubters. Their ascendancy means that the arduous post Hurricane recovery work has gotten more publicity in the last two weeks than it’s received in the last two years. This is maddening but many New Orleans residents wouldn’t have it any other way. As Saints linebacker Scott Fujita’s wife Jaclyn said, “The people of New Orleans love the Saints not because they provide a distraction from their fall but because they are a reflection of their rise.”

Whether you believe that or not, the proof is in the very vibe of the city. The French Quarter is hopping tonight. The Ninth Ward is hopping tonight. Algiers is hopping tonight. People in New Orleans are feeling damn good right now, and to scoff at that is to scoff at the very resiliency that makes us human. Community activist and former Black Panther Malik Rahim who has lived in the city for three decades and still works in Algiers, told me, “I haven’t seen people this happy since Katrina. No question about it.” That doesn’t mean all – or even some – questions about the future of New Orleans are solved by a Saints Super Bowl win. Jobs, housing, and the right of return for displaced residents still need to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

But it does mean that folks of the Big Easy are feeling fearless tonight. Every last person – from Bush to Brownie - that wrote this city off has to now bend down and kiss the ring. President Barack Obama, who often seems allergic to saying the words “New Orleans” must now greet the team at the White House and acknowledge both the Saints and the city that bears their name. Even if tomorrow is unbearably hard, we have today. And today feels mighty fine.

Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Robertson says Haiti paying for 'pact to the devil'

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/01/13/haiti.pat.robertson/index.html

Pat Robertson says Haiti paying for 'pact to the devil'
January 13, 2010
Pat Robertson has previously linked natural disasters and terrorist attacks to legalized abortion in the United States.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Robertson says native Haitians made deal with the devil for freedom from France
Robertson is evangelical Christian who has made similar comparisons
He once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina

(CNN) -- Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian who once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina, says a "pact to the devil" brought on the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

Officials fear more than 100,000 people have died as a result of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti.

Robertson, the host of the "700 Club," blamed the tragedy on something that "happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it."

The Haitians "were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever," Robertson said on his broadcast Wednesday. "And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' "

Native Haitians defeated French colonists in 1804 and declared independence.

"You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other." Robertson has previously linked natural disasters and terrorist attacks to legalized abortion in the United States. Soon after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 and wreaking unprecedented devastation on New Orleans, Louisiana, Robertson weighed in with his own theory.

"We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America," Robertson said on his September 12, 2005, broadcast of "700 Club."

"I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he [the author] used the term that those who do this, 'the land will vomit you out.' ... But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?"

Orleans-Area Residents 'Vindicated' by Katrina Ruling

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,575763,00.html

New Orleans-Area Residents 'Vindicated' by Katrina Ruling Against Army Corps of Engineers
Thursday, November 19, 2009

NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans-area residents have been "vindicated" after a historic ruling that found the Army Corps of Engineers negligent in failing to prevent Hurricane Katrina flooding, an attorney in the case said Thursday.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the corps' failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding during Katrina in August 2005.

Lawyer Joe Bruno, who represented plaintiffs in the case against the Corps of Engineers, praised the decision and said those affected by the devastating storm have been "vindicated."

Another speaker at the news conference said residents are finally seeing justice served and vowed that the decision will stand.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval sided with five residents and one business who argued the Army Corps' shoddy oversight of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet led to the flooding of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish.

He said, however, that the corps couldn't be held liable for the flooding of eastern New Orleans, where one of the plaintiffs lived.

Duval awarded the plaintiffs $720,000, or about $170,000 each, but the decision could eventually make the government vulnerable to a much larger payout.

The ruling should give more than 100,000 other people, businesses and government entities a better shot at claiming billions of dollars in damages.

Bruno, one of the lead plaintiffs lawyer, said the ruling underscored the Army Corps' long history of failure to properly protect the New Orleans region.

"It's high time we look at the way these guys do business and do a full re-evaluation of the way it does business," Bruno said Wednesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Lessons to Be Learned From Mistakes of 9/11

http://news.rutgers.edu/medrel/news-releases/2009/09/new-book-by-dean-joh-20090908

News Release
CATEGORIES: Politics, Law and Public Policy; Social Sciences
New Book by Dean John Farmer of Rutgers Law School–Newark Details Lessons to Be Learned From Mistakes of 9/11
September 08, 2009

Newark, NJ – The nation’s top-down command structure was abysmally ill-prepared to respond to the surprise attacks of September 11, 2001 and, as the bungled response to the much-anticipated Hurricane Katrina underscored, remains a bureaucratic hindrance to the “on the ground” way in which crises are actually experienced and most effectively addressed. Equally important, misleading accounts by the administration and the military of key aspects of the air and ground response on 9/11 have set the country up to fail in response to future threats.

That’s the conclusion presented by John J. Farmer, Jr., former Senior Counsel and Team Leader to the 9/11 Commission and now Dean of Rutgers School of Law–Newark, in The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11, published today by Riverhead Books. Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge, says that “all Americans should read” the book, which he describes as “a highly recommended historical curative for our times.” Brinkley praises the “keen analytical insight” with which Farmer “rips the lid off of many mysteries pertaining to both the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.” Kirkus Review concludes that the book “makes excellent use of declassified primary-source documents from 9/11” and describes it as “an important systematic brief on how an elaborately constructed national-defense system was penetrated . . . .”

The Ground Truth draws on Farmer’s experience with the 9/11 Commission as well as recently declassified tapes and transcripts to show a disturbing disconnect between what those in charge of the country’s security knew and what was actually happening on the ground and in the skies. Dean Farmer, one of the principal authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, includes critical evidence omitted in recent reports by the Departments of Defense and Transportation. The Commission, believing that civilian and military officials had not been completely forthright in their information to Congress, the media, and the Commission itself about significant aspects of 9/11, had requested the reports.

“At some level of government,” says Dean Farmer, “at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11. We owe the truth to the families of the victims of 9/11. We owe it to the American public as well, because only by understanding what has gone wrong in the past can we assure our nation’s safety in the future.”

