It begins with Katrina

[jonnygemini]

"The Bush family, Bush Sr., George W. and Florida Governor Jeb Bush are bilking the American government and victims by pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars from their on-going criminal billion-dollar 'Disaster relief' programs. Much of the money is going to them… not the victims. Wake up America!"

"I have been tracking the hurricanes this past season with keen interest. I have been privy to intelligence from the highest sources and the American Red Cross, thus confirming my suspicions; these hurricanes are all man-made by the Bush family (as a result of their industrial lobbyists and political supporters' lack of concern for the environment, and 'Global Warming') and I intend to hold the entire Bush Family Administration criminally, financially and morally responsible for the cruelest assault on humankind and our environment once I become President.”
And now, back to my phone conversation with JJK:
"I want to share something with you, Carol. Go to Network Solutions, www.networksolutions.com and look up www.bushclintonkatrinafund.org.
"Then type in the name of this website or domain, as if you wished to reserve or purchase it.
"You will receive the message that it has already been taken, of course," said JJK. "Now scroll to the place where you can learn more information about the owner of this domain."
I listened carefully, not sure yet where JJK was going with these instructions, but well aware it was leading to something critically important.
"You will learn in the WHOIS Record that bushclintonkatrinafund.org was registered by the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, 55 W 125th Street, New York, NY 10027 US, and the record was created 02-Sep-2005, expiring on 02-Sep-2005," JJK continued.
"And?" I waited.
"Now," instructed JJK, "scroll down further. Note the underlying registry data for this record. Here is what you will find”:
IP Address: 198.65.50.185 (ARIN & RIPE IP search)
IP Location: US (UNITED STATES) - COLORADO-ENGLEWOOD
Y! Directory: See listings
Web Site Title: Welcome to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund Official Web Site
Data as of: 14-Jun-2005
I followed JJK's instructions. I found the information he wanted me to see.
Further research also revealed the fund was set up months in advance of Hurricane Katrina.
"This is premeditated mass murder, just like the Florida Hurricanes last year before the presidential election, to put people in a state of vertigo and mass confusion," states John Joseph Kennedy. "The man-ufactured tornados, tsunamis and hurricanes are the ultimate weapons of mass destruction."
The information JJK delivered to me is a gift from Mother Nature. She asked me to pass it on because she felt if enough people saw this article, they would realize the urgency of her call for help.
***
Carol Adler is President of Dandelion Books, LLC, www.dandelionbooks.net, [e-mail]. John Joseph Kennedy can be reached at [e-mail].

[jonnygemini]

Published on Friday, September 2, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Bush Strafes New Orleans, Where's Huey Long?
by Greg Palast

The National Public Radio news anchor was so excited I thought she'd piss on herself: the President of the United had flown his plane down to 1700 feet to get a better look at the flood damage! And there was a photo of our Commander-in-Chief taken looking out the window. He looked very serious and concerned.

That was yesterday. Today he played golf. No kidding.

I'm sure the people of New Orleans would have liked to show their appreciation for the official Presidential photo-strafing, but their surface-to-air missiles were wet.

There is nothing new under the sun. In 1927, a Republican President had his photo taken as the Mississippi rolled over New Orleans. Calvin Coolidge, "a little fat man with a notebook in his hand," promised to rebuild the state. He didn't. Instead, he left to play golf with Ken Lay or the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of his day.

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial. As depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for balancing the budget.

Then, as the waters rose, one politician finally said, roughly, "Screw this! They're lying! The President's lying! The rich fat cats that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope and when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they push your kids under. I say, Kick'm in the ass and take your rightful share!"

Huey Long laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, an end to wars for empire, and an end to financial oligarchy. The waters receded, the anger did not, and Huey "Kingfish" Long was elected Governor of Louisiana in 1928.

At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. Governor Long taxed Big Oil to pay for the books. Rockefeller's oil companies refused pay the textbook tax, so Long ordered the National Guard to seize Standard Oil's fields in the Delta.

