Condoleeza Rice On Hurricane Katrina: 'I Should Have Known Better'

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By April Ryan, White House Correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks

Condoleezza Rice says she "should have known better" than to leave Washington as Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans in 2005, writing in her book, and admitting in a telephone interview Wednesday with theGrio, that she let the president down.

In her book, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, former George W. Bush National Security Advisor and the nation's 66th Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice chronicles the highs and the lows of her time in the Bush administration, describing her pivotal role in shaping policy and trying to stave off crises at the White House. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, she admits she didn't succeed at the latter. CONTINUE....

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Mayor Nagin gets caught up in vacation controversy

By BECKY BOHRER

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — They've already begun the countdown to Mayor Ray Nagin's last day in office a year from now. He is mocked on bumper stickers, even booed at the opera.

Now Nagin, whose career was nearly wrecked by Hurricane Katrina 3 1/2 years ago, has seen his approval ratings sink to their lowest level ever, amid anger over the city's slow recovery and recent ethics questions about his vacations to Jamaica and Hawaii.

Allegations that Nagin didn't pay for at least part of the trips were raised in a lawsuit over his once highly touted city crime camera system, now known more for cost overruns than catching criminals.

"It's been cleverly portrayed as, 'There's something wrong here,' and nobody's been able to prove that yet," Nagin recently told reporters. "And it further creates doubt about government and government officials, and ... I don't know how to deal with it other than to try and get through it."

Mayor Nagin gets caught up in vacation controversy....

After Katrina, it was literally open season on Black folks

A new report in The Nation documents what many have claimed for years -- for some Black New Orleanians the threat of being killed by White vigilantes in Katrina's aftermath became a bigger threat than the storm itself.

After the storm, White vigilantes roamed Algiers Point shooting and, according to their own accounts, killing Black men at will-- with no threat of a police response. For the last three years, the shootings and the police force's role in them have been an open secret to many New Orleanians. To date, no one has been charged with a crime and law enforcement officials have refused to investigate.

The facts are finally seeing the light of day. Now we must demand action. Given Louisiana's horrible record when it comes to criminal justice and Black folks, it's the only path to justice.

You can help. Join us in calling on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, and the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct a full investigation of these crimes and any police cover-up. It takes only a moment to add your voice and to invite your friends and family to do the same:

http://www.colorofchange.org/nation/

In the two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the media created a climate of fear with trumped-up stories of Black lawlessness. Meanwhile, an armed group of White vigilantes took over the Algiers Point neighborhood in New Orleans and mercilessly hunted down Black people. "It was great!" said one vigilante. "It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it."

The Nation's article tells the story of Donnell Herrington, Marcel Alexander, and Chris Collins -- a group of friends who were attacked by shotgun-wielding White men as they entered Algiers Point on September 1, 2005. As they tried to escape, Herrington recalls, their attackers shouted, "Get him! Get that nigger!" He managed to get away. Alexander and Collins were told that they would be allowed to live on the condition that they told other Black folks not to come to Algiers Point. Herrington, shot in the neck, barely survived.

And there's the story of Henry Glover, who didn't survive after being shot by an unknown assailant. 2 Glover's brother flagged down a stranger for help, and the two men brought Glover to a police station. But instead of receiving aid, they were beaten by officers while Henry Glover bled to death in the back seat of the stranger's car. A police officer drove off in the car soon afterward. Both Glover's body and the car were found burnt to cinders a week later. It took DNA analysis to identify the body.

Then there's the story of White militiamen who tried to drive their Black neighbors from their homes. Reggie Bell, who lived just two blocks down the street from the vigilantes' ringleader, was told at gunpoint, "We don't want you around here. You loot, we shoot." Later, another group of armed White men confronted him at his home, asking, "Whatcha still doing around here? We don't want you around here. You gotta go."

These are only a few of the stories of Black folks who were accosted in Algiers Point, and you can read more in The Nation. But unless you speak out, we may never learn the full extent of the violence. Journalists have encountered a wall of silence on the part of the authorities. The coroner had to be sued to turn over autopsy records. When he finally complied, the records were incomplete, with files on several suspicious deaths suddenly empty. The New Orleans police and the District Attorney repeatedly refused to talk to journalists about Algiers Point. And according to journalist A.C. Thompson, "the city has in nearly every case refused to investigate or prosecute people for assaults and murders committed in the wake of the storm."

The Nation's article is important, but it's just a start. For more than three years now, these racist criminals have by their own admission gotten away with murder, while officials in New Orleans have systematically evaded any kind of accountability. We have to demand it.

