Hurricane George
How the White House Drowned New Orleans by
Greg Palast, Aug 23, 2007
t's been two
years. And America's media is about to have another tear-gasm
over New Orleans. Maybe Anderson Cooper will weep again. The
big networks will float into the moldering corpse of the city
and give you uplifting stories about rebuilding and hope.
Now, let's cut through the cry-baby crap. Here's what happened
two years ago - and what's happening now.
This is what an inside source me. And it makes me sick:
"By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. Monday
night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody
was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."
The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White
House withheld from the state police the information that New
Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I
would not have believed it. But this was not just any source.
The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of
the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief
technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.
I'd come to van Heerden about another matter, but in our talks,
it was clear he had something he wanted to say, and it was a big
one. He charged that the White House, FEMA and the Army
Corp hid, for critical hours, their discovery that the levees
surrounding New Orleans were cracking, about to burst and drown
the city.
Hurricane Katrina
Understand that
Katrina never hit New Orleans. The hurricane swung east of the
city, so the state evacuation directors assumed New Orleans was
now safe - and evacuation could slow while emergency efforts
moved east with the storm.
But unknown to the state, in those crucial hours on Monday, the
federal government's helicopters had filmed the cracks that
would become walls of death by Tuesday.
Van Heerden revealed:
"FEMA knew at 11 o'clock on Monday that the levees had
breeched. At 2p.m. they flew over he 17th Street Canal and took
video of the breech."
Question: "So the White House wouldn't tell you the levees
had breeched?"
Dr. Van Heerden: "They didn't tell anybody."
Question: "And you're at the Emergency Center.'
Dr. Van Heerden: "I mean nobody knew. The Corps of
Engineers knew. FEMA knew. None of us knew."
I could not get the White House gang to respond to the charges.
That leaves the big, big question: WHY? Why on earth would the
White House not tell the state to get the remaining folks out of
there?
The answer: cost. Political and financial cost. A hurricane
is an act of God - but a catastrophic failure of the levees is a
act of Bush.[1] That is, under law dating back to 1935, a breech
of the federal levee system makes the damage - and the deaths -
a federal responsibility. That means, as van Heeden points out,
that "these people must be compensated."
The federal government, by law, must build and maintain the
Mississippi levees to withstand known dangers - or pay the price
when they fail.
Indeed,
that was the rule applied in the storms that hit Westhampton
Dunes, New York, in 1992. There, when federal sea barriers
failed, the flood waters wiped away 190 homes. The feds
rebuilt them from the public treasury. But these were not
just any homes. They are worth an average of $3 million
apiece - the summer homes of movie stars and celebrity
speculators.
There were no movie stars floating face down in the Lower
Ninth Ward nor in Lakeview nor in St. Bernard Parish. For
the 'luvvies' of Westhampton Dunes, the federal government
even trucked in sand to replace the beaches. But for New
Orleans' survivors, there's the aluminum gulag of FEMA
trailer parks. Today, two years later, 89,000 families still
live in this mobile home Guantanamo - with no plan
whatsoever for their return.
And what was the effect of the White House's self-serving
delay?
I spoke with van Heerden in his university office. The
computer model of the hurricane flashed quietly as I waited
for him to answer. Then he said, "Fifteen hundred
people drowned. That's the bottom line."
They could have survived Hurricane Katrina. But they got no
mercy from Hurricane George.
And read the full story of our investigation in the added
chapter on New Orleans in the paperback edition of “Armed
Madhouse: from Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and
Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.”
Click here to donate to our
Investigative Fund and receive a book signed by Greg Palast as a
gift from us.
Endnote by Wes Penre:
[1] Whether Katrina was manmade or not (HAARP and similar secret
government projects) is still an open question, but I strongly
doubt that the only reason for not intervening in time before
the levees broke was just a cost issue. I am sure it goes deeper
than that.
Even if Katrina was not manmade from scratch, scientists today
have the means to redirect hurricanes, tornados and other
natural phenomena. A direct hit on New Orleans might have been
too powerful and made more damage than intended, but the whole
catastrophe certainly put the whole nation in fear (with a lot
of help from the Media), and the Elite occultists feed on
fear... Wes Penre, Illuminati News
Wes Penre is the owner of the domain
Illuminati News and the publisher of the same. Please also check
out his MySpace website:
http://www.myspace.com/wespenre.
Source:
Greg Palast's Newsletter
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