No Questions Asked

Last week, the number of American soldiers who died in Iraq exceeded 1,900. An average of two US soldiers have died each day since the war began. Countless Iraqi civilians have also died.

The country the US said would become a model for democracy in the Middle East is fast becoming the second Islamic republic in the region. If Iraq does not become an Islamic republic, it will most likely be divided by a bloody civil war in which more people will die.

Three years and $300 billion later, the same people who told us that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to America and that he was secretly developing weapons of mass destruction are telling the same stories again. This time, however, Iran is the evil enemy developing nuclear weapons.

In building their case for war against Iraq members of the Bush administration told the world that Saddam Hussein had been secretly developing nuclear weapons and was six months away from completing his first weapon of mass destruction. Last week the same claims were made about Iran. Similarities in the wording and the attempts to build a case against the two countries are worth noting.

Saddam ‘is months away from a nuclear bomb’

President Bush, speaking during his summit with Tony Blair, said that Saddam was just six months away from going nuclear.

He said the prediction came from the IAEA but a spokesman for the agency said: “We don’t know where he got that figure from.”

…Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, said:“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

….A senior US official told The New York Times: “The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical or biological weapons.”

This made an invasion of Iraq imperative, he said. “The closer Saddam Hussein gets to a nuclear weapon, the harder he will be to deal with.”

Last week, the same claims were made about weapons of mass destruction. This time, however, Iran is the country just six months away from developing nuclear weapons.

Tehran six months off nuclear arms ability: Israel

IRAN may be only six months away from acquiring the capability to produce nuclear weapons, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom has claimed.

The assessment, which he said was based on Israeli intelligence, differs from US intelligence assessments that Iran could not begin producing nuclear weapons for another decade.

“Our experts say they are very close to this (production) stage,” Mr Shalom said. “They may need only another six months.”

…As member states of the nuclear watchdog met in Vienna to decide how to respond to Tehran’s defiant stand, British, French and German officials lobbied for possible international sanctions against Iran.

A British diplomat said: “We have a critical mass of support.”

The Bush administration, which has long campaigned to have Iran referred to the UN, said yesterday that the move was “long overdue”.

Israel has always maintained a policy of ambiguity regarding its own nuclear capacity, neither confirming nor denying it. There is no pressure regarding the issue from the US or Europe and none is expected.

US intelligence may state that Iran is “decades away” from developing nuclear weapons, but again, the administration has decided to ignore its own intelligence in favor of phantom evidence from foreign sources — including Iranian dissidents.

There are clear parallels to the build-up to the Iraq war.

Prior to the war in Iraq, many US intelligence agents did not believe that Iraq was just months away from developing weapons of mass destruction, but an Iraqi dissident in Germany, labeled “Curveball” told them otherwise. Since it was convenient, top US officials decided to believe him instead of their own intelligence sources.

“The fact is there was yelling and screaming about this guy,” said James L. Pavitt, deputy director of operations and head of the clandestine service until he retired last summer.

“My people were saying: ‘We think he’s a stinker,’” Pavitt said. But CIA bioweapons analysts, he said, “were saying: ‘We still think he’s worthwhile.’ “ Pavitt said he didn’t convey his own doubts to Tenet because he didn’t know until after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that Curveball was “of such import” in prewar CIA assessments provided to the president, Congress and the public.

“Later, I remember the guffaws by myself and others when we said, ‘How could they have put this much emphasis on this guy? … He wasn’t worth [anything] in our minds,” Pavitt said.

Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA European Division, said he and other senior officials in his office — the unit that oversees spying in Europe — had issued repeated warnings about Curveball’s accounts.

“Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening,” said Drumheller, who retired in November after 25 years at the CIA. He said he never met personally with Tenet, but “did talk to McLaughlin and everybody else.”

…”Believe me, there are literally inches and inches of documentation” including “dozens and dozens of e-mails and memos and things like that detailing meetings” where officials sharply questioned Curveball’s credibility, Drumheller said.

The Bush administration has slowly but steadily given credibility to “stinker” dissident sources who claim Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

During an interview broadcast on Israeli television Bush said “all options are on the table” including war with Iran if he wasn’t satisfied that they were not developing nuclear weapons. “The use of force is the last option for any president. You know, we’ve used force in the recent past to secure our country,” he said.

