It was the federal levees that failed – not the storm

On this day in 2005, over 50 badly constructed levees designed, built and maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers killing over 1,000 and causing over $100 billion in property damage.

New Orleans firemen riding out the storm high up in an office building saw levees collapse dooming the city.

They were ordered not to tell what they saw when they appeared before a Congressional committee hearing about the devastation.

Why not?

The epically corrupt US Army Corps of Engineers was trying, unsuccessfully it eventually turned out, to hide the basic fact: Their design, construction and maintenance was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people (it you count the people who died after the storm from the shock and trauma) and the near obliteration of a great American city.

The Truth about New Orleans – 2005

FEMA had a plane in the air that knew there were multiple levee breaches in New Orleans, but the information was not relayed to Louisiana emergency officials on the ground for twelve hours.

New Orleans firemen who rode out the 2005 storm in an office tower saw the breaches from their vantage point as they were occurring and were warned not to testify to what they they saw and when they saw it when they appeared before a Congressional investigative committee a few years later.

What was going on?

My best guess is that the Administration (Bush II) needed time to get its story straight. More specifically, the US Army Corps of Engineers whose incompetence and fraud was the reason for the levee failures, need time to muddy the waters with stories like:

* “Katrina did it” (Wrong: the city flooded many hours after Katrina passed);
* “New Orleans is below sea level” (Parts are and many parts aren’t, just like New York City, London and Amsterdam);
* And this one which the Corps broadcast to blog discussion boards across the Internet while posing as “average citizens”: New Orleaneans are no good and not worth worrying about. Besides, they’re stupid and reckless to live where they live.

The Corps spent millions of tax payer dollars on overt PR and utilized a long standing, well developed network of local “opinion leaders” who tried to shout down and ridicule anyone who questioned The Official Story.

With these kinds of resources, it’s almost impossible not to win the first battle with a massive sneak attack, but public knowledge and opinion is not a battle, it’s a war – a long war – and as the Japanese Imperial Forces learned a few short years after Pearl Harbor, “winning” one battle conclusively on Day One does not mean winning the war.

Through a relentless, grassroots campaign, Levees.org (with help from Brasscheck), has trained careless journalists to stop calling the 2005 New Orleans disaster “Katrina” and call it was it is: the Federal Levee Failures.

It’s placed permanent, unremovable historical markers at several breach sites telling present – and future – generations the real story.

Now, as you can see with this video, it’s collaborated with several New Orleans institutions, including UNO, the University of New Orleans, to convert its self-guided historical bike tour into a free app that plays on smartphones. It lets interested people see and hear what happened to New Orleans in 2005 and why.

Congratulations to our friends in New Orleans. This is kind of push back is a model for the nation. (I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.)

Does history matter? You bet it does. Just ask the expert on Big Brother and how to fight him: “Who controls the past controls the future.” – George Orwell.

For more info and to lend your support to this project, visit our good friends at Levees.org

Related article…

BP Cover-up ‘They Knew.’ Part 1

by Greg Palast
EcoWatch.org

Two years before the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP off-shore rig suffered a nearly identical blow-out, but BP concealed the first one from the U.S. regulators and Congress.

This week, EcoWatch.org located an eyewitness with devastating new information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had concealed from government and the industry.

The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival. But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate.

One cause of the blow-outs was the same in both cases: the use of a money-saving technique—plugging holes with “quick-dry” cement.

By hiding the disastrous failure of its penny-pinching cement process in 2008, BP was able to continue to use the dangerous methods in the Gulf of Mexico—causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history. April 20 marks the second anniversary of the Gulf oil disaster.

Continue reading here

Ask not for whom the bell tolls

I continue to follow the New Orleans story because it says so much about America and where it’s headed.

The broken levees?

Just a precursor to the broken financial system.

Same cause.

Government fraud and incompetence.

