Black people abandoned in Houston as they were in New Orleans

Racism and the evacuation of residents during Hurricane Harvey

I have never forgotten the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. 

 I recall being riveted to broadcasts from Amy Goodman of Democacy Now! and hearing the searing accounts of racism and sheer inhumanity towards others.

I now realise from one discussion with a friend that many people are too young or simply don’t remember the events for various reasons.

When I saw videos of people being rescued it did not escape my attention that black faces were conspicuous by their absence except for those doing the rescuing. Lots of stories of elderly white people, even dogs and horses – but no black people.

Today I found two videos that demonstrate that the more things change the more they stay the same.

PROOF Black People Are Being ABANDONED In Houston

“They opened the levees on black neighbourhoods”

Woman tells the truth about what happening to black people in Houston

“Who do I ring to get rescued?”

“Ring Jesus”

There is not nearly the same coverage from Democracy Now! this time round but they did do this story about how the Red Cross and aid agencies are just leaving people largely to fend for themselves

The Red Cross Won't Save Houston. Texas Residents Are Launching Community Relief Efforts Instead

What I remember clearly from Hurricane Katrina is the story of how the DN team found a black corpse and their attempts to get someone to take it away. The rang the police who said “ring FEMA” (these may not be the exact agencies. They rang FEMA who said “ring the police”...and so on.

And the other story was how prisoners were left to drown in their cells by the authorities who evacuated themselves.

This is from Human Rights Watch

New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters

Officers Deserted a Jail Building, Leaving Inmates Locked in Cells

Human Rights Watch,

21 September, 2005

As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff's department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail, Human Rights Watch said today.

Inmates in Templeman III, one of several buildings in the Orleans Parish Prison compound, reported that as of Monday, August 29, there were no correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates. These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level.

“Of all the nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, this must be one of the worst,” said Corinne Carey, researcher from Human Rights Watch. “Prisoners were abandoned in their cells without food or water for days as floodwaters rose toward the ceiling.”

Human Rights Watch called on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the Orleans Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, and to establish the fate of the prisoners who had been locked in the jail. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, which oversaw the evacuation, and the Orleans Sheriff’s Department should account for the 517 inmates who are missing from the list of people evacuated from the jail.

Carey spent five days in Louisiana, conducting dozens of interviews with inmates evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, correctional officers, state officials, lawyers and their investigators who had interviewed more than 1,000 inmates evacuated from the prison.

The sheriff of Orleans Parish, Marlin N. Gusman, did not call for help in evacuating the prison until midnight on Monday, August 29, a state Department of Corrections and Public Safety spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. Other parish prisons, she said, had called for help on the previous Saturday and Sunday. The evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison was not completed until Friday, September 2.

According to officers who worked at two of the jail buildings, Templeman 1 and 2, they began to evacuate prisoners from those buildings on Tuesday, August 30, when the floodwaters reached chest level inside. These prisoners were taken by boat to the Broad Street overpass bridge, and ultimately transported to correctional facilities outside New Orleans.

But at Templeman III, which housed about 600 inmates, there was no prison staff to help the prisoners. Inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch varied about when they last remember seeing guards at the facility, but they all insisted that there were no correctional officers in the facility on Monday, August 29. A spokeswoman for the Orleans parish sheriff’s department told Human Rights Watch she did not know whether the officers at Templeman III had left the building before the evacuation.

According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmates' last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench.

“They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation.

As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility.

“The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of minutes. They were crying, they were scared. The one that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I'm scared. I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was crying.”

Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells.

Inmates broke jail windows to let air in. They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Apparently at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows.

”We started to see people in T3 hangin' shirts on fire out the windows,” Brooke Moss, an Orleans Parish Prison officer told Human Rights Watch. “They were wavin' em. Then we saw them jumping out of the windows . . . Later on, we saw a sign, I think somebody wrote `help' on it.”

