Daily Kos

The story of how the MRGO amplified the effect of the hurricane was prominantly reported in the Washington Post, as was the fact that the levee walls did not go far enough down below the peat layer.

I also recall a diary shortly after the hurricane that talked about the explosive force of water through a small breech.  "Blew Holes" they call them.  This diarist recalled one along the Mississippi during the great flood in the '90's.  He said it sounded like a bomb going off.  Water can do that all by itself with no help from man.

 Sorry, but WTC 7 is highly suspicious and there have been NO explanations of why the building was brought down or how it was rigged for explosives in less than one or two hours.  The 9/11 Ommission Report failed to explain WTC 7.  

You can call me a tin foil hat wearing bastard for all I care, but WTC 7 is an 800 pound gorilla in the middle of the room.

Were Rumsfeld's lips moving when he said that?

I mean, really. You're claiming that Rumsfeld saying something means that it actually has any liklihood of it being true? I would have to say the opposite... he tried to take the credit for doing something right, because he figured nobody would be able to prove otherwise. And then, when someone did, he lied and said he never said it at all.

-fred

Ask yourself this, no really, stop and think for a sec, five years ago if someone told you that the CIA had secret prisons around the world where they whisk people off to be tortured, wouldn't you have said that THAT was a 'conspiracy theory'?

Believe whatever you want but when left on left crime occurs it breaks my heart. The right never defeats us we defeat ourselves. Let's just prove that we are smarter and cooler than the right and leave the left alone for awhile, like until we get a house of Congress back. You don't have to buy in, just say something weird happened in New Orleans and we need to find out what.

The borders of tinfoil hat land changed in early 2001 in the halls of the Supreme Court. One more question, how many times has the Administration said something is outlandish, ridiculous,etc. and then later...

Here's what Rumsfeld said Friday: "I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten - indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be."

Knowing how detached from reality this administration is, he probably did think the plane was shot down.

I debunked the 9/11 bomb and missile theories in a bunch of comments attached to the more ugly 9/11 questions thread and posts linked from them. And I did it with information from the conpiracy theorists own sites. On the other hand, LIHOP or even MIHOP is likely.

We need to concentrate on things bushco really did wrong. It is not like we have a shortage of material.

Cold Fusion anyone?

Damn, I could go on all day poking 757 sized holes into the official 9/11 conspiracy theory.  But as a member of Kos, I will refrain in this forum.

If there was an explosion, any evidence would have swept away.

There was going to be a "crater" at that site bomb or no bomb. If there had been a bomb, the soil that was exposed at the time of the explosion would have been washed away as the "crater" was enlarged by the flood waters.

NBC just had a UCB professor who investigated the levee break and found no evidence of a bomb.

A fully cloaked klingon battle cruiser blew away the levee with a photon torpedo. [snark]

There is no need for bombs when you have years of neglect and a substandard levee design to start with. Not to mention the fact that NO really hurt bushco politically. If they had blown up the levee, you can bet they would have been prepared with a quick, if ineffective, FEMA response to cover their ass.

And I do know that neither the Bush administration nor the Corps of Engineers has any credibility left in NOLA because of the way they handled the aftermath of the hurricane (and the failure to fix the levees properly to begin with).

Do I believe that an explosion occurred?  I believe that it is very unlikely?  Do I believe that racially motivated sabotage could happen in Louisiana?  Yes, I do.  Do I think that it did happen?  Not very likely.

And I have read enough of the diarist's previous work to understand his or her biases.

Does there need to be an independent investigation?  Yes.

Agreed on the thinking critically, asking questions, and taking no leaps of faith part.

There's a whole bushel of issues that need to be addressed with regards to the events surrounding Katrina, the Gulf states, and NO.

How's that for a run-on sentance?

I'd rather spend my time and money on effective persuits, not blind alleys.

Oddly enough, there's just about zip from the Good Old Days on his [non]performance in re the 27 flood.

Just like the blowing up of the levees in 27 has been memoryholed, like the Tulsa pogrom from the same time.

White history has been revisionist history all along.

