US: Iraq War Costs Now Exceed Vietnam's

IPS News
US: Iraq War Costs Now Exceed Vietnam's
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug 31 (IPS) - The U.S. Treasury is paying out more each month to sustain the war in Iraq than it did during the Vietnam War, according to a new report that calls the ongoing conflict "the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years".

The 84-page report, "The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War and the Case for Bringing the Troops Home", says that the total bill for the war in Iraq has come to some 204 billion dollars, or an average of 727 dollars per U.S. citizen, not counting an additional 45 billion dollars which is currently pending before Congress.

The report, which comes as Congress braces itself for the multi-billion costs of cleaning up after the unprecedented devastation inflicted this week on New Orleans and the broader Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina, also does not include at least another 25-billion-dollar request that the Pentagon is believed to be preparing to sustain operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year.

Released by two think tanks, the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus, that have strongly opposed the Iraq war, the new study is their third since mid-2004 to attempt a comprehensive accounting of the human, social, and international -- as well as financial -- costs of the war on the U.S. and Iraq.

The new report also includes a plan by IPS Fellow Phyllis Bennis for an "immediate and complete withdrawal of troops, military contractors and U.S. corporations backing the U.S. occupation".

The plan calls for U.S. troops to cease all offensive actions, withdraw from population centres, and redeploy to Iraq's borders to help Iraqi forces secure them, and for Washington to reduce the size of its embassy in Baghdad, and announce that it has no intention of maintaining either permanent bases in Iraq or control of its oil.

Similar steps have recently also been advocated by conservative critics of the war, such as the former director of the National Security Agency, ret. Gen. William Odom.

Bennis also called for Washington to negotiate with Iraqi insurgents over the mechanisms of withdrawal and endorse talks between them and U.S.-backed Iraqi leaders.

The Pentagon, according to the report, is currently spending 5.6 billion dollars per month on operations in Iraq, an amount that exceeds the average cost of 5.1 billion dollars per month (in real 2004 dollars) for U.S. operations in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972.

"While fewer troops are in Iraq, the weapons they use are more expensive and they are paid more than their counterparts who served in Vietnam," according to the report, which noted that at current rates, Washington could spend more than 700 billion dollars over 10 years -- 100 billion dollars more than the total cost of the Vietnam War.

If the 204 billion dollars appropriated for the war so far had been used instead for social programmes, according to the report, it could have paid for the health care of the more than 46 million citizens without medical insurance, the hiring of 3.5 million elementary school teachers, or the construction of affordable housing units for nearly two million people.

The same amount of money would also be enough to effectively cut world hunger in half and still cover the costs of life-preserving anti-AIDS medication, childhood immunisation, and the clean-water and sanitation needs of the world's developing nations for almost three years.

Those costs do not include long-term costs on the U.S. economy, including interest payments on that portion of the record federal budget deficit that is related to the war or the economic impacts on the families and small businesses of thousands of reservists and National Guard who have been called up to serve in Iraq.

Nor do they include the health-care and other benefits and disability payments to Iraq war veterans which, according to a recent estimate published in the New York Times by Linda Bilmes, a public-finance expert at Harvard University, will likely cost 315 billion dollars over 45 years.

Bilmes also estimated the potential impact of the war on the price of oil at five dollars a barrel, which, if sustained until 2010, will cost the U.S. economy some 119 billion dollars.

But the economic costs to the U.S. are not the only measure of the war's costs.

Nearly 1,900 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq since the Mar. 19, 2003 invasion and more than 14,000 have been more wounded.

Iraqis have borne a much higher toll, however. The new study quotes records of the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of the war and ensuing occupation at between 23,489 and 26,706, and the number of wounded at between 100,000 and 120,000.

Those figures do not take into account the death toll arising from indirect causes of the war and occupation, such as crime and infrastructure breakdowns. According to one study published last October by the British medical journal, the Lancet, Iraq had suffered nearly 100,000 "excess deaths" between March 2003 and September 2004.

A joint Iraqi-U.N. report released last May found that 223,000 Iraqis are suffering from a chronic health problem directly caused by the war.

In addition, the new study cites reports that up to 6,000 Iraqi military and police units have been killed since the war started, with the vast majority of those casualties incurred over the past year.

Despite these tolls, as well the reported killings or arrests of 40,000 to 50,000 alleged insurgents, the number of resistant fighters in Iraq, according to the Pentagon's own estimates, has risen from 5,000 to 20,000 over a two-year period.

Meanwhile, electricity generation in Iraq, which finally surpassed pre-war levels in July 2004, has not increased, while unemployment is estimated at between 20 to 60 percent, according to the report.

U.S. national security has also been degraded, according to the report, which cited recent State Department figures indicating that the number of "significant" international terrorist attacks has more than doubled since 2003, while terrorist attacks in Iraq has increased nine-fold.

Army recruitment this month remained at 11 percent behind its annual targets, while the Reserve and Army National Guard shortfalls are running twice as high. In addition, roughly 48,000 members of the National Guard and Reserve, a disproportionate number of whom are police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel in their home communities, are currently serving in Iraq.

The absence of these "first responders" back home has become a major preoccupation for local and state governments, including those in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama hardest hit by Katrina. (END/2005)

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US: Pro-War Groups' New Tune - 'Paint It Red'

IPS News
US: Pro-War Groups' New Tune - 'Paint It Red'
Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, California, Sep 1 (IPS) - Late in the evening of Aug. 24, the Drudge Report, one of the Internet's most frequented websites, featured the headline "Anti-War Protesters Target Wounded at Army Hospital", trumpeting a story from the Cybercast News Service claiming that anti-war protesters were taunting wounded soldiers returning from Iraq.

The following day, Cybercast News Service -- a subsidiary of the Media Research Centre, a conservative media watchdog group -- published a report charging that Code Pink Women for Peace was organising protests outside Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, where soldiers seriously wounded in Iraq are sent for the first stages of their recovery.

CNSNews.com reported that supporters of the Iraq war called the protests "shameless" and were conducting counter-demonstrations at the hospital.

"The anti-war protesters should not be demonstrating at a hospital. A hospital is not a suitable location for an anti-war demonstration," Bill Floyd of the Washington chapter of FreeRepublic.com told CNS.

"I believe they are tormenting our wounded soldiers and they should just leave them alone," Floyd added.

Code Pink, the news service charged, "has a controversial leader, [Medea Benjamin who] has expressed support for the Communist Viet Cong in Vietnam and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas".

The vigils at Walter Reed Hospital began in late March, Ann Wilcox, an organiser with the Washington office of Code Pink told IPS. They "bring together peace activists, soldiers, military families and neighbors, and they are a peaceful vigil that is not provocative", Wilcox said.

The vigils are focused on "reminding the public that physically and psychologically wounded soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan every night".

"These are not protests, but they are vigils calling for more support for the veterans. We always do them with military families and we get extremely positive responses from the families of the wounded soldiers. In my first DC vigil, the wife of a wounded soldier took me inside to meet her husband," Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink, told IPS.

