Eideard

Five current or former police officers have been found guilty on a combined 25 counts of civil rights violations tied to fatal shootings on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Jurors reached a verdict in the closely watched trial after three days of deliberations.

The shootings occurred on Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, six days after much of New Orleans went underwater after the powerful hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast.

Prosecutors contend the officers opened fire on an unarmed family, killing 17-year-old James Brissette and wounding four others. Minutes later, one of the officers shot and killed Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old man described by Justice officials as having severe mental disabilities.

Madison was trying to flee the scene when he was shot, according to a Justice Department statement. One of the officers allegedly “stomped and kicked” Madison before he died, the statement noted.

Officers Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso were convicted in the shootings along with a fifth defendant, former detective Arthur Kaufman.

The five men are scheduled to be sentenced on December 14. Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso are facing potential multiple life sentences, as well as additional penalties for charges tied to a conspiracy to cover up what happened on the bridge. Kaufman faces a maximum penalty of 120 years in prison.

“Today’s verdict by these jurors sends a powerful, a powerful, unmistakable message to public servants, to law enforcement officers and to the citizens we serve and indeed to the world,” U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said. “That message is that public officials and especially law enforcement officers will be held accountable for their acts, and that any abuse of power, especially that power that violates the rights and the civil liberties of our citizens, will have serious consequences.”

“The citizens of this country will not, should not, and we intend that they will never have to fear the individuals who are called upon to protect them,” Letten declared.

Overdue.

RTFA if you need your memory jogged. Local officials could have taken care of this – and didn’t. The police department could have come down on the side of justice and didn’t. Federal efforts on behalf of abused civil rights are still needed for justice in many of these United States.

New Orleans “Finest” turning themselves in for murder charges

Admitting a cover-up of shocking breadth, a former New Orleans police supervisor pleaded guilty to a federal obstruction charge on Wednesday, confessing that he participated in a conspiracy to justify the shooting of six unarmed people after Hurricane Katrina that was hatched not long after police stopped firing their weapons.

The guilty plea of Lt. Michael Lohman, who retired from the department earlier this month, contains explosive details of the alleged cover-up and ramps up the legal pressure on police officers involved in the shooting and subsequent investigation. It’s unclear when Lohman’s cooperation with federal authorities began, but he presumably is prepared to testify against the officers he says helped him lie about the circumstances of a shooting he immediately deemed a “bad shoot.”

Lohman, who pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to obstruct justice, admits he failed to order the collection of evidence or canvassing of witnesses, helped craft police reports riddled with false information, participated in a plan to plant a gun under the bridge and lied to investigators who questioned police actions…

In a news conference after Lohman’s plea, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said police must be held to the law.

“Police officers are there to protect us, and to protect the most vulnerable among us,” he said. “Their jobs are to help individuals and protect us, not to hurt us. Sadly, sadly, we come across in the course of our work here…officers who violate their oaths of office, who occasionally violate their duties, violate their commitment to serve the public. And we take actions against those individuals wherever they violate federal law. We will continue to do that.”

RTFA. A long and detailed narrative of corruption, conspiracy and cronyism.

The New Orleans PD went through enough crap with the exposure of individuals who spent their “rescue” time stealing from businesses overwhelmed by the storm. This sad tale will not ease the task of building honesty into a department that never had an excess of that quality in the first place.

Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.

The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.

That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities…

After losing an appeals court decision in Jefferson Morley’s lawsuit, the C.I.A. released material last year confirming Mr. Joannides’s deep involvement with the anti-Castro Cubans who confronted Oswald. But the agency is withholding 295 specific documents from the 1960s and ’70s, while refusing to confirm or deny the existence of many others, saying their release would cause “extremely grave damage” to national security…

What motive could C.I.A. officials have to bury the details of Mr. Joannides’s work for so long? Did C.I.A. officers or their Cuban contacts know more about Oswald than has been revealed? Or was the agency simply embarrassed by brushes with the future assassin — like the Dallas F.B.I. officials who, after the assassination, destroyed a handwritten note Oswald had previously left for an F.B.I. agent?

The only people I knew in New Orleans back in the day – who knew Oswald – always considered him a dork who may have been working for the Feds. They didn’t have proof. But, they shut him out of any political activities they were involved in.

