The Siege of New Orleans
SIEGE -The surrounding and blockading of a city, town, or fortress by an army attempting to capture it.
By now everyone has heard that assistance was prevented from entering New Orleans for days after it was available and people were begging for it. The reasoning put forward by Homeland Security was: if food and water was allowed into New Orleans people would refuse to evacuate.
I was somewhat stunned to be asked to accept that the Federal officials in charge of this effort actually believed that human beings would choose to live in the abject conditions of filth, discomfort and danger seen in and around the SuperDome and Convention Center if you gave them something to eat and clean water to drink. I can only conclude that Mr. Chertoff assumes that the residents of New Orleans are less than human.
The Federal officials wanted people out of New Orleans, so they laid siege to the city. They sealed it off from the outside world. They didn’t provide the communications equipment that was sitting in warehouses and might have helped the overwhelmed public safety personnel maintain control of the situation. On Meet The Press Mr. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, tells us that FEMA cut emergency communications in his area. They might have been successful if members of the media with satellite phones hadn’t managed to get in before they could complete their encirclement of the area.
They are still intent on starving out any stragglers. They have declared war on the city. They didn’t want civil order to be maintained, they have done everything they could to prevent it.