As of yesterday, signs reading “Help Us,” and “One Man Down,” could still be seen hanging from a window in the third floor of Templeman III.

Several corrections officers told Human Rights Watch there was no evacuation plan for the prison, even though the facility had been evacuated during floods in the 1990s.

“It was complete chaos,” said a corrections officer with more than 30 years of service at Orleans Parish Prison. When asked what he thought happened to the inmates in Templeman III, he shook his head and said: “Ain't no tellin’ what happened to those people.”

“At best, the inmates were left to fend for themselves,” said Carey. “At worst, some may have died.”

Human Rights Watch was not able to speak directly with Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gussman or the ranking official in charge of Templeman III. A spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department told Human Rights Watch that search-and-rescue teams had gone to the prison and she insisted that “nobody drowned, nobody was left behind.”

Human Rights Watch compared an official list of all inmates held at Orleans Parish Prison immediately prior to the hurricane with the most recent list of the evacuated inmates compiled by the state Department of Corrections and Public Safety (which was entitled, “All Offenders Evacuated”). However, the list did not include 517 inmates from the jail, including 130 from Templeman III.

Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

****

Here are two other stories.


The Democracy Now! archives on Hurricane Katrina can be found HERE

African American Residents Tell Story of Survival, Blast Racially-Skewed Government Response

Democracy Now! producers get reports from African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. We hear from a woman at the convention center and a record store owner from the city’s Algiers neighborhood. [includes rush transcript]

One week after Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, nearly the entire population of New Orleans has been evacuated. The streets are deserted and littered with fallen trees and twisted metal. Nearly 80 percent of the city remains submerged in water and the number of dead is unknown.

Most of the nearly 500,000 residents of New Orleans have been driven into what the New York Times calls a "modern-day Diaspora of biblical proportions."

But before the evacuation, tens of thousands of mostly poor African-American residents endured days of appalling conditions as they waited to be rescued. Survivors told horror stories from inside the SuperDome and the convention center. Others had stayed at home to avoid the mayhem.

Democracy Now! producers John Hamilton and Sharif Abdel Kouddous traveled to the convention center on Sunday afternoon. The site was completely evacuated–well almost. Three people remained at the site from the tens of thousands that had passed though over the previous week. They sat alone among the rows of empty chairs strewn outside. One of them told her story.

We speak with three residents of New Orleans who were forced to flee–David Gladstone, Beverly Wright and Curtis Muhammad–about who gets saved and who doesn’t and even the question: will New Orleans be rebuilt? [includes rush transcript]

Well there are is still no official toll of the numbers left dead by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But as the Army Corps of Engineers began pumping the water out of the city earlier this week, officials estimated that the death the toll could be as many as 10,000 making it one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country. More than 500,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are being relocated to other states all across the country. It is a historic exodus and it is unclear what will happen to them and what support they will receive to try and rebuild their lives. An Associated Press analysis of Census data shows that the people living in the path of the hurricane’s worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be lower income and without a car. The dead and the displaced are largely the ones who had no where to go, and no means to get there. They were the ones who waited for days at the New Orleans Convention Center and at other places throughout the city, without adequate food, medicine, housing and security. And they were mostly black and largely poor.

New Orleans is a city that is almost 70 percent black with nearly 23 percent of its residents living in poverty. Many African Americans are asking if this calamity would have been allowed to happen if the demographics of the city were different. And they are asking if the response would have been quicker if New Orleans had been a predominately white, wealthy city. On his way to Louisiana a few days ago, Reverend Jesse Jackson said that racial discrimination and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the disaster response. He went on to say, "In this same city of New Orleans where slave ships landed, where the legacy of 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow discrimination, that legacy is unbroken today."

The Reverend Al Sharpton spoke in Houston on Saturday and noted the difference between the government’s rapid response to the hurricane in Florida last year that hit mostly white upper-middle class areas and to Hurricane Katrina that hit the mostly black New Orleans and Mississippi.