Drawing on lessons he had learned feeding the starving European victims of World War I, Hoover swept into action. He cut through bureaucratic red tape, got aid to victims devastated by the flood and was dubbed a hero by the national press. There was only one thing that could tarnish Hoover's glowing image -- the treatment of African Americans in the Washington County levee camps. Hoover had visited the area and had approved the local flood relief committee's decision, under the leadership of Will Percy, to keep the African American refugees on the levee. But as conditions deteriorated in the camps, word slowly filtered North, and the scandal threatened to derail Hoover's presidential ambitions.

Hoover's friends urged him to get what they called "the big Negroes" in the Republican Party to quiet his critics, and Hoover turned to Robert Moton for the job. Hoover formed the Colored Advisory Commission, led by Moton and staffed by prominent African Americans, to investigate the allegations of abuses in the flood area.

The commission conducted a thorough investigation and reported back to Moton on the deplorable conditions. Moton presented the findings to Hoover, and advocated immediate improvements to aid the flood's neediest victims. But the information was never made public. Hoover had asked Moton to keep a tight lid on his investigation. In return, Hoover implied that if he were successful in his bid for the presidency, Moton and his people would play a role in his administration unprecedented in the nation's history. Hoover also hinted that as president he intended to divide the land of bankrupt planters into small African American-owned farms.

Motivated by Hoover's promises, Moton saw to it that the Colored Advisory Commission never revealed the full extent of the abuses in the Delta, and Moton championed Hoover's candidacy to the African American population. However, once elected President in 1928, Hoover ignored Robert Moton and the promises he had made to his black constituency. In the following election of 1932, Moton withdrew his support for Hoover and switched to the Democratic Party. In an historic shift, African Americans began to abandon the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and turned to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Democratic Party instead.

There's just a very strong and telling correlation between what was described as happening in 1927 and 2005. The parallels are unmistakeable. Destitute blacks camping out on the levee in 1927 = people camping out on the Interstate and in the SuperDome in 2005. Keeping the negroes on the levee in 1927 = Keep 'em from crossing the bridge to Gretna in 2005. If one can imagine a window into the past, I'm sure that the same crypto-racist justifications were used in 1927 as we saw in 2005.

Hoover may have done plenty of things right, but it is apparent that he played politics with the relief effort. I'm sure that this is the sort of cover-up that the Administration wishes it could have pulled off.

I highly recommend a read of the information on the linked site to anyone interested in the Katrina debacle. In some cases it seems like the response in 1927 was more competent and capable than today.

Rescue Work and Refugee Camps
Thousands of boats were pressed into service. Big river steamers were commandeered. Almost over night a thousand motor and patrol boats were mobilized from various sections of the country. They supplemented the hundreds of skiffs, launches, rowboats and other craft that did rescue work. Fleets of airplanes were used to discover marooned refugees. When it was all over, the prompt and heroic action had resulted in only 246 persons being reported drowned. The rescue fleet, under the direction of Engineer Officers of the United States Army who were assigned to the Red Cross staff, was a marvel of efficiency and organization.

It must save you a lot on thinking.

And the sad fact of the matter is that Democrats were just as complicit in undermining the protection of New Orleans as Republicans were.

There was bi-partisan support for MRGO, which contributed to overwhelming the levees.  There was bi-partisan acceptance of lower funding levels for the gulf coast restoration.

And unlike Iraq, there are real solutions for bringing New Orleans back--but where is the leadership and support?  Not really getting it from the Democrats, are we?

We can point to all the boogeymen we want to.  But in this day and age, when the hurricane hits, no matter where it hits, if you're old, poor, sick or homeless, you're dead.  

   My protestation is rather simple. If the diarist claims they know "What really happened" then they better be able to support this contention which the diarits fails to do. The diary is fine, occam's razor and all that, but the title is completely misleading.

People heard what sounded like an explosion. If an explosion is what it sounded like, an explosion is one thing of many things that it might have been.

It might have been other things. But people did not say that the Giant Spaghetti Monster reached down his Noodly Arm and zapped the levees with a loud "ba-boom". That would be "intelligent design".

Erosion from the water going through would have erased physical evidence of an explosion in the form of a crater.  More to the point you don't get burn marks under the bloody water.  You know, that stuff used to extinguish flame?