The Ground Truth narrates the government’s growing awareness of and reaction to the al Qaeda terrorist threat in units of time as it was lived – from years down to the final minutes and seconds to intervene and respond, vividly portraying key moments. The final section considers the nature of government in crisis. Dean Farmer offers seven lessons to be learned from the responses to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, with perhaps the most important: “A government reshaped by the lessons of its prior experiences requires candor.” And the “ground truth”? It’s that the fault for failing to detect or interdict the attacks lay in the nature of modern government itself. “Unless we change government, unless we plan to respond to crises the way we now know they are experienced,” says Dean Farmer, “we will fail to protect ourselves, with horrifying consequences.”

John Farmer became Dean of Rutgers School of Law–Newark on July 1, 2009. In addition to his work for the 9/11 Commission, he has served as Attorney General of New Jersey, Chief Counsel to Governor Christine Todd Whitman, as a federal prosecutor, a law enforcement expert to the special envoy for Middle East regional security, and a founding partner of a New Jersey law firm.

Contact: Janet Donohue
973-353-5553
E-mail: jdonohue@andromeda.rutgers.edu

The Problem with New Orleans Getting the Bowl

By Dave Zirin

Only in New Orleans could this be classified as "a return to normalcy." The Crescent City, torn asunder by Hurricane Katrina, stamped by federal neglect and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's neoliberal experimentaion, will once again collide with the freewheeling, hard-partying frenzy of the NFL's crown jewel: the Super Bowl.

It was announced this week that New Orleans will host their tenth Super Bowl in 2013, to the cheers of journalists with bionic livers and expense-account executives the nation over. It's also being celebrated across the sporting spectrum as an act of altruism. It shouldn't be, but that hasn't stopped the soundtrack of salutations.

ESPN's Len Pasquarelli wrote, "The Super Bowl was made for New Orleans. And as anybody who has attended a championship game there knows, New Orleans was made for the Super Bowl.... Great move owners!"

Governor Jindal said, "This is a huge win for New Orleans but also the entire state of Louisiana." Previously, Jindal has decried federal spending on disaster relief, which is somewhat like a governor of Nevada making a push to outlaw gambling.

The NFL wants to play up the choice as an act of post-Katrina missionary work, with commissioner Roger Goodell saying, "I think this is a great statement about the spirit and people of New Orleans and the great relationship the Saints and the NFL have in that community."

"No city has been through more than New Orleans," said Rita Benson LeBlanc, a part owner of the New Orleans Saints. "This is just a true testament to what an entire community can do."

Pasquarelli added, "Playing host to a Super Bowl should address some of the city's lingering problems." By "lingering problems" he must mean sky-high poverty and unemployment. Much has been made about the city's comeback, on the basis of healthy employment numbers (relative to the rest of the country) and a mini-construction boom buoyed by post-Katrina reconstruction.

But many New Orleans residents still feel compelled to celebrate any infusion of business, particularly the business of unlimited expense accounts and debauchery the Super Bowl inevitably brings with it. This is because the poverty in the city is still persistent. In March, the metro area lost jobs for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. And New Orleans, with some families still living in federal trailers and others still trying to return, remains the murder capital of the United States.

This is because the city has become profoundly dependent on its service economy since 2005.

This is also because the Obama administration has to date done nothing to help the Gulf Coast despite his repeated assurances to do otherwise. A look at politifact.com shows a depressing litany of broken promises straight from Obama's mouth on everything from strengthening the levees to rebuilding hospitals and schools.

As New Orleans resident and commentator Harry Shearer wrote:

“The farther we get into this administration, the clearer it becomes that New Orleans is now enjoying its second consecutive federal administration which, far from offering to fix what it broke, far from offering a hand of support, is merely offering one finger.”

This is why, in the absence of alternatives, the Super Bowl money train looks all the more seductive.

Scott Fujita, a star linebacker for the Saints who lives within the New Orleans city limits, said to me, "I'm thrilled about it.... You'd be hard-pressed to find a city that throws a better party, or a city that deserves the business more than New Orleans." He is correct on both counts. But this is one party that will come with a price tag which should make us more than skeptical. To paraphrase John Reed, the NFL never wants something for nothing. It will mean at least $85 million more in taxpayer money for Superdome improvements, including more luxury suites plus other bells and whistles. This investment is being pushed hard by Jindal and the New Orleans business community. Jindal is very fond of saying that "government can't solve our problems." However, it can provide Jindal's corporate backers with more luxury suites.

The Super Bowl decision perpetuates the status quo in New Orleans. The city will be forced to rise and fall on the basis of an external service economy. Jobs and wages will fluctuate rapidly based on whichever circus happens to be in town that week. Taxpayer dollars will pour into amenities for moneyed tourists and not into building the kind of stable industrial base that can stabilize the community. This will be another sporting shock doctrine.

Saints owner Tom Benson said after the announcement, in a moment of unvarnished truth, "It won't be all trickle-down, but it will definitely help." Someone needs to ask, When the Super Bowl party leaves town, who will really be helped and who will be left on the sidelines?

Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Obama inauguration got unprecedented coverage

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE50K6E320090121

Obama inauguration got unprecedented news coverage
Wed Jan 21, 2009

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's inauguration generated an unprecedented 35,000 stories in the world's major newspapers, television and radio broadcasts over the past day -- about 35 times more than the last presidential swearing-in -- a monitoring group said on Wednesday.

The Texas-based Global Language Monitor said there had also been 6 million new Obama-related mentions on the Internet since December 31.

By comparison, the last U.S. presidential inauguration, of George W. Bush in January 2005, resulted in about 1,000 stories in major media worldwide, Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor said.

"The Obama numbers are unprecedented and speak volumes to the global fascination with the new American president, his wife and young family," Payack told Reuters. "Obama is the biggest story of the century so far."

U.S. television audience ratings for Tuesday's inauguration ceremony, which was shown live on major broadcast networks and cable news channels, are expected to show record numbers tuning in when they are released later on Wednesday.

Payack said that according to his group's monitoring, the Obama campaign and election story had generated 717,000 citations in print, television and radio across the world in 2008 and 254 million mentions on the Internet and in Web blogs.