Please join us in calling on state and federal officials to investigate these brutal attacks and the conduct of Orleans Parish law enforcement agencies, and please ask your friends and family to do the same.

http://www.colorofchange.org/nation/

Katrina's Hidden Race War

by A.C. THOMPSON

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

A wide street lined with towering trees, Opelousas Avenue marks the dividing line between Algiers Point and greater Algiers, and the difference in wealth between the two areas is immediately noticeable. "On one side of Opelousas it's 'hood, on the other side it's suburbs," says one local. "The two sides are totally opposite, like muddy and clean."

Algiers Point has always been somewhat isolated: it's perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River, linked to the core of the city only by a ferry line and twin gray steel bridges. When the hurricane descended on Louisiana, Algiers Point got off relatively easy. While wide swaths of New Orleans were deluged, the levees ringing Algiers Point withstood the Mississippi's surging currents, preventing flooding; most homes and businesses in the area survived intact. As word spread that the area was dry, desperate people began heading toward the west bank, some walking over bridges, others traveling by boat. The National Guard soon designated the Algiers Point ferry landing an official evacuation site. Rescuers from the Coast Guard and other agencies brought flood victims to the ferry terminal, where soldiers loaded them onto buses headed for Texas.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

The existence of this little army isn't a secret--in 2005 a few newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in glowing terms in articles that showed up on an array of pro-gun blogs; one Cox News story called it "the ultimate neighborhood watch." Herrington, for his part, recounted his ordeal in Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke. But until now no one has ever seriously scrutinized what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and nobody has asked the obvious questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to a different, far uglier truth?

Over the course of an eighteen-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.
Hill, who runs Tulane's Southern Institute for Education and Research and closely follows the city's racial dynamics, isn't surprised the Algiers Point gunmen have eluded arrest. Because of the widespread notion that blacks engaged in looting and thuggery as the disaster unfolded, Hill believes, many white New Orleanians approved of the vigilante activity that occurred in places like Algiers Point. "By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt--that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion,"

Hill tells me. "It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period."

Katrina's Hidden Race War....

Commentary: McCain Failed to Mention the Middle Class Last Week, But Neither Nominee Mentioned Poverty

By: Deborah Mathis

This time three years ago, the national obsession was not presidential politics; it was poverty. Hurricane Katrina had flushed the poor out of their homes in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, pushing them into streets and shelters and FEMA-funded hotel rooms or claustrophobic trailers.

The country responded with sorrow, embarrassment and outrage that so many people were still so poor more than 40 years after the War on Poverty. It had been, after all, off the Topic A list for so long that some people seemed to think it, like polio, had been eradicated. The outbreak of reality presented in the hurricane’s aftermath put poverty back on the map, so to speak.

But that was then. No sooner had we started talking about poverty again than we dropped it like a hot potato. Sensitivity fatigue set in. The country returned to its old habit of looking the other way, pretending the problem either didn’t exist or was overblown or, in the worst instances, that the poor deserved their fate.

COMMENTARY....

FEMA TRAILERS FOUND TO BE POISONOUS

As if Hurricane Katrina victims didn't have enough to deal with, new FEMA trailers housing thousands of displaced residents in the Gulf Coast were found to be toxic with unsafe levels of formaldehyde.


A version of the chemical was present in composite wood and plywood panels used in thousands of travel trailers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency purchased after Katrina to house hurricane victims.


Formaldehyde is considered a human carcinogen, or cancer-causing substance, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Air quality tests of 44 FEMA trailers since April by the environmental group Sierra Club show formaldehyde concentrations as high as 0.34 parts per million – a level nearly equal to what a professional embalmer would be exposed to on the job, according to one study of the chemical’s workplace effects.


And all but four of the trailers have tested higher than the 0.1 parts per million that the EPA considers to be an “elevated level” capable of causing watery eyes, burning in the eyes and throat, nausea, and respiratory distress in some people.


Dr. Scott Needle, a pediatrician in Bay St. Louis, said he noticed some unusual and persistent health problems among his patients living in the trailers well before the possible link to formaldehyde exposure surfaced.


“I was seeing kids coming in with respiratory complaints – colds and sinus infections – and they were getting them over and over again,” he told the Associted Press. “…Almost invariably, these families were staying in the FEMA trailers.”

As a result of its testing and such accounts, the Sierra Club is pushing for a congressional investigation of the potential health hazards posed by the trailers.


“It’s simply wrong that the government would spend billions of dollars to poison people in these toxic tin cans,” said Becky Gillette, co-chair of the Sierra Club's Mississippi chapter.


