This was the most amazing hearing. If you didn't see it yesterday look for it to repeat. The Congressmen tried to get Mama D to not go overtime and she scolded them, saying she came up from N'awlins with a list of complaints from fellow victims and she is going to read ALL of them.
Then she accused Chris Shays of accusing the victims of lying about police pointing M-16s at 5 year olds, of perfectly fine housing projects that Bush had steel-plated and closed, of a LEVEE BOMB (and she went "BA-BOOOOOM! right in the hearing room), of concentration camp tactics on the I-10 Causeway, of outright Ethnic Cleansing.
One chagrinned Repuke said "Could you please refrain from calling it a Concentration Camp", to which eveacuee Leah Hodges exclaimed "No I will not! They separated children from families, did not feed us or give us water, they let people die, a woman lost her baby. And all the while trucks are going past--with no supplies--just full of soldiers with M-16s. It was like Hitler."
(There is no transcript up yet so I'm trying to remember)
IT WAS FANTASTIC AND CYNTHIA MCKINNEY AND WILLIAM JEFFERSON WAS THERE. THE REPUBS TRIED TO DEFEND THE RACISM AND ETHNIC CLEANSING CHARGE BY SCOFFING AT THEM.
WASHINGTON --Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina said Tuesday that racism contributed to the slow disaster response, at times likening themselves in emotional congressional testimony to victims of genocide and the Holocaust. The comparison is inappropriate, according to Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla.
"Not a single person was marched into a gas chamber and killed," Miller told the survivors.
"They died from abject neglect," retorted community activist Leah Hodges. "We left body bags behind."
Angry evacuees described being trapped in temporary shelters where one New Orleans resident said she was "one sunrise from being consumed by maggots and flies." Another woman said military troops focused machine gun laser targets on her granddaughter's forehead. Others said their families were called racial epithets by police.
"No one is going to tell me it wasn't a race issue," said New Orleans evacuee Patricia Thompson, 53, who is now living in College Station, Texas. "Yes, it was an issue of race. Because of one thing: when the city had pretty much been evacuated, the people that were left there mostly was black."
Not all lawmakers seemed persuaded.
"I don't want to be offensive when you've gone though such incredible challenges," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn. But referring to some of the victims' charges, like the gun pointed at the girl, Shays said: "I just don't frankly believe it."
"You believe what you want," Thompson said.
The hearing was held by a special House committee, chaired by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., investigating the government's preparations and response to Katrina. It was requested by Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
"Racism is something we don't like to talk about, but we have to acknowledge it," McKinney said. "And the world saw the effects of American-style racism in the drama as it was outplayed by the Katrina survivors."
The five white and two black lawmakers who attended the hearing mostly sat quietly during two and a half hours of testimony. But tempers flared when evacuees were asked by Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., to not compare shelter conditions to a concentration camp.
"I'm going to call it what it is," said Hodges. "That is the only thing I could compare what we went through to."
Of five black evacuees who testified, only one said he believed the sluggish response was the product of bad government planning for poor residents -- not racism.
http://www.boston.com/...
There are numerous witnesses to the explosion sound and divers have found a 30-foot crater at the bottom of the 17th St. Levee that flooded the 9th Ward, said the panel. In addition, they said historically, towns have blown levees upstream to prevent their own town from flooding, so blowing up levees was nothing new for Louisiana.
Don't know if the Levee Bomb is true or not, but they all swore to God it was the truth. All the rest of the Ethnioc Cleansing charges certainly appear to be true to me, especially the shuttering of the housing projects that NEVER GOT FLOODED.
Anyone else see it yesterday or last night on C-Span 2?
Update [2005-12-7 14:26:47 by Sherlock Google]: Otis704 found this. Good Catch O!
When the rains broke records in April 1927, the Gulf of Mexico was full and worked as a stopper to the Mississippi. The Mississippi was full, too, pushing its own waters up tributaries, breaking levees and causing flooding as far as Ohio and Texas. All that water had to go somewhere. It couldn't go to New Orleans, panicky city fathers told the Army Corps of Engineers; it would devastate the regional economy.
To save New Orleans, the leaders proposed a radical plan. South of the city, the population was mostly rural and poor. The leaders appealed to the federal government to essentially sacrifice those parishes by blowing up an earthen levee and diverting the water to marshland. They promised restitution to people who would lose their homes. Government officials, including Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, signed off.
On April 29, the levee at Caernarvon, 13 miles south of New Orleans, succumbed to 39 tons of dynamite. The river rushed through at 250,000 cubic feet per second. New Orleans was saved, but the misery of the flooded parishes had only started. The city fathers took years to make good on their promises, and very few residents ever saw any compensation at all.
The water, which had started rising on Good Friday, would not recede until July. Many victims would never return to their homes. Hoover, who won support for leading relief efforts, went on to win the presidential election. And the Corps of Engineers, who had said the levees would hold, was humbled. Says Daniel: "People complained about the corps . . . but they never blamed the river. They understood: 'That's the river. That's nature. That's what it's supposed to be doing.' " -Judd Slivka