Counter-protesters appear to be "trying to create a confrontation and make us look as if we are not supporting the soldiers", Benjamin stated. "It is a smear tactic and it is totally untrue. We are there to say that these soldiers deserve the best possible treatment when they come home."

On Aug. 22, CNSNews.com featured a story headlined "Backlash Against Cindy Sheehan Gains Momentum", which reported that Move America Forward, the right-wing group that led a recent "Truth Tour to Iraq", was about to launch its "You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy" tour to counter the vigil that Sheehan -- the mother of Casey Sheehan, a soldier killed last year in Iraq -- maintained at Pres. George W. Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch throughout the month of August.

Whatever one thinks about comparing the chaotic occupation of Iraq with the situation during the war in Vietnam, one element is consistent: as the occupation of Iraq continues to slide into chaos, pro-war advocates are getting more vigorous and vituperative with their criticisms of the anti-war movement.

When the going gets tough for supporters of Pres. Bush's war on Iraq, they go on the attack. Typical targets have been liberal academics on U.S. college campuses, Hollywood celebrities that have dared speak out against the war, liberal talk show hosts, and of course, the anti-war movement.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, whose award-winning documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11", set box office records last year, was the right's whipping boy for most of 2004. Cindy Sheehan became its target of choice this summer.

In the months leading-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, millions of people in cities around the world demonstrated against the impending war. Despite that outpouring of sentiment, during the pre-invasion debate, Bush administration supporters went after the anti-war movement with gusto.

Moreover, after the invasion began, those who spoke out against the war were quickly labeled anti-patriotic, anti-U.S. or sympathisers of the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein.

On Tuesday, the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, the premier think tank of the conservative movement, sponsored an event entitled, "The Politics of Peace: What's Behind the Anti-War Movement?" featuring John J. Tierney, whose book, "The Politics of Peace", was published this year by the Capital Research Centre.

In the introduction to his book, Tierney maintains that "The irony of the modern 'peace' movement is that it has very little to do with peace -- either as a moral concept or as a political ideal …. The leaders of anti-war groups are modern-day Leninists …. street revolutionaries [attempting] to use reactions to the war on Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein as a way to foment radical political change at home."

"This appears like a real attempt to smear the peace movement," said Benjamin. "It is interesting that it is coming at a time when the peace movement is beginning to represent the feelings of the majority of the American people."

"In reality, this is the first time since the war began that the right is on the defensive. To claim that the anti-war movement is anti-American is a move fueled by desperation, and I don't think it is going to resonates with the American people who now feel that this war isn't worth fighting."

Benjamin also said that the attack on the anti-movement is coming at a time when more Republicans are seriously questioning the war.

It is significant that Tierney's book was published by the Capital Research Centre (CRC), a Washington-based outfit, which for the past 20 years has steadfastly dedicated itself to defunding and disempowering the progressive non-profit sector and "exposing" the foundations that fund them.

Through its four flagship publications -- Organisation Trends, a monthly analysing the activities of advocacy organisations; Labour Watch, a monthly tracking "the increasing activism of labour unions that are trying to achieve through political coalition-building the goals they have failed to achieve at the bargaining table"; Foundation Watch, a monthly "examin[ing] the grantmaking of private foundations"; and Compassion & Culture, a monthly "highlighting the work of small, locally based charities that help the needy" -- CRC staff does the grunt work of the right-wing movement.

In an introduction to an excerpt of "The Politics of Peace" published in the March issue of Organisation Trends, Robert Huberty, the executive vice president and director of desearch at CRC, maintained that, "Many leaders of the principal anti-war organisations today are members of Communist splinter groups."

"They have ties to North Korea, Cuba and Maoist China. Some have political roots in radical anti-Vietnam war groups like Students for a Democratic Society … Others trace their origins to the heyday of the U.S. Communist Party."

Huberty argues that these facts "have been obscured by false media depictions of a grassroots and idealistic anti-war movement".

"On the face of it," Benjamin said, "it is ridiculous to characterise United for Peace and Justice as anti-American. This is an organisation that is comprised of more than 1,000 local organisations, and whose membership includes a fair share of religious leaders, military families, and veterans."

"The way they tried to smear Cindy Sheehan was despicable and didn't work very well; they way they are trying to position politicians calling for an exit strategy also reflects that. We in the peace movement feel like we are turning a corner and that we have greater possibilities of reaching and convincing the American people," she said.

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column "Conservative Watch", documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right. (END/2005)

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IRAQ: U.S. Influence 'Too Much'

IPS News
IRAQ: U.S. Influence 'Too Much'
Dahr Jamail

LONDON, Sep 5 (IPS) - U.S. influence in the process of drafting a constitution for Iraq is excessive and "highly inappropriate", a United Nations official says.

"It is a matter of public record that in the final weeks of the process the newly arrived U.S. ambassador (Zalmay Khalizad) took an extremely hands-on role," Justin Alexander, legal affairs officer for the office of constitutional support with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) told IPS. "Even going so far as to circulate at least one U.S. draft."

Alexander, who oversaw the recent proceedings in Baghdad added: "This involvement was highly inappropriate for a country with 140,000 soldiers in country."

Zaid al-Ali, a legal expert who also oversaw the drafting process in Baghdad, made a similar case at a meeting at the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies in London.

"There are three ways in which the occupation intervened in the context of Iraq's constitution-writing process," he said. "Firstly, the occupation authorities selected and affected the makeup of the commission that was charged with drafting Iraq's transitional law, and its permanent constitution. Second, the occupation determined the limits and parameters within which the constitution was to be drafted. Third, the occupation authorities intervened directly in order to safeguard its interests in the context of the constitutional negotiations."

Al-Ali said it was significant that one article in the draft constitution on foreign military bases was dropped from the final version. "One article contained in a previous draft provided that setting up foreign military bases in Iraq was to be forbidden, and that the only way in which this could be deviated from would have been by a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament."

Al-Ali said "this article was dropped from the final draft of the constitution."

An alliance including the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars and the large movement of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said it rejected the draft and a "political process which had been led by occupiers and their collaborators."

The group said in a media statement: "We consider this draft as a next step of this process which does not represent the peoples' will." The alliance also expressed "major suspicions about the honesty of the next referendum, which will take place under occupation and with neither international nor Arabic and Islamic supervision."

Dr. Marinos Diamantides, senior lecturer in law at the University of London, said the entire drafting process could be illegal under international law.

"One could argue the entire process is against the law," Diamantides told IPS. "According to the 1907 Convention (the convention for the pacific settlement of disputes), the occupying power has a duty to maintain the legal system of the country it occupies. This is the first time ever that an occupying power has dismantled the internal law system of the country it occupies."

He also pointed out that ironically the Sunnis now have power to derail the upcoming referendum vote by a two-thirds vote in three provinces. That power was originally intended to give Kurds power to veto the constitution.

When Iraq's Kurdish and Shia dominated parliament recently approved the draft, Sunnis immediately began campaigning for a 'no' vote in the upcoming October referendum. If the draft were to pass the referendum, it would be followed two months later by election for a government.

At least four provinces are predominantly Sunni, and Sunni clerics have urged their followers to reject the draft if it does not meet Sunni demands.

Adding further complexity to the already muddled situation, former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq during the sanctions Denis Halliday believes that even the United Nations has no place in occupied Iraq..

"The UN doesn't have a position in Iraq today," Halliday told IPS. "Once the invasion took place, the UN became collaborators with the enemy (the United States)."

Halliday, who had resigned from his UN post in protest against "genocidal sanctions" added: "This lesson should have been learned in August, 2003 when our office in Baghdad was blown up, as we were collaborators. The UN has simply become a tool of the U.S., and Iraqis can no longer distinguish between the U.S. and the UN."

Justin Alexander said Iraq might need a new constitution. "If Iraq creates a progressive and effective constitution and laws to implement the constitution, then this could benefit Iraqis." But "in the absence of mutual reconciliation and an end to the occupation this is all futile." (END/2005)

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Thousands lose jobs after Katrina

BBC NEWS
Thousands lose jobs after Katrina

Hurricane Katrina led to 10,000 new claims by Americans for jobless benefit last week, US government figures show.

But despite the surge in claims from New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama and neighbouring states, the overall US new claims total fell by 1,000 to 319,000.

The less volatile four-week moving average showed jobless claims had risen by 2,000 to 318,500.

Officials have warned that Hurricane Katrina is likely to result in a large rise in unemployment benefit claims.

Hurricane fallout

Government officials said that the increase in claims from areas devastated by Katrina was merely an estimate as many labour offices had been closed as a result of the storm, making it impossible for people to file their paperwork.

Experts added that many other people affected by the storm could delay making claims while they deal with more immediate needs.

Cities and metropolitan areas in the region worst hit by the hurricane accounted for more than a million jobs in July, according to reports.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Department estimated that Katrina could result in around 400,000 job losses in coming months.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/4227070.stm

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Cold beer and hope in New Orleans

BBC NEWS
Cold beer and hope in New Orleans

By Alastair Leithead
BBC News, New Orleans

Throughout the horrors of the past couple of weeks in New Orleans, a number of bars in the French Quarter were determined to stay open and give their regulars a slice of normality.

Slumped at the bar, bourbon and Coke in a plastic pint glass, he could have been any drinker.

But my new friend was one of the famous four who hung on to the shutters and fought the storm as Hurricane Katrina tried to close Johnny White's bar for the first time in 17 years.

Why are they still here? Because they have got a job to do.

You cannot really make it out by candlelight, but the torch beam reveals the quest that keeps them all going: a small, cardboard sign behind the bar which simply reads "We never close". So far so good.

They had a hurricane party on the night of the storm and have been working in shifts, around the clock, since then.

Johnny White's has always been an institution on the corner of Bourbon Street and Orleans Street in the French Quarter and, despite it all, they somehow manage to keep cold beer on ice.

Run by alcoholics for alcoholics was how it was described to me, and that is not far off the mark.

"What is the toilet etiquette?" I asked the barmaid, wondering if I should just go out into the street.

"Here is the restroom key," she said, handing me a torch, "and watch the body on the stairs."

Hellish sights

The body's name was Squirrel. He was banished to the landing for getting lippy when the cops dropped by, and he was just sleeping it off.

But he was a much more pleasant sight than the bodies we had seen earlier in the day, while we were driving the streets of New Orleans East on a motor boat.

There was the man sprawled across the roof of a submerged car. Captain Bill, the river patrol officer, thought he had got to safety but then died of a heart attack in the storm.

Then another, floating next to a house around the tips of some metal railings that were just peeping out above the water.

Thankfully, I did not see the two homeless guys who had chained themselves to a lamp post in the storm and had been killed by flying debris.

The streets were hellish. Hollywood would have paid millions to create this if it had been making a disaster movie.

The Super dome stadium was stripped of its roof. Trees had been picked up and thrown into the road. Metal signs had been ripped from buildings and tossed along alleyways. Power lines lay prostrate in the flood water. And the smell... the smell of sewage, of gas, of rotting things.

The poor, black neighbourhoods took the worst of it, as we have heard so much about.

Ghost town

How many people will they find who died in their attics as the water level rose in just 30 minutes?

People who could not find their way to their roofs when the lights went out and Lake Pontchatrain flooded in.

People given the choice of drowning in their living rooms or braving the full force of a hurricane on top of their houses.

And there are those who still refuse to leave, confident they can live a new life on the water, determined to protect their possessions, deluded by the scale of the disaster, persuading themselves the water levels will soon drop and everything will be normal again.

It is normality that people are after. And being open 24 hours a day is normal in Johnny White's bar.

The floodwaters left the French Quarter alone. The original city, the high point, the home of New Orleans bohemia, art, and jazz; its life and soul, its sin.

Two cops burst into the bar, the torch points at the hard liquor. "You got any grandfather bourbon," one asks.

"Grandfather and Coke, and go easy on the Coke."

They are from New Orleans. It is their city. It is now their ghost town.

Tear gas

Some of their colleagues have taken their own lives rather than shoot the looters stealing to survive, or take on the gangs roaming the streets of chaos.

Others have handed their badges in, appalled at how their own people were left living rough without food and water for days, how they were abandoned by their government, living in their own waste, some dying of dehydration in the heat.

They are as fed up of the gun-toting officers sent from out-of-town to restore order who you would have thought would have more to do than tear gas the regulars at Johnny Whites - the only bar still open in the narrow, dark, oppressive streets - because they are spilling out of the bar and drinking on the pavement.

So how long will the doors, with their smashed out windows stay open? How long will they cling on to the promise scrawled on cardboard behind the bar?

Everyone has been told to leave, the city will never be normal again. But for now in this small corner of New Orleans where there is cold beer there is hope.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 8 September, 2005 at 1100 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4224020.stm

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It's Your Failure, Too, Mr. Bush

washingtonpost.com
It's Your Failure, Too, Mr. Bush

By Eugene Robinson

BATON ROUGE -- After a tragically incompetent beginning, the effort to give urgent care to the multitudes from New Orleans whose homes and livelihoods have been obliterated is finally in high gear. The problem now is that nobody knows where it's headed.

At the top, things are still hopeless. Federal, local and state officials who perform for the cameras here at the Louisiana State Police complex, headquarters for the relief effort, still spend an unconscionable amount of time debating who's in charge. Is the president the ultimate authority, or is it Blanco, Nagin, Chertoff, Brown or the generals? The answer seems to vary from hour to hour, depending on who's holding court in the hot, stuffy briefing room or outside on the portico, where visiting luminaries get mobbed by microphones.