A class-action lawsuit also has been filed in Louisiana, naming the federal government and trailer manufacturers as defendants and alleging that “the temporary housing is unsafe and presents a clear and present danger to the health and well-being of plaintiffs and their families.”

KATRINA VICTIMS FILE 489,000 CLAIMS AGAINST FED. GOVT.

Roughly 489,000 claims have been filed against the federal government over damage from the failure of levees and flood walls following Hurricane Katrina – and one of the plaintiffs is seeking damages in the quadrillions. Seriously.


According to the Associated Press, a person from Baker, La. is seeking $3,014,170,389,176,410, which amounts to a little over $3 quadrillion dollars, to compensate for troubles ever since the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane rolled through.


Of roughly 489,000 total claims, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it has received 247 for at least $1 billion apiece, including the one for $3 quadrillion.


Some residents may have grossly exaggerated their claims to send a message to the corps, which has accepted blame for poorly designing the failed levees.

"I understand the anger," Scott said. "I also understand it's a negotiating tactic: Aim high and negotiate down."


Daniel Becnel, Jr., a lawyer who said his clients have filed more than 60,000 claims, said measuring Katrina's devastation in dollars and cents is a nearly impossible task.


"There's no way on earth you can figure it out," he said. "The trauma these people have undergone is unlike anything that has occurred in the history of our country."


The corps released zip codes, but no names, for the 247 claims of at least $1 billion. The list includes a $77 billion claim by the city of New Orleans. Fourteen involve a wrongful death claim. Fifteen were filed by businesses, including several insurance companies.

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer Meets The Great Debaters

By Cameron Turner

My kids and I were singing along with a CD of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when I got to thinking: what if Rudolph’s nose hadn’t been bright enough to guide Santa’s sleigh through that foggy Christmas Eve? What if it had simply been an unusual nose rather than an exceptional nose? Rudolph would probably have been doomed to a life of rejection and ridicule.

Rudolph was mocked and excluded simply because he looked different. Not only did the other reindeer “laugh and call him names” but they “never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.” All that changed, of course, after Santa asked Rudolph to take the point position on that murky night. “Then how the reindeer loved him” as the song says.


The injustice here is that, because of bigotry and discrimination, Rudolph was forced to earn a place in the society into which he had been born. Rudolph had to perform an extraordinary act of heroism -- literally saving Christmas -- in order to be accepted by his peers. He was cool after the foggy night because he did something that benefited the system. He bailed out The Man.


Victims of exclusion and oppression are often told to prove themselves worthy of inclusion. Blacks and other so-called “minorities” know all about that.


The civil rights heroes of yesteryear often faced criticism from whites who claimed that black Americans weren’t culturally or intellectually ready for integration. This theme comes out in The Great Debaters, the extraordinary new movie about students from a small black college in Texas who soar to the national debate championships. During a verbal battle over school integration, a white student concedes that discrimination is wrong but argues that the South isn’t ready for black and white students to go to class together. Jurnee Smollett’s character beats that argument down by stating passionately, “The time for justice is always now!”


Reminds me of Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “All, Here and Now” speech in which King declares, “We are not willing to wait 50 years for what is ours on the basis of the Constitution of the United States and the authority of God himself!”


So it was with Rudolph. Like us, he was entitled to full citizenship and the North Pole society had no moral right to exclude or deny him. As our Constitution eloquently asserts, freedom and equality are rights endowed to each of us by the Creator. They are not privileges doled out by biased power elites.



HOMELESS IN BETHLEHEM AND NEW ORLEANS

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” -- Luke 7:2


We revisit those beautiful words from the Gospel of Luke every year at Christmastime. They remind us that God’s empathy for the poor was so great that he permitted his son to enter this world homeless, literally born in a barn. Jesus’ humble birth underscores God’s expectation that we love one another as ourselves.


This Christmas, however, Luke’s comforting words take on heartbreaking irony in the Katrina-ravaged city of New Orleans. There, local and federal governments are poised to actually increase homelessness. Last Thursday the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to let the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) tear down 4,500 public housing units (aka “the projects”) to make way for new mixed-income buildings. There are supposed to be 3,200 units in these new buildings but only 900 will be designated for low-income residents. The New Orleans City Council approved a measure asking HUD to build the same number of low income homes as it plans to demolish. But HUD isn’t obligated to grant that request. Don’t hold your breath.