That surpassed media interest generated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global financial meltdown in 2008, the Iraq War in 2003 and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Payack said.

The tallies were calculated using the group's proprietary algorithm which tracks the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, the Internet and major databases.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

People of the Dome

I originally wrote this article 3 years ago immediately following hurricane Katrina and the horror of New Orleans.

It's happening all over again, and the questions asked at the time continue to go unanswered.

Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens / Green Party of NY

People of the Dome
by Mitchel Cohen
mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

"I'm sick to death of hearing things from uptight narrow-minded pigheaded politicians. All I want is the truth. Just give me some truth."
—John Lennon

AS HURRICANE KATRINA RAVAGED THE GULF STATES, many organizations kicked into high gear to send relief to local groups in Mississippi and Louisiana, with no help from the government or formal relief agencies. Among them was the Malcolm X Grassroots movement, with whom the Brooklyn Greens shared an office. Tons of donated supplies poured into the office and were trucked to Jackson Mississippi, where they were distributed through community-based efforts.

I spoke daily with Les Evenchick, a Green who lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I was also in touch with New Orleans residents Malik Rahim and Mike Howell; the areas in which they live were dry and they were holding out as long as they could. The story they tell is shocking: U.S. and local government officials ordered the local drinking water turned off and refused to allow water or food relief into New Orleans. Hundreds of people died unnecessarily as a result.

And yet, there was no shortage of water or food being sent — it was just not allowed into the City! When Green Party activists tried to donate a large amount of water for the people in the SuperDome a few days after the levees broke, armed soldiers pointed rifles at them and prevented them from delivering supplies. Even three Wal-mart trucks loaded with drinking water were denied entry and turned away. No water was allowed into New Orleans. Evenchick says that "this was a brazen attempt to starve people out."

There was no health reason to turn off the drinking water at the time, as the water is drawn into a separate system from the Mississippi River, not the polluted lake, and filtered through self-powered purification plants separate from the main electric grid. If necessary, people could have boiled their water — strangely, the municipal natural gas used in stoves was still functioning properly as of Thursday night of that first week! I emailed Governor Kathleen Blanco (a Democrat) asking, "Who ordered the turnoff of the drinking water?" I have not received a response from Gov. Blanco.

A commanding officer of a police squad complained that his 120 cops were provided with only 70 small bottles of water. Hospitals were supplied with nothing. Could FEMA, Homeland Security, and local officials have forgotten to store bottles of drinking water in the Superdome, Convention Center and hospitals?

The only FEMA official on the scene in the early stages, Marty Bahamonde, has testified to Congress that he begged FEMA director Michael Brown for water, food, toilet paper and oxygen, saying that "many will die within hours." Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, responded that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. "He needs much more than [sic] 20 or 30 minutes," Worthy wrote. "Restaurants are getting busy," she said. "We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choice [sic], followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc." Let them eat gumbo.

Green activist and former Black Panther Malik Rahim, who lives in the Algiers section — which, like the French Quarter and several other areas above sea-level, remained dry — points out that the government could have and should have provided water and food to residents of New Orleans but did not do so intentionally, to force people to evacuate by starving them out. This is a crime of the gravest sort.

French Quarter resident Mike Howell adds that the capability had been there from the start to drive water and food right up to the convention center, as those roads were clear. "It's how the National Guard drove into the city," he said.

The evidence is overwhelming that the government intentionally did not allow food or water into New Orleans.

These were the people, after all, who had twice voted in huge numbers against the candidacy of George Bush, the only area in the state to have done so. In recent years they also fought off attempts to privatize the drinking water supply, battled Shell Oil's attempt to build a liquefied Natural Gas facility, and tried to prevent the teardown of public housing — battles in which Mayor Ray Nagin sided with the oil companies and millionaire developers. Nagin had contributed funds to George W. Bush's presidential campaign and was a registered Republican until just prior to the Mayoral election in 2002.

Attempts to starve civilians into leaving an area is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Who gave the order to block water and food from entering New Orleans? Who ordered the drinking water inside the city to be turned off? No one has yet answered those questions.

On Thursday of that first week, volunteers who had rescued over 1,000 people in boats were ordered to stop, under the pretext that it was too dangerous. The volunteers wanted to continue rescue operations. They said there was little risk, that desperate people had been welcoming them with open arms. The military "convinced" the volunteer rescuers at gunpoint to "cease and desist." They did the same to a state senator who had led a flotilla of hundreds of boats and rafts all the way from Mississippi to rescue people.

Who gave the order to block the volunteer rescue teams in New Orleans? No one has yet answered that question.

Officials claimed that people were trying to shoot down the rescue helicopters. In actuality, there were a couple of people shooting into the air to signal helicopters to pick them up. Yet officials repeated the lies about people shooting at helicopters over and over, as justification for shutting down voluntary rescue operations and sending in thousands of fully armed military troops, along with private Blackwater mercenaries fresh from Iraq under orders to "shoot to kill."1

Two U.S. military helicopters spent a few days plucking 110 people from the roofs of their flooded houses. We saw them on T.V. and cheered. When they returned to base they were called into the commander's office. They thought they were going to be given medals. Instead, as reported in the NY Times, their commanding officers reprimanded them and removed them from helicopter duty for "violating orders."

Who gave the order not to rescue people? No one has answered that question.

For more than two weeks, hundreds of volunteer doctors and fire personnel — including a squad from New York City — were denied entry to New Orleans. They were dispatched, instead, to provide backdrop for Bush's photo-ops in other areas. The medical personnel were kept twiddling their thumbs, as people were dying.

Who gave the order not to allow rescue workers into New Orleans? No one has answered that question.

In an interview with WWL-TV, Mayor Ray Nagin complained vociferously that Louisiana National Guard Blackhawk helicopters were being stopped from dropping sandbags to plug the levees soon after the breech. No repairs were allowed on the levees until long after the poor areas of New Orleans were totally flooded!

Who gave the order not to allow National Guard helicopters to drop sandbags to plug the levees soon after the breech? No one has answered that question.