In August, claims by the National Council of Resistance of Iran received a lot of attention in the American media. Members of the group claimed that Iran had 4,000 centrifuges at secret sites and that they were being used to develop nuclear weapons. This group of dissidents is even shakier than “Curveball.” According to the US State Department, the National Resistance of Iran is a terrorist organization.

The US tried to gather support for a war in Iraq by presentations to UN officials and constant spins in the US media about Hussein’s dangerous threat. It is doing the same now with Iran.

U.S. Deploys Slide Show to Press Case Against Iran

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 13 — With an hour-long slide show that blends satellite imagery with disquieting assumptions about Iran’s nuclear energy program, Bush administration officials have been trying to convince allies that Tehran is on a fast track toward nuclear weapons.

The PowerPoint briefing, titled “A History of Concealment and Deception,” has been presented to diplomats from more than a dozen countries. Several diplomats said the presentation, intended to win allies for increasing pressure on the Iranian government, dismisses ambiguities in the evidence about Iran’s intentions and omits alternative explanations under debate among intelligence analysts.

The presenters argue that the evidence leads solidly to a conclusion that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at producing weapons, according to diplomats who have attended the briefings and U.S. officials who helped to assemble the slide show. But even U.S. intelligence estimates acknowledge that other possibilities are plausible, though unverified.

The problem, acknowledged one U.S. official, is that the evidence is not definitive. Briefers “say you can’t draw any other conclusion, and of course you can draw other conclusions,” said the official, who would discuss the closed-door sessions only on condition of anonymity.

…Several diplomats said the slide show reminded them of the flawed presentation on Iraq’s weapons programs made by then-secretary of state Colin L. Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. “I don’t think they’ll lose any support, but it isn’t going to win anyone either,” said one European diplomat who attended the recent briefing and whose country backs the U.S. position on Iran.

And like the claims of Iraq’s weapons capabilities, the administration is ignoring the findings of the UN’s nuclear agency which says Iran is telling the truth about its nuclear program.

The UN nuclear watchdog agency rebuts claims that Iran is trying to make A-bomb

The UN nuclear watchdog is preparing to publish evidence that Iran is not engaged in a nuclear weapons programme, undermining a warning of possible military action from President George Bush.

Iran is about to receive a major boost from the results of a scientific analysis that will prove that the country’s authorities were telling the truth when they said they were not developing a nuclear weapon. The discovery of traces of weapons-grade uranium in Iran by UN inspectors in August 2003 set off alarm bells in Western capitals where it was feared that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon under cover of a civil programme. The inspectors took the samples from Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, which had been concealed from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for 18 years.

But Iran maintained that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, and that the traces must have been contamination from the Pakistani-based black market network of scientist AQ Khan. He is the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb.

The analysis of components from Pakistan, obtained last May by the IAEA, is now almost complete and is set to conclude that the traces of weapons-grade uranium match those found in Iran. “The investigation is likely to show that they came from Pakistan,” a Vienna-based diplomat told The Independent on Sunday.

The new information, which strengthens Iran’s case after last week’s contentious IAEA board meeting in Vienna, will be a central part of the next report to the board by Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA chief. “The biggest single issue of the past two years has now fallen in their [the Iranians’] favour,” the diplomat said. The meeting of the 35-nation board, which ended last Thursday, urged Iran to suspend the uranium-related activity at its Isfahan plant, which many fear will be the first step towards building a nuclear weapon.

Can history so blatantly repeat itself without consequence? Americans are now protesting the war in Iraq, but who’s paying attention to the buildup against Iran. The administration may not send troops, but is bombing a country any better? Innocent civilians will die for lies — again.

The President’s recent UN speech linking the war on terror and poverty is a belated acknowledgement that the “war on terror” is nothing more than a slogan, like a war on drugs or crime.

The president has acknowledged what the media should have noted years ago — that it is impossible to stop terrorism by dropping bombs and invading countries.

Bush said on September 20, 2001:

Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.

It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’ They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: Our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way.

We’re not deceived by their pretenses to piety.

The words are haunting, especially when they are applied to the actions of the Bush administration.