Huey Long was called a "demagogue" and a "dictator." Of course. Because it was Huey Long who established the concept that a government of the people must protect the people, school, house, and feed them and give every man or woman a job who needs one.

Government, he said, "We The People," not plutocrats nor Halliburtons, must build bridges and levies to keep the waters from rising over our heads. All we had to do was share the nation's wealth we created as a nation. But that meant facing down what he called the "concentrations of monopoly power" to finance the needs of the public.

In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party. Franklin Roosevelt and the party establishment, scared senseless of Long's ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, called it the New Deal, and later The New Frontier and the Great Society.

America and the party prospered.

America could use a Democratic Party again and there's a rumor it's alive -- somewhere.

And now is the moment, as it was in '27. As the bodies float in the streets of New Orleans, now is not the time for the Democrats to shirk and slink away, bleating they can't "politicize" this avoidable disaster.

Seventy-six years ago this week, Huey Long was shot down, assassinated at the age of 43. But the legacy of his combat remains, from Social Security to veterans' mortgage loans.

There is no such thing as a "natural" disaster. Hurricanes happen, but death comes from official neglect, from tax cuts for the rich that cut the heart out of public protection. The corpses in the street are victims of a class war in which only one side has a general.

Where is our Huey Long? America needs just one Kingfish to stand up and say that our nation must rid itself of the scarecrow with the idiot chuckle, who has left America broken and in danger while he plays tinker-toy Napoleon on other continents.

I realize that the middle of rising flood is a hell of a bad time to give Democrats swimming lessons; but it's act up now or we all go under.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his commentaries or view his investigative reports for BBC Television at www.GregPalast.com

[UniverseSeven]

"Go Fuck Yourself Mr. Cheney"

CNN LIVE, VIDEO:

godlikeproductions.com/scans/Cheneygofu.wmv

[Healthy Merking]

jonnygemini said:

Re: The real Future of New Orleans....read if you dare !!!

** All this is in the mainstream news, this is not Conspiracy theories, it´s is out in the open.


Ohh, you got that right buddy.

Thing is, everyone is so fuckin´ numb -- all we can do is keep talkin´ about it. All this is gonna be water under the bridge for them; in a week, maybe two, at most.

Christ, we don´t need a long memory - like what was grampa´s life about. Shit, we only have to remember a few days ago, and that´s going down the memory hole so fast, it´s bloody scary.

You can see it happening on any forum or any newsgroup, people are going back to business as usual. Shoot, man, we will have hell to pay for our short term memory.

holy shit

that is horrifyingly true

[jonnygemini]

www.asiantribune.com/show_article.php?id=2695

Date : 2005-09-09
New Orleans becomes a war zone: A dress rehearsal for martial law?

By Bill Van Auken – World Socialist Web Site

The disaster that struck New Orleans and the southern Gulf Coast has given rise to the largest military mobilization in modern history on US soil. Nearly 65,000 US military personnel are now deployed in disaster area, transforming the devastated port city into a war zone.

Squads of combat-equipped troops toting assault rifles and columns of humvees with gunners at the ready crisscross its flooded streets. Soldiers with bayonets mounted have begun house-to-house canvassing of the city to enforce the complete removal of its civilian population.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the disastrous delay in providing aid to the city’s beleaguered citizens was in large part a matter of waiting until this massive military force was ready to deploy.

With New Orleans under de facto martial law, its Mayor Ray Nagin issued an order Tuesday for the forced evacuation of its remaining residents, estimated at anywhere between a few thousand and tens of thousands. New Orleans police officials indicated that they were prepared to forcibly drag people from their homes.

US military spokesmen initially said that they would support the operation, but claimed that uniformed soldiers would not participate directly in these evictions. But Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Inge, deputy commander of US Northern Command, told Pentagon reporters Wednesday that National Guard units, which are formally under state control, could be used to compel people to leave.