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez and Cuba's President Fidel Castro offered millions of dollars and hundreds of doctors to help save lives in New Orleans. They were turned down.

Who gave the order to turn down the aid offered from Venezuela and Cuba? No one has answered that question.

Millions of concerned citizens wanted to send assistance as well. FEMA recommended that they send contributions to "Operation Blessing," a front group for rightwing evangelist Pat Robertson. Robertson had recently televised a speech calling for the assassination of Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez.

Who gave the order to divert tens of millions of dollars in contributions sent to help the people of New Orleans by outraged American citizens, to rightwing Christian zealots? No one has yet answered that question.

The Saudization of New Orleans

Les Evenchick is an independent Green activist who lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans in a 3-story walkup. He points out that people were told to go to the bus depot to evacuate, but the bus station had closed down the night before. Unless you owned a car, Les told me, FEMA and state police would not let you leave.

Hundreds attempted to walk out of New Orleans; they were forced off the road and ordered back to the Coliseum or Superdome, where no water or food was available.

As a consequence the vast majority of the so-called looters were simply grabbing water, food, diapers and medicine. "It's only because of them that old people, sick people, and small children were able to survive," Les says. "But the 'anti-looting' hype was just an excuse to militarize the area, place it under martial law and evict the population, mostly Black people, mostly the poor.

On August 30, Yahoo front-page news showed two pictures of people wading in water carrying supplies. The caption under the picture of the Black person read: "A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans." The caption under the picture of a White couple wading through the water pulling supplies reads: "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store." Got that? Whites "find," Blacks "loot."

MSNBC interviewed dozens of people who had managed to get out during the first few days. Every single one of them was white.

Some tourists trapped in the Monteleone Hotel pooled their funds and paid $25,000 for 10 buses to get them out. The buses were sent (there was no shortage of available buses — why didn't the government use them?) but the military confiscated all ten of them for its own use. The tourists were not allowed to leave the city and were ordered to the Convention Center.

How simple it would have been for the government to have provided buses before the hurricane hit, and throughout the week. AMTRAK says it offered free rides out of town but that City officials never got back to them to finalize arrangements. Evacuating the 100,000 people trapped in the city should not have been that difficult. Even without AMTRAK or private cars, it would have taken at most 3000 buses to get them out, fewer than come into Washington D.C. for some of the giant anti-war demonstrations. Even at $2,500 a pop — highway robbery — that would only be a total of $7.5 million for transporting out of harm's way all of those who did not have the means to leave.

The people who are poor (primarily Blacks but many poor Whites as well) who were trapped in the city as well as those thousands who were refusing to evacuate, not wanting to leave their pets or their homes and who had neither money nor places to go, were locked in the superdome and not allowed to leave — five days of hell. Those who survived the first dome were then — finally! — bussed out of the area to another stadium, the AstroDome in Houston. Call them "People of the Dome."

The Grassroots Organizing Itself

Gulf Coast resident Latosha Brown reports that the first group to send emergency supplies was TOPS, The Ordinary Peoples Society, a prison ministry in Dothan, Alabama founded and staffed by ex-offenders. They organized food, pooled their money for additional goods and brought the supplies to a second organization of former prisoners in Mobile who distributed them, while they went back to Dothan for more. "That's why we tell everybody now that it was felons who were the first to feed, the first to respond to need, the first to get up and do something. They didn't wait for permission or for a contract. That's real leadership." ("Rescue Came from the Grassroots: The People, Not FEMA, Saved Themselves," by Bruce Dixon, in The Black Commentator.)

Volunteer medics established free clinics with the Common Ground Collective: www.commongroundrelief.org in defiance of governmental edicts and machine guns. Common Ground has also mobilized thousands of young people from all over the country to come to New Orleans and help with the rebuilding, while using non-toxic alternative methods of mold removal and prevention in their efforts. Others, working in solidarity with tribal leaders, have created a dedicated relief effort for Native American communities: www.intuitivepath.org/relief.html. Food Not Bombs volunteers have been feeding people all over the region, with no help from the government or the Red Cross: www.foodnotbombs.net/dollar_for_peace.html.

On the other hand, from Day One huge war profiteering corporations such as Halliburton, Bechtel and other private contractors began descending on the region, their pockets stuffed with billions of dollars in government handouts. Currently, thousands of poor homeowners and rental tenants — including those unable to return to New Orleans just yet, having been evacuated to the far away domes — are being evicted, says Mike Howell, who is organizing tenants to resist eviction. The phony "reconstruction" of New Orleans begins with the land grab, and with Mayor Nagin proposing gambling casinos, which he says would "rescue" the city, while destroying the remaining wetlands — wetlands are nature's way of protecting large areas from floods(!); their destruction prior to Katrina contributed to the devastation of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta — and spraying massive amounts of cancer-causing pesticides over the entire flooded areas.

Many people are resisting this blatant confiscation of their lands and homes. As the resistance grows, New Orleans may soon become known as the first battle of the new American revolution.

1) Blackwater, Inc. billed the federal government $950. per man, per day — at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi, reports Jeremy Scahill in his pathbreaking book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books.

Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens, and the coordinator of the No Spray Coalition: www.nospray.org. Write to Mitchel directly at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com. If you'd like to donate funds and be sure the money is going to a good purpose, donate to CommonGroundRelief.org

In Ex-Spokesman’s Book, Harsh Words for Bush

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/washington/28mcclellan.html

May 28, 2008
In Ex-Spokesman’s Book, Harsh Words for Bush
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

PHOENIX — President Bush “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,” and has engaged in “self-deception” to justify his political ends, Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, writes in a critical new memoir about his years in the West Wing.

In addition, Mr. McClellan writes, the decision to invade Iraq was a “serious strategic blunder,” and yet, in his view, it was not the biggest mistake the Bush White House made. That, he says, was “a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

Mr. McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” is the first negative account by a member of the tight circle of Texans around Mr. Bush. Mr. McClellan, 40, went to work for Mr. Bush when he was governor of Texas and was the White House press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006.

The revelations in the book, to be published by PublicAffairs next Tuesday, were first reported Tuesday on Politico.com by Mike Allen. Mr. Allen wrote that he bought the book at a Washington store. The New York Times also obtained an advance copy.