Since that speech in 2001 the U.S. has invaded two countries and overthrown the existing governments. It appears a third country is being targeted — officials recently presented an hour-long slide show called “A History of Concealment and Deception,” to diplomats from more than a dozen countries. The Washington Post says the presentation “blends satellite imagery with disquieting assumptions about Iran’s nuclear energy program.” Bush administration officials are using the presentation to try to convince allies that Tehran is developing WMDs. “Several diplomats said the presentation, intended to win allies for increasing pressure on the Iranian government, dismisses ambiguities in the evidence about Iran’s intentions and omits alternative explanations under debate among intelligence analysts.”

The freedom Bush bragged about has become tenuous in the U.S. and abroad. Personal records — bank statements, library records, private e-mail messages, phone conversations and more — can be monitored by the government under the USA Patriot Act.

Thousands remain imprisoned by the U.S. government without being charged with a crime. Even American citizens have been denied the right to a fair trial. Jose Padilla was arrested on May 8, 2002 in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after returning from Pakistan. He was labeled an enemy combatant and has been in prison since then. He has not been given a chance to defend himself in court.

In Guantanamo Bay one-fourth of the prisoners are on a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention and 18 are being force-fed in a military hospital. Others in Guantanamo Bay have been deemed innocent but remain in prison.

According to Arthur Eisenberg, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, “the government’s willingness to erode the line between civilian and military authority disregards the wisdom and intent of the framers of the Constitution. Even during the most trying times facing our nation, including the bloody Civil War, courts have held fast to the principle that the military not be allowed to usurp civilian authority.”

Even the new Iraqi government is tired of “pretenses to piety.”

Justice Minister Abdul Hussein Shandal criticised the U.S. military’s detention of Iraqi journalists and said the media should have legal protection so reporters can report all sides of the story.

“No citizen should be arrested without a court order,” he said this week, complaining that U.S. suggestions that his ministry has an equal say on detentions were misleading.

“There is abuse (of human rights) due to detentions, which are overseen by the Multinational Force (MNF) and are not in the control of the justice ministry,” said Shandal, a Shi’ite judge respected for standing up to Saddam Hussein on the rule of law. Killings and unjustified arrests of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops risked going unpunished, he said, because of U.N. Security Council resolution 1546, which granted U.S.-led forces sweeping powers following their overthrow of Saddam in 2003.

“The resolution … gives immunity to the MNF and means taking no action against the MNF no matter what happens or whatever they do against the people of Iraq,” Shandal said.

In Iraq, people live in chaos and poverty. In Afghanistan, people live in chaos and poverty. And, in the U.S., people live in chaos and poverty.

What is the result of the administration’s declaration of a war on terror?

Bruce Hoffman of the Rand Corporation, a government advisory group said, “Today there is not one al-Qaeda, there are many al-Qaedas. [They] don’t see the resolution of this struggle in their own lifetimes.”

It makes the president’s recent proclamations of hope seem hollow.

“There can be no safety in looking away or seeking the quiet life by ignoring the hardship and oppression of others. Either hope will spread or violence will spread, and we must take the side of hope.”

Four years after that passionate speech about “our freedom” and the “evil forces” who hate “our way of life”, George Bush has destroyed almost everything that America stands for both nationally and internationally.

If the result of a war for our freedom was that we lost most of our freedom, God save us from the result of a war on poverty.

Prior to the war in Iraq President Bush said he was a “compassionate conservative” who wanted to bring “moral clarity” to the world. (See chapter 1 of No Questions Asked)

He told West Point graduates in 2002: “Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place”.

In the past five years Bush has certainly showed the world his “moral truth.” Recently, Americans learned that he meant what he said about his moral truth being the same in every culture and in every place. The poor and hopeless victims of Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. were treated the same way as the poor and hopeless victims of the war in Iraq.

What is this moral truth, this easy distinction Bush makes between good and evil?

Bush’s moral truth appears to be that human life is insignificant. His administration is indifferent to human suffering. Those who had the resources to flee the hurricane did so. Those who did not were left behind to die without much consideration. They were mostly the poor and the elderly. Civilized societies protect the weak and vulnerable. When help did come to those stranded in New Orleans, the sick and the elderly were the last to get out.

