Rick Stanley New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes

Rick Stanley
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We the People Scoop 09/10/05

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OPINION RELEASE:  New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes

STANLEY NOTE: More POLICE STATE OF AMERICA. Sounds like we all need to be in
uniforms to be able to defend ourselves in the America they are erecting... You
gun people and defenders of America have failed. It's over. Accept your
chains... Disgust me.

----- Forwarded message from eagle1@xxxxxxxx -----
    Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 22:29:05 -0500
 Subject: New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes


Guys? This isn't Baghdad, this is NEW ORLEANS. This is a RESCUE, not
an occupation.
whatreallyhappened.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08cnd-storm.html?ei=5094&en=efe0a58b7fc8e12c&hp=&ex=1126238400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print


September 8, 2005
New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes
By ALEX BERENSON and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS zzz

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Waters were receding across this flood-beaten
city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including
legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass
forced evacuation of the residents still living here.

No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols,
shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the
superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have
weapons," he said.

But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security
guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect
property. The guards, employees of private security companies like
Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass
said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had
no plans to make them give up their weapons.

Nearly two weeks after the floods began, New Orleans has turned into
an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal
law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and
active-duty soldiers. While armed looters roamed unchecked last week,
the city is now calm. No arrests were made on Wednesday night or this
morning, and the police received only 10 calls for service, a police
spokesman said.

The city's slow recovery is continuing on other fronts as well, local
officials said at a news conference. Pumping stations are now
operating across much of the city, and many taps and fire hydrants
have water pressure. Tests have shown no evidence of cholera or other
dangerous diseases in flooded areas, though health officials have
said the waters contain unsafe levels of E. coli bacteria and lead.

Efforts to recover corpses have also started.

But there were still signs of confusion and uncertainty over
government plans. FEMA's director, Michael D. Brown, had said his
agency would begin issuing debit cards, worth at least $2,000 each,
to allow hurricane victims to buy supplies for immediate needs. More
than 319,000 people have already applied for federal disaster relief,
and many evacuees began lining up at the Astrodome, in Houston, early
today in hope of getting cards.

"The concept is to get them some cash in hand," Mr. Brown had said,
"which allows them, empowers them, to make their own decisions about
what they need to have to restart their lives."

But this afternoon, FEMA announced that it no longer planned to issue
the cards. An agency spokesman, David G. Passey, said that he did not
know why the program was scrapped but that now "we believe that our
normal methods of delivery - checks and electronic funds transfer -
will suffice."

In Washington, the House an Senate overwhelmingly approved $51.8
billion for relief efforts, the second disbursement since the storm
devastated the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. The funds include $50 billion
for FEMA, $1.4 billion for the Department of Defense and an
additional $400 million for the Army Corps of Engineers. The request
follows a $10.5 billion package that President Bush signed on Friday
and that is intended to address the immediate needs of survivors.

Hundreds of miles to the east, Ophelia, a tropical storm off the
Florida coast, was upgraded to hurricane status this afternoon after
its winds reached speeds of 75 miles per hour. Forecasters have
predicted that Ophelia will turn east into the Atlantic Ocean during
the next few days, although its path remains unclear.

With pumps running and the weather here remaining hot and dry, water
has receded across much of New Orleans. Formerly flooded streets are
now passable, although covered with leaves, tree branches and mud.

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, Dan Hitchings, said 37
of the city's 174 permanent pumps were working this afternoon,
removing about 11,000 cubic feet of flood water per second. The
city's 174 pumps have the capacity to remove about 81,000 cubic feet
of water each second when they are all operational.

While Mr. Hitchings would not try to quantify how much the water
level in the city had dropped, he did say that "it's going down."

The Army Corps of Engineers continues to try to plug two levee
breaks, Mr. Hitchings said, on London Avenue, and at the end of the
Harbor Navigation Canal.

Many neighborhoods in the northern half of New Orleans remain under
10 feet of water, and Mr. Compass said today that the city's plans
for a forced evacuation remained in effect because of the danger of
disease and fires.

Mr. Compass said he could not disclose when New Orleans residents
might be forced to leave en masse, but other police officers and law
enforcement officials said the city planned to start as early as tonight.

The city's Police Department and federal law enforcement officers
from agencies like the United States Marshals Service will lead the
evacuation, Mr. Compass said. Officers will search houses in both dry
and flooded neighborhoods, and no one will be allowed to stay, he said.

Many of the residents still in the city said they did not understand
why the city remained intent on forcing them out.

"I know the risks," said Renee de Pontchieux, as she sat on a stool
outside Kajun's Pub in the working-class Bywater neighborhood east of
downtown. "We used to think we lived in America - now we're not so
sure. Why should we allow this government to chase us out and allow
people from outside to rebuild our homes? We want to rebuild our homes."

But Ms. De Pontchieux said she was resigned to being evacuated if the
police insisted. "It would be foolish" to fight, she said.

This afternoon, President Bush announced a series of measures
intended to make it easier for evacuees to receive state and federal
assistance, like Medicaid and food stamps, to make the aid as "simple
as possible to collect."

"There will be many difficult days ahead, especially as we recover
those who did not survive the storm," he said, adding that he was
declaring Sept. 16, next Friday, a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance.

Vice President *** Cheney, accompanied by Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales and the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff,
surveyed damaged neighborhoods in the Gulf Coast region today, and
pledged that the federal government would help rebuild the devastated area.

Mr. Cheney visited Gulfport, Miss., and New Orleans, where flood
waters are growing increasingly fetid and thousands of people are
still insisting on staying, despite the evacuation order.