Fortunately, the finger-pointing follies don't matter much on the ground and in the water. Military, police and civilian relief units did what had to be done and emptied the New Orleans basin of Hurricane Katrina's bereft survivors. They are being fed, sheltered and clothed. They can't be described as alive and well, but they're alive.

Now what?

Hundreds of thousands of evacuees are scattered around Louisiana and neighboring states in a sudden diaspora, and no one seems to have any idea what to do with them next. The evacuees bristle at the word "refugees," which makes them sound as if they don't belong in this country. But whatever you call them, they won't be able to go back home -- and won't have a home to go back to -- for months or even years.

Baton Rouge, perhaps the best example, has swollen like the Mississippi River in an epic flood. The people here have been generous and good-natured to a fault. Down by the river, at the convention center, the Red Cross is housing about 5,000 evacuees; another big shelter is being opened across town, and smaller shelters are being organized every day, many by local churches. It's impossible to count the families who have opened their homes to relatives, friends or needy strangers.

Every city and town in Louisiana that wasn't blasted by the hurricane is full of evacuees. Then there are the tens of thousands in Texas and the multitudes scattered across neighboring states. Their host communities have the best of intentions, but many won't be able to stand the added drain on resources indefinitely. Where will these people go? Why wasn't there a plan?

That's when I start my finger-pointing, because a few days in and around this ground zero have convinced me that there are two things the federal government failed to do, and that for these failures there's ultimately no one to blame but the president.

First, an administration that since Sept. 11, 2001, has told us a major terrorist strike is inevitable should have had in place a well-elaborated plan for evacuating a major American city. Even if there wasn't a specific plan for New Orleans -- although it was clear that a breach of the city's levees was one of the likeliest natural catastrophes -- there should have been a generic plan. George W. Bush told us time and again that our cities were threatened. Shouldn't he have ordered up a plan to get people out?

Second, someone should have thought about what to do with hundreds of thousands of evacuees, both in the days after a disaster and in the long term. As people flooded out of New Orleans, it was officials at the state and local level who rose to the challenge, making it up as they went along. Bring a bunch of people to the Astrodome. We have a vacant hotel that we can use. Send a hundred or so down to our church and we'll do the best we can.

Tent cities aren't a happy option, but neither is haphazard improvisation. Is the problem the Bush administration's ideological fervor for small government? Does the White House really believe that primary responsibility should fall on volunteers, church groups and individuals? Or is it just stunning incompetence and lack of foresight?

At the big shelter here in Baton Rouge on Sunday, some student volunteers from Louisiana State University took a group of children outside to get some air. The kids were using sheets of cardboard as sleds and surfboards, zooming down the grassy levee next to the Mississippi River and then scampering back uphill for another ride. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the scene warmed your heart. But those college students are going to have to go back to their classes, and then how will those kids from New Orleans spend their days?

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

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CIA videos reveal the missed chances to kill Bin Laden

abcnews.go.com
CIA videos reveal the missed chances to kill Bin Laden
Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding
Wrangles stopped arming of plane

::nobreak::PREVIOUSLY unseen footage of Osama Bin Laden taken by a CIA spy drone reveals how close the Americans came to killing the Al-Qaeda leader two years before the September 11 attacks.

The pictures were filmed by a Predator unmanned aircraft and show Bin Laden, in white robes, with a small group of followers at a training camp near Khost in eastern Afghanistan at the end of 1999. The drone was one of the first to be used in Afghanistan by the CIA, but because of bureaucratic wrangles it was unarmed.

The pictures, thought to be the first spy plane footage of Bin Laden to be published, have been obtained from American sources by Al-Jazeera, the Arabic language television station. “We had no doubt over his identity. Bin Laden can clearly be seen standing out from the rest of the group next to the buildings,” said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA officer who headed Alec Station, the agency’s unit which tracked Bin Laden during the 1990s.

He added: “Nobody at the top of the CIA wanted to take the decision to arm the Predator. It meant that even if we could find him (Bin Laden) we were not allowed to kill him.”

The pictures are part of a mass of evidence now emerging of the missed opportunities to kill or capture Bin Laden and his associates before they launched the terror attacks on America in 2001.

They include at least three further occasions in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 when the CIA had Bin Laden in its sights but was prevented from acting. There were divisions between the agency and the White House over who would have the authority to fire and the legality of killing the Al-Qaeda leader.

On one occasion a satellite photographed the Al-Qaeda leader on a hunting trip, but the White House ordered the CIA not to launch a missile attack after finding out that princes from a friendly Arab country were in his party.

On another occasion a raid by local tribesmen on Bin Laden’s base in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, was called off after American officials could not agree on whether it should go ahead.

The third episode, also in Kandahar, involved a human spotter tracking him for five days, but the decision was taken not to attack because of fears over civilian casualties.

The missed opportunities are documented in Blinking Red, an Al-Jazeera series beginning this week to mark the fourth anniversary of September 11.

It describes how Bill Clinton’s administration turned down an offer from the Sudanese government to help to capture Bin Laden when he was living in Khartoum in the early to mid-1990s. It also shows how the Americans “lost” two of the September 11 hijackers despite having them under surveillance. The two men later entered America.

“The Bush administration has still not come clean with the American people about 9/11. Our investigation, which has taken a year to complete, has raised many outstanding questions that urgently need to be answered, not least over the missed opportunities to take out senior leaders of the organisation,” said Al-Jazeera.

The nearest the CIA came to killing Bin Laden was on the hunting trip in February 1999, just a few months before the Predator incident. The site was a camp in the desert south of Kandahar where Bin Laden had gone with wealthy visitors from the United Arab Emirates.

Afghan agents reported the trip to a CIA station. Tracking teams were immediately dispatched and by February 9 they had located the isolated camp, close to a large airstrip.

Richard Clarke, Clinton’s senior counter-terrorism adviser, has written in his memoirs: “When word came through that we had a contemporaneous sighting from our informants, the counter-terrorism security group met immediately by secure video conference.”

An attack on the camp using cruise missiles was the only option the Americans could employ at such short notice. The previous year a similar strike using dozens of missiles had been launched on the Khalden training camp in the east of the country, but there were few casualties and the work of the camp was hardly disrupted. This time, with a smaller, more clearly defined target, the intelligence experts believed they would have more luck.

The attack was planned for February 11, but according to Scheuer the White House stalled. Officials wanted more information about Bin Laden’s movements.

In addition it was now clear that the hunting party consisted of minor princes from the United Arab Emirates, an American ally in the Gulf.

As the White House dithered, the hunting party moved on. “All that was left was a pile of burning garbage in the desert,” said Scheuer this weekend. He claimed that the group had left after Clarke called a senior figure in the Emirates royal family. “It’s hardly surprising that they pulled out so quickly and that we lost our chance to kill Bin Laden,” said Scheuer.