After the hurricane, thousands of desperate people begged for life-saving assistance. What did the president do? He was photographed at a party. He went mountain biking, played golf, played a guitar with a country western singer and smiled and waved to reporters. He spent a few minutes looking serious and discussing the grave hurricane before smirking and moving on to another vacation event.

When a quick fly-by of the area in Air Force One didn’t quell criticism he went back and hugged a few of the victims. But he made it clear that he didn’t want to be there — he was forced to go. He told reporters: “I’m not looking forward to going down there to tell you the truth. It’s devastated.”

As thousands remained stranded without food and water, Condoleezza Rice took in a in a Broadway show and went shopping for shoes in a Manhattan boutique. Dick Cheney was on vacation — he seems to have returned this week and will visit New Orleans on Thursday.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez most accurately summarized Bush’s response:

“That government had no evacuation plan … it is incredible, the first power in the world … that is so involved in Iraq … and it left its own population adrift!” said Chavez. “That man … that man is the ‘king of vacations’ … he sat at his ranch in Texas and said nothing … did nothing … yes, he told people ‘you have to flee’ but he didn’t say how … what a cowboy, what a cowboy mentality,”

Why weren’t the people of New Orleans evacuated? In July China safely evacuated 600,000 people from coastal areas in anticipation of a typhoon. China has a horrible human rights record, yet its government appears to value human life more than the “free,” “democratic” United States. On Tuesday, the Japanese government sent military troops to evacuate 110,000 people who were in the way of a typhoon.

It is horrifying to realize that the government we elected does not care for the people. But it should not come as a surprise. The administration was ill prepared for the war in Iraq and the results were the same as in New Orleans — there was chaos, desperation and finally anger, hatred and a surge in the anti-government feelings and a growth in insurgents.

The arrogance and incompetence of the administration is infuriating. No matter what country you are from, watching people suffer needlessly because of bureaucratic red tape becomes maddening to the point of instilling enough hatred to kill.

Ben Morris, Slidell, La. mayor said: “We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we’ve heard that they’ve gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they’d better be armed because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them deprive our citizens. I’m pissed off, and tired of this horse$#@@.”

Doctors around the country united and gathered supplies and medical staff to assist those in need in the worst hit areas only to be told by FEMA they couldn’t go near the victims.

One hundred surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital tried to help but were stopped in rural Mississippi.

“We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here,” said one of the frustrated surgeons, Preston “Chip” Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

That government officials can’t straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they’re just a few miles away “is just mind-boggling,” he said.

Firefighters volunteered with equipment and were told to hand out fliers and do PR work for the government.

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

“They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter. “We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.” The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.

Even administration-friendly Fox News turned on the administration. Reporter Geraldo Rivera described how thousands were literally locked in the Superdome, dying because of the lack of food, water, medicine and toilets. He repeated “let them go, just let them walk out of here” several times while broadcasting live from the Superdome.

As thirty thousand people were held hostage inside a stinking Convention Center, the official response was not water, food and compassion — it was guns and threats.

Every so often, an armored state police vehicle cruised in front of the convention center with four or five officers in riot gear with automatic weapons. But there was no sign of help from the National Guard.

At one point the crowd began to chant “We want help! We want help!” Later, a woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.”

Shrugging off the suffering, Bush arrogantly told the people of the world he didn’t need their help, but he would accept “cash money” if it was sent.

While much of the world was introduced to Bush’s moral truths in the ugly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. citizens largely ignored it. Now they’ve seen it for themselves.

This time the people dying from a lack of food, water and medical supplies weren’t foreigners. This time they were friends, family members — Americans who needed help and were ignored. It shouldn’t take a stretch of the imagination to understand that the feelings of abandonment, desperation, hopelessness and anger of those left in New Orleans are the same for families in Iraq who lost everything. It is not easy to lose your home, your job and all your belongings. It is infuriating to watch a child, a parent or a grandparent die from dehydration or a treatable illness.

Whether Bush’s arrogance during a national crisis will have a long-term consequence is still unclear. What is clear is the U.S. is in danger of losing something very valuable, if it has not lost it already — it’s moral fiber.

