"The body of an old man who jumped from a bridge lies on the sidewalk. A grandmother died in her wheelchair during the exodus. Volunteers threw a blanket over the corpse and left it on the side of the road. Another woman sits despondently in a highway median next to the body of her dead husband. The police, almost as clueless as everyone else, simply pushed the corpse out of the way, where it now lies in the shade behind a low wall. Then, says the wife, the police simply moved on. "These are scenes from a Third World country," complains Kiersta Kurtz-Burke of Charity Hospital in New Orleans."
"Mayor Ray Nagin, fearing death tolls in the hundreds and possibly thousands, issued a "desperate SOS call" to federal authorities in Washington. By Friday Nagin, frustrated with the sluggish pace of the relief effort, said in a radio interview: "I'm disgusted -- I need more troops and more help. They just send me a couple of goddamned buses, and they don't even know what's happening here. I'm pissed off." "The catastrophe in New Orleans, made all the worse by incompetent rescue efforts, shines a glaring spotlight on the chasm between rich and poor in the southern United States. In New Orleans, those who couldn't afford to get out ended up struggling for their lives." DER SPIEGEL 36/2005 - September 5, 2005 URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,373047,00.html SPIEGEL Cover Story The Downfall of New Orleans Last week America's Gulf coast sank into the flood waters produced by Hurricane Katrina. The catastrophe in New Orleans, made all the worse by incompetent rescue efforts, shines a glaring spotlight on the chasm between rich and poor in the southern United States. In New Orleans, those who couldn't afford to get out ended up struggling for their lives. The catastrophe zone in New Orleans: "A City Descends into Madness" REUTERS http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,512486,00.jpg It seems like the kind of nightmarish scene one would see in African cities consumed by civil war, in places like Liberia or Congo: burning houses, flooded streets, corpses floating by. As military helicopters clatter overhead, heavily armed National Guard units in armored vehicles patrol the city's abandoned business districts where windowless skyscrapers jut into the sky like dark ruins. Meanwhile, long columns of refugees walk the elevated highways above the flooded wasteland -- Monrovia on the Mississippi. A CNN reporter stunned her viewers by saying: "We have to warn you: These are not the kinds of images of a major American city that we're accustomed to seeing." And the images are indeed shocking. Babies and the elderly are dying in front of our eyes -- on the street and while cameras roll -- under the blazing sun that began heating up the devastated coastal region in the US' deep south by the second day after the hurricane. The body of an old man who jumped from a bridge lies on the sidewalk. A grandmother died in her wheelchair during the exodus. Volunteers threw a blanket over the corpse and left it on the side of the road. Another woman sits despondently in a highway median next to the body of her dead husband. The police, almost as clueless as everyone else, simply pushed the corpse out of the way, where it now lies in the shade behind a low wall. Then, says the wife, the police simply moved on. "These are scenes from a Third World country," complains Kiersta Kurtz-Burke of Charity Hospital in New Orleans. "Waterworld" Katrina was a monster storm whose gigantic, rotating circle of clouds covered almost the entire Gulf of Mexico. It's been a week since the hurricane swept across the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, and this port city still lies paralyzed, drowning in a stinking cesspool of chemicals, excrement and swollen corpses. The police, unable to recover all the dead right away, are attaching tracking devices to some of the corpses so that they can be pulled from the floodwaters later on. Cynical survivors call it "Waterworld," this landscape of upended containers, wrecked cars, shattered shop windows and stripped apartment buildings -- and it could easily double for a scene in a big-budget Hollywood disaster film. The homeless, the distraught survivors wander the streets, scavenging for food and medicine. "Help us, help us," they yell, whenever a helicopter flies by. Some even write calls for help onto the roofs of their houses. Law and order have vanished in this city, just as entire neighborhoods in the unfortunate position of being below sea level have virtually disappeared. "A City Descends into Madness," writes the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune. Anger, sadness and frustration over help that seems to have been delayed indefinitely has turned into fury and senseless aggression. In the city's historic French Quarter, where the storm pushed in the metal shutters on shops, survivors search for water and food. In other neighborhoods, left-behind residents walk the streets pushing shopping carts overflowing with looted flat-screen TVs, watches, jeans and sneakers. The Oakwood Shopping Center went up in flames after looters started a fire there. Young Katrina victims: "Help us, help us!" AP http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,513525,00.jpg Street gangs, which had already controlled entire city blocks before the catastrophe, cleared out gun stores and were carjacking fellow New Orleansers at gunpoint. In many cases, the already overburdened local police could do nothing but watch as store owners resorted to vigilante justice. A sign in front of one store warns: "You steal -- I shoot." Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has even embraced this phrase as a motto for her own officials, threatening thieves with a shoot-on-sight policy after last week's rampage through the city's unguarded businesses. But then even the rescuers came under fire. A police truck carrying food supplies was attacked and hijacked. At hospitals, where medical personnel have been struggling to care for patients under what they have called Third World conditions, backup generators have been disappearing. In downtown New Orleans, a rescue helicopter was forced to turn around when it came under fire during an attempt to evacuate the injured from a hospital. "We are trying to survive," says police chief Michael Pfeiffer. It's been a week since the catastrophe began, and yet Pfeiffer, whose agency's communications system collapsed during the hurricane, still has no clear idea of the scope of devastation in his city. Since then, hundreds of police officers have left their posts and, like 80 percent of the city's 500,000 residents before, fled the city. Others, unnerved by the chaos and anarchy, have simply quit their jobs. Mayor Ray Nagin, fearing death tolls in the hundreds and possibly thousands, issued a "desperate SOS call" to federal authorities in Washington. By Friday Nagin, frustrated with the sluggish pace of the relief effort, said in a radio interview: "I'm disgusted -- I need more troops and more help. They just send me a couple of goddamned buses, and they don't even know what's happening here. I'm pissed off." An American crown jewel This isn't just any old city sinking into the water like some reincarnated Atlantis before the eyes of a horrified and still seemingly paralyzed America. It's one of America's legendary cities. It's New Orleans, "The Big Easy," the place Americans have always flocked to whenever they wanted to get a dose of sinful pleasure in the Deep South, a place whose seemingly well-functioning multiculturalism, whose largely harmonious blend of black, white and Latino has always been a beacon for the rest of the world. And what a city it was: as feverish as in the wild days of Mardi Gras, as fiery as in the French Quarter's jazz clubs, as frivolous as, in the words of novelist Walker Percy, one's chances are of seeing, in its streets, "more nuns and naked women than anywhere else." It was a city of poets, musicians, songwriters and filmmakers. Despite -- or perhaps precisely because of -- its deeply Catholic roots in a largely non-Catholic South, New Orleans, with its famed parties like the "Southern Decadence Festival," came closer to being a Sodom and Gomorrah than any other US city. Playwright Tennessee Williams chose the French Quarter as the setting for his play "A Streetcar Named Desire." Henry Miller once called New Orleans the "most pleasant place in the country," the only city in the United States "where you can feel like a civilized person." One of its most famous worshippers, author William Faulkner, called New Orleans "a courtesan whose hold is strong upon the mature, to whose charm the young must respond." Bourbon Street in the heart of New Orleans' French Quarter Wiechman Tourism Service http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,512968,00.jpg Pleasure was written with a capital P here, between Bourbon, Royal and Canal Streets, in Cajun restaurants and Creole street joints, and pleasure was New Orleans' biggest selling point. New Orleans, a thriving tourist center that attracted 10 million tourists last year alone, used an apt slogan to advertise its charms: "Let the good times roll!" While the region is second only to neighboring Texas as a US center for the petroleum industry, and while a hoped-for high-tech boom has been moving forward more slowly than anticipated, the city had been successfully polishing its image as a conference center and vacation hotspot. New attractions were being developed in and around the picturesque French Quarter. The bitter irony, at least from today's perspective, is that most had some connection to water. The city had approved new paddleboat steamers for pleasure cruises on its "Ol' Man River," the Mississippi, and renovated its famous aquarium. In 1999, riverboat casinos were joined by the city's first casino on solid ground. But no matter what the city did in recent years to polish its image, there was always one thing no one could hide: New Orleans -- even before the great flood -- was a city with two faces. On the one hand, there was the small but charming French Quarter, with its sinfully expensive restaurants. But this was little more than a pretty façade, especially in light of the city's vast, neglected sections whose primarily black populations struggled along at or below the poverty level. Unemployment in these neighborhoods was over 50 percent, making New Orleans one of America's poorest cities. New Orleans is a city with a rich history of catastrophes -- both of the predictable and completely unexpected variety. The fact that it was developed in hot, humid marshland filled with vermin seems to completely contradict common sense. Greed was what brought New Orleans to life in the first place, and deception is what's kept it alive ever since. It all started in 1716, when a Scottish con man sold the land to French investors as a "paradise" filled with gold. Two years later, French King Louis XV ordered a colony established in the swamp and had it built by slaves. The outpost changed hands over the years, first going to the Spaniards and then back to the French. In the early years, fires destroyed almost the entire city on two occasions. In 1803, Napoleon sold New Orleans, together with the entire Mississippi region, to the Americans for $15 million, in a deal known as the "Louisiana Purchase." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/VpgUKB/pzNLAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
