[Vision2020] 09-08-05 LA Times OP/ED: The thin veneer of civilization

[Burt Sid]

Some of the goury details.  Truly disgusting behavior by some of
the citizens.  The government did not make them commit these
hideos crimes.

---

http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tporleans/archives/2005_09.html#077206

Tuesday, September 06, 2005


Mayor says Katrina may have claimed more than 10,000 lives

Bodies found piled in freezer at Convention Center

By Brian Thevenot
Staff writer

Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food
service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Monday,
flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started
pointing out bodies.

"Don't step in that blood - it's contaminated," he said. "That one
with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man."
Then he shined the light on the smaller human figure under the white
sheet next to the elderly man.

"That's a kid," he said. "There's another one in the freezer, a
7-year-old with her throat cut."

He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his
camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor.
"There's an old woman," he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a
sheet. "I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to
death," he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.

Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and
40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. "It's not on, but
at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip
Thompson.

The scene of rotting bodies inside the Convention Center reflected
those in thousands of businesses, schools, homes and shelters across
the metropolitan area. The official death count from Hurricane Katrina
in Louisiana was 71 as of Monday evening, but that included only those
bodies that had been brought to a make-shift morgue in St. Gabriel.

Nearly a full week after Hurricane Katrina, a rescue force the size of
an invading army had not yet begun the task of retrieving the bodies
Sunday. What's more, officials appeared to have no plan.

Daniel Martinez, a spokesman for FEMA working on Interstate 10 in
eastern New Orleans, said plans for body recovery "are not being
released yet."

Dozens of rescue workers questioned Monday said they knew of no
protocol or collection points for bodies; none said they had retrieved
even one of the many corpses seen floating in neighborhoods around the
city as they searched for survivors.

Scores of rescue workers this week repeated the same mantra, over and
over: We can't worry about the dead; we're still trying to save the
living.

But as rescue teams across the city said they had checked nearly every
house for survivors, the enormity of the death that lay in Hurricane
Katrina's wake came into sharp focus even as the plans for taking care
of the dead remained murky.

Mayor Ray Nagin, addressing the potential body count for the storm for
the first time, said the storm may have claimed more than 10,000
lives.

In a news conference Monday morning, Deputy Chief Warren Riley said
his department was "not responsible for recovery."

"We don't have a body count, but I can tell you it's growing. It's
growing," he said.

As the rescue missions covered more and more ground but yielded fewer
survivors, New Orleans Police Deputy Chief Steve Nicholas said that
the time has come to start dealing with the dead.

"I know we're still rescuing people, but I think it's time we start
pulling out the bodies," he said.

The highest concentration of casualties from Hurricane Katrina likely
will come in the Lower 9th Ward, St. Bernard Parish, areas first
inundated on Aug. 29 with floodwaters that engulfed second story homes
in minutes. New Orleans also will likely see mass casualties, New
Orleans Police Capt. Timothy Bayard said.

"We're going see a lot more bodies out of New Orleans East than we
anticipated," he said.

In just one subdivision, Sherwood Forest, survivors who showed up to
the Convention Center on Monday said police told them roughly 90
people in the subdivision had died.

In St. Bernard, 22 bodies were found lashed together. Officials
surmised the drowning victims had tried to stay together to keep
themselves from being washed away in the storm.

Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu said "more than a thousand" people had
died in St. Bernard. "When the death toll comes out, it's going to be
a jolt for everybody," he said. "I'll be surprised if the casualties
in St. Bernard are less than a thousand."

Even Uptown near the river, one of the few spots of dry land, a body
lay in front of a white wooden shotgun double at 4732 Laurel St. The
body of an older woman lay under a gray blanket, pinned down at the
corners by brick and slate, adorned with a plastic-wrapped flower
bouquet. Above her, a yellow cardboard sign quoting John 3:16 had been
taped to the window.

Alcede Jackson
Rest in Peace
In the loving arms of Jesus

Given the length of time many had been dead, and in the water, some of
the bodies already might be unrecognizable, and some may never be
recovered.

Many trapped by flood waters in shelters found their own ways of
dealing with those who died in their midst.

Near an elementary school at Poland and St. Claude avenues, Dwight and
Wilber Rhodes, two brothers, said they had tried to save a middle-aged
man and woman at the Convention Center who appeared to have drowned.

"We performed CPR on them, but they were already dead," Dwight Rhodes
said. "So we took the food out of the freezer and put the bodies in."

Of the four bodies that lay just inside the food service entrance of
the Convention Center, the woman in the wheelchair rattled Brooks the
most. When he found her two days before among the sea of suffering in
front of the Convention Center where one of the last refugee camps
evacuated, her husband sat next to her. He had only one concern when
Brooks and some of his comrades carted her away.

"Bring me back my wheelchair," he recalled the man telling him.

One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years
old. Though they could not confirm it, they had heard she was
gang-raped.

"There was an old lady that said the little girl had been raped by two
or three guys, and that she had told another unit. But they said they
couldn't do anything about it with all the people there," Brooks said.
"I would have put him in cuffs, stuck him in the freezer and left him
there."

Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year
of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing
comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center,
where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.

"I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq," said
Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies sat
decomposing. "In Iraq, it's one-on-one. It's war. It's fair. Here,
it's just crazy. It's anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping
people in the streets for food and water … And this is America. This
is just 300 miles south of where I live."


On 9/8/05, Art Deco <deco at moscow.com> wrote:
>  
> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gartonash8sep08,0,68039.story?track=tothtml
>  
> The thin veneer of civilizationBy Timothy Garton Ash
> TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is a professor of European studies at Oxford University
> and a Hoover Institution senior fellow.
> 
> September 8, 2005