Now it's entirely possible for a crater-like structure to have shown up because of water flowing through a breach.  You see it all the time in fast-flowing rivers and in places like the Scablands of Washington which underwent massive flooding when the Lake Missoula ice dam broke a few thousand years ago.

The burn thing, however, is pure bullshit.  It'd be believed by people who look at Hollywood explosions with the massive bursts of flame and think that's the way explosives work.  People who have used real explosives, like me, know it's crap.

Really?  How many levees have you heard break?  How many has the average NO resident heard?  I suspect the answer is NONE.  

How many explosions have you heard?  Dozens, hundreds?

Under the circumstances, the natural thing for people to do would be to assume that something exploded.

Thus, in an atmosphere of racial prejudice, an urban legend is born.

I believe in adaptive psychology.  Psychological health is measured just by not by a mainsteam assessment of what is "sane" divorced from life circumstances, but also in terms of adaptive responses to one's actual life circumstances and the history of those like you.  

It is therefore an adaptive, healthy, response, psychologically for Blacks to assume the worst sometimes, when it comes to conspiracies that sacrifice them to benefit others.  History dictates that this has indeed been the case and there is no proof that anything meaningful has changed.  It is psychologically, unhealthy, and maladaptive, to reject in a knee-jerk fashion evidence that folks contend support their theory simply because of a moral judgment that "conspiracy based on race = so bad that nobody in America would stoop to it, so its crazy to suggest it."

What I wrote was in response to the assertion that there was, essentially, "something wrong" with these witnesses for believing that the levees were blown at the expense of poor Black neighborhoods to save more expensive, non-Black ones.  A willingness to believe such a thing is not insane, irrational or anything other than common sense based on a clear understanding of the past.

Now, if that belief continues to persist after someone actually proves that it did not occur following a real, thorough, evaluation of the actual levees and underlying riverbed (not just speculation, which right now is all anyone who insists that they weren't blown has; the same bupkis as those believing in a conspiracy), then and only then would words like "irrational" and "crazy" (used in various places in this diary thread) apply.

Oh -- and I hope you don't live downstream from a dam.  You know, those things that can be OPENED by the Army COE.

You want to talk to him and let him know how humorous you think his plight is?

This has been talked about for years and it is what people from Chalmette believe today.

And it's not a racial or ethnic cleansing thing.

My friend and his family lost everything. He's relocated to Florida. His family relocated to the northshore Covington area. These people lost everything.

My friend had what he left at my place.... a few changes of clothes

This idiot poster above is ridiculing what I'm saying, which is fine. It's his/her choice to have no heart/compassion. But these are real people and they, like the people who testified at the hearings yesterday, lost so much... and they want answers.

We ALL grow up with the belief that we will be sacrificed to "save New Orleans".  They flooded us out in 1972 down in Assumption Parish.  

And, it's interesting that every time the officials want to open the spillway, there's a protest by local environmentalists.  Tricky situation.  The officials claim the environmentalists endanger the city, the environmentalists claim the officials have a trigger finger and open the spillway when it clearly doesn't need to be opened.  Who'd have thought we (may) be having similar conversations about a chunk of the city?

Lotsa-lotsa.

And like some long-time Senator-friend of Cheney said yest'day or the day before - something to the effect of "Cheney don't give a rat's ass" what people say about him. Not that Unca Dick is the only string-puller in the mess, but I kinda figure that this is a fairly representative characterization.

It's not hard to imagine this scenario playing out, not in my mind.

It used to be hard to believe people would do something so wrong for such selfish reasons, but I've been shaking my head for 5 years at the immorality of the new Republicans; I'm almost numbed by their audacity.

As for bad polls, lost reputation, incompetency, public trust, all those effects came later and probably unexpectedly. Since when do these clowns plan for contingencies?

So....my family was subjected to the possibility of intentional drowning not in order to save New Orleanians from drowning, but just to make shipments easier.  Great.  <snark>

But this is much cooler, because WE are from New Orleans.

Damn I still love that I can say that after all of this. It brings tears to my eyes.