"The president asked me to come down to take a look at things, and to
begin to focus on the longer term, in terms of making certain
obviously that we're getting the search-and-rescue missions done and
all those other immediate things," Mr. Cheney said after touring a
neighborhood in Gulfport. "The progress we're making is significant."

Mr. Cheney's visit follows a visit earlier this week by President
Bush, his second since the storm hit, following much criticism last
week that the administration and federal agencies had been slow in
responding to the disaster.

An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people remain inside New Orleans more
than a week after Hurricane Katrina hit, many in neighborhoods that
are on high ground near the Mississippi River.

But the number of dead still remained a looming and disturbing question.

In the first indication of how many deaths Louisiana alone might
expect, a spokesman for the State Department of Health and Hospitals,
Robert Johannessen, said on Wednesday that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency had ordered 25,000 body bags. The official death
toll remains under 100.

In Washington, House and Senate leaders announced a joint
investigation into the government's response to the crisis.
"Americans deserve answers," said a statement by the two top-ranking
Republicans, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Senator Bill Frist, the
majority leader. "We must do all we can to learn from this tragedy,
improve the system and protect all of our citizens."

Democratic leaders, however, said they would not participate, citing
a preference for an independent inquiry.

The government continued its efforts to help evacuees. At the
Astrodome in Houston, where an estimated 15,000 New Orleans evacuees
found shelter over the weekend, the number had dwindled to only about
3,000 on Wednesday as people were rapidly placed in apartments,
volunteers' homes and hotels that had been promised reimbursement by FEMA.

With the overall death toll highly uncertain, Mr. Brown, the FEMA
director, said in Baton Rouge that the formal house-to-house search
for bodies had begun at midmorning. He said the temporary mortuary
set up in St. Gabriel, La., was prepared to receive 500 to 1,000
bodies a day, with refrigeration trucks on site to hold the corpses.

"They will be processed as rapidly as possible," Mr. Brown said.

As it worked to remove the water inundating the city, the Corps of
Engineers said that one additional pumping station, No. 6, at the
head of the 17th Street Canal, had started up, and that about 10
percent of the city's total pumping capacity was in operation. But
the corps added that it was dealing with a new problem: how to
prevent corpses from being sucked to the grates at the pump inlets.

"We're expending every effort to try to ensure that we protect the
integrity of remains as we get this water out of the city," said John
S. Rickey, chief of public affairs for the corps. "We're taking this
very personally. This is a very deep emotional aspect of our work down there."

Officials emphasized that as testing of the flood waters continued,
substances in addition to E. coli bacteria and lead were likely to be
found at harmful levels, especially from water taken near industrial sites.

"Human contact with the floodwater should be avoided as much as
possible," the environmental agency's administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said.

A spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention said state and local officials had reported three deaths
in Mississippi and one in Texas from exposure to Vibrio vulnificus, a
choleralike bacterium found in salt water, which poses special risks
for people with chronic liver problems.

At a news conference this morning, officials in New Orleans cautioned
people to decontaminate themselves as best as possible when entering
homes after wading through the floodwater.

Among the authorities, though, some confusion lingered about how a
widespread evacuation by force would work, and how much support it
would get at the federal and state level. Mayor C. Ray Nagin told the
police and the military on Tuesday to remove all residents for their
own safety, and on Wednesday, the police superintendent, Mr. Compass,
said state laws give the mayor the authority to declare martial law
and order the evacuations.

"There's a martial law declaration in place that gives us legal
authority for mandatory evacuations," Mr. Compass said. "We'll use
the minimum amount of force necessary."

But because the New Orleans Police Department has only about 1,000
working officers, the city is largely in the hands of National Guard
troops and active-duty soldiers.

State officials said Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco could tell the
Guard to carry out the forced removals, but they stopped short of a
commitment to do so. In Washington, Lt. Gen. Joseph R. Inge, deputy
commander of the United States Northern Command, said regular troops
"would not be used" in any forced evacuation.

The state disaster law does not supersede either the state or federal
Constitutions, said Kenneth M. Murchison, a law professor at
Louisiana State University. But even so, Mr. Nagin's decision could
be a smart strategy that does not violate fundamental rights,
Professor Murchison said.

When police officers came to Billie Moore's 3,000 square foot
Victorian to warn her of the health risks of remaining in the city,
she pushed her identification tag from the hospital where she works
as a nurse through slats in the door.

"I guess you know the health risks then," the officer said as he walked away.

Ms. Moore and her husband, Richard Robinson, who do not drive and use
bicycles for the 5-mile ride to their jobs at the still-functioning
Ochsner Hospital in suburban Jefferson Parish, have no plans to
leave. Their circa-1895 home, on the city's southwest flank, suffered
virtually no damage in the hurricane or its aftermath. They have been
lighting an old gas stove with a match to cook pasta and rice,
dumping cans of peas on top for flavor.

"We try to be normal and sit down and eat," Ms. Moore, 52, explained
as she showed off the expansive, well-kept home where they have lived
for 10 years. "I think that's how we'll stay healthy is if I keep the
house clean."

Ms. Moore said she had not worked since the hurricane because there
are few babies left at the hospital, but that she remains on standby;
her husband has been on duty the past five days.

"I don't want to go, I don't want to lose my job," she said. "Who's
going to take care of the patients if all the nurses go away?"

Alex Berenson reported from New Orleans for this article, and Timothy
Williams from New York. Reporting was contributed by John Broder from
New Orleans, Sewell Chan from Baton Rouge, La; Christine Hauser from
New York, and Matthew L. Wald from Vicksburg, Miss.


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Disclaimer: Information shared in the Stanley Scoop is not
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