Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? ‘Times-Picayune’ Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues

By Will Bunch

PHILADELPHIA Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans late on Tuesday. That’s because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city’s 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it’s level with the massive lake.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: “No one can say they didn’t see it coming. … Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation.”

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: “It appears that the money 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.”

Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps’ project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

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By Alastair Macdonald

A cameraman for Reuters in Iraq has been ordered by a secret tribunal to be held without charge in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison until his case is reviewed within six months, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday.

But another Reuters cameraman was released after being held for three days by U.S. troops following an incident in which his soundman was shot dead, apparently by American soldiers.

Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani was arrested by U.S. forces on August 8 after a search of his home in the city of Ramadi. The U.S. military has refused Reuters’ requests to disclose why he is being held. He has not been charged.

His brother, who was detained with him and then released, said they were arrested after Marines looked at the images on the journalist’s cameras.

“The CRRB has determined that Mr. Mashhadani remains a threat to the people of Iraq and they recommended continued internment,” Lieutenant Colonel Guy Rudisill said, referring to a hearing of the Iraqi-U.S. Combined Review and Release Board held at a secret location in Baghdad on Monday.

He said Mashhadani would be entitled to a review of his case within 180 days and would be held at Abu Ghraib.

Rudisill said he would not be allowed to see an attorney, his family or anyone else for the first 60 days of his detention, which began in Abu Ghraib last week.

Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger said: “I am shocked and appalled that such a decision could be taken without his having access to legal counsel of his choosing, his family or his employers.

“I call on the authorities to release him immediately or publicly air the case against him and give him the opportunity to defend himself.”

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The Gulf Coast has always been vulnerable to coastal storms, but over the years people have made things worse, particularly in Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina struck yesterday. Since the 18th century, when French colonial administrators required land claimants to establish ownership by building levees along bayous, streams and rivers, people have been trying to dominate the region’s landscape and the forces of its nature.

As long as people could control floods, they could do business. But, as people learned too late, the landscape of South Louisiana depends on floods: it is made of loose Mississippi River silt, and the ground subsides as this silt consolidates. Only regular floods of muddy water can replenish the sediment and keep the landscape above water. But flood control projects channel the river’s nourishing sediment to the end of the birdfoot delta and out into the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico.

Although early travelers realized the irrationality of building a port on shifting mud in an area regularly ravaged by storms and disease, the opportunities to make money overrode all objections.

When most transport was by water, people would of course settle along the Mississippi River, and of course they would build a port city near its mouth. In the 20th century, when oil and gas fields were developed in the gulf, of course people added petrochemical refineries and factories to the river mix, convenient to both drillers and shippers. To protect it all, they built an elaborate system of levees, dams, spillways and other installations.

As one 19th-century traveler put it, according to Ari Kelman, an environmental historian at the University of California, Davis, “New Orleans is surprising evidence of what men will endure, when cheered by the hopes of an ever-flowing tide of dollars and cents.”

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By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb News

In recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft for the first time acknowledges that Mozilla’s browsers pose a competitive threat and the software giant also notes that security vulnerabilities leave it open to legal action.

“Competitors such as Mozilla offer software that competes with the Internet Explorer Web browsing capabilities of our Windows operating system products,” said Microsoft in the annual 10K Form it’s required to file with the SEC. This is the first time that the Redmond, Wash.-based developer has referred to Mozilla by name in an SEC filing.

Although Microsoft last year named Linux as a competitive threat on the client side, Mozilla’s browsers, particularly Firefox, only climbed out of obscurity to grab 8-10 percent of the browser share after Microsoft filed 2004’s 10K.

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For some time, the central mystery in the Valerie Plame saga was which members of the White House staff leaked the undercover CIA operative’s identity to reporters. Although there are still many unanswered questions, at least part of the mystery has been solved: Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper has testified that he was told about Plame by White House senior adviser Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Yet while Cooper and his editors at Time spent two years keeping Rove and Libby’s — and their own — role a secret, they published articles that reported, without challenge, a statement from the White House that they knew to be false.

The issue of Time’s actions over the past two years was revived by an August 25 Los Angeles Times article stating that the magazine did not pursue a waiver from Rove allowing Cooper to testify in part because “Time editors were concerned about becoming part of such an explosive story in an election year.” While the favor this “concern” did for the Bush re-election effort has been criticized, Time’s lack of disclosure about its own role in the affair has gone largely unnoticed.

As the Los Angeles Times laid out the chronology, the details of which became publicly known only earlier this summer, on July 11, 2003, Rove told Cooper that the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA and had a role in sending Wilson on a 2002 mission to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there. After speaking to Rove, Cooper sent an email to Michael Duffy, Time’s Washington bureau chief, relating what Rove had told him about Wilson’s wife and saying that Rove had spoken on “double super secret background.” The next day, Cooper spoke to Libby, who confirmed Plame’s identity. Two days later, Robert D. Novak’s infamous column revealing Plame’s identity appeared.

