Further, Alex dredges up video clips of other facilities used in the past for mass containment of dissenters- from Pier 57 in New York City used to detain those rounded-up during mass arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention to the former Mueller Airport facility in Austin which news clips exposed had been converted to hold mass arrestees to the Sand Point Naval Station in Seattle used for 1999 WTO protesters.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the federal official at the heart of a firestorm over Washington’s slow response is acknowledging the government’s shortcomings. Former Federal Emergency Management agency director Mike Brown tells NBC’s “Today” show “there was a disconnect” about what the Bush administration was saying about the situation, and how bad things actually were.

Brown said “there was a mentality in Washington which says you put the best face on everything.” He said information given out by the administration was accurate, but “we never put it in context” with how much still needed to be done to lift the stricken city…

[continues at AP]

Matt Pascarella writes:
Four years ago, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I sat with Patricia Thomas. Greg Palast and I had just helped her break into her home in the Lafitte Projects. She had been locked out for a year. She showed us her former home, her belongings scattered everywhere, and wrestled out endless stories of post-Katrina life: how she struggled to find shelter over the last year, how they came and put bars on her doors and windows and locked her out, how it was “man made.”

I picked up a photo of her at Mardi Gras, taken a few years earlier, and compared it to what she looked like now. In the picture her hair was longer, her face younger, her smile deeper. Now her arms were wasted and thin, her eyes sunken into her face, and her bottom front teeth were gone. On most days, she told me, she wore her dead mother’s dentures, but today she had forgotten to put them in. Her own teeth broke off when escaping the rising waters. She had fallen face first onto the concrete slab that was her front porch. The very spot where we were sitting was where it had happened. Over my left shoulder, running the length of the building, was a scar, a stain from the water line.

August in Louisiana is unbearably hot for a Northern boy. Beads of sweat poured from my face, down my neck. Patricia went inside, found an old roll of paper towels in a kitchen cabinet and brought me one. The quilted paper had a kitschy design — a giant heart with words that said, “Home Sweet Home.”

I looked at her and wondered how this could happen in my country.

A few weeks before, I was in Mexico City with Palast covering the Presidential Election. A presidency had been stolen. People were on the streets screaming “Vota por Vota, Casilla por Casilla!” Count the votes! “Vote by Vote, box by box!” I had seen the aftermath of a massacre in a small village outside Mexico City. I had seen people from all over the country rise up in anger taking to the streets. I had seen the Zapatistas march and Subcomandante Marcos himself flanked by young women acting as a protective barrier. I had seen the house where Trotsky was stabbed in the back of the head with an ice pick.

When I finally left Mexico City, I remember being deeply confused. The kind of confusion that tears at the soul and has the ability to completely dismantle any preconceived notions of how to view the world. I was inspired to see so many people fighting for democracy, and yet a deep depression sunk in as the plane took off. I knew their efforts would not matter. I had seen the American ‘consultants’, the DC hacks, in the offices of the ruling party and I knew it was over.

Now, here I was — back home in the United States — outside a decimated house near the levees, trying to understand why a New Orleans native, Brod Bagert, was calling a friend who worked with the fire department. Brod was asking his old friend what the number “5” below the giant orange spray-painted X on the front of the house meant. But Brod already knew what it meant.

Here I was watching Brod, one year later, trying to convince himself that what had happened to his neighbors didn’t actually happen. After many long days of hearing countless horrifying stories and walking through miles of destruction, I now stood next to a grown man who was desperately trying to lie to himself simply because the alternative was too painful. I couldn’t hold back the tears. It was the first, and only, time in my professional life that I had to walk away from an interview. I hid out behind a smashed up, rotted out BMW and cried.

After a few minutes I returned to Brod. He hung up the phone, looked at Palast and me, and slowly choked, “Five people died here.”

He finally gave in to what had happened here: the sprayed “9-16″ above that X meant that those five bodies had been left to decompose for nearly 19 days before being discovered by rescue crews.

Brod rubbed his eyes and we went inside the house. His fathomless sadness hardened into anger. We walked through a sand dune littered with toys into what was once the living room. I tried not to imagine the mom and dad and kids as water crushed them against the ceiling; as they clawed for one more breath.

Brod took us down the street to his home, that is, the sticks that were left of his home. He was breathing hard, he was shaking. “Old ladies watched the water come up to their nose, over their eyes and they drowned in houses just like this, in this neighborhood, because of reckless negligence that is unanswered for.”

I think back now, to those words, spoken four years ago and wonder if it will ever be answered.

We then met Stephen Smith. He worked at the Marriott hotel, but had no car and no way to get out when the Mayor said to get out. Stephen pulled a dozen neighbors to a bridge over the rising water for four days as helicopters whirled overhead. Four days in the humid sun. No food. An old man gave his grandchildren his only bottle of water; then the old man died of dehydration. Stephen now works in a grocery store in Houston where FEMA ultimately dumped him. His kids live in Baton Rouge.

The next day Palast and I drove up to Baton Rouge to confront the company that was contracted to come up with an evacuation plan for the City of New Orleans. They had refused all of our interview requests, so we showed up at their offices to request a copy of the plan in person. We were quickly thrown out, they threatened to call security. They knew what we knew: There was no plan.

We drove out to the town of Baker. There, we surreptitiously passed through a security checkpoint before funneling into a massive FEMA trailer park. Here we met Pamela Lewis who told us her story of escaping the flood. Despite having MS, she pushed a boat with her 86-year-old mother, other relatives and neighbors through the streets of New Orleans. When she got to a bridge, armed men yelled at her, called her a nigger, and commanded her to turn around. They didn’t want a boat full of black people coming into their neighborhood. She then managed to make it to the Superdome where she was sprayed down by hoses, tossed on a bus, and then told to pay a fare and get off. She had no idea where she was.