Nagin’s proclamation asserted that the presence of civilians in the city would “impede” and “distract” from the recovery operation. Some officials have cited a potential public health disaster resulting from the city’s inundation by waters polluted by toxic chemicals and decaying corpses.

Whatever the validity of these motives, the proposed forced evacuation will constitute the most massive military operation mounted against the people of an American city since the Civil War.

While the US military deployment includes medical teams, search-and-rescue helicopters and other forms of relief, the largest troop contingents have been deployed as a military occupation force, to protect private property and suppress civil disturbances.

The Pentagon has issued continuous press releases touting how many millions of meals, gallons of water and pounds of ice it has delivered to the city in the last few days. These reports, however, beg the question of why such supplies were not made available during the first four days after the hurricane hit, when impoverished residents of the city were literally dying in the streets.

With the bulk of the population having left the city, the greatest supply operations now will involve not the relief of hurricane victims but logistical support for the tens of thousands of troops themselves.

The Bush administration’s defenders have made demonstrably false claims that no one could have expected a disaster on this scale, while attempting to shift blame onto state and local officials. The deadly delay in the relief effort has been attributed by the administration’s opponents to the government’s criminal incompetence and seeming indifference to the plight of New Orleans’ largely poor and black population.

While no doubt incompetence and indifference played a major role, there is also strong evidence that aid was deliberately withheld by the White House and the Pentagon as part of a strategy for asserting unfettered military control over the city.

Both hurricane victims and public officials have given multiple accounts of US authorities’ actively turning back aid and blocking rescue attempts in the days that followed the breaching of the city’s levees.

Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, for example, broke down in tears Sunday during an appearance on the NBC television program “Meet the Press,” declaring, “It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area.”

He cited repeated actions by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration) that involved the deliberate sabotage of relief efforts. He reported that FEMA turned back trailer truckloads of water sent by Wal-Mart, claiming the city didn’t need them. He also said that the Coast Guard’s offer of fuel urgently needed to power generators was countermanded by FEMA.

Finally, he said that just a day earlier FEMA agents had come in and “cut all of our emergency communication lines” without any warning. The local sheriff, he added, had the lines reconnected and then posted armed guards to see that they were not cut again.

This last, and most sinister, example is in keeping with the Pentagon’s “information war” doctrine, which demands the complete control of communications in an area targeted for invasion and occupation.

Denise Bottcher, press secretary for Governor Blanco, also charged that FEMA deliberately blocked offers of aid from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and others.

And a spokesman for Sen. Mary Landrieu (Democrat, Louisiana), told the media that FEMA held up aid from both public and private agencies, withholding approval for the US Forest Service to use water tanker aircraft to put out fires and delaying the arrival of Amtrak trains to evacuate people from the city. Offers by private companies to provide communications equipment were also held up by the agency. There were also reports that the Red Cross was prevented from going into the city and that FEMA refused to allow the unloading of food, water and medical supplies brought by ships into New Orleans harbor.

The apparent aim of this organized obstructionist behavior by the agency that is supposedly charged with coordinating relief was to block any significant aid until the military could intervene in the city with overwhelming force.

This came on Friday, with military commanders treating New Orleans as a combat operation. This was the term used by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, in an interview with the Army Times.

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” said General Jones. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.” The newspaper clearly got the message, referring in its report to troops coming in to “fight the insurgency in the city.”

There were numerous reports from New Orleans residents of being treated as if they were indeed “insurgents,” with police and troops sealing off the city to prevent attempts to leave.

Over 1,000 National Guard troops and police were sent in Friday to seize control of the New Orleans Convention Center, one of the areas where evacuees had been left to die. Military officials referred to the operation as a “clear and hold” mission, using the phraseology employed by the Pentagon to describe its attacks on towns in Iraq where there is substantial resistance to the US occupation.

Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, bragged of having “stormed the convention center,” while acknowledging to Pentagon reporters, “We waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force.”

Asked specifically by a reporter if the buildup of this force was reason why it took until Friday before the National Guard came in with any significant aid, Blum responded, “That is not only fair, it is accurate. You’ve concisely stated exactly what was needed, and I told you why. We took the time to build the right force.”

Also on Friday, Bush administration officials sent Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco a legal document demanding that she sign over control of the state’s National Guard as well as state and local police units. The memo sought their federalization under the Insurrection Act, a statute that allows the president to take control of state militias under conditions in which state governments themselves are unable to “suppress rebellion.”

Blanco rejected this demand, no doubt seeing it as an admission of failure by her own administration.

For Bush, the assumption of full military control was a matter of political importance. Under the Insurrection Act, the US president is required to issue a public order for those in “rebellion” to cease and disperse. There is little doubt that had he gained the acquiescence of the Louisiana governor, he would have taken to the airwaves as the “commander-in-chief,” in an attempt to dispel the wave of outrage sweeping the country over the government’s response to the disaster.

As early as Wednesday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was telling the press that “martial law has now been declared in Mississippi and Louisiana,” an indication of the administration’s intentions but not the legal reality in either state.

Blocked from achieving total military control, Bush dispatched Lt. Gen. Russell Honore from the US Northern Command to develop a parallel command structure overseeing active duty troops.

The media has lionized Honore, portraying him as the “John Wayne” of New Orleans—with the city’s residents presumably assuming the role of Indians. The general thrust of such commentary is that the military is the only institution that can “get the job done.”

That the civilian agency which was created to deal with such disasters—FEMA—has been gutted, with an unemployed former horse show organizer, Michael Brown, placed at its head, has everything to do with such perceptions.

The most adamant proponent of the thesis that the military must take charge is the Wall Street Journal,< whose editorial board enjoys the closest political relations with the Bush White House. In a Tuesday editorial titled “Bush and Katrina,” the Journal commented: “The New Orleans mess improved only after the Pentagon got involved. Though the military is normally barred from domestic law enforcement by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Defense officials have been doing a lot of creative thinking about what they can do and what the public now expects post-September 11.”

Washington’s response to the disaster in New Orleans is hardly a manifestation of “creative thinking,” much less “what the public now expects.”

In reality the US ruling elite and both major parties have used September 11 as the pretext for implementing far-reaching attacks on democratic rights and breaching legal barriers—such as Posse Comitatus—against the use of military force against the American people.

Just last month, the Washington Post published an article revealing that US military’s Northern Command had developed a series of “war plans” for the military “to take charge” in domestic crises. (See: “Pentagon devising scenarios for martial law in US”.)

While apparently these plans involved a response to supposed terrorist attacks, including the detonation of a nuclear device in a major American city, the catastrophe that struck New Orleans provided ideal conditions for testing the plans out.

The growing reliance on the military, however, is a response neither to terrorist threats or natural catastrophes. On the international arena, the US ruling elite has turned toward the use of military aggression and the seizure of strategic assets and territories as a means of offsetting the relative decline of American capitalism’s position in the world economy.

At home, the turn toward martial law is a manifestation of growing fears within America’s fabulously wealthy financial oligarchy that conditions of social polarization and steady decline in the living standards of the vast majority of working people have created a social powder keg.

The deliberate denial of food, water and means of escape to tens of thousands of suffering New Orleanians in order to prepare a massive military exercise is a crime. It is moreover a warning that the deepening of the social crisis in America raises the threat of military repression and dictatorship.

[jonnygemini]

CNN toeing the party line:

Official: Some holdouts 'delirious'

The sweep of New Orleans for the last voluntary evacuees is nearly complete, authorities say, with officers ready to carry out the mayor's order to forcibly remove the thousands of holdouts. "It's getting to the point where they're delirious," Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Jason Rule said. "A couple of them don't know who they were." He says some don't want to leave unless they can take their pets.

