Another Side Emerges in Post-Katrina Sniper Case (Snipers on Bridge)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nosnipers24nov24,0,2395328.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.

Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department's resolve to take back the streets.

But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city's east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.

A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a child-like innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.

[DeltaLady]

1. Heartsick for these preventable tragedies

More deaths because of criminal negligence and ineptitude. The people of New Orleans suffered unimaginable hardships in the days following Katrina; more than most people experience in a lifetime. I pray for all the victims; the living and the dead.

[RagingInMiami]

2. And all those reports of guns being fired at helicopter relief efforts

Was never confirmed either. It just doesn't add up.

Why would even the hardened criminals shoot at a helicopter bringing in food for the survivors?

And if they were military helicopters, why would they retreat without a fight?

[DoYouEverWonder]

10. Turned out that some of the people firing guns

weren't firing at anything, they were just trying to let people know where they were and to get their attention.

[Historic NY]

3. I find it sickening.........

and I am a former LEO. Something went terribly wrong & innocents suffered.....that is not our creed to protect & serve. At least it appears it hasn't been whitewashed yet. When this story first broke I sensed that something wasn't quite right.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Crap! I KNEW there was something wrong with those reports!

The "snipers" were the excuse for stopping aid. I think Bush was stopping aid deliberately (apparently, with support from black ops or collusive police shooting innocents and saying there were snipers) to strongarm Blanco into total White House control of the Katrina loot. And I suspect that why he was doing that is that he was being blackmailed by Cheney on Traitorgate. That was Cheney's price for not ratting on Bush. Bush didn't fully succeed with Blanco (and since when does a president personally perform dirty tasks like this--where were his aides and operatives?), but the first no-bid contract then went to...guess who?

I think there was a lot of Traitorgate stuff going on behind the scenes, during Katrina. I think Rove was on strike (he later put out a story he had been in the hospital during--total B.S., I think--forced to make something up because his absence was noticed). He let Bush hang out there on his own, twisting in the wind--getting caught on camera eating cake, etc., while Americans were dying of neglect, and a big chunk of the U.S. was getting blown off the map. Bush's cluelessness went on for days. (WHERE were his handlers?) Rove negotiating a pardon?

Then there was the Daddy Bush-Clinton moment--they just came out of nowhere and were standing behind Bush. I thought there might actually be a coup in progress.

All of this under the corporate news monopoly radar. Then, after Katrina was all over with, Fitzgerald seemed to spring out of nowhere with his indictment of Libby.

Thinking back thru it all, I'm pretty sure I'm right. I mean, I couldn't believe how bad Bush's P.R. was, and the conspicuous absences of Cheney, Rove, Rice. Cheney may have been in his rathole, but he was not uninvolved. He was ordering ground crews to restore power to the Texas to northeast pipeline and NOT to two rural hospitals, one of which was already on generators. (The crews were puzzled by the orders--but it came right from the VP's office--an intervention.)

God, these people are so-o-o-o-o-o-o dirty!

[chat_noir]

6. call CSI

Seriously, though, where is the forensic evidence? Weren't the bullets recovered?

[uppityperson]

7. Aw hell, I'm glad that these incidents are still being brought forward.

It was very chaotic, much of this will be worth movies. The USA is no better than anywhere else, any other country. It can, and has, easily reverted to such "uncivilized" behavior that it condemns elsewhere in the world.

[donsu]

8. kicking for justice

nt

[stalphonzo]

9. another example of the police being

out of control jack booted thugs. maybe we should take the guns away from them first.

[maddezmom]

11. kick to combine

[Wilms]

12. Doubts Now Surround Account of Snipers Amid New Orleans Chaos

November 24, 2005

latimes.com : National News

Doubts Now Surround Account of Snipers Amid New Orleans Chaos

By James Rainey, Times Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS — Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.

Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department's resolve to take back the streets.

But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city's east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.

A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.

snip

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nosnipers24nov24,0,2395328.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[MisterP]

13. as long as it's entered the public consciousness--like Dean "being the

only one responsible" for his losses due to the "scream" or al-Jazeera being a "terrorist" network--the presstitues have done their job

[SoCalDem]

14. It was mass hysteria, coupled with hunger, thirst, fear...

But unfortunately someone with a cell phone started the urban myth, and radio "ran with it" because it was a logical step (in their thinking) to bolster the unowrthiness of the people "left behind".. They're LOOTERS, Ahh tell ya..and now they're SHOOTIN' at rescuers"..