We finished filming. Pamela stood in front of the car next to her trailer, and I locked eyes with her. I put the car in reverse and backed out, leaving her there, alone, not knowing what she was going to do with her life.

We drove back to New Orleans, passing an Exxon Oil Refinery — the only thing near Pamela’s trailer park. Several weeks later, at the request of Exxon, Homeland Security would file a criminal complaint against me and Palast under the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act for filming “critical infrastructure.” The only thing critical about that refinery was the pollution it was spewing near what had become a refugee camp.

Five years have gone by and it is rare if a week passes that I don’t think of New Orleans. Nearly two thousand people lost their lives. An entire city was decimated. People were killed by the very police officers who were supposed to be protecting them. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes and livelihoods. To this day there are some still living in FEMA trailers. Patricia died a few years back in a horrible car accident; Lafitte, her home, has since been demolished.

My job was to go, to report, and then go home. My job was to leave Patricia, Pamela, Brod and countless others whom I had encountered, behind — to place them in a compartment in my mind, and to move on to the next story. Yet I never quite managed to do that with New Orleans. Maybe it was easier for me to cope in places like Mexico, but New Orleans was America. It happened in my country. All of the people I met in New Orleans — their images, their words — have, over the years, crystallized into a vivid sense of disenchantment with the romantic narrative of America I was taught as a child.

I sit here now, thumb through my old notebook that is labeled in black marker “NOLA” and find the paper towel Patricia gave me. It still reads, next to that big, faded heart, “Home Sweet Home.”

*********

Matt Pascarella produced the Greg Palast investigation, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans.

Pascarella is currently a journalist with the Palast Investigative Fund which is offering the film as download FREE of charge during this week of commemoration. Or, for a donation, receive the DVD signed by Palast.

The Palast Fund requests your tax-deductible donations. We are returning to New Orleans to finish the investigation we started.

This article cross-posted from www.GregPalast.com

Public Intelligence has received a request from FEMA to remove a “For Official Use Only” document regarding the National Level Exercise 2010 (NLE 10), which was scheduled for this coming May.  The exercise was to be based on National Planning Scenario 1 which simulates a nuclear detonation in a U.S. city.  However, recent political pressure has led to the exercise being “scaled back” according to the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and a variety of other publications.  At the behest of Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the exercise’s Nevada events have reportedly been canceled and the FEMA website now shows no mention of NLE 10…

[continues at Public Intelligence]

In a giant auction, the federal government has agreed to sell for pennies on the dollar most of the 120,000 formaldehyde-tainted trailers it bought nearly five years ago for Hurricane Katrina victims. But the sale of the units, perhaps the most visible symbol of the government’s bungled response to the hurricane, has triggered a new round of charges that it is endangering future buyers for years to come.

Consumer advocates and environmentalists are outraged that the government resold products it deemed unsafe to live in, saying warning stickers attached to the units will not keep people from misusing them.

Besides formaldehyde, units might be plagued by mold, mildew and propane gas leaks, FEMA acknowledged.

“Proceed with caution, extreme caution, if you are tempted to respond to what appears to be an attractive offer for a travel trailer or manufactured home,” Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel wrote in a consumer alert. He and others cautioned that the FEMA units could be resold many times, including over the Internet, and that unscrupulous sellers could remove warning labels or withhold information about the dangers.

Read more in the Washington Post

A massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service, government officials say.

That was their conclusion after participating in a tabletop exercise that looked at what might happen today if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859.

Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. Minor storms are common and can light up the Earth’s Northern skies and interfere with radio signals.

Every few decades, though, the sun experiences a particularly large storm. These can release as much energy as 1 billion hydrogen bombs.

How Well Can We Weather The Solar Storm?

The exercise, held in Boulder, Colorado, was intended to investigate “what we think could be close to a worst-case scenario,” says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder. The Center is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It’s important to understand that, along with other types of natural hazards, (solar) storms can cause impacts,” says Craig Fugate, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who also took part in the tabletop exercise.

Bogdan and Fugate say that eventually there will be another storm as big as the ones in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina.

But the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation.

In the tabletop exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, Bogdan says.

Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles “basically took out” most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives, Bogdan says.

“When you go into a gas station and put your credit card in and get some gas,” he says, “that’s a satellite transaction.”…

[continues at NPR]

With conspiracy talk-show host Alex Jones leading the way, one of the most disturbing trends in 2009 has been the resurrection and proliferation of some of the same anti-government conspiracy theories that so riled up domestic extremists in the 1990s. Such theories had been less popular in the 2000s, but Obama’s election gave anti-government conspiracy theorists a new focus for their efforts, a new light in which they could re-cast some of the old theories, and a willingness to come up with new conspiracies. More extreme than the “birther” conspiracy theory, these theories allege dark, violent designs on the part of the federal government.

Anti-Government Conspiracy Theories and Their Transmission

Though there are many conspiracy theories and numerous permutations, three are particularly entrenched among anti-government extremists:

• Imposition of Martial Law. The federal government is plotting to declare martial law in the near future as a way to strip Americans of their freedoms and institute the New World Order. The government may utilize or even manufacture a crisis, such as the swine flu epidemic, in order to have an excuse for imposing martial law.
• Gun Confiscation. The government is plotting to embark upon a massive program of gun confiscation, going door to door to take firearms away from American citizens so that they will be unable to resist the New World Order. Police, the military and even foreign troops may be used in the gun confiscation efforts.
• FEMA Concentration Camps. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has constructed hundreds of concentration camps in the United States, designed to hold “dissidents” and other American citizens following some imminent crackdown such as a declaration of martial law.

[continues at the ADL site]