Mr. McClellan writes that top White House officials deceived him about the administration’s involvement in the leaking of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. He says he did not know for almost two years that his statements from the press room that Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr. were not involved in the leak were a lie.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush,” Mr. McClellan writes. “He too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

He is harsh about the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying it “spent most of the first week in a state of denial” and “allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.” Mr. McClellan blames Mr. Rove for one of the more damaging images after the hurricane: Mr. Bush’s flyover of the devastation of New Orleans. When Mr. Rove brought up the idea, Mr. McClellan writes, he and Dan Bartlett, a top communications adviser, told Mr. Bush it was a bad idea because he would appear detached and out of touch. But Mr. Rove won out, Mr. McClellan writes.

A theme in the book is that the White House suffered from a “permanent campaign” mentality, and that policy decisions were inextricably interwoven with politics.

He is critical of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her role as the “sometimes too accommodating” first term national security adviser, and what he calls her deftness at protecting her reputation.

“No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean,” Mr. McClellan writes, adding that “she knew how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems, and come out looking like a star.”

Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

He does have a number of kind words for Mr. Bush, particularly from the April day in 2006 when Mr. Bush met with Mr. McClellan after he learned he was being pushed out. “His charm was on full display, but it was hard to know if it was sincere or just an attempt to make me feel better,” Mr. McClellan writes. “But as he continued, something I had never seen before happened: tears were streaming down both his cheeks.”

McCain Spiritual Adviser Recants Earlier Statement

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/04/26/mccain-spiritual-adviser-recants-god-damned-nola/

McCain Spiritual Adviser Recants Earlier Statement That God Damned New Orleans with Katrina
Jon Ponder Apr. 26, 2008

John McCain’s spiritual adviser, John Hagee, has apparently gotten the word from on high and has now recanted his assertions that Katrina was God’s curse on New Orleans because it hosted an annual gay event:

“As a believing Christian, I see the hand of God in everything that happens here on earth, both the blessings and the curses. But ultimately neither I nor any other person can know the mind of God concerning Hurricane Katrina. I should not have suggested otherwise. No matter what the cause of the storm, my heart goes out to all who suffered in this terrible tragedy. There but for the grace of God go any one of us.”

Hagee first declared that God damned New Orleans in September 2006:

“I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades.” He later added, “I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

Just last week Hagee reaffirmed this assertion:

HAGEE: The topic of that day was cursing and blessing. Moses taught in the book of Deuteronomy that everything in life is either a blessing or a curse. There are days that things happen that at the time look like a curse. In the passing of time, they may become what appears to be a blessing. An illustration is Joseph, when he was sold into slavery it looked like a curse, it looked like the worse day of his life. When his brothers came into Egypt looking for food, what looked like a bad day 13 years before turned out to be a blessed day. What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God, in time if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city it can become it may in time be called a blessing. But at this time it’s called a curse.

The timing of Hagee’s statement on April 22 was embarrassing for McCain because it pulled focus from his campaign stop in New Orleans two days later.

Hagee is best known for espousing the belief that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon referred to in the Book of Revelation.

Topics: Louisiana, Republicans, Campaign 2008, Jesusland

Hagee Says McCain Sought His Endorsement

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003728364

Hagee, in 'NYT' This Sunday, Says McCain Sought His Endorsement
By Greg Mitchell
Published: March 20, 2008

NEW YORK In an interview that will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, controversial televangelist Rev. John Hagee declares, "It's true that [John] McCain's campaign sought my endorsement."

McCain has attempted to distance himself from some of Hagee's views, much as Barack Obama is doing in relation to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But unlike McCain, Obama has not stood on stage with Wright and accepted his accolades this year.

Interviewed by Deborah Solomon, Hagee refused to discuss his statement that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for a gay rights parade in New Orleans, calling it "so far off-base." He claims, "Our church is not hard against the gay people. Our church teaches what the bible teaches, that it is not a righteous lifestyle. But of course we must love even sinners."

He also said that charges that he had bashed the Catholic Church ("false cult system," etc.) have been "grossly mischaracterized....I was referring to those Christians who ignore the Gospels."

Asked what he thinks of Obama, he answers, "He is going to be difficult to beat, because the man is a master of communication. If he were in the ministry, he would make it in the major leagues overnight."

He also denies that he is a strong supporter of Israel because of any coming "Rapture" in the holy land.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell is editor. His new book is "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failld on Iraq."

Fury in New Orleans as housing demolition OKd

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-neworleans21dec21,1,7386395.story?coll=la-news-a_section

Fury in New Orleans as housing demolition OKd
Protesters, police clash outside a City Council meeting where a plan to raze public housing is unanimously approved.
By Jenny Jarvie
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 21, 2007

NEW ORLEANS — After protesters skirmished with police inside and outside New Orleans City Hall on Thursday, the City Council voted unanimously to approve a federal plan to demolish a vast swath of public housing.

The fate of the 4,500 public housing units has become a flash point as this city struggles to piece itself back together after Hurricane Katrina damaged more than 134,000 homes, many of them in poor, mostly black neighborhoods.

Tents line the Interstate 10 underpass and a homeless camp has settled outside City Hall.

Even before New Orleans' seven City Council members took their seats for the public meeting, protesters were booing and pumping their fists.

"Why y'all standing behind the curtains?" a woman called out to council members who waited at the back of the council chambers for protesters to calm down. "This ain't no stage show! Get out from behind those curtains and tell us why you want to demolish our homes."

The hearing was, in many ways, political theater. Protesters, who complained that many residents had been locked out of the packed public meeting, fought with police almost immediately.

City Council members -- some sipping water, others leafing through file folders -- looked on impassively as a man was tasered, handcuffed and dragged from the council chambers.

Outside, dozens of locked-out people tried to force their way through iron gates and clashed with police, who used pepper spray and stun guns on them.

One woman was taken away on a stretcher after being sprayed.

Inside, once it began, the meeting was orderly -- with a SWAT team standing between the City Council and the residents, lawyers, developers, preachers, rappers and sociologists who had come to voice their opinions on the city's public housing.

