Taking back history

The Truth about New Orleans – 2005

FEMA had a plane in the air that knew there were multiple levee breaches in New Orleans, but the information was not relayed to Louisiana emergency officials on the ground for twelve hours.

New Orleans firemen who rode out the 2005 storm in an office tower saw the breaches from their vantage point as they were occurring and were warned not to testify to what they they saw and when they saw it when they appeared before a Congressional investigative committee a few years later.

What was going on?

My best guess is that the Administration (Bush II) needed time to get its story straight. More specifically, the US Army Corps of Engineers whose incompetence and fraud was the reason for the levee failures, need time to muddy the waters with stories like:

* “Katrina did it” (Wrong: the city flooded many hours after Katrina passed);
* “New Orleans is below sea level” (Parts are and many parts aren’t, just like New York City, London and Amsterdam);
* And this one which the Corps broadcast to blog discussion boards across the Internet while posing as “average citizens”: New Orleaneans are no good and not worth worrying about. Besides, they’re stupid and reckless to live where they live.

The Corps spent millions of tax payer dollars on overt PR and utilized a long standing, well developed network of local “opinion leaders” who tried to shout down and ridicule anyone who questioned The Official Story.

With these kinds of resources, it’s almost impossible not to win the first battle with a massive sneak attack, but public knowledge and opinion is not a battle, it’s a war – a long war – and as the Japanese Imperial Forces learned a few short years after Pearl Harbor, “winning” one battle conclusively on Day One does not mean winning the war.

Through a relentless, grassroots campaign, Levees.org (with help from Brasscheck), has trained careless journalists to stop calling the 2005 New Orleans disaster “Katrina” and call it was it is: the Federal Levee Failures.

It’s placed permanent, unremovable historical markers at several breach sites telling present – and future – generations the real story.

Now, as you can see with this video, it’s collaborated with several New Orleans institutions, including UNO, the University of New Orleans, to convert its self-guided historical bike tour into a free app that plays on smartphones. It lets interested people see and hear what happened to New Orleans in 2005 and why.

Congratulations to our friends in New Orleans. This is kind of push back is a model for the nation. (I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.)

Does history matter? You bet it does. Just ask the expert on Big Brother and how to fight him: “Who controls the past controls the future.” – George Orwell.

For more info and to lend your support to this project, visit our good friends at Levees.org