The Al-Jazeera series also reveals how the January 2000 meeting in Kuala Lumpur, at which the September 11 attacks were planned, came to light after the CIA tracked the telephones of Khalid al-Midhar, later to become one of the hijackers.

Most of the senior planners of the attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, were at the meeting, which was also photographed by intelligence agents. Shortly afterwards Al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, another of the future hijackers who was also at the Malaysian meeting, flew to San Diego using their real names and passports. They were so casual that Al-Hazmi’s name appears in the San Diego residential phone directory for the period when they were in the area.

The ease with which the two men were able to operate in America came partly because the CIA did not show its evidence to the FBI — responsible for internal security — until June 2001, 18 months after the planning meeting and well after the two had entered the country.

The failures revealed in the Al-Jazeera documentary were echoed last week by further revelations about the so-called Able Danger military intelligence unit.

Two members of this unit have come forward in recent weeks to say that Mohammed Atta, leader of the September 11 hijackers, was known as a terrorist suspect at least a year before the attacks.

Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Shaffer and Captain Scott Philpott, former members of the unit, said that Atta and three of the other hijackers had been identified. They say that they testified to the September 11 commission but their testimony was not taken seriously.

The Al-Jazeera series, together with Scheuer’s disclosures, add to growing pressure on the American authorities over their performance in the run-up to September 11. In an unpublished report to Congress last week John Helgerson, the US government’s inspector-general, delivered a scathing attack on George Tenet, CIA director at the time of September 11, and a score of other agency personnel for their failure to develop a strategy against Al-Qaeda.

The report recommends a public reprimand against Tenet, James Pavitt, former deputy director of operations, and Cofer Black, former head of the counter-terrorism centre.

Yosri Fouda, a journalist with Al-Jazeera, is the presenter of Blinking Red. His interviews with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, the 9/11 planners, were first published by The Sunday Times in 2002

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Barbara Bush: Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans

editorandpublisher.com
Barbara Bush: Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans

By E&P Staff

NEW YORK
Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."

The former First Lady's remarks were aired this evening on National Public Radio's "Marketplace" program.

She was part of a group in Houston today at the Astrodome that included her husband and former President Bill Clinton, who were chosen by her son, the current president, to head fundraising efforts for the recovery. Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Barack
Obama were also present.

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to
Houston."

Then she added: "What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

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Memo to the Media: Stop Enabling the White House Blame Game

huffingtonpost.com
Arianna Huffington
Memo to the Media: Stop Enabling the White House Blame Game

When it comes to managing political crises (as opposed to national ones), the Bush White House has earned a reputation as masters of damage control. And rightly so -- let’s see you get reelected after Abu Ghraib, the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” memo, no WMD, no bin Laden (dead or alive), and “Mission (Most Definitely Not) Accomplished”.

Well, according to the New York Times, Rove, Bartlett and the damage control boys are at it again, rolling out a plan to hang the post-Katrina debacle around the necks of Louisiana state and local officials… and, in the process,
erase the image of a crassly incompetent administration too busy vacationing to worry about the dying in New Orleans.

Hence, today’s Presidential Visit, Take Two. Can’t you just see Rove yelling “Cut!”, hopping out of his director’s chair, pulling Bush aside, and whispering in his ear: “Okay, Mr. President, this isn’t “Armageddon” meets “The Wedding Crashers”. So this time 86 the stories about how you used to party in New Orleans, and, for heaven's sake, do not focus on the suffering of Trent Lott. And no more hugging only freshly-showered black people who look like Halle Berry -- this time you gotta get a little closer to the living-in-their-own-feces crowd. Alright…. action!”

Look, as much as I despise the way they go about it, I get it: trying to save face by deflecting blame and sliming your enemies may be ugly but it’s straight out of the Rove playbook and has proven highly effective.

What I don’t understand is why the media continue to be star players on the Bush damage control team.

Take the way that both the Washington Post and Newsweek obediently, and ineptly, passed on -- and thus gave credence to -- the Bush party line that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s hesitancy to declare a state of emergency had prevented the feds from responding to the crisis more rapidly.

The Post, citing an anonymous “senior Bush official”, reported on Sunday that, as of Saturday, Sept. 3, Blanco “still had not declared a state of emergency”… when, in fact, the declaration had been made on Friday, August 26 -- over 2 days BEFORE Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. This claim was so demonstrably false that the paper was forced to issue a correction just hours after the original story appeared.

So here are a couple of questions: 1) Had everyone in the WaPo fact checking department gone out of town for the Labor Day weekend? I mean, c’mon, the announcement of a state of emergency isn’t exactly the kind of thing government officials tend to keep a secret. 2) Why were the Post reporters so willing to blindly accept the words of an administration official who obviously had a partisan agenda -- and to grant this official anonymity?

Weren’t they familiar with the Post’s policy on using anonymous sources, which states: “Sources often insist that we agree not to name them in the newspaper before they agree to talk with us. We must be reluctant to grant their wish. When we use an unnamed source, we are asking our readers to take an extra step to trust the credibility of the information we are providing. We must be certain in our own minds that the benefit to readers is worth the cost in credibility. …Nevertheless, granting anonymity to a source should not be done casually or automatically.” Here it was clearly done both casually and automatically.

The Post’s policy continues: “We prefer at least two sources for factual information in Post stories that depends on confidential informants, and those sources should be independent of each other.” Oops. They could have saved themselves a lot of grief if the second source they never got for this story had been a staffer for Gov. Blanco… or, if the price of a phone call was too much, the state of Louisiana website where the truth about the state of emergency declaration was a click away [pdf].

Especially since the Post instructs its reporters: “When sources have axes to grind, we should let our readers know what their interest is” and “We do not promise sources that we will refrain from additional reporting or efforts to verify the information they may give us”. You mean like checking to see if the line of bull they are feeding you is, y’know, a line of bull?

If anything, Newsweek’s effort to assist the Bush damage control effort was even more egregious.

While claiming that “Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Barbineaux Blanco seemed uncertain and sluggish, hesitant to declare martial law or a state of emergency, which would have opened the door to more Pentagon help” the magazine didn’t even bother to cite a “senior Bush official”, choosing instead to report Blanco’s alleged failings as fact. Wonder where they got that “fact”? You think it might have been from the same “senior Bush official” that snookered the Post? Josh Marshall wonders…

The unquestioning regurgitation of administration spin through the use of anonymous sources is the fault line of modern American journalism. You’d think that after all we’ve seen -- from the horrific reporting on WMD to Judy Miller and Plamegate (to say nothing of all the endless navel-gazing media panel discussions analyzing the issue) -- these guys would finally get a clue and stop making the Journalism 101 mistake of granting anonymity to administration sources using them to smear their opponents.

The Washington Post corrected its article. Now it should take the next step and reveal who the source of that provably false chunk of slime was. And Newsweek should do the same.

It’s time for the media to get back to doing their job and stop being the principal weapon in Team Bush’s damage control arsenal.