[Os3y3ris]

This is getting more and more bizarre by the minute.

[jonnygemini]

New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes

New York Times | September 8 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Waters were receding across this flood-beaten city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass forced evacuation of the residents still living here.

No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16´s and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.

[jonnygemini]

(anything I'm putting up now is from the Godlike Productions Board Univ7 clued me in on...word from 7 is that site is monitored heavily by NSA/NRO so to save ya'll the hassle of alerting em...I'm crossposting)

The Governor is surrendering N.O. to the Feds. It will have to be completly free of all people a blank canvas. Most of the well off and people with assets in homes and businesses will be given the chance to remove them, but then they will have to leave as well. Then the next move by the Feds will be the time play. Watch as something we don´t know about yet rears it´s ugly head. It´ll be some kind of super bad bacteria or virus, or some kind of really bad complication that "We" didn´t count on. It´ll set back the time frame for a possible rebuilding or return home for an indefinate, but really long period of time, while the best and brightest try to figure out a solution, which will not happen.

This will cause the former residents to enact more permanant solutions to housing, relocation, jobs etc. It will also serve to distance the rest of the country from the disaster. Next year sometime you will be told that the only thing that can be done is a massive and total restructure of the area. This will be done with Federal funds and Private corporations and will be called a rebirth of the area. It will be a huge port system, convention centers, oil and bulk material handling and wharehousing. It´ll be super duper and we´ll even keep a couple of the old French quarter buildings in a quaint little spot with some real original street signs. N.O. will be gone with a trace element left like a museum exhibit and a brand spankin new modern safe megaport and commerce zone will be in it´s place.

[jonnygemini]

Boing Boing readers may recall previous posts here recounting similar "man-in-the-'dome" comments -- some NOLA residents believe the levees were blown up to destroy poor black neighborhoods. Those rumors appear widespread among some evacuee populations. Snip from Ben Ehrenreich's LA Weekly story, "Baghdad on the Bayou" (photo above: evacuees in Astrodome, not persons referenced in this story, by Jacob Appelbaum.)
www.laweekly.com/ink/05/42/after-ehrenreich.php

In the Houston Astrodome last Saturday, I met a man named Robert. He invited me to take a seat beside him on a cot pushed against the wall - his home for the previous three days and the foreseeable future. Robert had lived in New Orleans for all of his 55 years, and was in the St. Bernard projects when Katrina washed it all away. "After the storm," he told me almost as soon as I sat down, "they blew the levees up so they could flood New Orleans." I asked him who "they" were.

"The money people," he answered. "The big money." "Why?" I asked.

Robert shook his head at my naiveté. "They had to get the poor people out so they could get the space." He gestured to the thousands of people in the dome around us, almost all of them African-American, crammed onto cots a few inches apart. "Now they got their space.

"We survived the storm," Robert went on. "We survived the wind and the rain. After the storm passed, the water started rising, and all you heard was 'Boom!' " The explosions, he said, were the levees blowing. "Ask any of these people. The hurricane wasn't that bad, but the opportunity came up."

It was a real estate grab, Robert explained - gentrification with a genocidal edge. And if he was more than slightly paranoid - he didn't want to tell me his last name, and grew visibly nervous when a white stadium employee began sweeping the floor within earshot a few feet away - his theory made a certain kind of sense, far more than any of the official excuses for government inaction. I would later hear similar speculations again and again in New Orleans, and saw them written on the walls. Just across the canal from the flooded 9th Ward, on a corner heavy with the scent of death, these words were scrawled across an abandoned garage: "Fuck Bush They Fucking Left Us Here Them Bitches Flooded Us . . . Them Bitches Killed Our People."