****

Looking back after 10 years

"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People": Reflections on Kanye West's Criticism 10 Years After

Just in case you think that this is all about heartless Republicans, George W Bush and Donald Trump here is a story from 2011 and Hurrican Irene.

NYC Criticized For Failing To Evacuate Prisoners at Riker's Island Ahead of Hurricane Irene

Charges agaisnt Amy Goodman dropped

Breaking: Judge Rejects "Riot" Charges Against Amy Goodman in North Dakota

Democracy Now!

17 November, 2014

A North Dakota judge today refused to authorize riot charges against award-winning journalist Amy Goodman for her reporting on an attack against Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters.

“This is a complete vindication of my right as a journalist to cover the attack on the protesters, and of the public’s right to know what is happening with the Dakota Access pipeline,” said Goodman. "We will continue to report on this epic struggle of Native Americans and their non-Native allies taking on the fossil fuel industry and an increasingly militarized police in this time when climate change threatens the planet."

District Judge John Grinsteiner did not find probable cause to justify the charges filed on Friday October 14 by State’s Attorney Ladd R. Erickson. Those charges were presented after Erickson had withdrawn an earlier charge against Goodman of criminal trespass. Goodman had returned to North Dakota to turn herself in to the trespassing charge.

The charges in State of North Dakota v. Amy Goodman stemmed from Democracy Now!’s coverage of protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. On Saturday, September 3, Democracy Now! filmed security guards working for the pipeline company attacking protesters. The report showed guards unleashing dogs and using pepper spray and featured people with bite injuries and a dog with blood dripping from its mouth and nose.

Democracy Now!’s report went viral online, was viewed more than 14 million times on Facebook and was rebroadcast on many outlets, including CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and the Huffington Post.

On September 8, a criminal complaint and warrant was issued for Goodman’s arrest on the trespassing charge.

"These shifting charges were a transparent attempt by the prosecutor to intimidate Amy Goodman and to silence coverage of the resistance to the pipeline," said Reed Brody, an attorney for Goodman. "Fortunately, these bully tactics didn’t work and freedom of the press has prevailed."

The pipeline project has faced months of resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and members of over 100 other tribes from across the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning public television/radio news program that airs on over 1,400 stations worldwide. Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers and won many of journalism’s highest awards in more than three decades working as a reporter.

Amy Goodman Broadcasts from North Dakota Across from Court Where She Faces Riot Charge Today

The CIA torture report

Excellent commentary from Amy Goodman and Ray McGovern who make up for the CIA goon from Washington.

CrossTalk: United States of Torture (ft. Amy Goodman)

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture gives a new meaning to the term “shock and awe.” Obama's words “We tortured some folks” is a gross understatement. Will anyone ever be punished for these crimes? CrossTalking with Fred Fleitz, Ray McGovern and Amy Goodman

Torture report’s big bombshell: How a glaring double standard was exposed

The ugly truth: Torturers are enjoying their freedom -- as truth-tellers like John Kiriakou are sitting in prison

JESSELYN RADACK

EnlargeJohn Kiriakou (Credit: AP/Cliff Owen)

Salon,

11 December, 2014

Here’s what it’s come down to in America. The newly released Executive Summary of Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report lays bare that the CIA makes propaganda its business, and the propagandists and perpetrators of torture are enjoying their freedom. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has made truth-telling a crime, and truth-tellers are in jail.

The Executive Summary of Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report brings to light gruesome and shameful details about the U.S. torture program. It describes horrific acts of human degradation (such as “rectal rehydration” when not medically necessary) and the chilling implementation of policies that specifically authorized the abuse far worse than we ever imagined or were ever told.

The report’s Executive Summary includes a deception section, describing in detail how the CIA systematically leaked classified information about the torture program to journalists who published the agency’s version of events, including “inaccurate claims about the effectiveness of CIA interrogations, much of it consistent with the inaccurate information being provided by the CIA to policymakers at the time.” CIA refused to file crimes reports about these “unauthorized disclosures,” which makes sense since the CIA Office of Public Affairs (OPA) masterminded them.

It doesn’t square, however, with the Obama administration’s unprecedented use of the Espionage Act against more people for alleged mishandling of classified information than all previous presidential administrations combined. One of the people Obama prosecuted is whistle-blower and Government Accountability Project client, former CIA officer John Kiriakou. Kiriakou publicly revealed in 2007 that torture was an official program of the U.S. government, not some rogue pastime of a few sadistic agents. In an attempt to silence Kiriakou, who continued to speak publicly and wrote a book highly critical of torture, the CIA filed six crimes reports against him for alleged “unauthorized disclosures” of information.

The Torture Report Executive Summary brings this hypocritical double standard into sharp focus, describing how when congressional overseers asked CIA why a crimes report was not filed for a story in the New York Times, CIA’s legal office responded that “‘part of this article was based on ‘background’ provided by [Office of Public Affairs]. That, essentially, negates any use in making an unauthorized disclosure [report].” In other words, the CIA’s public advocacy for torture campaign came above concerns about disclosure of classified information.

It’s even more unseemly that the CIA began to realize all this leaking completely contradicted its so-called Glomar position in FOIA cases that CIA could neither confirm nor deny the torture program’s existence. When the CIA prepared a media campaign glorifying the program, one CIA attorney warned that “our Glomar figleaf is getting pretty thin,” and another noted that the agency’s proposed media campaign “makes the [legal] declaration I just wrote about the secrecy of the interrogation program a work of fiction …” Disturbingly, the CIA attorneys did not advise correcting FOIA court filings. Instead, the lawyers recommended that the disclosures should not be attributable to CIA.

Before the Torture Report Executive Summary’s release, the CIA’s most famous and offensive leak came from former CIA director Leon Panetta, when he revealed the name of the Navy SEAL unit and ground commander who carried out the Osama bin Laden raid and discussed classified information in a 2011 ceremony attended by “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmaker Mark Boal.

The Torture Report Executive Summary reveals that CIA leaks weren’t just glorifying torture to make a Hollywood movie, they were systematically remaking the “Rendition and Interrogation Program” to deceive Congress, the “free” press and the American public into thinking torture was something mild, rare and effective. The entire program was one giant propagandist leak.

This information, four years in the making and two years in the withholding, would have been nice for Mr. Kiriakou and the other Espionage Act defendants to use to defend themselves on the basis of selective and vindictive prosecution. Unfortunately, forced with facing decades away from his family and young children, Mr. Kiriakou agreed to a plea bargain and is still in prison serving a 30-month sentence for confirming the identity of a torturer working in the euphemistic “Rendition and Interrogation Program.” All the Espionage Act charges against him were dropped, but not before the CIA got its pound of flesh.

The Executive Summary is a welcome glimmer of transparency, but until we have accountability for torture, we will always be in danger of history repeating itself.

Jesselyn Radack is the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization.

What the Torture Report Isn’t Telling You | Weapons of Mass Distraction

Why is the corporate media turning torture into a debate? Abby Martin discusses the media’s reaction to the Senate torture report and why torture has suddenly turned into a partisan debate.

Op-Ed

Betrayal of Hope

Seemorerocks

As the tragic events in the Philippines unfold things are happening pretty much in line with the 'worst-case' scenarios laid out by people back in the early days of climate change awareness said predicted.

That has caused me to go back to recollecting the past.

My first awareness of global warming goes back to 1988 when I was travelling in Asia. I read an article in the Bangkok Post that made a huge impression on me. I remember going to the New Zealand embassy to check on the newspapers and looked for reference to climate change: all I could find was a small article saying that climate change may be bad for the ski fields!

Signs of the future.