The racism and classism that was hidden just below society’s surface has been exposed and magnified by media coverage.

In picture captions of the chaos in New Orleans, black people carrying bags were “looters,” white people were “securing what little belongings they had been able to save.” Bush issued a zero tolerance policy toward people who were breaking into ruined stores for basics such as food, toothpaste, deodorant and toilet paper.

Those stuck in New Orleans told reporters “they had been saved by looters who smashed windows of abandoned stores and distributed food and water to those left with nothing.”

World opinion is turning against the U.S. and rightfully so. If this is the way we treat our own citizens, then we are no better than animals. Are we truly a nation that punishes the weak and the vulnerable? Do we sanction violence? Before sending food and water to those suffering in New Orleans we sent troops, armed with “M-16s” “locked and loaded”, with orders to shoot.

During his 2002 speech to West Point graduates, Bush said:

Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.

Will Americans remain indifferent to human suffering or will they stand up, reveal a problem and confront an evil and lawless regime?

Bush is right that there can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty. The fate of the American conscience is at stake. Take a stand, fight to preserve human dignity in the U.S. and abroad. Otherwise Bush’s moral truth will become America’s moral truth.

The media is now awash with stories of President Bush’s visit to the areas devastated by the hurricane. Bush has been photographed hugging and kissing those displaced by the disastrous storm.

What has not been well reported is the desperate pleas by the Mayor of New Orleans for assistance. It was after Mayor Ray Nagin’s honest appraisal of the situation on a national radio program that Bush finally sent help. Perhaps he realized the significance of Nagin’s allegations that he ignored his request for help.
Mayor of New Orleans pleaded for help during a radio interview.

Mayor to feds: ‘Get off your asses’

A few news sources also noted the “disconnect” between the Bush administration’s version of events and what really happened.

The big disconnect on New Orleans
The official version; then there’s the in-the-trenches version

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday. The sanitized view came from federal officials at news conferences and television appearances. But the official line was contradicted by grittier, more desperate views from the shelters and the streets.

These conflicting views came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN’s transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin,evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here’s what they had to say:

Conditions in the Convention Center

* FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of CNN asking why FEMA is clueless about conditions — 2:11)

* Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin’s angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)

* CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you
.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/katrina.response/index.html

My heart goes out to all those suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

It difficult to comprehend the pain and discomfort being experienced by those who have been through such a horrible ordeal. But the result of the desperation is not. New Orleans has been wracked with looting and violence by those who are hungry, thirsty and fearful that they have lost everything and will be unable to survive.

Thousands were told to report to the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. When they arrived they were herded into the buildings and introduced to hell on earth.

Instead of meeting the emergency with personnel, food, water and other necessities, officials crammed people into the buildings where gangs with guns raped, killed and terrorized innocent people who had already suffered great loss. Babies and the elderly died from dehydration and the heat.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Thousands of people forced from their homes by Hurricane Katrina have crammed into the New Orleans convention center, where they’ve had no food, no water and no word on when help would come.

And people are dying.

CNN’s Chris Lawrence described “many, many” bodies, inside and outside the facility on New Orleans’ Riverwalk.

“There are multiple people dying at the convention center,” he said. “There was an old woman, dead in a wheelchair with a blanket draped over her, pushed up against a wall. Horrible, horrible conditions.

“We saw a man who went into a seizure, literally dying right in front of us.”

People were “being forced to lived like animals,” Lawrence said — surrounded by piles of trash and feces.

He said while he has seen police SWAT teams drive by in armored vehicles, no one has stopped to talk with the refugees.

“People are asking, ‘Where are the buses? Where is the plan? Where is the help?” he said..

Those housed in the Superdome, which was described by the media as a sweltering sewer pit overflowing with human excrement and rotting garbage, have turned on the people who were sent to help them.

NEW ORLEANS - Fights and trash fires broke out at the hot and stinking Superdome, where the airlift operation was suspended, and anger and unrest mounted across New Orleans on Thursday as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured in to help restore order.

“We are out here like pure animals. We don’t have help,” the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, complaining that he and hundreds of others were evacuated, taken to the convention hall by bus, dropped off and given nothing.

People outside the center, some holding crying babies or elderly barely able to stand up, shouted for help as TV news crews passed by.