As the bulldozers demolish those 4,500 homes (many of which were not seriously damaged by Katrina) the residents will likely join the 12,000 homeless New Orleanians who already sleep in parks and under bridges every night. About 1/3 of these individuals work full time jobs but they can’t afford a roof and walls because rents have doubled since Katrina. Unfortunately, the HUD demolitions aren’t even the worst part of what’s about to happen in New Orleans. FEMA reportedly plans to close all of its trailer parks over the next six months. 50,000 Katrina survivors currently live in FEMA trailers.


Homelessness will expand much faster than new, permanent housing will be built and the poor, mostly black New Orleanians, will ultimately be forced to leave the city. That’s probably what some people have wanted all along.


For this to all go down at Christmas just adds insult to injury. After all, the man who was born in that barn 2,000 years ago admonished us that we will be judged by the way we treat “the least of these.”

DOZENS IN NEW ORLEANS PEPPER-SPRAYED OVER HUD PROTEST

Police in New Orleans used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday as dozens of protesters tried to force their way into a packed City Council chamber during a debate on the planned demolition of some 4,500 public housing units, reports the Associated Press.


One woman was sprayed with chemicals and dragged from the gates. She was taken away on a stretcher by emergency officials. Before that, the woman was seen pouring water from a bottle into her eyes and weeping.

Another woman said she was stunned by officers, and still had what appeared to be a Taser wire hanging from her shirt.

"I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting," said the woman, Kim Ellis, who was taken away in an ambulance.

"Is this what democracy looks like?" said Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who opposes demolition, as he held a strand of Taser wire he said had been shot into another of the protesters. Quigley said he would explore legal action over the incident, which he believed violated public meetings laws.

Protesters said they pushed against the iron gates that kept them out of the building because the Housing Authority of New Orleans had disproportionately allowed supporters of the demolition to pack the chambers. After roughly 30 minutes of on-again-off-again struggle to get into the meeting, protesters fell back, continuously chanting with bullhorns. An afternoon storm thinned the protesters, some of whom had been waiting since 7 a.m. to enter.

At the peak of the confusion, some 70 protesters were facing about a dozen mounted police and 40 more law enforcement officers on foot. One sheriff's deputy wept on the city hall side of the gate and was comforted by his comrades.


A vote on the demolitions, required by the city charter before the work can begin, was expected in the late afternoon.

The demolition debate has at times exposed class and race divisions in the city — most public housing residents are black, as were many of the protesters, while the City Council is majority white. However, support for demolition among those who spoke at the meeting crossed racial lines.

"It's about being able to walk into a house and say this is a house, not a project," said Donna Johnigan, a black public housing resident who supports redevelopment and who has clashed with residents from other housing complexes. "What we're going to demand is better housing, better schools."

HUD wants to demolish the buildings, most of them damaged by Hurricane Katrina, so developers can take advantage of tax credits and build new mixed-income neighborhoods. HUD says the redevelopment, which was in the works before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, will mark an end to the city's failed public housing experiment that lumped the poor into crime-ridden complexes and marooned them outside the life of the rest of the city.

Critics say the plan will shrink the stock of cheap housing at a time when housing is scarce and drive poor blacks out of the city. They also say the buildings are, contrary to popular opinion, mostly handsome brick structures that will outlast anything HUD builds in their place.

"It is beyond callous, and can only be seen as malicious discrimination. It is an unabashed attempt to eliminate the black population of New Orleans," said Kali Akuno, an organizer with the Coalition to Stop the Demolition.

KATRINA CREATES CHANGES IN NEW ORLEANS POLITICS

Whites to take control of city council.

As a result of the recent local elections, the New Orleans City Council will soon have a white majority for the first time in over 20 years.

The election results are a clear and dramatic indication of the displacement of the city's predominantly Black population by Hurricane Katrina which struck the city in 2005.

Estimates vary but it is believed by most experts that as many as half of the Blacks displaced by Hurricane Katrina have been unable to return to the city and establish new residences.

The election results also confirm initial fears that powerful political and economic forces would take advantage of the displacements to turn New Orleans into a smaller, higher income and whiter city. For example, virtually none of the reconstruction projects planned by the city to benefit lower income Blacks has gotten off the drawing board. In addition, those African Americans who have managed to re-establish themselves in the city may have lost faith in the political process.

In the Nov. 17 elections, for example, the 52,614 people casting ballots was down sharply from the 113,000 who voted during the 2006 elections for mayor. In addition, 29,700 whites voted compared to only 22,900 Blacks casting ballots.

As a result, veteran white politician Jacquelyn Clarkson was able to defeat Black candidate Cynthia Willard-Lewis in the contest for an at-large seat on the city council.

The Council now has four white and three Black members.