Left2Right Comments

In case the video piece falls off the BBC's front page, the direct URL is here. Harrowing stuff.
 

Prof. Darwall, allow me to enlighten you as to why all those guns are there. Since you are so fond of the BBC, I'll lead with them:

[22 yr-old Brit tourist male in New Orleans] witnessed a good deal of violence, with scuffles going on and people breaking things.

"The group [of Brit tourists trapped in NO] really feared for their safety because they were being targeted because they were the only white people there.

"The National Guard moved them out into the basketball stadium next door where the very sick were being held.

.....

He said of his eventual Superdome refuge: "There was a lot of heat from the people in there, people shouting racial abuse about us being white.

"The army warned us to keep our bags close to us and to grip them tight."

He said he saw crack cocaine being used in the filthy toilets, youngsters breaking into soft drink machines and men brawling. Urine and excrement spilled into corridors where they were sleeping.

Whole thing from the BBC here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/4208792.stm

(Not that I blame them one whit for breaking into the soda pop machines, for god's sake.)

Australia's Herald Sun is reporting this about Australian tourists:

Mr McNeil's father, Peter, said his son was with about 60 other foreign tourists who had fled the Superdome.
"They couldn't stay another night, the situation was so bad," he said.

"People were just staring at them and making suggestions that they were going to kill them."

John's sister Susie said he saw shocking acts of violence amid fierce racial tension in the Superdome.

"It's turned into a black against white thing," she said. "My brother has witnessed murders, stabbings, rapes . . . it's like a Third World country."

rest here: http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,16473521%5E663,00.html

Then there is this:

I had to walk two blocks to get here and I have arthritis and three ruptured discs in my back," said Selma Valenti, 80, as her husband lay beside her, being revived by a policeman in riot gear. The two had eaten nothing since Wednesday.

Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.

"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said, sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people in charge told us this morning."

Rest here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050903/ts_nm/mayhem_dc

Shooting at rescue helicopters, at contractors trying to plug the levees, terrorizing doctors in hospitals to loot the pharmacy and such, that all went on. Liberal Democratic Gov. Blanco despairingly authorized ordered the National Guard to shoot to kill, so that rescue efforts could commence.

Hope that clarifies things for you.

--Mona--
 

"Shooting at rescue helicopters [...] terrorizing doctors in hospitals to loot the pharmacy"

Check this:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1087205
(see the last few paragraphs)

And this:
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/3910.php

I don't think there's actually any confirmed instances of either happening.

In the longer term, one has to ask why there's such racism in New Orleans (I can't imagine the wealth differences help), and whether sending in a bunch of white cops to shoot black people is really going to help.
 

In the longer term, one has to ask why there's such racism in New Orleans (I can't imagine the wealth differences help), and whether sending in a bunch of white cops to shoot black people is really going to help.

New Orleans has long had a crime rate that, at various times, made it the murder capitol of the country. On my first visit there it was a black sketch artist in the French Quarter who told my travel party that under no circumstances should we leave the boundaries of the Quarter for the surrounding black neighborhood. He said it would be very dangerous.

While I am certain some of the claims about the murder and mayhem there in the after-math of Katrina will turn out to be urban legends, these are fed by an underlying reality. I've seen reports at several legal blogs, based on an NPR story, along these lines:

Johnson v. California and racial tension at the Superdome

Posted by Ted Frank
British and Australian news sources are reporting that white foreign tourists have been evacuated from the Superdome to other staging sites and shelters because they were being threatened on account of their race: BBC account (via Kaus); Australian Herald Sun account; Australian Age/Reuters account.

According to Bearing Blog, officials seem to be planning to racially segregate the emergency shelters to avoid racial tension; the blogger comments on the linguistic somersaults needed in an NPR interview to avoid the word "segregation."

Ann Althouse reminds us that February's 5-3 decision, Johnson v. California, authored by Sandra Day O'Connor, held that the safety concern of warring racially-based gangs in prisons did not create an exception to strict scrutiny of racial segregation. (The majority for this position, as Althouse notes, is actually 6-2; Justice Stevens' dissent protested that the Court should have gone ahead and found the practice unconstitutional rather than remanding to the courts below.)

If this is true, if "shelter apartheid" is happening, that reflects a very serious racial divide; the fear of violence must be great indeed if normally risk-averse bureaucrats are implementing such a scheme, and risking the accusations that are sure to arise. But there is a reality driving such decisions.

In any event, I surely do not doubt the need for all those guns. Indeed, they should have been in place at the outset.

--Mona--
 

The US military might not be good at a lot of things, but no one ever accused them of failing to generate gigs and gigs of reports, including after-action reports.

The Coast Guard and Navy and etc. commands all provide very detailed operational documents that are available on-line and can be used to confirm or deny the claims made here with verifyable documents. Heck, just surf over to the Coast Guard web-site, or the Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 461, or etc. and check for oneself.

It'd be fairly easy, considering air traffic control data is carefully recorded, transcribed, and stored, to verify the story here. Yet it doesn't appear that any serious attempt has been made to do so. Why?