Katrina Whitewash: A Shameful Cover-Up. posted by Richard Seymour

This is the US government's report on Katrina. I've had some time to digest it, but bear in mind that it is about 380 pages long, not including the appendices. The flavour? As the media were alerted to suggest, presumably with a digest from the Executive Summary, it is a litany of failures, slip-ups, errors, and a 'failure of initiative': it is also a disgusting, shambolic and insulting cover-up. The tone is avuncular, wry and pious. The report forever tells us what the fabled "American people" want its authors to achieve, carefully setting the boundaries in terms of failure, incompetence - who screwed up, guys? Procedures are evoked, failures in this and that elaborated, individuals and institutions found wanting.

We are informed of the terrible bad luck: the storm arrived at the weekend and people on "fixed incomes" had no money for gas, lodgings etc. This would be the poor, who were to be informed in DVDs that were eventually not delivered that no help would be forthcoming from the authorities. The report doesn't mention those DVDs. But the report goes further: "Officials had worried about the high number of people who would ignore hurricane evacuation orders in coastal areas. Indeed, thousands of people in New Orleans did not obey the mandatory evacuation order." Indeed, "thousands" of people did not, and could not, and no help was available unless they could find their way to a shelter. The findings are entirely conventional in this sense: the report speaks of a "risk averse culture that pervades big government". The report discusses how the "One-size fits all plans proved impervious to clear warnings of extraordinary peril". The President is guilty of little more than having received inadequate advice. Several individuals are found to be at fault, but only to the extent of being in error, incompetent and so on: the NRP implemented late, ineffectively or not at all; Nagin and Blanco insufficiently quick to order a mandatory evacuation; Incident of National Significance unfortunately not declared in time; IEM's precise forecast of the event somehow didn't lead to good planning (and here, the report takes the word of the president of IEM at face value); etc. The city makes mysterious decisions - "Despite the New Orleans Plan’s acknowledgement that there are people who cannot evacuate by themselves, the city did not make arrangements for their evacuation." The preference for 'shelter' rather than evacuation (and there was only one designated shelter, a "shelter of last resort" in the Superdome) is simply left unexplained.

The report never even mentions the state of martial law imposed. It notes that the Red Cross was blocked from re-entering New Orleans as it would dissuade people from evacuating, but does not connect this with the coterminous existence of road-blocks preventing exit, which it does not mention. The USS Bataan is mentioned, not in respect of the lengthy period it sat unused, but in terms of requests made from it, and what it was eventually able to deliver. Racism is not mentioned once in the main document. The police shooting of civilians is not mentioned once in the main document. The Chief of Police is described as having fuelled and legitimised false rumours that led to aid being withheld and presumably many deaths: no questions asked why, and no answers given. (He quit before he could lose his job). Other public officials, including Mayor Nagin, are cited as having contributed to this: he is either a malicious liar or a buffoon, and should be out on his ear. He ought to be in jail, too, for instructing officers to cease locating survivors and start shooting at looters: property being far more paramount in his imagination than people.

We know that there is testimony of repeated mistreatment of survivors by the authorities, including military police and armed forces, but it doesn't appear in the main report. There should be prosecutions here, for if there was a lawless, violent and chaotic force in New Orleans, it was the armed forces and military police. We know that leading army figures spoke of an "insurgency" in the city to justify taking it by force. Nowhere does this appear in the main report. We know that army officials interviewed described the situation in New Orleans as a "little Somalia" (not without obvious references), but it is not in the report. We know that many prisoners were simply left to die, locked in cells, but prisoners are only in the context of those who were moved by the authorities. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act so that the very large companies allied to key Republicans and Democrats could exploit what labour was left there. Not a mention. Lt Gen Blum is quoted discussing delays to aid caused by the bogus media reports of raping and killing. He is not quoted as follows:

Q: One quick follow-up. Is it fair to say, using the convention center as an example, that one reason it took until Friday to get aid in is the National Guard needed time to build up a response team with military police to ensure law and order because the New Orleans Police Department had degraded so much?

GEN. BLUM: That is not only fair, it is accurate. You've concisely stated exactly what was needed, and I told you why. We took the time to build the right force. The outcome was superb. No lives hurt, nobody injured. It was done almost invisibly.

Aid was blocked, so that they could build up a sufficient force to storm the city and impose martial law. Never mentioned. Never even the courtesy of a gloss. Again and again, you go through the report and find plenty of incompetence, buffoonery, unforgiveable failure and so on, but the crucial issues of criminality are not touched upon. There should be people in jail for what they did, yet the report stretches credulity to gush about the wonderful service performed by the armed forces and the police. The report is amply decorated with photographs of National Guards and so on appearing to help senior citizens and smiling at the folks. There are photos of death: deaths caused by calamity, accident, bad weather and bungling. This issue, the report says, is "too important for carping". Certainly, no one could accuse them of carping. It is a shameful, embarrassing, hateful piece of work: it reeks of the bodies tactfully shoved under the carpet.

The only part of the report worth reading is Cynthia McKinney's excellent commentary on the findings in the appendix, here. It was McKinney who persuaded the Select Committee to listen to the survivors and let them explain what they had been through. It is she who goes to the bother of detailing what was discovered about martial law, about the prisoners, about racism and so on. It falls to Cynthia McKinney to interrogate the brutalities of police and armed forces, the withholding of aid, FEMA's apparently deliberate sabotaging of relief efforts, the history of past floods in which levees were deliberately destroyed, the precedents for martial law, the army's approach which involved a conception of New Orleans as a "combat operation" and so on. It is she who bothers to ask the right questions, and direct attention to where it matters, while criticising the main report for its glaring ommissions and bureacratic orientation. Here is a little sample:

President George W. Bush spoke of how reconstruction of the Gulf “would provide a ‘fantastic opportunity’ for private businesses and investment. ‘There is going to be a building boom down here. It's going to be an exciting time,’ he said. Bush suggested that the $85 billion in assistance already pledged by the Federal Government was sufficient. He added: “‘I'm sure there's still concern about the future, but the eyes have cleared up’”7 To suggest that none are still crying or in pain is an insult to the dignity of the survivors. A greater insult is the fact that while the Bush Administration seems unwilling to spend the sums necessary to prevent tens of thousands of poor, mostly African-American survivors from being turned out onto the streets, the reconstruction efforts he is excited about involve giving multi-billion dollar, sweetheart, no-bid contracts8 to firms like Halliburton, a company currently facing multiple investigations of fraud. For example, a Pentagon audit of the giant firm is now calling into question more than a billion dollars’ worth of the company’s bills in Iraq.9 The Select Committee Report steers clear of this scandal. The only conflict of interest involving contractors that is dealt with concerns companies pursuing contracts with both local and federal government at once.

And that's just the beginning.