The six-hour proceeding was briefly disrupted when what appeared to be rainwater began to drip from the ceiling.

"We're having problems with water coming in," said Arnie Fielkow, president of the council, when those in attendance complained that City Council members were paying insufficient attention to residents opposed to the demolition.

"Tear the building down!" shouted one unsympathetic activist. "Yeah, get HUD to fix it," another chipped in.

Rags were used to sop up the growing puddle of water around clerk Peggy Lewis' black patent leather shoes.

The razing of public housing projects, part of a broader nationwide move away from public housing and toward mixed-income projects, has been particularly contentious in New Orleans.

Activists and preservationists have sharply criticized the government's proposal to raze the city's biggest public housing complexes when low-income housing is in short supply.

With rents up 45% and more than 3,000 former public housing residents scattered across the country, they say officials should quickly renovate and reopen the sturdy, mostly 1940s-era brick buildings, some of which were barely damaged by Katrina. Many talk of a conspiracy to purge the city of its poorest residents, pointing out the government will not replace all of the 4,500 public housing units it plans to demolish.

"The question remains: Who's in the mix?" said Torin Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, near the old St. Thomas housing project, which was razed before Katrina to make way for a mixed-use project. "I saw church members with bags packed walking around the city for somewhere to live."

Yet many residents came to the meeting to speak in favor of new mixed-income communities.

"Why can we not go into something that looks good?" asked Donna Johnigan, a resident of B.W. Cooper, her voice trembling. "It's about being able to walk into a little house and be able to say this is a house, it ain't a project. What we've got to demand is better housing."

The Housing Authority of New Orleans, which has been under federal control since 2002, had planned to begin demolition last Saturday, but former tenants and activists sued the federal government to delay further demolition, arguing that the authority had acted without City Council permits.

A judge ruled in their favor. The hearing Thursday was in response to that ruling -- and the council issued the permits.

In the last few weeks, the campaign against demolition of the housing projects gained momentum and national attention. Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards of North Carolina, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, asked the government to delay demolition.

City Council members, however, said they agreed with the underlying government conclusion that concentrating the poor in mammoth complexes was a failed social experiment that fostered drug abuse, prostitution and other crimes.

The goal is to have mixed-income neighborhoods where former project residents with Section 8 rent subsidies live alongside those who pay market rates.

"We have the opportunity to make our home a place that all New Orleanians can point to with pride," Fielkow said. "It's my hope that the word 'project' will never again be used in place of what should be 'transitional homes.' "

To activists who pointed out that fewer than 900 of the 3,200 new mixed-use units will be available to former public housing residents, the council offered something of a concession: a unanimous resolution asking the Department of Housing and Urban Development to rebuild every public housing unit it destroys, and to restructure the local Housing Authority's board of directors to include a public housing resident.

"Let's be clear: We need affordable housing in this city," said Councilwoman Shelley Midura, who proposed the resolution.

"But public housing ought not to be a warehouse for the poor," she said.

In order to thrive, Fielkow added, the new complexes must be rigorously maintained, with clear rules requiring upkeep of property, limits on visitors and criminal background checks.

"Change is hard, and in New Orleans it's even harder," he said. "But I'm convinced we could do much better."

jenny.jarvie@latimes.com

In New Orleans, Plan to Raze Low-Income Housing

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/us/nationalspecial/14orleans.html

December 14, 2007
In New Orleans, Plan to Raze Low-Income Housing Draws Protest
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — At a moment when the shortage of low-income housing in the city is causing significant hardship, the federal government is beginning this week to tear down thousands of apartments in the city’s four biggest public housing projects.

The plan is producing sharp opposition, which has escalated to include raucous demonstrations and, perhaps, threats of arson and other violence.

On Thursday, outside City Hall and opposite a park where homeless people are living in dozens of small tents, about 100 demonstrators chanted “Stop the demolitions now!” A few were displaced public-housing residents; most were activists and public housing advocates from here and cities from New York to California.

Though local and federal housing officials say the storm-damaged projects were inhuman places to live and should not be rebuilt, some protesters accused the government of a darker motive behind the demolition plan. They contended that the government’s real aim was to keep the poor, mostly female, almost entirely black residents of public housing from returning to their city, to their homes.

“They don’t want this city to be for the poor, working-class people,” said Sharon Sears Jasper, a former public housing resident who says she is now living in a “slum house.” Government policies favor the wealthy and tourists, she continued after the demonstration. “Everyone else, kick them to the curb.”

Meanwhile, James Bernazzani, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation office here, confirmed that its domestic terrorism unit was investigating the source of small posters reading “For Every Public Housing Unit Destroyed a Condo Unit Will Be Destroyed.”

Lawyers for former residents continued to ask the courts to stop the plan, by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, to demolish buildings containing 4,500 units, about 3,000 of which were occupied before Hurricane Katrina.

The government said private developers would replace them with about 3,300 subsidized housing units in developments that will also include homes for people with higher incomes, but others said there would not be that many low-cost units.

The debate over the plan has become a political issue. On Wednesday, John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, urged the government to build replacement housing before bulldozing the projects.

Demolition began on Wednesday night at one housing project that had been scheduled to be destroyed before the storm and will begin on two other projects this weekend.

Federal officials say the barracks-style complexes were substandard before Hurricane Katrina and were badly damaged by the storm. New subsidized housing, and vouchers for existing and new apartments, will ensure that no one who lived in the demolished projects will be left homeless, they said.

“The goal was to rebuild it, build it better, and move people into new homes,” said Jereon M. Brown, a spokesman for the housing department.

Mr. Brown said of the protesters: “Ask how many of them have lived in public housing, have been to public housing other than to protest.”

But the protesters, including some former residents of the projects, say the sturdy apartment buildings could be rehabilitated, especially at a time when little low-cost housing is available in New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 50,000 rental units here, and damaged thousands more apartments, affecting two-thirds of the city’s rental stock. Rents have soared for the apartments that remain habitable.