(...)The first time he came across any soldiers, Washington told me, they trained their rifles on him. I heard the same complaint from others, and it was easy to imagine. Squads from the 82nd Airborne patrolled the deserted New Orleans streets as if playing at urban warfare, M-16s at the ready. Of course, they weren't playing. Armored cars bristling with weaponry swerved around the corners. Rifle barrels protruded from the windows of passing SUVs. At the staging ground at the base of Canal Street - the most secure spot in the city if not the entire nation - hundreds of officials milled about lugging shotguns and automatic rifles as if expecting the Mahdi Army. Among thousands of soldiers and police from every imaginable government agency, I twice saw groups of heavily armed men in khaki fatigues wearing T-shirts that read "Blackwater." A city was submerged, hundreds of thousands homeless, and the feds called in the mercenaries.

[jonnygemini]

Katrina: message control, patterns of press access denial?
Snip from a post on NBC correspondent Brian Williams' blog:

While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

Josh Marshall says:

Take a moment to note what's happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn't get key aid on the scene in time last week is coming in in force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what's happening in the city.

Reporters Without Borders reports at least 2 cases of police confiscating or destroying reporters' camera gear in New Orleans.

When [police] realized [Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk] had photographed them hitting looters, they hurled him to the ground, grabbed his two cameras and removed memory cards containing around 350 pictures.

Several reports of "potemkin relief" -- staged scenarios for photo opps, including this news clip (in German) of a German correspondent reporting on the hurricane aftermath in the US. She says she witnessed a scene near Biloxi in which -- all of a sudden -- a number of relief workers appeared right before Bush arrived at the area. Once the president left, as did the bus with all of the reporters trailing him, the relief workers also disappeared.

From Andrew Sullivan's blog, a call to arms for photobloggers:

FEMA is trying to censor the reality in New Orleans, under the guise of "respect" for the dead. Money quote:

[O]n Tuesday, FEMA refused to take reporters and photographers along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would take up valuable space need in the recovery effort and asked them not to take pictures of the dead. In an e-mail explaining the decision, a FEMA spokeswoman wrote: "The recovery of victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect and we have requested that no photographs of the deceased by made by the media."

The press should ignore those requests, get boats themselves and show the world what has actually happened. (Hey, much of the media was ahead of FEMA during the worst of it. Why not again now?) That goes for any intrepid bloggers with camera-phones or anyone else who can slip through the censorship net. If necessary, faces can be blurred to protect the dignity of the dead. But it matters that we see the full consequences of government delinquency. That's what the press is for. Ignore FEMA. Photobloggers, here's an opportunity for important and necessary work.

[jonnygemini]

Infectious Disease Research in and Around New Orleans

Summary: At the very least, there are two Level-3 biolabs in New Orleans and a cluster of three in nearby Covington. They have been working with anthrax, mousepox, HIV, plague, etc. There are surely other labs in the city.


Here's a great tip for all reporters looking for a completely new - and extremely important - angle on the situation in New Orleans. As far as I can tell, no one has yet mentioned the biological research labs located in and around NOLA. For example, in nearby Covington, Tulane University runs the Tulane National Primate Research Center, a cluster of Level-3 biological labs containing around 5,000 monkeys, most of which are housed in outdoor cages. According to an article in Tulane University Magazine, "The primary areas of focus today at the Tulane National Primate Research Center are infectious diseases, including biodefense related work, gene therapy, reproductive biology and neuroscience. The Tulane primate center is playing a key role in the federal strategic plan for biodefense research." [Google cache | Memory Hole mirror.]

So what happened to these diseased monkeys living outside in cages? Granted, Covington didn't get hit nearly as hard as NOLA, but it still got hit.

According to the Sunshine Project, which digs up grant proposals and other primary documents from the US biowarfare effort, "Tulane scientists are working with anthrax, plague, and other biological weapons agents." [read more]

And how much of this kind of research was going on within New Orleans itself? Apparently quite a bit.