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By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

If the thunder don’t get you
Then the lightning will …
— Robert Hunter

Try this madness on for size.

Here we have Pat Robertson, ostensibly a Christian, judging by the number of
crosses he surrounds himself with, calling for the assassination of Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez. Parsing the gibberish that pours forth from this fraud
of a holy man has been a parlor game in my home for a while now. My favorite
remains the statement made by Robertson in the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
when he said the attack was God’s judgment on America for our tolerance of gays,
feminists and the ACLU.

After you get past the immediate disgust that comes whenever you hear something
so vile, you are left with the Robertson pretzel-logic. Think about it: If the
attacks of 9/11 were the righteous judgment of the Lord, as the false priest
told us, then the terrorists were acting on behalf of and to the purposes of
God. In other words, they were doing holy and important work, and are therefore
above reproach. Call off the War on Terra, folks, and let’s bring the troops
home. We’re waging war on a bunch of dudes who were only seeking to follow Jesus’
direct orders.

Yes, such is life in the la-la land of Pat Robertson. This newest one, the
call to put a bag on Hugo Chavez, verges into equally bizarre territory. This
televangelist is supposed to be a Christian leader, and the last I’d heard,
Christ was the guy they called the Prince of Peace. I have this image of Robertson’s
version of Jesus, however, being an Aramaic rendering of the Max Fischer character
from the movie “Rushmore,” contemplating the murder of Chavez while
walking around Nazareth muttering, “He just made my list of things to do
today. I’m gonna pop a cap in his ass.”

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Televangelist and self-proclaimed Biblical prophecy expert Jack Van Impe denounced Pat Robertson’s call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, comparing Robertson to Osama bin Laden.

From the August 30 broadcast of Jack Van Impe Presents:

VAN IMPE: And right now, the National Association of Evangelicals informs us that this man has done damage, and it could actually take the lives of some of the missionaries in South America because the news media in South America is bombarding this thing across the airwaves around the clock. God forgive him.

[...]

Not only that, but Mr. Robertson, you are pro-life, and yet you wanted the members of the Supreme Court to die last year, and now the president of Venezuela. We believe this book: Thou shalt not kill; Exodus 20, verse 13. And my Bible says that this is wrong, and I want to challenge you right now to change your ways. Because we as Christians do not need an Osami [sic] Bin Laden leading us.

The weekly program Jack Van Impe Presents is carried on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest Christian broadcasting outlet; TBN also broadcasts Robertson’s The 700 Club, on which his comments about Chavez originally appeared. Founded in 1973 by Paul and Jan Crouch, TBN currently owns 23 U.S. full-power television stations and 252 low-power TV stations. TBN has also produced films, including The Omega Code. Van Impe’s program, in addition to appearing on TBN, is syndicated to TV stations across the country and is broadcast internationally as a radio program. Van Impe is the author of several books, including Revelation Revealed: A Verse-by-Verse Study (W Publishing Group, 1997).

— M.B.

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Diane Wilson; Foreword by Kenny Ausubel

Foreword

When the first-draft manuscript of An Unreasonable Woman arrived in the mail from Diane Wilson, I had already resolved, sight unseen, to option her story for development into a dramatic film. Her larger-than-life heroine

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By Paul Brown
The Guardian UK

Some of America’s leading scientists have accused Republican politicians of intimidating climate-change experts by placing them under unprecedented scrutiny.

A far-reaching inquiry into the careers of three of the US’s most senior climate specialists has been launched by Joe Barton, the chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce. He has demanded details of all their sources of funding, methods and everything they have ever published.

Mr. Barton, a Texan closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby, has spent his 11 years as chairman opposing every piece of legislation designed to combat climate change.

He is using the wide powers of his committee to force the scientists to produce great quantities of material after alleging flaws and lack of transparency in their research. He is working with Ed Whitfield, the chairman of the sub-committee on oversight and investigations.

The scientific work they are investigating was important in establishing that man-made carbon emissions were at least partly responsible for global warming, and formed part of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which convinced most world leaders – George Bush was a notable exception – that urgent action was needed to curb greenhouse gases.

The demands in letters sent to the scientists have been compared by some US media commentators to the anti-communist “witch-hunts” pursued by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

The three US climate scientists – Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University; Raymond Bradley, the director of the Climate System Research Centre at the University of Massachusetts; and Malcolm Hughes, the former director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona – have been told to send large volumes of material.

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By Ross Gelbspan  

THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming.

When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was global warming.

In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years, the explanation was global warming.

When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees and killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.

