You are a riot, Grainne. Here's what I said:
The author is a retired federal official but I don't have permission to name him (because the communication was not directly to me).
Here is your interpretation:
the piece you posted by the insider who needed to be anonymous
Talk about spin! I get a lot of communications passed on to me, as I'm sure you do. If I didn't get it first-hand, I don't use the writer's name. Simple as that. Let's not get paranoid here. The author said what he thought in an open forum, but he was not talking to me.
On the subject of who is telling the truth between the Administration and the Democrat officials in Louisiana, perhaps time will tell -- or not. A lot of the discrepancies may be the result of the total communication blackout on the Gulf Coast.
Here is an interesting piece from the Sunday Times of London about conditions in New Orleans prior to the hurricane. I have been to NO and love the ambience, but it seems it may not have been the easiest place to mount a Herculean rescue operation.
September 04, 2005
Focus: Mean streets, murder and all that jazz
Corrupt policemen and an eager market for the drugs trade meant that New Orleans was in a lot of trouble even before Katrina, says John Harlow
Even before the flood, the mean streets of New Orleans had a reputation as a place where things could easily get out of control.
When Ray Davies, founder of the Kinks, chased a mugger who attacked his girlfriend in the city’s French Quarter last year, he was shot in the leg. But the singer, now 61, could count himself lucky not to be killed in what is, or was, the crime capital of the South.
While murder rates have declined in most American cities, in New Orleans they have been rising. There were 53.1 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2002, compared with 7.3 in New York and and 17.1 in California.
Tourists were routinely warned against leaving the 30 blocks that make up the supposedly safe French Quarter, but in the Big Easy crime had a long-ingrained habit of breaking its banks.
New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) — long accused of deep-rooted corruption — claimed it was cleaning up its act, but in an extraordinary admission last week the FBI said any improvement in the city’s grim statistics could have been due to people taking the law into their own hands.
James Bernazzani, an FBI special agent, told reporters: “There is a community perception that the state judicial system has failed. And when that perception, true or not, becomes ingrained, then a second judicial system kicks in: street revenge.”
When the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina brought these ugly currents to the surface, the poor, black-populated northern reaches of the city were worst affected; it has been no surprise that mobs from these districts appeared to take advantage of the chaos.
Blacks, who comprise 67% of the city’s population but 88% of its unemployed, have long mistrusted the NOPD, and not without reason. Along with a reputation for corruption, the force has frequently been accused of racism. If the black community looks anywhere for protection, it is towards its own churches and social networks.
The NOPD gamely insists it is reforming, but in the past year alone one officer has been convicted of murder and another four have been charged with conspiring to rob banks. Senior officers are also investigating a gambling racket called the Razzle Dazzle, which for years has fleeced tourists of up to £5,000 each on Bourbon Street, the city’s Leicester Square, without the police seeming to notice.
Worryingly, New Orleans has hung on to some of its worst vices while other parts of America have moved on or reformed. Police say the poor of New Orleans are still using crack cocaine, a highly addictive and dangerous drug which went out of fashion elsewhere a decade ago.
The reasons are not hard to find: the city has traditional links with South American criminals who use it as an entry point for smuggling. In a city where rates of poverty are above average and with unemployment rampant, there was never a shortage of volunteers to join the drugs trade.
A New Orleans courier carrying a packet of cocaine from the city’s dock across the country charges the equivalent of £1,400. In Los Angeles a similar job costs £3,000. But even the crime bosses appear reluctant to live in New Orleans itself: they reside in Houston.
The New Orleans Cajun music slogan is “laissez les bon temps rouler” — let the good times roll — and indeed the police appear happy to go along with the theme. No New Orleans police chief has ever attempted anything like zero tolerance.
While many other American states have clamped down on public drunkenness, Louisiana boasts sidestreet stalls offering £2 plastic beakers full of rum and passion fruit, a lethal cocktail — inevitably called a hurricane.
Influenced by its dependency on hedonistic tourism, New Orleans has the lowest drunkenness arrest rate in the United States, while enjoying one of the nation’s highest alcoholism rates. Few observers were surprised to see women looters stealing food; what might have struck outsiders more were pictures of male looters ignoring the televisions and electronic gadgets, and plumping instead for trolley loads of whisky and rum.
Poverty has been an enduring blight. In 1999 nearly 40,000 households had an income of less than $10,000, or £5,400. Nearly 30% of children live beneath the poverty line, compared with a national average of 12%. Some academics prefer to describe the subtropical city as simply “different” from anywhere else in the United States, but in fact New Orleans falls into a category demographers call “fringe” cities. They are population centres geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of America — other examples being Savannah, Georgia, and some of the tiny islands off the Maine and Washington State coasts.
It is this isolation that made New Orleans resistant to change. Outsiders talked about its poorest being trapped in an underclass, immune to the social revolutions and welfare reforms of the past half-century. On the other hand, social workers in the city talk of a fierce local pride that conflicts with accepting handouts.
“One of the frustrations is that many of the poor are also angry, and they will not accept state or federal aid because they do not want the strings that go with it,” said a Baptist minister last week. “They would rather raise their kids in abject poverty than bend the knee to outsiders.”
He said it was New Orleans’ unique mix of poverty, pride and cultural recklessness that helped provoke the anarchy of the last week. But the minister, now resident in Los Angeles but mourning friends he fears he may have lost, clung to the belief that some good may emerge from the turmoil.
The city that gave the world jazz, he said, was a resilient beast. “New Orleans will never be the same: we may lose some of our good-time feeling, or spirit of life — but maybe it’s time we started growing up.”
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