FEMA convoy gets ice to cities not in need

September 12, 2005
by Woody Baird
Associated Press writer
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- About 200 tractor-trailer trucks with ice and water for victims of Hurricane Katrina took a convoluted, weeklong trip to a storage depot in Memphis, partly because of what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called "miscommunication."

The drivers were sent to cities that didn't end up needing water or ice and were final directed to Memphis, said Corps spokesman Bob Anderson.

"They're in the right place now," Anderson said Monday. He said the problem trip may have resulted from "miscommunication, a breakdown in communication between FEMA and the Corps."

The trucks are leased by the F E M A, while theCorps is responsible for getting them to where they are needed in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Memphis has a Corps storage facility where relief supplies are held before being shipped south.

No one went without water because of the mix-up, Anderson said.

"Our supply of ice and water is exceeding the demand right now," Anderson said.

"The ice and water will not be wasted."

The 18-wheelers, under contract for up to $900 a day, are part of a relief operations that already has sent more than 5,300 trucks of ice and water to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Anderson said.

Drivers said they picked up their loads a week ago and were sent to Meridian, Miss., before being dispatched to Selma, Ala., and finally to Memphis.

Some also were detoured through Hattiesburg, Miss., drivers said.

Jeff Henderson of Dade City, Fla., picked up his load near Grand Rapids, Mich.

"I drove all the way up from Florida to Michigan thinking I was going to help these people out and now I've been sitting on this load for over seven days," Henderson said.

"Somebody dropped the ball somewhere."

Blackwater Mercenaries: Coming Soon to Your Town

September 12, 2005
by Kurt Nimmo

It is now obvious how martial law (not officially declared as such) will work in America in the wake of the devastation of New Orleans.

Instead of federal troops or an influx of National Guard troops sent to “restore order”(the latter mandated in our now anachronistic Constitution; see Article 1, Section 8) and empowered to “suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions,” in Louisiana the state and federal governments have brazenly violated the Constitution by sending in Blackwater Security and other private goon squads.

“Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous

for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans,” write Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo.

“Some of the mercenaries say they have been ‘deputized’ by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms.

They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force.” Soon after Katrina slammed into New Orleans, the media reported the presence of Blackwater goons  (and have no doubt, Blackwater hires “special ops types from South Africa’s former apartheid regime,” according to James Ridgeway and others, people fairly characterized as murderous paramilitary goons).

Initially, it was reported that Blackwater was hired to protect the property of New Orleans’ rich elite (and hotels and other businesses), but soon the company admitted it was “helping the U.S. Coast Guard Sept. 1 with search-and-rescue missions, lending one of its Puma helicopters for the missions…. [and] protecting facilities that house ‘priceless art pieces’ and special landmarks” from “looters” who were mostly interested in water and food, not priceless art.

“We are preparing for a rather long deployment for this work,” Jack Serpas, who works for

Securitas Security Services USA Inc., another “security” firm, told Marguerite Higgins of the Washington Post on September 10.  “As the threat of forced evictions now looms in New Orleans and the city confiscates even legally registered weapons from civilians, the private mercenaries of Blackwater patrol the streets openly wielding M-16s nd other assault weapons,” note Scahill and Crespo, a fact that runs counter to Police Commissioner Eddie Compass’ assertion that only New Orleans law enforcement would carry and use weapons.

In standard Bushian fashion, the Ministry of Homeland Security has feigned ignorance of this invasion of private security company goons in New Orleans.

“A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, Russ Knocke, told the Washington Post he knows of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security,” write Scahill and Crespo. It’s like a scene out of Sinclair Lewis’ dystopic novel, It Can’t Happen Here.

“Gun toting militias terrorize the nation at a local level, with the redneck morons handed leadership roles in every community, with the right to summarily execute people who say the wrong thing.

Resistors are threatened with imprisonment or death if they don’t go public supporting the party line,” opines Rob Kall for Op-Ed News.  “Lewis wrote his book in 1937, having see Hitler’s rise to Power.

We’ve seen many articles describing how similarly the Bush administration has operated, starting with When Democracy Failed by Thom Hartmann.

In 2002, Hartmann’s article seemed to reek of conspiracy theory and paranoia to some. Now, it is a frightening portent, characterizing too many parallels suggesting that we are much further along the dangerous roadthat Sinclair Lewis created as a fiction.”

Kall continues:An American city is under military rule, with citizens being dragged and handcuffed out of their homes, helpless, frail old women thrown around, manhandled, captured and thrown into transport trucks. FEMA has created “detainment camps” which

----people are not allowed to leave,

----where they get two meals a day,

----are not allowed to cook,

----can’t leave to go to church…

As our illegitimate president and his cronies keep telling us, it is only a matter of time before a terrorist nuke takes out an American city.

If this happens (and we are told repeatedly it is not a matter of if but when),the Bush administration, FEMA, the Ministry of Homeland Security, and  the Pentagon will be ready, having field tested their “response” in New Orleans.

Expect Blackwater goons, experienced in killing “insurgents” in South Africa and Iraq, to enter your house—by way of kicking in the front door or pitching a stun grenade through  the living room window—and confiscate your weapons and haul you off  to a FEMA concentration camp.

Of course, they will bear special badges, issued by a corrupt or compromised local government, and thus it will be said the gun and Constitution nuts resisting will be going up against the will of the people (that is to say the will of our neolib plutocratic overseers who have decided the Constitution and a constitutional republic are no longer workable under the rubric of their globalist agenda).

Unfortunately, many Americans are so brainwashed (and afraid of al-CIA-duh, due to an unrelenting and highly organized campaign of fake terror alerts) they are unable to realize the threat (due in large part to a complicit media that soft pedals totalitarianism as “compassion”).

For as Sinclair Lewis wrote in his prophetic novel, “most of the easy-going descendants of the wise-cracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ meant anything more than a high school yell or a cigarette slogan.”

Many of them will come around when a goon trained by South Africa’s apartheid government shoves the muzzle of an M-16 in their faces, barking obscenities and  smashing up the furniture.

Of course, by then, it will be far too late.