Now we have the culprits responsible for the destruction of New Orleans – the US Army Corps of Engineers – using their computers to post misinformation and personal attacks against community leaders on blogs and news sites using fake names.

Little known fact:

The US Army Corps of Engineers is the same group that administered the Haliburton and KBR contracts in Iraq.

Please go to the site on YouTube directly and give it a hight rating, favorite it, comment on it, give it a boost.

Thanks.

Click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDwuMBOPrrQ

Chertoff ran the post-levee failure relief

If a CNN cameraman hadn’t had the balls to walk into this situation and document it, no one would outside the city would have known it was happening.

Michael Chertoff claimed to not even know it was going on.

Of course that’s a lie.

What we know for a fact is people who tried to get into New Orleans to help were turned away at gunpoint.

The people trapped at the Convention Center could have walked out of the city to safety, food and water.

Instead they were turned away at gunpoint when they tried to cross the bridge out of the city.

This went on for over FIVE DAYS.

No water was delivered, no food, no medical help, no security nothing.

And then the people who were trapped in this way were portrayed as animals and looters.

That’s Michael Chertoff’s handiwork and it’s a disgrace that he wasn’t removed from his job then.

Now we’re all paying the price for allowing this government criminal and what he represents to continue his career.

More about Michael Chertoff: Click here

Leading Louisiana wetlands scientist fired for speaking the truth

The US can’t be destroyed, or even seriously injured, by an external enemy.

But it can be – and is – being destroyed from within by its so-called “elites.”

We’re all well aware of corruption in government, investment banks, corporations, the news media and other obvious white collar criminals.

What is less obvious, but every bit as threatening, is the censorship of science by state and corporation funded academic institutions.

The hero…hanged

Did you know that after the collapse of the US Army Corps of Engineers levees following Hurricane Katrina, LSU (Louisiana State University) fired one of the nation’s leading wetland scientists and disbanded its Hurricane Studies Center?

Yes, they really did that. They fired the man who warned about the coming disaster, prepared for it, and in the process helped save countless thousands of lives.

Now thanks to the most recent oil industry-created catastrophe, Professor Van Heerden’s detailed knowledge of Louisiana’s wetlands is needed more than ever.

So where is he?

In court.

Trying to protect his career and reputation from a band of government-funded thugs in academic gowns who used threats, intimidation, media smear campaigns, and – according to evidence presented in court – an e-mail documented plot to poison him.

Why are they doing this?

Simple: Van Heerden’s telling the truth threatens their lucrative scams.

More here: Defend the practice of science in the US

The future of science, the future of America

There are things more important than the Super Bowl…

Yes, I know. It’s sacrilege.

But the Question of the Age – for New Orleans at least – is this:

Is the perpetuation of the inept and corrupt criminal enterprise known as the US Army Corps of Engineers more important than the physical survival of New Orleans?

The issue really is that stark.

I’ve never been prouder to stand by someone: Dr. Ivor Van Heerden.

Van Heerden continues, at great personal expense, to insist that the Corps (and their enablers at LSU) tell the truth about why New Orleans flooded in 2005.

For the full story: Ivor Van Heerden, the Corps, and LSU

Note: If you question my categorization of the Corps as a criminal enterprise, they crossed that line when they applied pressure on LSU to censor and ultimately fire Professor Van Heerden for telling the scientific and engineering truth about the New Orleans levee failures.

Why I love New Orleans

Besides the fact it’s got great food and great music (world class in both cases), it’s also home to a creative population of free thinking people who is very good at seeing through the BS of the US consensus reality.

In the first video, painter and musician Tony Green talks about the direction he believes the country is headed

In the second video, a street publisher spreads his vision of Obama.

The third video documents something called the Jazz Funeral for Democracy, a spectacle that took place before the federal levee failures that devastated the city in 2005.

No wonder Bush and Rove let the city drown.

But it’s back.

If you’re looking for a warm place to visit this winter, I can’t recommend a better place to go.