Wayne Madsen has outdone himself with this report on strange jamming of radio frequencies in New Orleans. There’s also an update without a direct link, dated Sept. 4, if you go for such things (search the page for “jamming”).
PS. Why am I so skeptical? Lack of imaginable motive, primarily.
It has a certain twisted logic: If the thing that is most responsible for Bush’s bad week is the bad TV images, and the reporters who saw with their own eyes that he and his underlings were lying–then surely the answer is to remove the reporters from the picture so we can all get back to spinning as usual.
Thus, blogs report “Rape, murder, beatings” in Astrodome, say evacuees — but the press is being excluded from the Astrodome, just as the press is being excluded from the ugly side of the recovery efforts (FEMA: “We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media.” And they are trying to enforce it too). You can get more details of the campaign against information at Jacob Appelbaum’s blog, along with the long, sad saga of his attempts to set up a low-power radio station there in order to provide information to its denizens. [Also, see the flickr collection of pictures from Houston, where the people evacuated are being held.]
[Update: more details at TPM, notably this link to Brian Williams’s account of the military training weapons on reporters. (Sudden flash of all the journalists shot by our troops in Iraq?)]
[Update2: Kevin Drum sees the pattern here also.]
Of course, it wasn’t just a failure of the administration’s media policy. It was a much more telling failure, a failure of the government to even care. A failure dramatically underlined by a rapier-like anecdote told by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about Bush’s reaction when she told him that he should fire FEMA Head Michael Brown:
‘He said ‘Why would I do that?”’ Pelosi said.
“‘I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?””
Pelosi then said what needed to be said: the US government is headed by someone who is, in her words, ”Oblivious, in denial, dangerous.”
Until we get all the facts out, any assignment of the responsibility for the human component of this natural and human-enhanced disaster must have an air of tentativeness to it. Nevertheless, here’s how it looks right now.
Besides the universal condemantion of FEMA’s failures, much of the early sparring seems to be centered on the role of Mayor Ray Nagin. A series of posts at Sivacracy suggests that the Rove machine has picked on him to be their fall guy:
Whoever is spreading this story — most likely a part of the larger disinformation campaign — from what I can tell (and we don’t have all the facts) it seems to be pretty much baloney. We have federal supremacy; we have FEMA because a locality devastated by a huge disaster has lost the ability to act as first responder and/or is likely to be overwhelmed. And it sure isn’t the case that FEMA couldn’t act without an instruction book from a mayor or a governor as to whether food and water and doctors were needed.
But that doesn’t make the local officials heroes either. This mayor — and past mayors — are not blameless for the state of the infrastructure. [Although it’s notable that the Bush administration slashed federal funds to strengthen the levees and then (I gather) raided what was left for another purpose–Iraq.] This mayor — like past mayors — is not blameless for signing off (weeks in advance) on an evacuation policy that was, at best, radically insufficient to meet the needs of the poorest and most helpless. And this mayor, at least in hindsight, seems to have waited a long time to order an evacuation.
Even after the storm, there have been a number of very ugly reports of local authorities either blocking the Red Cross, or acting like racist thugs.
None of that excuses the total evil of FEMA’s sloath, failure and malfeasance both as the hurricane was approaching and after it hit: turning away help, providing too little itself, too late.
Nor does it excuse the person who appointed the incompetents at the helm. Oh no, not at all.
One of the Daily Kos diarists has a Another NO Story from the inside, a first-person account of being trapped in the Big Uneasy.
I’ve included just part of this ugly story below. It’s very ugly, and I urge you to read all of the original, it’s horrific stuff.
Revolutions have started over less.
[Update: Original source, via Dave Farber’s list.]
Obsidian Wings makes the case in At All Levels that the Mayor of New Orleans waited too long to order an evacuation. Yes, the hurricane track was originally away from the city, but even after it shifted, there was first no order, then a request for a ‘voluntary’ evacuation, and then, at least nine hours late, the actual order.
(None of which absolves the feds for a substantial failure to pre-position assets, and a very near total failure to get into gear once the hurricane had passed.)
liberal pen pal .:. FEMA: Agency of the Damned has lnks to all kinds of help that FEMA turned away. Amazing.
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