[Marxism] L.A. Times: "Their mission, simply, is to turn New Orleans into a police state"

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(The headline in ARMY TIMES newspaper yesterday:

"Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans"
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1077495.php
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/41788

(As you will see when you read the article, the Guardsmen
were obviously given the impression they were entering a
war zone, but what they found instead was a population of
traumatized people who are desperately trying to survive,
not a popular resistance struggle as the Louisiana Guard's
"elite Special Response Team" must have been briefed.

(The social fabric of New Orleans, what was left of it, is
obviously falling apart under the pressure of the hunger,
thirst and sense of abandonment these people must be feeling.

(And Bush

===============================================================

<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-troops3sep03,1,3550798
.story?coll=la-headlines-nation>
KATRINA'S AFTERMATH
Met by Despair, Not Violence
As they begin to patrol the chaotic city,
troops are surprised by what they don't find.
By Scott Gold
Times Staff Writer

September 3, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - Forty-four troops pressed together in their truck,
swaying as one at every bump and turn like reeds in a river.

As they plunged into the dark water engulfing the business district
of New Orleans, their wake pushed the body of a woman onto the steps
of the Superdome. The floodwater had ripped her pants down to her
knees. She was facedown in the muck, a red ribbon still tied neatly
around her graying hair.

The troops, members of an elite Special Response Team from the
Louisiana Army National Guard, were the first convoy out of what was
rapidly becoming a massive military staging ground.

Their mission, simply, is to turn New Orleans into a police state -
to "regain the city," 1st Sgt. John Jewell said.

The truck lurched through the streets, past buildings burning
unabated and MPs in gun turrets. When they stopped to gear up for
their arrival at the New Orleans Convention Center, where more than
15,000 people had been living in squalor since Katrina, these words
echoed - for the first time, one would imagine - through the
intersection of Poydras Avenue and Carondelet Street: "Lock and
load!"

"Sixteen in the clip!" one Guardsman shouted, a common refrain used
to indicate that rifles are fully loaded.

But when they arrived, they did not find marauding mobs. They did not
come under fire. They found people who had lost everything in the
storm and, since then, their dignity.

The troops were part of the Superdome team that came to town before
the hurricane. For days, they had been cut off from news reports,
sleeping and working among the refugees and the vicious rumor mill at
the Superdome.

Their Superdome duties left them with a terrible image of the city.
They knew that out on the streets, a police officer had been shot in
the head, that looting was widespread, that snipers were taking shots
even at boaters trying to rescue victims from rooftops and attics.

Now assigned to patrol the streets, they headed for the New Orleans
Convention Center, in the city's central business district. Many had
wads of tobacco in their bottom lip and emitted long, dense streams
of spittle into the streets below.

Their mission was to establish a command post at the center, which
officials have increasingly turned their attention to, particularly
as the evacuation of the Superdome nears its end. They would then
build a staging area to bring in food and water. Finally, they would
send in teams to seize control of a massive and lawless facility.

The troops braced for the worst.

"Is this the calm before the storm?" one asked as they rolled through
the streets.

"There are a lot of gangs out here in the water," said Sgt. 1st Class
Maris Pichon, a 26-year veteran of the National Guard who served in
Afghanistan last year. "This is not going to be a cakewalk."

Two trucks pulled beside them, one carrying water and one a massive
pile of ready-to-eat military meals in boxes.

"Tell me they're not letting the food go in before the troops," one
Guardsman said.

"That's called bait," another said.

They pulled into a parking lot next to the convention center in full
battle mode. They spilled over the sides of the truck, formed a tight
circle and began walking outward, stepping over the detritus of the
refugees. Dirty underwear. A CD that included the song "Thank God I'm
a Country Boy."

A troop carrier rolled over an empty water bottle, popping it like a
balloon. The troops yanked their weapons to a firing position before
realizing what it was.

"No civilians in this parking lot!" a sergeant shouted. "Hold your
perimeter!"

No one came at them but a nurse. She was wearing a T-shirt that read
"I love New Orleans." She ran down a broken escalator, then held her
hands in the air when she saw the guns.

"We have sick kids up here!" she shouted. "We have dehydrated kids!
One kid with sickle cell!"

Another storm victim, Cory Williams, 50, a respiratory therapist
spending his third day at the convention center, greeted the troops
as they came up the stairs.

He had ridden out the storm at his 9th Ward house. On Tuesday
morning, when the flooding began in earnest, 6 feet of water came
inside in five minutes, he said. He tried to stay on top of a car in
the garage but the water continued to rise, so he made a run for it,
dragging several neighbors out behind him on an inflatable raft as he
swam, then waded, through the water.

He made it several miles west, toward downtown and higher ground,
then watched police stop at gunpoint a Ryder van that had been
hot-wired by thieves. The officers told the men inside that they had
to stop looting and must try to get people out of the neighborhoods,
that people were dying.

"Believe it or not, those dudes got the message," Williams said.

The thieves began ferrying people out of the devastated neighborhoods
to the east. The police had deputized looters.

"They had to," Williams said. "There was no other way to get people
out."

The thieves dropped him off at the convention center, where he stayed
until the troops arrived.

Though there have been reports of shootings and several rapes, the
crowd at the convention center does not appear to have degenerated
into the kind of chaos and violence seen at the Superdome.

Physically, however, the masses at the center might have been in
worse condition than those at the stadium, which was at least prepped
as a storm shelter.

People at the convention center had received a single deposit of food
and water, dropped from a helicopter, since Katrina's strike. The
drop caused a riot; Williams, an Army veteran, said he feared the
people clambering onto the pallet of food as it neared the ground
were going to pull the helicopter into the parking lot. The craft
never returned.

Children slept on laps and on the ground. There was an elderly
emphysema patient. A diabetic. The boy suffering from sickle cell
anemia, his eyes puffy and his skin yellowish-brown.

The troops arrived Friday, ready for anything.

"You've got to do something," said the nurse in the New Orleans
T-shirt.

"We'll get you some help as soon as some people get here," Lt. James
Magee said as the troops arrived. "OK?"

Inside, human waste covered the floor. An elderly woman tumbled out
of her wheelchair and landed on the ground. Her housedress was
soiled. A man had poured fruit punch into an industrial-size bottle
of floor cleaner and was drinking it with a straw.

"If you kept a dog in an environment like this, they would arrest you
for animal cruelty," said Cindy Davis, 39, the nurse, who had been
separated from her group while caring for a patient and stranded at
the convention center three days ago. "It's like a cesspool."

Frankie Estes, 80, said she was glad to finally see the troops. It
was a glimmer of hope. Friday night marked her fifth night sleeping
on the sidewalk in front of the center.

"I haven't had food or water for three days," she said. "I didn't
know if I was going to make it."

By Friday night, dinner had been served to a seemingly endless line
of refugees. Helicopters had begun descending on the convention
center, airlifting the most critically ill. The troops had found
their mission. It just wasn't what they thought it was going to be.
>



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism