Another "nutjob's" accusations re NO levees: 25 Questions Re Murder of NO

Environmental historian Mike Davis has written an article, which has appeared in Mother Jones and the Nation, in which he comes very close to accusing New Orleans city officials and elites of deliberately flooding the Ninth Ward and other areas.

Davis has also recently pblished a book concerning the looming catastrophe of "bird flu" and the roots of its causes in the industrialization of poulty production, the proliferation of slums in poor countries and the Bush administration's gutting of the public health sector.

Here are a few of Davis's unaswered questions:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051017/davis

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect--the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or Congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans side and not on the Metairie side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward--the most deadly hit-and-run accident in US history?

3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods?

...

10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council, which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves"--white business leaders led by Reiss--reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

a bit. There's been some talk of these issues on DU.

I found out about his article concerning NO also!

I've seen it, but it deserves to be widely read.

I'm trying to stay to the 4 paragraph limit.