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Why Little George Can’t Feel Your Pain

huffingtonpost.com
Thomas de Zengotita
Why Little George Can’t Feel Your Pain

One thing Little George learned from genuinely strong men he knows (like Big George, his father; these are actual family nick-names, by the way) is how to act decisively in moments of high emotion. Only, with Little George, it's just an act. He can only do his decisive shtick when he’s not really feeling anything.
That’s why he flees into isolation in the immediate aftermath of crisis. He needs time to anesthetize himself.

With the New Orleans situation, Little George has an added motive for denial. The structural injustices of the system he serves have become literally visible. If he let himself feel this pain, he would have to face the fact that it’s always been there. Really tough SOB’s like Haley Barbour have always known that, felt that. They can take it on. They just don’t care. It’s that simple for them. They are monsters of greed.

But Little George can’t face hard core stuff. He needs simple facades of good and evil to relate to. The members of his retinue have learned that their principal task is to surround him with such facades. That’s how they have controlled the policies of our nation.

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The Real Gas Gougers

thenation.com
The Real Gas Gougers

How convenient for the oil industry that Hurricane Katrina hit just before the traditional Labor Day-weekend hike in gas prices. Now, instead of having to fake up some absolutely absurd excuse for jacking up gas prices, the industry can try and dupe Americans into thinking that they are suddenly paying $3.25 a gallon because of a storm.

The oil industry's response to Katrina has provided a reminder of why it is so exceptionally profitable.

Even before a start had been made on assessing the damage caused by the tropical storm, energy corporations were cashing in. And every indication is that they plan to continue doing so--perhaps taking prices over the $4-a-gallon mark, according to James DiGeorgia, editor and publisher of the Gold & Energy Advisor and author of The Global War for Oil.

No one debates the fact that the hurricane has done significant damage to oil rigs, refineries and delivery systems along the Gulf Coast, a region that accounts for roughly 10 percent of US refining capacity. But roughly 90 percent of US refining capacity remains fully functional and, it should not be forgotten, the US has not stopped importing oil.

Additionally, the Bush Administration jumped to the aid of the oil companies long before the relief effort was in full swing.

The Environmental Protection Agency suspended summertime antipollution measures, lifting the requirement that refiners lower fuel volatility and cut sulphur levels. At the same time, the Administration moved to release oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was created more than three decades ago with the precise purpose of boosting fuel supplies in order to keep a lid on rising wholesale gasoline prices in a circumstance such as the one that has now developed.

Despite all the aid they are getting, however, the oil companies are not giving anything back. There is no evidence of a willingness on the part of these highly profitable corporations to sacrifice in a time of national emergency.

Make no mistake: These corporations should be able to absorb a hit. Over the past year and a half, the four largest oil companies--ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Royal Dutch/Shell Group and BP Group PLC--have pocketed close to $100 billion in profits. During the first quarter of 2005 alone, those firms pulled in a cool $23 billion.

But instead of sharing the pain, they appear to be moving to squeeze every cent they can out of the crisis.

With oil-industry friends in charge of the White House and the Congress, don't expect much of a response from the federal level.

But this is one case where states have an ability to intervene.

Three years ago, in a move to protect against gouging, Hawaiian officials enacted legislation that allows state officials to set price caps on gasoline.

Now, as gas prices are skyrocketing in the aftermath of Katrina, a California legislator wants to give a state agency broad authority to regulate the cost of fuel.


State Senator Joe Dunn, a Democrat, has introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow the state Public Utilities Commission to require mandatory fuel reserves, set profit margins for oil and gas companies and order the construction of new pipelines. The measure would also bar agreements between energy corporations to reduce competition.

Dunn's amendment would allow the California Public Utilities Commission to cap prices, although the senator told reporters that step would only be taken as a last resort.

Dunn brings a refreshing bluntness to the discourse. Speaking to the Associated Press, he accused the oil industry of creating a dysfunctional market in California, in which competition is essentially eliminated. That, he explained, is why states need to step up their use of regulatory powers.

"Two years ago, when gasoline cost $2 a gallon, the industry said to give it time and prices would settle down. Now, we're seeing $3 a gallon," Dunn said. "People in California are no longer believing the excuses of the industry. If they can't fix their market behavior, we'll fix it for them."

It is certainly true that consumers should take steps to reduce their use of petroleum products--not just because of a storm in the Gulf of Mexico but because of the human, economic and environmental tolls this country's reliance on imported petroleum products has imposed. But petroleum companies should sacrifice as well. And if they are not willing to do so, states should remind them of their patriotic duty.

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Rove Returns: CIA Leaker Now Leading Campaign to Blame Local Officials for Katrina Aftermath

thinkprogress.org
Rove Returns: CIA Leaker Now Leading Campaign to Blame Local Officials for Katrina Aftermath

Scott McClellan, 9/1/05:

As I have indicated, this is not a time for politics. This is a time for the nation to come together for those in the Gulf Coast region and that’s where our focus is. This is not a time for finger-pointing or politics. And I think the last thing that the people who have been displaced or the people who have been affected need is people seeking partisan gain in Washington.

This morning’s New York Times:

Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

It orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, … and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.


The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. … In many ways, the unfolding public relations campaign reflects the style Mr. Rove has brought to the political campaigns he has run for Mr. Bush.

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NY Times reprinted without contradiction Bush's false claim that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees"

mediamatters.org

NY Times reprinted without contradiction Bush's false claim that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees"

In a September 2 article headlined "Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure," The New York Times printed without challenge President Bush's false claim, originally made on ABC's Good Morning America, that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" surrounding New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, dozens of news organizations had reported on the possibility of a breach well in advance of the hurricane, and even the Times' lead editorial in the same day's newspaper flatly stated that "[d]isaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees."

From the September 2 Times report:

The response will be dissected for years. But on Thursday, disaster experts and frustrated officials said a crucial shortcoming may have been the failure to predict that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of the city would be breached, not just overflow.

[...]

In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He added, "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."

Though the Times kept it a secret from its readers, Bush simply wasn't telling the truth. Many people "anticipated the breach of the levees," as Media Matters for America has detailed. A September 2 Washington Post editorial similarly noted:

It is simply not true, as Mr. Bush said yesterday, that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees." In fact, experts inside and outside of government have issued repeated warnings for years about the city's unique topography and vulnerability, and those warnings were loudly and prominently echoed by the media both nationally and in Louisiana.

Not only is it not true, as Bush claimed, that nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees," it seems that nearly everybody anticipated the breach. The problem wasn't lack of anticipation, it was lack of preparation.

