Greg Palast: New Orleans & Homeland Security

2007-04-28

Richard Moore

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Subject: 18 Missing Inches in New Orleans
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 23:08:43 -0400
From: Greg Palast <•••@••.•••>

18 Missing Inches in New Orleans

By Greg Palast

From the new updated and expanded paperback edition of the bestseller Armed 
Madhouse in stores now.

Since the initial release of Armed Madhouse in June 2006, much has changed in 
America.

The Department of Homeland Security, after a five-year hunt for Osama, finally 
brought charges against... Greg Palast.

As America crawled toward the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attack, 
Homeland Security charged me and my US producer Matt Pascarella with violating 
the anti-terror laws.

Don't you feel safer?

And I confess: we're guilty.

On August 22, 2006, we were videotaping Katrina evacuees still held behind 
barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It 
had been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW's (Prisoners of Dubya) were 
still in mobile home Gulags. I arranged a surreptitious visit with Pamela Lewis,
one of the unwilling guests of George Bush's Guantanamo on wheels. She told me, 
"It's a prison set-up" - except there are no home furloughs for these inmates 
because they no longer have homes.

You can't film there. FEMA is part of Homeland Security and its camps are off 
limits to cameras. We don't want Osama to know he can get a cramped Airstream by
posing as a displaced Black person.

To give a sense of the full flavor and smell of Kamp Katrina, we wanted to show 
that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is close by Exxon 
Petroleum's Baton Rouge refinery. The neighborhood goes by the quaint sobriquet,
"Cancer Alley."

So we filmed it. Uh, oh. The refinery, is a CAVIP, "Critical Asset and 
Vulnerable Infrastructure Point." Apparently, you can't film a CAVIP.

As to the bust: The positive side for me as a reporter was that I got to see 
Bush's terror-trackers in action. I should note that it took the Maxwell Smarts 
at Homeland Security a full two weeks to hunt us down. And we're on television.

Frankly, Matt and I were a bit scared that, given the charges, we wouldn't be 
allowed on a plane into New York for the September 11 commemoration. But what 
scared us more is that we were allowed on the plane.

Once I was traced, I had a bit of an other-worldly conversation with my would-be
captors. Detective Frank Penantano of Homeland Security told me, "This is a 
'Critical Infrastructure' Š and they get nervous about unauthorized filming of 
their property."

Well, me too, Detective. In fact, I'm very nervous that extremely detailed 
satellite photos of this potential chemical blast-site can be downloaded from 
maps.google.com.

Detective Penantano, in justifying our impending arrest, said, "If you remember,
a lot of people were killed on 9/11."

Yes, I remember "a lot" of people were killed. So I have this suggestion, 
Detective - and you can pass it on to Mr. Bush: Go find the people who killed 
them.

18 Missing Inches

Before the Big Bust, we learned a little more about how New Orleans drowned. 
Given my line of work, I'm not shocked at much. Yet, this one got to me.

"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state 
Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. 
Nobody."

The charges were so devastating - the White House's withholding from the state 
police the information that the city was about to flood - that from almost any 
source, I simply would have dismissed it. But this was not just any source. The 
whistleblower was Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy chief of the Louisiana State 
University Hurricane Studies Center, and the chief technician advising the state
on saving lives during Katrina.

That Monday night, August 29, 2005, the sleepless crew at the state Emergency 
Operations Center, directing the response to Hurricane Katrina, were high-fiving
it, relieved that Katrina had swung east of New Orleans, sparing the city from 
drowning.

They were wrong. The Army Corps, FEMA and White House knew for critical hours 
that the levees had begun to crack, but withheld the information for a day and 
night. The delay was deadly.

Van Heerden explained that levees don't collapse in a single bang. First, 
there's a small crack or two, a few feet wide, which take hours to burst open 
into visible floodways.

Had the state known New Orleans' bulwark was failing, they would have shifted 
resources to get out those left in the danger zone.

Van Heerden: FEMA knew on 11 o'clock on Monday that the levees had breeched. At 
2pm they flew over the 17th Street Canal and took video of the breech.

Question: So the White House wouldn't tell you that the levees had breeched?

Van Heerden: They didn't tell anybody.

Question: And you're at the Emergency Center?

Van Heerden: I mean nobody knew. Well, the Corps of Engineers knew. FEMA knew. 
None of us knew.

The prevarications continued all week.

Van Heerden said, "I went to the Governor's on Tuesday night and I said this, 
'There's a lot more breeches than one.' They said, "Whatever you need, go find 
out.' I got in an airplane, I flew. I counted 28 breeches."

The White House had good reason, or at least political and financial reasons, to
keep mum. A hurricane is an act of God, but catastrophic levee failure is an act
of the Administration. Once the federal levees go, evacuation, rescue and those 
frightening words - responsibility and compensation - become Washington's. Van 
Heerden knew that "not an act of God, but catastrophic failure of the levee 
system" would mean that, at least, "these people must be compensated."

Not every flood victim in America gets the Katrina treatment. In 1992, storms 
wiped out 190 houses on the beach at West Hampton Dunes, home to film stars and 
celebrity speculators. The federal government paid to completely rebuild the 
houses, which, hauled in four million cubic feet of sand to restore the tony 
beaches, and guaranteed the home's safety into the coming decades - after which 
the "victim's" homes rose in value to an average $2 million each.

But in New Orleans, instead of compensation, 73,000 have been sentenced to life 
in FEMA's trailer-parks in Louisiana. Even more are displaced to other states. I
asked van Heeerden about the consequences of the White House's failures, the 
information about the levee being just one of a list.

"Well, fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the bottom line."

But why did the levees fail at all if the hurricane missed the city? The 
professor showed me a computer model indicating the levees were a foot and a 
half too short - the result of a technical error in the Army Corp of Engineer's 
calculation of sea level when the levees were built beginning in the 1930s.

And the Bush crew knew it. Long before Katrina struck, the White House staff had
sought van Heerden's advice on coastal safety. So when the professor learned of 
the 18-inch error, he informed the White House directly. But this was advice 
they didn't want to hear. The President had already sent the levee repair crew, 
the Army Corp of Engineers, to Afghanistan and Iraq.

*********

Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans  - Sordid 
Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild, released this week by 
Penguin.

<http://www.gregpalast.com/mailing_list/lt/t_go.php?i=19&e=ODA=&l=-http--www.gregpalast.com/order-the-book/>

here.<http://www.gregpalast.com/mailing_list/lt/t_go.php?i=19&e=ODA=&l=-http--www.gregpalast.com/order-the-book>

For more information on the Armed Madhouse tour and for a podcast of 18 Missing 
Inches read by 'On With Leon's' Dr. Wilmer Leon go to 
<http://www.gregpalast.com/mailing_list/lt/t_go.php?i=19&e=ODA=&l=-http--www.gregpalast.com/>

You can also read "Who Drowned the Big Easy?," a new article by Greg Palast, in 
the next issue of YES! magazine.
-- 

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