And when the Indian city of Bombay (Mumbai) received 37 inches of rain in one day — killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million others — the villain was global warming.

As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.

Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

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In 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked a major hurricane strike on New Orleans as “among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country,” directly behind a terrorist strike on New York City. Yesterday, disaster struck. One of the strongest storms in recorded history rocked the Gulf Coast, bringing 145 mph winds and floods of up to 20 feet. One million residents were evacuated; at least 65 are confirmed dead. Tens of thousands of homes were completely submerged. Mississippi’s governor reported “catastrophic damage on all levels.” Downtown New Orleans buildings were “imploding,” a fire chief said. Oil surged past $70 a barrel. New Orleanians were grimly asking each other, ”So, where did you used to live?” (To donate to Red Cross disaster relief, click here or call 1-800-HELP-NOW). While it happened, President Bush decided to … continue his vacation, stopping by the Pueblo El Mirage RV and Golf Resort in El Mirage, California, to hawk his Medicare drug benefit plan. On Sunday, President Bush said, “I want to thank all the folks at the federal level and the state level and the local level who have taken this storm seriously.” He’s not one of them. Below, the Progress Report presents “How Not to Prepare for a Massive Hurricane,” by President Bush, congressional conservatives, and their corporate special interest allies. 

SLASH SPENDING ON HURRICANE PREPAREDNESS IN NEW ORLEANS:  Two months ago, President Bush took an ax to budget funds that would have helped New Orleans prepare for such a disaster. The New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suffered a “record $71.2 million” reduction in federal funding, a 44.2 percent reduction from its 2001 levels. Reports at the time said that thanks to the cuts, ”major hurricane and flood protection projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. … Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now.” (Too bad Louisiana isn’t a swing state. In the aftermath of Hurricane Frances — and the run-up to the 2004 election — the Bush administration awarded $31 million in disaster relief to Florida residents who didn’t even experience hurricane damage.)

DESTROY NATURAL HURRICANE PROTECTIONS: The Gulf Coast wetlands form a “natural buffer that helps protect New Orleans from storms,” slowing hurricanes down as they approach from sea. When he came into office, President Bush pledged to uphold the “no net loss” wetland policy his father initiated. He didn’t keep his word. Bush rolled back tough wetland policies set by the Clinton administration, ordering federal agencies “to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands and an untold number of waterways nationwide.” Last year, four environmental groups issued a joint report showing that administration policies had allowed “developers to drain thousands of acres of wetlands.” The result? New Orleans may be in even greater danger: “Studies show that if the wetlands keep vanishing over the next few decades, then you won’t need a giant storm to devastate New Orleans — a much weaker, more common kind of hurricane could destroy the city too.” 

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By Diane Farsetta, PR Watch

Sometimes even the slickest public relations effort doesn’t improve a person’s or an institution’s image. Think of the U.S. State Department’s $15 million “Shared Values” ad campaign, which tried to assuage anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries.

More commonly, PR campaigns enjoy partial successes. That appears to be the case with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC, formerly called the School of the Americas or SOA), a Defense Department facility at Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia. While media coverage and Congressional attitudes haven’t improved appreciably since WHINSEC launched a major PR effort three years ago, the Institute has achieved a partial d

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The first TRMPAC-related trial set the stage for the criminal process to come

BY JAKE BERNSTEIN

oe Crews is relating how he convinced his partners at the law firm of Ivy, Crews & Elliott to jump into litigation involving the 2002 election.

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They were Iraq’s only real WMDs. The U.S. refused to secure them. Now Saddam’s nuclear and bioweapons scientists are dispersed and more dangerous than ever.

By Kurt Pitzer
Illustration: Tomer Hanuka

I MET THE MASTERMIND of Saddam Hussein’s former nuclear centrifuge program outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad a few days after U.S. troops took over the city in 2003. Despite the midday heat he was dressed in a sport coat and tie, which made him look incongruous amid a scruffy crowd of protesters gathered to shout slogans at the U.S. Marines guarding the hotel. He said his name was Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, and he showed me a printout of a prewar Washington Post story in which he was named as one of the Iraqi weapons scientists whom the U.S. government had very much wanted to interview. His eyes darted nervously back and forth between the protesters and the tense-looking Marines inside the cordon of concertina wire.

Minutes earlier he had approached a photographer friend of mine on the street, saying he wanted to reach out to Washington with some important information about Saddam’s nuclear program. It was a desperate move. He had tried contacting U.S. troops, but they had rebuffed him and threatened him with arrest if he showed up again. Now he wanted to know if I could use my satellite phone to help him.

At first I didn’t know whether to believe him. But that night, at his urging, I dialed the Washington number of David Albright, a former American member of the United Nations weapons inspections team in Iraq. When I explained who had given me his name, the line went silent for a moment.