A June 8, 2004, New Orleans Times-Picayune article noted: "For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees." The article quoted the manager of the Army Corps of Engineers' Lake Pontchartrain levee project saying that "people should know that this is a work in progress, and there's more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place." A Corps senior project manager added, "When levees are below grade, as ours are in many spots right now, they're more vulnerable to waves pouring over them and degrading them." And Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the paper: "It appears that the money [for hurricane-protection efforts] has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. ... Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten noted on September 2:

Three years ago, New Orleans' leading local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, National Public Radio's signature nightly news program, "All Things Considered," and the New York Times each methodically and compellingly reported that the very existence of south Louisiana's leading city was at risk and hundreds of thousands of lives imperiled by exactly the sequence of events that occurred this week. All three news organizations also made clear that the danger was growing because of a series of public policy decisions and failure to allocate government funds to alleviate the danger.

[...]

Since 2002, when all these reports ran, the Times-Picayune has published no fewer than nine stories reporting that the combination of tax cuts, the war in Iraq and the demands of homeland security had led President Bush's administration to repeatedly reject urgent requests from the Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana's congressional delegation that it allocate the money to save New Orleans.

Former Sen. John Breaux (D-LA) told the Associated Press that it was well-known that the levees could not withstand a major hurricane: "Those levees are OK under normal times but once every hundred years, that's not enough. ... We've all said for years that a category 4 or 5 hurricane hit just right on New Orleans, there was nothing there sufficient to prevent New Orleans from being 20 feet under water."

And Mike Parker, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi who headed the Army Corps of Engineers in the Bush administration until losing his job after criticizing the White House budget office, told the AP: "I'm not saying it wouldn't still be flooded, but I do feel that if it had been totally funded, there would be less flooding than you have."

On September 1, the Chicago Tribune reported details of some of those budget shortfalls:

For instance, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for this fiscal year to pay for hurricane-protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush administration countered with $3.9 million, and Congress eventually provided $5.7 million, according to figures provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Because of the shortfalls, which were caused in part by the rising costs of the war in Iraq, the corps delayed seven contracts that included enlarging the levees, according to corps documents.

A quick search of the Nexis news database reveals no shortage of news reports about possible levee breaches that could occur in the event of a major hurricane. Here's a small sampling:

* ABC's Nightline, 9/15/04: "If it sounds overly dramatic, it is not. This city is surrounded by water on three sides. Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi below. A major hurricane hitting right here would breach the levees. Water would cascade in, submerging the city. And because of the levees, it would have no way of escaping."

* Associated Press, 5/16/04: "Officials have warned that if a major hurricane hits New Orleans, thousands of people could be killed and the city could be flooded for weeks as flood waters breach the levees ringing the city, which has the topography of a saucer that dips several feet below sea level in many places."

* The Advocate, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 9/19/03: "... the Hurricane Center has developed an 'extremely detailed' map of New Orleans because the city, which sits about 6-feet below sea level and is surrounded by levees, is a 'worst-case scenario' for a major storm to hit. Knowing how far and how fast the water in the inlets will rise, evacuations and cleanups can be better planned, [LSU Hurricane Center director Ivor] van Heerden said. In the case of south Louisiana, a breach of the levees would trap the flood water on the wrong side of the bank once the bayous and rivers receded, van Heerden said."

* Richmond Times-Dispatch, 8/6/02: "New Orleans, with more than 460,000 residents, lies entirely below sea level and depends on a system of levees to hold back the Gulf of Mexico. Some researchers say a Category 3 hurricane could breach the levees and kill thousands of people."

At least two other news organizations pointed out the contradiction between Bush's words and reality:

* Cox News Service, 9/1/05: "On ABC-TV Thursday, President Bush acknowledged the 'frustration' of New Orleans residents, but said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.' In fact, such a failure has been forecast for years."

* San Francisco Chronicle, 9/2/05: "'I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday. I mean, I understand the anxiety of people on the ground. I can -- I just can't imagine what it's like to be waving a sign saying "come and get me now,'' ' Bush said. 'But I want people to know there's a lot of help coming. ... I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,' he said. That point was fiercely contradicted on blogs and talk radio Thursday."

When Bush claims nobody "anticipated the breach of the levees," he isn't telling the truth; he's trying to avoid responsibility for underfunding Army Corps of Engineers' hurricane-protection projects. And the New York Times is helping Bush avoid responsibility by repeating his false comments without contradiction. Indeed, the false claim that nobody anticipated a levee beach occurs throughout the Times article (headlined "Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure"), with nary a hint that it isn't true.

And yet, if Times readers turned to the editorial page of the same September 2 paper that contains that article, they would see a lead editorial that declared: "Disaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees, yet somehow the government was unable to immediately rise to the occasion."

Times readers with long memories might also remember an August 11, 2002, Times article in which Times reporter Adam Cohen warned:

New Orleans ... may be America's most architecturally distinctive and culturally rich city. But it is also a disaster waiting to happen. New Orleans is the only major American city below sea level, and it is wedged between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi. If a bad hurricane hit, experts say, the city could fill up like a cereal bowl, killing tens of thousands and laying waste to the city's architectural heritage. If the Big One hit, New Orleans could disappear.

[...]

There is considerable agreement about what the Big One would look like. A Category 4 or 5 hurricane would move up from the Gulf to Lake Pontchartrain, forcing lake water over levees and into the city. If the New Orleans "bowl" filled, the Red Cross says, there could be 100,000 deaths. An additional 400,000 could be stranded on roofs, surrounded by a witches' brew of contaminated water. Property loss estimates run as high as $150 billion, though much of the imperiled architecture -- like the St. Louis Cathedral -- is priceless.

So far, Washington has done little, and New Orleans's response has been less than satisfying. The city is focused on evacuating its 500,000 residents. But the roads leading out would flood quickly, stranding those who lingered. Then there is the thorny issue of the 100,000 residents without cars. "When I do presentations," said Terry Tullier, head of the New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness, "I start by saying that 'when the Big One comes, many of you will die -- let's get that out of the way.' "

Mr. Tullier has seen computer models of Canal Street under 20 feet of water and heard that the floodwaters could stay for weeks, that the National Guard might bring in thousands of body bags -- and that New Orleans might never recover. "In this business, we bring no good news," he said. "It's full of worst-case scenarios."

It's clear that there has long been wide recognition that a large hurricane could cause exactly the kind of devastation currently being seen in New Orleans, and that the levee system would not be sufficient to stop it. The Army Corps of Engineers knew it; the Times-Picayune knew it; countless news stories over the years have dealt with the possibility; Congress knew it; the former Republican congressman who lost his job as head of the Corps of Engineers for complaining about budget cuts knew it -- and The New York Times knew it.

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The "city" of Louisiana

msnbc.com
The "city" of Louisiana
Keith Olbermann

SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

Well there's your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”

Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural... and government-made.

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?

I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — "New Orleans."

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.

Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.

E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com

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Makeshift morgue works to identify Katrina's dead

Reuters
Makeshift morgue works to identify Katrina's dead
Mon Sep 5, 2005 3:59 PM ET

By Jim Loney

ST. GABRIEL, Louisiana (Reuters) - In a long, low, nondescript warehouse in a Louisiana town that used to be a leper colony, Hurricane Katrina's victims will be identified and returned to their families.