Adding to the pressure on the rental market, almost 3,000 families living in government trailer parks in Louisiana must find a new place to live in the next few months, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency closes the sites it manages. By the end of the year, it will stop paying for 3,700 trailers in private trailer camps.

Some residents of the complexes and many who lived nearby said that they were delighted the projects were going to disappear and that they believed they would be replaced with something better.

Stacy S. Head, a City Council member whose district includes two of the complexes, said she had heard from many who welcomed the new plan.

“The vast majority do not want to go back to the way it was,” Ms. Head said, adding that the old projects were run-down and dangerous, and that the new buildings would help the working poor.

As for the protesters, she said, “I wish that all these people, particularly from out of town, would just leave us alone and let us improve our city.”

Some advocates for the residents said they did not oppose changes or improvements but wanted a guarantee that there would be a place for former residents in the new developments, a promise that they said had not always been kept in previous redevelopments of public housing here.

“Many residents are not against redevelopment but want an interim housing plan that gets them home,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, a director of the Advancement Project in Washington, a civil rights group that is involved in the legal fight against the demolition plan.

At the project where demolition has begun, the B. W. Cooper Apartments, not far from the Superdome, residents were almost unanimous in wanting the government to finish tearing down some of the four-story blond-brick buildings that had been erected in the 1950s and closed before the storm.

“I know people need places to stay, but these places aren’t for living,” Trina Davis said, as a group of women sitting on a nearby porch talked of their hopes of moving into the new buildings that are to replace the old ones across Erato Street.

But Gertrude Luster, who was moving in nearby, said that public housing was needed for people of her age living on fixed incomes. She is 79 and receives $643 a month.

“I don’t think they should tear none of it down,” Ms. Luster said. “People need a place to come back to.”

Beast of the Month - October 2007

Beast of the Month - October 2007
Erik Prince, Chairman & CEO, Blackwater USA

"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men..."
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

September was a month of dubious anniversaries for the Bush Team. For one it was the sixth year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, attacks which created the "War on Terror" that has morphed into the Quagmire in Iraq. It was also the second anniversary of the shocking aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, which has become, along with Iraq, the most cited example of the failures of Bush and cronies. Through the company known as Blackwater USA (whose CEO is Erik Prince, The Konformist Beast of the Month) the two events have a very noted link.

Before September, Blackwater wasn't a particularly well known group. This all changed when, while escorting a US State Department convoy through Baghdad, Blackwater security opened fire on a crowd, killing 17 and injuring another 24. Despite Blackwater's claims that they were responding to gunfire, eyewitness and video evidence contradicts this, and indicates the mass slaying was inspired by trigger-happy Blackwater personnel. An Iraqi Interior Minister report concluded the shootings began when a solitary Toyota car with a couple and child inside didn't clear path for the convoy, resulting in the death of all three passengers. (Following the assault, the car caught fire, burning the baby to its mother's body.) Despite the excessive response to a phantom menace, which apparently included fire from above via Blackwater helicopters, Iraqi spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh declared: “There was not shooting against the convoy. There was no fire from anyone in the square.” The Iraqi report bluntly concludes that “the murder of citizens in cold blood in al-Nissour area by the Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against the civilians just like any other terrorist operations.” Despite all this and the intense desire in Iraq for justice, no criminal charges have been filed yet.

Incredibly, this may not be the most in-your-face crime perpetrated by Blackwater personnel. That would've happened last year on Christmas Eve, when a drunken Blackwater member gunned down a security guard for Iraqi's Vice-President. Normally, the crime of shooting someone while drunk is only acceptable if your name is Dick Cheney, but thanks to Blackwater and US Government stonewalling, no charges have yet to be filed ten months later. Other allegations against Blackwater include charges of arms smuggling into Iraq, weapons which were later transferred to Kurdish terrorist networks. Meanwhile, they face wrongful death lawsuits filed by families of dead contractors, who claim that cost-cutting moves by Blackwater to increase profits contributed to their deaths. They cite Blackwater's refusal to buy armored vehicles, a move which saved $1.5 million but likely led to the deaths of personnel.

How has Blackwater gotten away with it for so long? Much of the credit must be given to Mr. Prince, the billionaire former Navy SEAL officer. As a special forces soldier and korporate titan, he combines the twin images of comic super villain Lex Luthor as both a Superfriends-era jumpsuit-wearing man of action and an eighties Trump-esque megalomaniac mastermind. (Or, for you Simpsons fans out there, a real life Hank Scorpio.) To say Prince is well-connected is an understatement: his father, the late Edgar Prince, founded the Family Research Council with Gary Bauer, the Christian right-wing lobbying organization that rivals the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition in influence. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the wife of the heir to the Amway pyramid scam fortune. He was a White House intern under Shrub's daddy (though he isn't kind to Bush I era in interviews: "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with -- homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kinds of bills.") Even today, he and his family are big-time financiers of the right-wing Christian movement. Given all this, it’s understandable why all investigations of Blackwater criminality and negligence have been hampered by stonewalling from the US State Department, CIA and Pentagon.

But to focus just on Prince may lose sight of the big picture: what he and Blackwater are doing (profiting off of misery in Iraq) hardly makes them lone wolves in this endeavor. As noted by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine, Blackwater is merely a large cog in a much larger machine of korporate profiteering in Iraq. Taibbi describes Operation Iraqi Freedom as "a sort of Willy Wonka's paradise for contractors, where a small pool of Republican-friendly businessmen would basically hang around the Green Zone waiting for a contracting agency to come up with a work order." Bechtel, DynCorp and Donkey Dick's former employer Halliburton all have profited handsomely off the scam. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (unloaded in April due to activities that even sullied the Halliburton name) is of special note for its kreepiness. According to Taibbi, "KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as 'sailboat fuel.'" This, along with overcharging the government for services while screwing American soldiers with shoddy equipment, is the modus operandi of these korporate mercenaries.