The hospital (where the rumor started) was desperately trying to be evacuated, and maybe thisd was someone's lame attempt to make the situation appear more dire than it already was. They had been on their roof, watching another hospital get evacuated..but not them..

The thing backfired though, because suddenly NO help came for anyone..

[annabanana]

16. It was fear- MONGERING...

They wanted there to be an excuse to militarize the situation to the maximum degree possible, as quickly as they could.

Hysteria was caused by the mass movement of heavily armed personnel through residential neighborhoods..

[La_Fourmi_Rouge]

15. No Kidding???

Whoulda thunk it?

[tuvor]

17. Remember the reports of planes being shot at?

I recall at least one news item that said the FAA had no such information.

[Festivito]

18. A theme unfolds: Officials were not the answer, but the problem itself.

Especially the ones deciding not to allow food to be delivered.

[markus]

21. You are correct

The FAA reported that they were in constant contct with all aircraft, military and civilian, all through the immediate aftermath, and there were no reports of ground fire.

There are a lot of incidental reports from the ground of people firing into the air to try to attract rescue.

[Roy]

19. And to think, the Looter Shooters......

trolling DU at that time used this incident as confirmation for all the other myths they were spreading around here about the out of control hurricane victims.

[Peace Patriot]

20. Goddamn, this makes me mad! It was a black op, for sure.

Bush was meanwhile trying to strongarm Blanco for martial law and total White House control--I think using the poor and dying of N.O. as an extortion item. My guess: Cheney was blackmailing Bush on Traitorgate. Cheney's price for not ratting on Bush: total control of the Katrina loot, first no-bid contract to Halliburton.

So often, we can SMELL these set-up's as they happen, but can't prove anything. I felt that way about Nick Berg and his beheading. It didn't smell right. Turns out, Nick Berg was in FBI custody for ten days or so, before they released him onto the streets during the Falluja uprising (where he was supposedly captured and beheaded on video), and that they had interrogated him previously, way back in early 2002, because when they finally got access to Zachararias Mousaoui's computer (denied to Collen Rowley prior to 9/11), they found Nick Berg's email account and password in Mousaoui's computer, and, according to Nick's father, accepted Nick's story that he had met Mouaoui by coincidence, on a bus, going to a college class, and had lent him his computer. In addition to this story not making any sense technically, it just smells to high heaven that an American with a tie to Zacharias Mousaoui was permitted to enter Iraq to look for business (in telecommunications), and was allowed to just wander around Iraq on his own. Not credible.

Somehow we need to achieve a capability of investigating these highly suspicious events when they happen. We're getting better and better with our Smell-O-Meters on the internet. (The capturing of screen shots of the real exit poll numbers on election day 2004 was a good example.) So, those made-up looter/snipers in NO were probaly Blackwell or Titan operatives, carrying out a mission for Dick Cheney (likely). (You know what else he was doing during Katrina--besides not lifting a finger to improve the Fed response? He was ordering ground crews to restore power to the Texas-to-northeast pipeline and NOT to two rural hospitals, one of which was already on generators.)

[JFreitas]

22. Social breakdwon

I always view accounts of social cohesion breakdons with extreme skepticism. This is not to say that they won't happen, just that they're rare, and generally wouldn't happen during a natural disaster. Obviously, the prevalence of firearms in US society makes some problems more acute than in other countries - there will always be fringe elemenst of any society that can profit from disorder, and in the US they're armed with semiautomatic weapons, making them more disruptive.

There were sufficiently different explanations of events in New Orleans to make me suspect that in fact most reports of complete social breakdown were bogus or exagerated. Here in Portugal many newspapers showed pictures from US media side-by-side depicting the same event (survivors wading in water with supplies taken from stores in hand) noting the radically different captions depending on race (blacks "were looters using the general disorder and natural calamity to rampage and steal" whereas whites "were exeercising their ingenuity and survival spirit after securing supplies from a nearby store"). It seems to me that it's in the interest of the powers that be do show that without them them in charge things would totally breakdown and we will all be in risk of being killed.