My awareness was furthered by hearing talks by the great environmentalist, the late Teddy Goldsmith, who warned, back in 1988 that the world had ten years to put things right, and was predicting extinction of life on the planet.

Wind on a bit further and I remember being influenced by a 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance” by one Al Gore who went on to become vice president of the United States.

That was before he went on to push through neo-Liberal economic policies and dismantle social and economic protections and then to help to torpedo the Kyoto negotiations. It was before he went on to make money on what is essentially a ponzi scheme called carbon trading (or cap-and-trade), that has very little to do with cutting Greenhouse gasses.

In fact I remember James Hansen saying the Kyoto protocol (1997) helped to increase emissions.

Anyway, back then reading his book was the first time I saw the outlandish prediction that with climate change we are likely to see mega-storms, stronger and more frequent than any time in recorded history.

When I realised who he was, I remember thinking how fortunate we were having someone like this as vice-president of the United States.

How little I knew!

By 1997 we knew that our hopes had basically been betrayed. Things could hardly get worse.

Little did I know.

We had the stolen election of 2000, 9/11 and the 'war on terror' which continues to this day.

If we thought there might be some light with the election of Barack Hessein Obama, this was dashed with the COP-15 talks in Copenhagen.

I remember watching in-depth coverage of the events on Democracy Now! I remember watching in horror with my friends Pam and Dido as events unfolded.

I remember how environmental activists were first excluded, demonstrated and were beaten by police; how delegates from Third World countries had to queue for hours in the snow.

I remember the pleas from leaders of small island states such as Vanuatu, the Solomons and the Maldives pleaded for action

I watched how the developed countries (led by Obama and the United States) torpedoed the talks- how the world agreed not to agree.

I remember how Tim Grosser, who had just become New Zealand's Minister for Treaty Negotiations, defended COP15 and condemned Pacific Island leaders for their statements.

This was the moment when hope for any meaningful action that would halt the destruction of our beautiful planet was extinguished.

It was before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis; it was before Deepwater Horizon, before the earthquake, tsunami and catastrophic nuclear meltdown at Fukushima.

It was before we started hearing about the melting of the Arctic ice cap and the release of methane from the Arctic ocean and the melting permafrost of Siberia.

It was before the 26 (at last count) positive, self-reinforcing feedbacks.

In fact, it was at almost exactly at this time that I found a BBC documentary, Global Dimming, that had a huge effect on me.  It examined the effect of pollution on dimming sunlight and hiding the effects of global warming. It was the first source to talk about runaway climate change and posit the possibility of sudden release of methane from the sea floor, leading to runway global warming.

More or less exactly what we are witnessing today

As an aside, it was before (I think) when Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! chose corporate funding over principle for her TV show.  

In those days she was still doing good work and chronicled the betrayal of climate justice at COP15.

Here she is interviewed at the conference


 
Since then a few other people I trusted and looked up to, have proved to be disappointments, notably George Monbiot who I used to read avidly, waited for the Fukushima disaster to adopt nuclear power as a saviour in the fight against global warming.  He has also, since then, swallowed the corporate disinformation and done a mea culpa on Peak Oil.

The days in which truths were much simpler and we (the tiny minority) stood united against corporate power and for climate justice have well-and-truly passed.

It has proved too difficult a pill to swallow for many of yesterday's friends to acknowledge that the days of finding a 'solution', of moving back to 350 ppm (or in any way halting the runaway train).

Instead we see hopium served up in truckloads. If we just donate and help build up a movement, if we divest from investment in hydrocarbons (or whatever), we can save the planet.

It takes guts to recognise that (in all probability) the game's up.

It takes even more fortitude to embrace uncertainty.

I have gone through all the emotions identified by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross - anger, depression (not so much denial and bargaining), and hopefully, some acceptance. 

The past few days in the Philippines have shown us that we are not going to quietly disappear into oblivion

Things are going to become very ugly indeed.

Just to finish off where we began here is the plea from the Filippino delegate at the Doha climate change talks.