And, in the case of Blackwater, we are indeed talking about actual mercenaries. Paul Krugman of the New York Times describes the Bush Team's use of Blackwater "security" as soldiers a "hired gun fetish" that runs counter to the stark warnings of Machiavelli nearly 500 years ago. The Prince is hardly an obscure book in the field of political science: that they chose to go down the mercenary path implies either a BushMob arrogance that lessons of history don't apply to them, or perhaps that the whole Iraq Quagmire was a scam to begin with to plunder the US treasury with a long, expensive failure.

Which leads to the other big failure of the Bush years, Hurricane Katrina. Two years later, vast areas of New Orleans still have not been rebuilt, but that hasn't stopped korporations from plundering the tragedy for profit. The most noted profiteers, unsurprisingly, include Halliburton, Bechtel, Dyncorp and, of course, Blackwater. Perhaps the most repulsive contract pays Blackwater security to guard homes in NOLA poor and working class areas (mainly consisting of African-Americans) so the residents can't return, forcing them to stay in FEMA trailers while their homes (which in many cases are in great condition) remain unused. The purpose, alleges journalist Greg Palast in his usual blunt style, is to use Katrina as a pretext to evict impoverished minorities from their land so it can be redeveloped by wealthy businessmen for immense profit. As one victim of the fraud put it, "They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain’t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that’s just the bottom line.”

Will there be any justice for the victims of Blackwater, whether in Iraq or Louisiana? Probably not: certainly the Bush Team has no interest in punishing their korporate kronies. And even if (as it now looks to any oddsmaker) Hillary becomes prez in 2008, don't expect things to change much: Mark Penn, Ms. Clinton's chief adviser, is CEO of Burson-Marsteller, the PR firm retained by Blackwater to battle their sudden onslaught of bad press. As any mercenary knows, it's good for business to have business relations with all sides in a battle.

In any case, we salute Erik Prince as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Erik!!!

Benen, Steve. "Blackwater ‘May Be Worse than Abu Ghraib.'" The Carpetbagger Report 26 September 2007 <http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/13008.html.>

"Blackwater Faces Arms Smuggling Probe." MSNBC 21 September 2007 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17149369>.

Broder, John M. "Ex-Paratrooper Is Suspect in a Blackwater Killing." New York Times 4 October 2007 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/world/middleeast/04contractor.html>.

Chatterjee, Pratap. Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004.

Krugman, Paul. "Hired Gun Fetish." New York Times 28 September 2007 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/opinion/28krugman.html>.

Glanz, James and Tavernise, Sabrina. "Blackwater Case Will Go to Iraqi Criminal Courts." New York Times 22 September 2007 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/world/middleeast/22cnd-blackwater.html>.

Palast, Greg. "They Wanted Them Poor Niggers Out of There." GregPalast.com 30 August 2007 <http://www.gregpalast.com/“they-wanted-them-poor-niggers-out-of-there”>.

Scahill, Jeremy. "Blood Is Thicker than Blackwater." The Nation 8 May 2006 <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060508/scahill>.

Scahill, Jeremy. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. New York, Nation Books, 2007.

Taibbi, Matt. "The Great Iraq Swindle." Rolling Stone 23 August 2007 <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle>.

Tavernise, Sabrina and Glanz, James. "Iraqi Report Says Blackwater Guards Fired First." New York Times 19 September 2007 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/world/middleeast/19blackwater.html>.

Glenn Beck Flashback

Glenn Beck Flashback:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200509090003?f=h_top

Glenn Beck called hurricane survivors in New Orleans "scumbags," said he "hates" 9-11 families

Summary:

Nationally syndicated Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck referred to survivors of Hurricane Katrina who remained in New Orleans as "scumbags." Also, after acknowledging that nobody "in their right mind is going to say this out loud," Beck attacked victims of the disaster in general and the families of victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saying: "I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims."

From the September 9 broadcast of The Glenn Beck Program:

BECK: Let me be real honest with you. I don't think anybody on talk radio -- I don't think anybody in their right mind is going to say this out loud -- but I wonder if I'm the only one that feels this way. Yesterday, when I saw the ATM cards being handed out, the $2,000 ATM cards, and they were being handed out at the Astrodome. And they actually had to close the Astrodome and seal it off for a while because there was a near-riot trying to get to these ATM cards. My first thought was, it's not like they're going to run out of the $2,000 ATM cards. You can wait! You know, stand in line. Maybe it's because I'm the kind of guy, when I go to a buffet, I either have to be first in line, or I'm the very last. Because I know there's going to be extra food, and I just won't stand in the line. I'll wait until all the suckers go get their food, and then I'll go get mine. Or if I'm really hungry, I hate to admit this -- and really, I don't even have to be really hungry. If I'm really being a pig, I will kind of, like, hang out around the buffet table before the line is -- you know, chat with people right around the table: "Oh, they just opened the line! Let's go!" And then you're first in line.

When you are rioting for these tickets, or these ATM cards, the second thing that came to mind was -- and this is horrible to say, and I wonder if I'm alone in this -- you know it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families? Took me about a year. And I had such compassion for them, and I really wanted to help them, and I was behind, you know, "Let's give them money, let's get this started." All of this stuff. And I really didn't -- of the 3,000 victims' families, I don't hate all of them. Probably about 10 of them. And when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh shut up!" I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them. And, again, it's only about 10.

But the second thought I had when I saw these people and they had to shut down the Astrodome and lock it down, I thought: I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims. These guys -- you know it's really sad. We're not hearing anything about Mississippi. We're not hearing anything about Alabama. We're hearing about the victims in New Orleans. This is a 90,000-square-mile disaster site, New Orleans is 181 square miles. A hundred and -- 0.2 percent of the disaster area is New Orleans! And that's all we're hearing about, are the people in New Orleans. Those are the only ones we're seeing on television are the scumbags -- and again, it's not all the people in New Orleans. Most of the people in New Orleans got out! It's just a small percentage of those who were left in New Orleans, or who decided to stay in New Orleans, and they're getting all the attention. It's exactly like the 9-11 victims' families. There's about 10 of them that are spoiling it for everybody.

Beck's program is syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks (owned by radio conglomerate Clear Channel Communications) on more than 160 radio stations across the country to an estimated weekly audience of 3 million listeners.

— S.S.M.

Posted to the web on Friday September 9, 2005