-- Louisiana State University’s Medical School has a Level-3 biolab in the Clinical Sciences Research Building located at 533 Bolivar Street. According to grant applications, LSU’s facility was the site of research involving anthrax and genetically-engineered mousepox. And that’s just what we know about.

-- The State of Louisiana has a Level-3 biolab in New Orleans. [see this PDF document]

-- It seems highly likely that an institution the size of Tulane has biolabs in New Orleans itself, not just Covington.

-- Then there’s the University of New Orleans, Loyola University, Xavier University of Lousiana, and others. I don’t know whether they’ve been engaged in bioresearch or have high-level biolabs, but it’d be worth finding out.

-- And let’s not forget the New Orleans Medical Complex, which contains over 40 blocks of hospitals and biomedical research facilities. According to this website, it’s been severely flooded.

So with all the known and probable Level-3 biolabs in and around New Orleans, what's happened to the infected animals? Are they free and roaming? Are they dead, with their diseased bodies floating in the flood waters? And what about the cultures and vials of the diseases? Are they still secure? Are they being stolen? Were they washed away, now forming part of the toxic soup that coats the city?

And take a look at this. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a “Select Agents Program” for any facility that handles highly dangerous germs, including Ebola, Marburg, ricin, avian flu, and anthrax. At the top of their website is the following notice:
----------------------------------
Announcement for Entities Impacted by Hurricane Katrina

Entities that are registered with the Select Agent Program who have been impacted by Hurricane Katrina may contact the CDC Select Agent Program for guidance on actions that should be taken to transfer Select Agents to another registered entity or report the theft, loss, or release of select agents that might have occurred due to storm damage. The CDC Select Agent Program will expedite any special requests from registered entities as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Contact the Program via email at [e-mail], phone at 404-498-2255, fax at 404-498-2265, or call your designated CDC representative.

[jonnygemini]

AP: Sweep of New Orleans finds far fewer bodies than expected, suggesting death toll may not be catastrophic 10,000 feared, authorities say. Details soon.


yeah....right

[Healthy Merking]

jonnygemini said:

AP: Sweep of New Orleans finds far fewer bodies than expected, suggesting death toll may not be catastrophic 10,000 feared, authorities say. Details soon.


yeah....right

what
the
fuck

this is getting too much

so
the general public is getting fed horse shit
the folks running the show are feeding the horse shit

the 'conspiracy theorists' who have been trying to figure out what is going on FINALLY have the means by which to report accurately

and those (relative) few who keep an eye on alternative media get to watch the entire thing go down


from the horrifying comfort of their own homes

uhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

i am going to restrain myself from pressing the caps lock button

but
what the fuck is this?

am i supposed to take all of this seriously?




what do we do?
do we start busting people out of jail?

what do we do?
keep talking about it?

i am really stumped here

[jonnygemini]

funny how they are always "running a simulation" right before shit hits the fan (9/11, 7/7, Katrina):

Hurricane Simulation Predicted 61,290 Dead

By RON FOURNIER and TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writers 8 minutes ago

As Katrina roared into the Gulf of Mexico, emergency planners pored over maps and charts of a hurricane simulation that projected 61,290 dead and 384,257 injured or sick in a catastrophic flood that would leave swaths of southeast Louisiana uninhabitable for more than a year.

These planners were not involved in the frantic preparations for Katrina. By coincidence, they were working on a yearlong project to prepare federal and state officials for a Category 3 hurricane striking New Orleans.

Their fictitious storm eerily foreshadowed the havoc wrought by Category 4 Katrina a few days later, raising questions about whether government leaders did everything possible — as early as possible — to protect New Orleans residents from a well-documented threat.

After watching many of their predictions prove grimly accurate, "Hurricane Pam" planners now hope they were wrong about one detail — the death toll. The 61,290 estimate is six times what New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has warned people to expect.

"I pray to God we don't see those numbers," Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "My gut is ... we don't. But we just don't know."

