The Dispossessed of New Orleans Tell of Their Medieval Nightmare

The dispossessed of New Orleans tell of their medieval nightmare

By David Usborne inside the Houston Astrodome

Published: 04 September 2005

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And, happily, they are no longer cowering in the New Orleans Superdome, a place that turned mad with murders, rapes, suicide, abortions and the ammonia fumes of human waste. Or imprisoned in the convention centre without food or water, in the company of corpses. Those two places of sanctuary became hell-holes of a kind unthinkable in the United States of America. Until last week.

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Devan Allen is 11 years old. Here with his dad, he gingerly approaches to tell what he saw in the Superdome. They were things no child should witness. Like the moment on Tuesday - or was it Wednesday? The days have blurred together for everyone here - when a man stood on one of the balconies and screamed so everyone could hear that he had lost everyone in the storm and now he would die also. He dived headfirst on to the playing field below, his head bursting open. Devan shouldn't have seen that. Nor should he have heard the gunshots. Nor the whispers of the girls who were raped and stabbed to death, right there with him in the Superdome. Or of the boy who was raped.

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"You don't want to know what it was like. We had killings, abortions, babies born, toilets stacked up and it was hot, hot, hot." Pressed for details, she doesn't hesitate. She speaks of two girls being raped and murdered inside the dome, one aged seven. The other was 16 and was "slit open" by a knife after she was raped in the woman's bathroom, she says. Much of what she tells is similarly described by several other dome evacuees. A boy aged seven was also raped by two men. (Mr Allen says the rapist was chased down by other men and beaten before being handed over to the soldiers. He claims they also beat him and then threw him from a terrace outside the Superdome to the asphalt, killing him.)

"There was babies born and put in the garbage," Ms Farrell continues. Apparently, someone else found one infant alive and took it to the small clinic they had inside. Almost everyone talks of gunshots in the night, including one shooting of a National Guard soldier. Ms Farrell says the soldier died, others spoke of him being wounded in the leg and surviving. Meanwhile, she adds, a black-market trade flourished in marijuana cigarettes, crack cocaine, guns and alcohol, in plain view of the authorities. Men were flashing their penises at the women, who dared only go to the bathroom in groups of five. When the bathrooms became so foul that going into them was impossible, people began squatting down just anywhere to relieve themselves. "Human beings don't live like that, people in the street don't live like that," she says.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310194.ece

:puke: :cry: :mad:

I have no words. None.

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Would Jesus love a liberal? You bet!
http://timeforachange.bluelemur.com/liberalchristians.htm

I believe that under Clinton we were under the illusion of the still powerful country.

But Katrina has ripped away the illusion.

:cry:

The behavior of caged humans in an inhuman environment...

:cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry:

:cry:

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

You would have killed him for his crimes? Why?

Why do republicans especially advocate executing whomever "commits" sins?

I would never condone what that man did but he should have been put in prison, not put to death.

What happened here was no less than a sickening, racist, FEMA lab experiment. And I can't even think of how demented Chertoff must be!

:mad: :crazy:

If, big IF, someone took advantage of an emergency situation like that and refused to accept any level of control from authorities - killing him might have been the only option.

You are talking about a man who raped a 7 year old boy. The very act screams unusual.

That's up to a military or court to decide. Killing him on the spot in front of thousands was not our choice to make.

Who would take us seriously anymore after this??? :shrug:

:cry:

"Nor should he have heard the gunshots. Nor the whispers of the girls who were raped and stabbed to death, right there with him in the Superdome. Or of the boy who was raped."
- note, that all of this is rumor, whispers.

"The details of the stories from inside the Superdome vary slightly depending on who is telling them. The accuracy of some of the details cannot yet be proven."
- important point.

"Pressed for details, she doesn't hesitate. She speaks of two girls being raped and murdered inside the dome, one aged seven. The other was 16 and was "slit open" by a knife after she was raped in the woman's bathroom, she says. Much of what she tells is similarly described by several other dome evacuees."
- the stories could be true, or they could be repeated tales, a sort of instant urban legend incubator. The stories continue in that mode, with nobody actually saying they saw the incidents in questions.

The Independent is a good British newspaper, but bear in mind that "Lord of the Flies" is a British novel. They are also a very class ridden society, so there is an institutional bias toward believing these sorts of stories.

I don't doubt that in 5 days or more, a crowd of 30,000 desperate people will generate a lot of lurid stories, and some of them will even be true. But I would need sworn testimony before I took it as necessarily correct.

the other reports. Having witnessed such a gruesome suicide and then not being able to leave while suffering an all-out assault to their senses could well have tales become all-too-real.

Then again....

anything? Of course you are right - we shouldn't just believe anything and everything. But you seem to be overly critical.

"The Independent is a good British newspaper, but bear in mind that "Lord of the Flies" is a British novel. They are also a very class ridden society, so there is an institutional bias toward believing these sorts of stories." Now what, please, are you insinuating here? The Independent is an impeccable source. Wish American papers were a bit more like the Independent!

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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

My mom is Scottish, from a working class area of Dundee. She informed me in no small way about the British class system, as she experienced it. I am just saying that there is a tendency there (and in many other places too) to believe that the "veneer of civilization is thin", especially when it comes to the working classes. But, to be fair, Lord of the Flies was about middle class English schoolboys, so this notion goes past the working class.

I guess I have learned over the past number of years (especially since the Bush era) to take anything with a huge grain of salt that doesn't have reliable testimony behind it. That particularly applies to rumor and hearsay, and I parse news accounts carefully to see if they are actually making claims or repeating hearsay.

I do believe the account of the man who committed suicide, which seems well attested.

Medieval.

That's exactly the word I have been using, thinking.

Scandalous.

I will never forgive and I will never forget and I will fight these fuckers to the end of my days.

somehow i really don't believe these stories.

Once the storm hit, that sort of control went out the window.

Before the storm, about 10,000 people were in the Dome. During and after the storm the numbers swelled to about 30,000. 20,000 of those people we not checked at all.

On Sunday before the storm a few of us on DU were screaming about the crime that was being committed by putting all those people in the Dome without food and water or anything else for that matter. Right before the storm FEMA (or someone) dropped a load of MRE's. We had calculated that there was enough MRE's to feed 10,000 people for 2 days if they were lucky. That was all those folks got until this Friday.

Once the storm passed, the weather was calm by Monday night. The interstate from the west was still intact and the Dome was accessible by road from that direction. There is no god damn good reason in the world that food and water was not brought to the Dome by Tues at the latest. But we all know what happened. Bush & Co were still on vacation and couldn't be bother. Now they are trying to blame everyone else for their crimes and failures. Bush did this on purpose because he loves to see poor people die. This is what these monsters are about.