Duck & Cover, The National Guard Is In The House posted by BionOc

This business of the New Orleans police killing 5 (or 4) civilians, either contractors or, an hour later, not contractors. (Hmm, yeah, I'm definitely putting my confidence in the revised report. After all, why would the Army Corps of Engineers lie about innocent civilians being randomly shot to death? And what with the tremendous verifiability of the whole thing...)

It's a straw in the wind, this. The city is filling up with National Guardsmen straight out of Iraq. This is what those troops do over there; it's literally SOP, what they've been trained for all this time, over there where nobody important is going to notice one or two or a dozen more dead civilian towelheads. When in doubt, when suspicious, jumpy or even just bored, kill civilians indiscriminately. Shoot first, don't even bother asking questions.

And now they're in New Orleans, in a situation their commanders are already calling a combat operation, helpfully identifying the point elements in question as 'insurgents'. That must make the Guardies feel so at home! And they certainly know what the United States Armed Forces do with 'insurgents'.

We will be seeing more of this. Civilian 'accidental' shootings are about to skyrocket, and I for one am agog to see how that goes down on American turf. The government has been notably slow to catch on to the fact that the whole world can see them (a touch of Ravenous Bugblatter Beast syndrome); when they do things like pull that insane fake-aid-station-photo-op stunt, or for that matter leave 20,000 monumentally fucked-off people sitting outside the Convention Center to tell reporters exactly what's being done to them, the pols just don't appear to get the fact that we're watching.

So I'm betting it's going to take them a while to cotton to the fact that, appearances to the contrary, this ain't actually Fallujah, and people here actually are counting bodies (or trying to). And I can't help feeling that, assuming news continues to get out (despite FEMA's efforts), people just aren't going to stand for it they way they do (unjustly of course), when it's happening in someone else's country.