The known Katrina death toll was less than 400 on Friday, but officials expect it to skyrocket once emergency teams comb through 90,000 square miles of Gulf Coast debris. Fears are particularly acute in New Orleans, where countless corpses lie submerged beneath a toxic gumbo that engulfed the city after levees gave way.

The death toll is just one of the many chilling details in a 412-page report obtained by the AP from a government official involved in the Hurricane Pam project. Written in ominous present-tense language, the report predicts that:

_Flood waters would surge over levees, creating "a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation" and leaving drainage pumps crippled for up to six months. "It will take over one year to re-enter areas most heavily impacted," the report estimated.

_More than 600,000 houses and 6,000 businesses would be affected, more than two-thirds of them destroyed. Nearly a quarter-million children would be out of school. "All 40 medical facilities in the impacted area (are) isolated and useless," it says.

_Local officials would be quickly overwhelmed with the five-digit death toll, 187,862 people injured and 196,395 falling ill. A half million people would be homeless.

The report calls evacuees "refugees" — a term now derided by the Bush administration — and says they could be housed at college campuses, military barracks, hotels, travel trailers, recreational vehicles, private homes, cottages, churches, Boy Scout camps and cruise ships.

"Federal support must be provided in a timely manner to save lives, prevent human suffering and mitigate severe damage," the report says. "This may require mobilizing and deploying assets before they are requested via normal (National Response Plan) protocols."

On the defensive, White House officials have said Louisiana and New Orleans officials did not give FEMA full control over disaster relief. The so-called Hurricane Pam plan, which was never put into effect, envisions giving the federal government authority to act without waiting for an SOS from local officials.

Under FEMA's direction, federal and state officials began working on the $1 million Hurricane Pam project in July 2004, when 270 experts gathered in Baton Rouge, La., for an eight-day simulation. The so-called "tabletop" exercise focused planners on a mock hurricane that produced more than 20 inches of rain and 14 tornadoes. The drill included computer graphic simulations projected on large screens of the hurricane slamming directly into New Orleans.

"We designed this to be a worst-case but plausible storm," said Madhu Beriwal, chief executive of Innovative Emergency Management Inc. of Baton Rouge, hired by FEMA to conduct the exercise.

The experts completed their first draft report in December 2004.

A follow-up workshop on potential medical needs took place in Carville, La., on Aug. 23-24 of this year, bringing together 80 state and federal emergency planning officials as well as Beriwal's team.

They produced an update on dealing with the dead and injured, and submitted it to FEMA's headquarters in Washington on Sept. 3. By then, Katrina had hit and the Bush administration, state and city officials were under heavy criticism for a sluggish response.

The report was designed to be the first step toward producing a comprehensive hurricane response plan, jointly approved and implemented by federal, state and city officials. But a lack of funding prohibited planners from quickly following up on the 2004 simulation.

"Money was not available to do the follow-up," Brown said.

Hurricane Pam planning was prescient in many ways, predicting the flooding would exceed 10 feet and create a putrid mix of corpses, chemicals and human waste.

The report is remarkably detailed in spots. It includes diagrams for makeshift loading docks to distribute water, ice and food to storm victims — color-coded to show where pallets, traffic cones and trash bins would be placed.

In other places it's obvious that the report is a working document; it doesn't specify what hospitals or airports would be used.

The report missed the mark in some cases. Planning for a weaker but slower-moving storm than Katrina, the Hurricane Pam report did not predict that levees would break as happened in real life. However, state and federal official have long known that the levees were not built to withstand a Category 4 storm or higher.

Hurricane Pam slammed into New Orleans. Katrina's eye hit to the east.

The report did not mention looting and lawlessness, which was rampant in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. It did call for at least one security guard at each shelter.

In another burst of foresight, the planners sought creative ways to house evacuees. Among other ideas, they instructed Louisiana parishes to find large vacant lots that could house makeshift trailer parks at a moment's notice.

The deadline for doing so: Next month.