Police told reporters to be careful. “We were told don’t drink or eat in public as it could lead to a mob situation,” NBC’s Michelle Hofland said. “We were told that by sundown to get out of here.”

A New Orleans police officer told reporters: “People were raped in the Superdome. People were killed in there. We had multiple riots.”

Where was the Red Cross, FEMA, the National Guard?

The suffering isn’t limited to New Orleans. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a city that was literally wiped out by Katrina, editors at the local paper begged the administration to help the region.

While the flow of information is frustratingly difficult, our reporters have yet to find evidence of a coordinated approach to relieve pain and hunger or to secure property and maintain order. People are hurting and people are being vandalized.

Yet where is the National Guard, why hasn’t every able-bodied member of the armed forces in South Mississippi been pressed into service?

Reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.

…We need the president to back up his declaration of a disaster with a declaration of every man and woman under his command will do whatever is necessary to deal with that disaster.

Those who have paid attention to the news reports coming from Iraq will notice similarities in the statements made by Iraqi civilians and those in New Orleans.

In New Orleans, civilians said:

“We’ve got people dying out here — two babies have died, a woman died, a man died,” said Helen Cheek. “We haven’t had no food, we haven’t had no water, we haven’t had nothing. They just brought us here and dropped us.”

Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, “‘Go to hell — it’s every man for himself.’”

“This is just insanity,” she said. “We have no food, no water … all these trucks and buses go by and they do nothing but wave.”

FEMA director Michael Brown said the agency just learned about the situation at the convention center Thursday and quickly scrambled to provide food, water and medical care and remove the corpses.

In Iraq, civilians said:

“We have over a million people here and all of us suffer. Sometimes we have to drink the sewage. Yesterday our water smelled like petrol, because there is a station nearby and we all know the benzene leaks into our water.”

…“Nobody from the Council (US Appointed Iraqi Governing Council) cares about us here. We hear that companies are coming here to rebuild, but we haven’t seen anything rebuilt. We know they only came for the oil. Our situation hasn’t changed one bit since the American’s arrived here. We are still suffering just as we did under Saddam. But now it is worse because there are fewer jobs, and it is even more dangerous for us.”

The US is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, how can this happen? Where is the president’s compassion? Where is the rapid response to alleviate the suffering?

Bush once said he doesn’t read newspapers or listen to the news, which could explain why it took his administration so long to learn about the problems in Iraq and in New Orleans. The signs that trouble was afoot in New Orleans were there since the storm hit on Sunday.

Because of this inaction, the US has another war zone to contend with, this time it is at home. Some of the damage from the storm would have happened no matter how prepared New Orleans was. But there were some very preventable things that could have been done to minimize the suffering.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

…Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Bush responded to the criticism of his lack of foresight the same way he responded to criticisms of how he handled post 9/11 warnings of an al-Qaeda attack. Bush on Good Morning America:

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” (Remember this: “Nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.”)

The Bush administration’s response to the emergency in New Orleans has been slow and inadequate. Like the aftermath of the war in Iraq, looting, riots and lawlessness was allowed to flourish and innocent citizens were victimized again. Members of the National Guard, who have historically helped with search and rescue missions at home are in Iraq, helping that country regain control of the looting and lawlessness that resulted from the US government’s failure to secure the country after it invaded.

Called back from the war zone abroad, these guardsmen arrived in New Orleans yesterday. What can the city expect? Not the friendly, helpful National Guard of old. According to the Louisiana governor, the people stuck in the city can expect more death and more chaos.

“They have M-16s and they’re locked and loaded,” Gov. Kathleen Blanco said of 300 National Guard troops who landed in New Orleans fresh from duty in Iraq. “These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will.”

Maybe now we can grasp the enormity of the anger and frustration of the innocent civilians of Afghanistan and Iraq. Will “these troops” sent to protect the people of New Orleans begin randomly killing civilians, as they were taught in Iraq?

The insurgency grew in Iraq because the Bush administration was arrogant, slow in providing security and leadership, and did not show any compassion for the suffering of civilians — the same reasons the chaos has grown in New Orleans.

When will the administration learn its lesson? When will the violence and suffering end?