A convoy of refrigerated trucks, seven in all, pulled up alongside the makeshift morgue early on Monday. The bodies will be stored inside.

In the warehouse, the location of which authorities are trying to keep quiet to lend some dignity to the grim task of collecting and processing perhaps thousands of corpses, concrete floors are covered with plastic sheets to contain fluids that could pose a biohazard threat.

Rows of stainless steel gurneys await the first bodies. Processing is expected to start within 24 hours and the U.S. Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) has drawn up a plan to handle in excess of 5,000 corpses.

"Families need to know what happened to the people they lose," said Dr. David Senn, a forensic dentist from San Antonio, Texas, who helped identify victims of the September 11 attack on New York and gathered remains after the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.

DMORT teams, comprised of pathologists, coroners, forensic anthropologists and experts in fingerprinting, DNA and dental identification, will be able to process up to 140 bodies a day.

When they enter the cavernous building, the bodies, many of which have been submerged in the toxic swamp that inundated New Orleans, will be decontaminated using a chlorine solution.

They will be taken through regimented stages that include examination by a forensic pathologist, panoramic X-rays, fingerprinting and dental exams. DNA will be extracted from bone.

"These are my patients. They are not just bodies," said Dr. Corinne Stern, a medical examiner from El Paso, Texas who said the goal of the DMORT team is to "reunite families and to answer questions for the families."

Even for those accustomed to disaster, aspects of the job can be difficult.

"I don't like identifying children," Senn said. "When I think about St. Bernard Parish where families were scrambling into attics to escape the water, I can visualize that there were children in that group. It's not the best part of the job."

The morgue, which will see a steady stream of bodies in coming days as U.S. and state authorities ramp up the collection of corpses from the flooded streets and homes of New Orleans, was located in a place that was "partly founded on tragic circumstances," said its mayor, George Grace.

St. Gabriel, a town of 6,000 on the east bank of the Mississippi River about 70 miles from New Orleans, was a leper colony in 1921 and hosts a leper facility to this day.

Grace welcomed the chance to help deal with the Katrina disaster.

"We want to do it with dignity and respect," he said. Local officials assured residents the biohazards would be contained.

Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana's emergency medical services director, said there had been no concerted effort to collect corpses in the week since Katrina struck as rescuers focused on survivors. But the task was to begin in earnest within hours.

"Ideally, all hurricane victims will be brought into this facility," he said. "If worse comes to worst, they can process 130 to 140 individuals per 24-hour period here."

Members of the unit responsible for decontaminating the corpses wore black T-shirts with a skull and crossbones on the back. Playing on the term "first responders," which refers to emergency medical units and fire crews, the words "last responders" were splashed across the shirts.

"The job they're doing, you've got to have some sense of humor," an information officer for the unit said.

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Katrina could prompt new black "great migration"

Reuters

Katrina could prompt new black "great migration"

By Adam Tanner

HOUSTON (Reuters) - If refugees end up building new lives away from New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina may prompt the largest U.S. black resettlement since the 20th century's Great Migration lured southern blacks to the North in a search for jobs and better lives.

Interviews with refugees in Houston, which is expecting many thousands of evacuees to remain, suggest that thousands of blacks who lost everything and had no insurance will end up living in Texas or other U.S. states.

Officials say it will take many months and maybe even years before the birthplace of jazz is rebuilt.

"We advise people that this city has been destroyed," New Orleans Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley told reporters on Monday. "We are simply asking people not to come back to this city right now."

Many evacuees like Percy Molere, 26, who worked in a hotel in New Orleans' famed French quarter, say they cannot keep their lives on hold for very long.

"If it took a month, I'd go back, but a year, I don't want to wait that long," said Molere. "Hopefully we're going to stay in Houston just to stay out of New Orleans" for the time being.

Experts caution that it is too soon to clearly predict the long-term impact of the devastation of New Orleans, a city of less than half a million people more than two-thirds of whom are black. But one scenario would be massive resettlement elsewhere.

"You've got 300,000, 400,000 people, many of them low income without a lot of means, who are not going to have the ability to wait out a year or two or three years for the region to rebuild," said Barack Obama, the only black member of the U.S. Senate.

"They are going to have to find immediate work, immediate housing, immediately get their kids into school and that probably will change the demographics of the region," he told Reuters on Monday during a visit to Houston, the largest single gathering point for the refugees.

Because of the legacy of slavery, southern states including Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have historically been home to the greatest concentration of U.S. blacks. In 1900, 85 percent of U.S. blacks lived in the South and as early as 1830, more than 58 percent of Louisiana's population was black.

Between 1940 and 1970 economic changes prompted 5 million blacks to quit the south for cities across the North including Chicago, Detroit and New York, marking one of the nation's largest internal migrations.

"It could have potentially that kind of effect," said Obama, whose father immigrated from Kenya.

MIGRATION TRENDS

New Orleans did not always follow the trend. Historically, far fewer residents have moved from New Orleans than from most American cities, despite its high poverty and crime rates.

Nicholas Lemann, author of "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America," was wary of predicting that Katrina would prompt major resettlement.

"It is kind of early to tell," he said.

But he said as officials elsewhere accommodate large numbers of blacks, they should avoid putting them in confined areas as Chicago did in the past, which created new urban woes. "They should think carefully on how to avoid the sort of ghetto phenomenon," he said.

Part of the migration trend will be set by what federal, state and local agencies do to help refugees rebuild their lives.

"What I do think should be focused on now is what is the Congress is going to do when they get back," former President Bill Clinton said in Houston on Monday. "How are we going to find jobs for these people, where are they really going to live, do they need some cash right away?"

"They feel lost."

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Flash: Bush Nominates Roberts As Chief Justice

Yahoo! News
Bush Nominates Roberts As Chief Justice

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer 3 minutes ago

President Bush on Monday nominated John Roberts to succeed William H. Rehnquist as chief justice, and called on the Senate to confirm him before the Supreme Court opens its fall term on Oct. 3.

The swift move would promote to the Supreme Court's top job a man who currently is being considered as one of eight associate justices.

"I am honored and humbled by the confidence the president has shown in me," Roberts said, standing alongside Bush in the Oval Office.

"He's a man of integrity and fairness and throughout his life he's inspired the respect and loyalty of others," Bush said. "John Roberts built a record of excellence and achievement and reputation for goodwill and decency toward others. in his extraordinary career."

The selection of Roberts, who has drawn little criticism, helps Bush avoid new political problems when he already is under fire for the government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina and the president's approval ratings are sagging.

Getting a new chief justice of Bush's choosing in place quickly also avoids the scenario of having liberal Justice John Paul Stevens making the decisions about whom to assign cases to and making other decisions that could influence court deliberations. As the court's senior justice, Stevens would take over Rehnquist's administrative duties until a new chief is confirmed.

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Relief plan

Relief plan

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The Cavalry

The Cavalry

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The French Quarter

The French Quarter

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