“You are actually talking to Obeidi?” Albright finally asked. “Where is he? What did he say?”

Albright had met Obeidi in Iraq in the 1990s, when the U.N. inspectors were dismantling Saddam’s WMD programs. Saddam had kept Obeidi’s identity secret longer than that of any other scientist, Albright said. If anyone could say for sure what had happened to Iraq’s nuclear program, it was him.

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Does Anyone Know What We’re Doing in Iraq?

President Bush is out of touch with the American people, the US military, and international political
reality.

With every poll showing smaller
and smaller minorities approving of Bush and his war in Iraq,
with top US generals sending signals that they want to reduce
US troops in Iraq, and with the world at large viewing Bush as
a fanatic who cannot acknowledge his blunders and mistakes, Bush
announced in his weekly radio address that “our efforts
in Iraq and the broader Middle East will require more time, more
sacrifice and continued resolve.”

Does Bush think he is a dictator?

The polls show that it is the
American people’s resolve that Bush bring his Iraq venture to
an end, an orderly end if possible, but to an end. Every explanation
Bush has given for his invasion of Iraq has proved to be false.
Yet, Bush still speaks of “our noble cause,” while
taking great care to avoid Cindy Sheehan and her question, “What
is the noble cause?”

Perhaps Bush supplied the answer
in his reference in his weekly radio address to “our efforts
in . . . the broader Middle East.”

What are our efforts “in
the broader Middle East”?

The only American efforts “in
the broader Middle East” that have been defined are in the
policy writings of Bush’s neoconservative advisers who cooked
up the invasion of Iraq. For the neocons, our efforts are in
behalf of Israel’s security.

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By Matthew Robinson
Source: Reuters

CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug 28 (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday his government would take legal action against Pat Robertson and potentially seek his extradition after the U.S. evangelist called for Washington to assassinate the South American leader.

Robertson, who later apologized for the remark, said he was expressing his frustration with Chavez’s constant accusations against the administration of President George W. Bush.

“I announce that my government is going to take legal action in the United States … to call for the assassination of a head of state is an act of terrorism.” Chavez said in a televised speech.

The fiery left-wing critic of Bush’s foreign policy who frequently charges the U.S. government is plotting to kill him, called Robertson “crazy” and a “public menace.”

He said Venezuela could seek Robertson’s extradition under international treaties and take its claim to the United Nations if the Bush administration did not act.

Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition and a leader of the Christian right that has backed Bush, said on Monday that if Chavez “thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”

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The President, Cindy Sheehan, and How Words Die

By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over
and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

— George Bush, “President Participates in Social Security Conversation in New York,” May 24, 2005.

Forced from his five-week vacation idyll in Crawford by the mother of a dead
boy he sent to war, the President has recently given two major speeches defending
his war policies and, between biking and boating, held a brief news conference
at Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, Idaho. On August 22nd, he addressed the national
convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City for 30 minutes;
on August 24th, he spoke for 43 minutes to families of the Idaho National Guard
in the farming community of Nampa, Idaho.

As his poll figures continue on a downward spiral, he has found it necessary
to put extra effort into “catapulting the propaganda.” Though he struck
a new note or two in each speech, these were exceedingly familiar, crush-the-terrorists,
stay-the-course, path-to-victory speeches. That’s hardly surprising, since his
advisors and speechwriters have been wizards of repetition. No one has been
publicly less spontaneous or more — effectively — repetitious than our President;
but sometimes, as he says, you “keep repeating things over and over and
over again” and what sinks in really is the truth rather than the propaganda.
Sometimes, just that extra bit of repetition under less than perfect circumstances,
and words that once struck fear or offered hope, that once explained well enough
for most the nature of the world they faced, suddenly sound hollow. They begin
to sound… well, repetitious, and so, false. Your message, which worked like
a dream for so long, goes off-message, and then what do you do?

This is, I suspect, exactly what growing numbers of Americans are experiencing
in relation to our President. It’s a mysterious process really — like leaving
a dream world or perhaps deprogramming from a cult. Once you step outside the
bubble, statements that only yesterday seemed heartfelt or powerful or fearful
or resolute truths suddenly look like themselves, threadbare and impoverished.
In due course, because the repetitious worldview in the President’s speeches
is clearly a believed one (for him, if not all of his advisors) and because
it increasingly reads like a bad movie script for a fictional planet, he himself
is likely to look no less threadbare and impoverished, no less — to use a word
not often associated with him — pathetic and out of touch with reality to some
of those who not so long ago supported him or his policies.

Under these circumstances, it’s worth taking a close look at his recent speeches
and comparing his linguistic landscape with that of Cindy Sheehan, at the moment
a stand-in for the mute (and previously somewhat hidden) American dead from
his war as well as an encroaching Iraqi catastrophe.

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