Deliberately delaying rescue

[redbird]

For those who were questioning whether the delays in getting people out of New Orleans were deliberate: DoD is not only admitting it, they're calling it a job well done.

The excuse is that there were dangerous people in the Superdome. So they responded by making everyone else stay there longer, with no food, no water, and "gang members" threatening them. Also, they claim that they needed to search people for guns and weapons on the way out--remember that everyone who came in was searched, and had to stand in line for hours because of this.

Comments

[liv]

Oh good Lord! I saw that somewhere else, not very clearly labelled, and I skimmed it on the assumption it was cheap satire. I'm really horrified to realize where it actually comes from.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

Sounds like he's talking specifically about the delay in retaking the Convention Center, not in operations generally. That they deliberately waited till they had enough people to do it, rather than go in with an insufficient force and end up with people killed; I'm sure that if the'd done so, the same people who are upset now would be even more upset and critical.

And the people were searched for weapons on their way back in to the CC, not on their way out.

[redbird]

So, it matters to the sick and starving which government-recommended shelter they're locked into, with no, water, or medicine, by an army that has locked them in because it believes that there are thugs and rapists locked in with them?

Zev, is there anything that could get you to stop defending authoritarians who see no problem in the deaths of their fellow citizens?

[zsero.livejournal.com]

I didn't see anything in the article about the army locking anyone in the Convention Center, or preventing anyone from leaving (as far as I can tell, the people inside didn't leave because, as bad as it was inside, they had nowhere else to go). What I saw was a reasonable explanation for why the army didn't storm the place earlier, and evict the thugs.

And it certainly didn't relate, as you claimed, to "the delays in getting people out of New Orleans"; it related to one specific situation, where the army was needed to get people out of one building, and they did so as soon as they had enough people to do so safely.

[ala-too.livejournal.com]

Given that this was a center set up by the city why wasn't there food, water, and security there in the first place? I understand why they didn't want the Red Cross operating all over the city but the convention center seemed like a place where they might have done a whole lot of good.

There seems to be a whole lot of stories about real violence (rape, death) in the convention center. So the violence was real. How much of that was caused by lack of water and food though?

[avram]

Yeah, if the killing happens under a Democrat. In RASEFF, he criticized the BATF over the Waco massacre.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

The sentence that staggered me was, "Those that were undesirable to re-enter the convention center were segregated from the people that we wanted to provide water, shelter and food." They don't even have the grace to be ashamed of THAT. I couldn't bear to read the whole report.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

Huh? What's wrong with that? Other than being atrocious English, of course.

[redbird]

It implies that the "undesirables", whoever they may be, are not being given water, shelter, and food.

Locking people up without those things is an inhuman death sentence.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

you infer that, and i can see why. i have a hard time parsing it, his grammar was so bad in that paragraph. which indicates to me that he was speaking without having had his speech prepared for him, and that might easily lead to unfortunate sentence construction leaving some to think "whoa, those 'undesirables' weren't provided for at all". but it could well be that they simply separated people with weapons from the rest of them, put them in a separate place, and gave them food and water there.

before i get upset about this, i'd like to know who was considered "undesirable", and how they were consequently treated. alas nobody asked him that, everyone was so number-happy instead. *grump*. the pentagon press here doesn't impress me.

people could leave the convention center, btw, and many did (the two people posting their story to the socialist website talked about that, didn't they?); i recall the story of the tourists who felt menaced because they were white, and who didn't stay either. so this wasn't quite as bad as the superdome in regard to being locked in. people at the CC had also not previously been searched; you're confusing the two locations. blum is only talking about the convention center.

i do think the whole idea that it took such an overwhelming force shows a kind of mindset about the people at the convention center that i find ... curious. but i wasn't there, i don't know just how dangerous it was. if he had gone in with too few people, and a riot had broken out and people had gotten killed, he'd certainly get blamed now too. i am too distant from this one to judge without knowing a whole lot more. and you know i am not an authoritarian. :)

i am, btw, starting to think that LA state homeland security has a lot to answer for as regards the provisioning of people left in the city. did you see the red cross statement about them being prevented from going in because HS wanted people out?

[shikzoid.livejournal.com]

What I've seen in online newspapers is that foreign tourists were allowed to leave because their embassies were pitching a fit about unlawful detention.

Janice

[stealthpup.livejournal.com]

A couple of friends' LJs have mention of an account where folks were being prevented from evactuating New Orleans by police (http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18337.shtml).

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

They were "undesirables" from the big bad city, being prevented by the local suburban cops (City of Gretna, Parish of Jefferson) from invading their precious suburb! Jefferson Parish (second most populous in the state) is racially polarized, and has been taken to court over election schemes designed to prevent African-American voters from electing local officials:
http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/williams/Williams_v._McKeithen.pdf