Let me paste some excerpts from "What we learned from Katrina", from Ran Prieur's site (http://www.ranprieur.com):

"... Ordinary people are competent and decent when you strip away the system and the stupid roles it requires us to play. A catastrophe is a huge opportunity for us to learn to help each other as equals, for people suddenly free of jobs and cars and television to rediscover their aliveness, to come together and build something beautiful. This will not be permitted. It's the Federal Emergency "Management" Agency. People with their survival needs met and free time are a huge threat to management. The reason they sent troops to New Orleans instead of food and water, the reason police violently broke up groups of people who managed to come together and take care of each other, the reason they sealed off the whole city except for official evacuation buses in which people were treated worse than cattle, is the same reason you have to have a job to eat and occupy space, and the same reason they had to kill the Indians: It is so deeply ingrained in human nature to build cooperative non-coercive communities, that the domination system cannot afford to give us an inch. (...) "Roving gangs" happen but they're overrated. They do not attack hard targets and fight to the last man like in the movies. The "lawlessness" in New Orleans confirms what I wrote in The Slow Crash, which is just what anyone can see in history: Even when people are starving, it is very rare that someone will kill to steal food. Low-status sociopaths attack easy targets: a pretty young woman will be raped. A rich tourist will be robbed. If you're defending a private home or business with a grim look and a big gun, you almost certainly won't have to use it."

And from Slow Crash:

(...)"I forgot to mention the last thing the guy said, which was that he had told the same story many times to people in the US and the response was always, "That wouldn't happen here -- it'd be total anarchy, people would be at each other's throats." . This shows how effective the propaganda is but it's interesting just how wrong those predictions were, although the propaganda system was able to maintain the illusion perfectly for people (in the mainstream) outside New Orleans. The system tells us that without it we would be living in anarchy but in actual fact we would be living in community and that's what the troops were doing in New Orleans -- preventing outbreaks of community, not outbreaks of anarchy."

I am not sure he is 100% certain, but he certainly makes a good point.

Best

José de Freitas
Portugal

[annabanana]

23. excellent post, thank you

And welcome to DU :toast:

[peacebird]

24. Welcome to DU!

An excellent, well thought out post.
:toast:

Looking forward to your future posts!

[glitch]

26. Third annabanana and peacebird - very welcome to DU! nt

[MisterP]

29. we actually noticed the caption discrepancy here, early on

[1932]

25. I would love to take a look at some of the DU posts on this when it first

happened to see who was skeptical and who bought it and to get a sense in what sort of thought processes those different groups went through.

[rayofreason]

27. It would make for interesting reading

Of the body of reporting "from the scene" of Katrina, what, exactly, has stood the test of time and investigation of fact? Precious little, it would seem - with the more sensational the more likely to be bogus.

[1932]

28. Maybe someone with a star will help a brother out?

[gmaki]

30. I got in a big fight with my dad and brother the day this happened.

My brother, father and I were working on a rental property I own the day this happened. We had a portable radio in the house with us that we were using for music and news updates.

When this story came across the radio my brother said "Good!" I kind of gasped and shook my head at his statement. He asked me what the deal was and I asked "how can you cheer about people getting killed?" of course at that time the story was 8 looters killed while shooting at rescue workers.

He said they should shoot all the looters and he was glad they were killed. I pointed out that he had no idea if the story was true or if looting was really as big of a problem as the media made it out to be. I pointed out that the reports of people firing at helicopters had already been debunked.

Now a little context on my bro here. He is a fireman. I have a lot of fireman in my family. I have an uncle who was shot at during the Watts riots. So of course the next thing my brother says is "Are you going to tell me that my friends (other fireman) are lying when they say they have been shot at?" he was apparently referring to some other incident that I was not aware of us but I again pointed out that so much of what was being reported in NO was BS, regardless of what had happened in riots or other incidents in the past.

My dad joined in and took my brothers side and it really got pretty heated after awhile. Finally they both kind of "had a talk with me" about how my problem was I just wouldn't listen to them when they were making sense, after which they both pretty much cut me off and we worked in silence for about an hour until some lighter topic came up and we could again talk and joke and just forget about the fight.

Nonetheless I was pretty hurt by the whole thing, and quite dissapointed in my family. My brother is not your typical freeper but he does still believe that there are WMD's hidden somewhere. My dad on the other hand despises Bush but still has a tendency to defend authority whenever the question arises. he was a peace officer before he retired.

Anyway, I have been searching DU for "danziger bridge" almost once a week waiting for the real story to come out. and so here I am in this thread. of course I will printing out two copies of this story, and mailing them along with a cheeky cover letter to my brother and my father.

So thanks DU for coming through for me. I knew this story would eventually be corrected and I knew someone at DU would find it!

[guruoo]

31. I knew it was just a matter of time....

Sounds like they were trying hard
not to leave any witnesses behind.