BTW, the coppers who claim not to have any idea of what Oswald was doing in NoLa are full of crap. You couldn’t hand out a leaflet announcing the sun would rise the next day – without being photographed and tracked by a dozen federal, state and local snoops self-chartered to spy on Americans.

Peering through thick fog, hundreds stood on the banks of the Mississippi River early Tuesday and cheered as the latest piece of naval history cut through the haze and belched its horn.

The onlookers waved flags at the New York, a freshly built 684-foot Navy warship slowly making its way to New York City, where it will be commissioned in early November and renamed the USS New York.

The $1.2 billion ship, which is designed to launch cargo, troop transport ships and helicopters for warfare missions, is named for the city that suffered the first attacks of 9/11. Its bow stem was built with 7½ tons of scrap metal excavated from the World Trade Center ruins…

The ship and New Orleans share a bond: Both are reminders of the two deadliest American tragedies of this decade — the terrorist attacks in 2001 and the drowning of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. About 2,700 people died in the New York attacks; New Orleans lost about 1,200 residents in the floods…

The New York is the first of three Navy ships to be named for places associated with 9/11, said Ed Winter, a Northrop Grumman spokesman. Under construction are the Somerset, named for the Pennsylvania county where one of the four jets hijacked by terrorists crashed, and the Arlington, named after the site of the attack on the Pentagon in Virginia.

Tears welled in Loretta Corbett’s eyes as she waved a 5-foot-tall American flag. Originally from Ridgewood, N.J., Corbett moved to New Orleans a few months before Katrina. The New York attacks killed 27 Ridgewood residents, she said.

“It’s ghostly,” Corbett said as the ship plied downriver through the haze. “It feels like all those lives are following that ship out to sea.”

I’m pleased to see the ship was build at Avondale. We took a lot of pride in what we built – back in the day when I worked there. I imagine that hasn’t changed.

Photograph by Tyrone Turner

A vast swath of the coastal lands around New Orleans will be underwater by the dawn of the next century because the rate of sediment deposit in the Mississippi delta can not keep up with rising sea levels.

Between 10,000 and 13,500 square kilometres of coastal lands will drown due to rising sea levels and subsidence by 2100, a far greater loss than previous estimates.

For New Orleans, and other low-lying areas of Louisiana whose vulnerability was exposed by hurricane Katrina, the findings could bring some hard choices about how to defend the coast against the future sea level rises that will be produced by climate change.

They also revive the debate about the long-term sustainability of New Orleans and other low-lying areas.

Scientists say New Orleans and the barrier islands to the south will be severely affected by climate change by the end of this century, with sea level rise and growing intensity of hurricanes. Much of the land mass of the barrier island chain sheltering New Orleans was lost in the 2005 storm.

But the extent of the land that will be lost is far greater than earlier forecasts suggest, said Dr Michael Blum and Prof Harry Roberts, the authors of the study. “When you look at the numbers you come to the conclusion that the resources are just not there to restore all the coast, and that is one of the major points of this paper,” said Roberts, a professor emeritus of marine geology at Louisiana State University.

Professional skeptics and pundits who pander to know-nothings need not worry. They’ll be dead and gone by then – and the effect of their carelessness will only be visited upon their children’s children. BTW – Blum and Roberts do suggest solutions.

Those who try to develop political and social standards based upon science will keep on with the good fight. Here in the GOUSA, it’s a given that superstition and fear produce more votes than reason and study. The battle with opportunist politicians is still the focus – not wasting time blathering with fools.

Building bigger, stronger levees in New Orleans will not be enough to save the US city from another Hurricane Katrina, a report has said…

The report said the authorities should consider raising the level of buildings and even abandoning flood-prone areas…

New Orleans has about 563 km (350 miles) of barriers, levees and other structures intended to protect the city. But in August 2005, large sections of this system failed and much of the city was inundated by the storm surges brought by Katrina.

The report, from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Research Council (NRC), said the disaster had exposed the “many weaknesses in the hurricane protection and preparedness systems” for New Orleans and surrounding areas. It said there had been “undue optimism” about the ability of the protection systems to withstand the impact of a storm on the scale of Katrina.

The report said improvements made to the flood protection system since Katrina had “reduced some vulnerabilities”. But, it said that “the risks of inundation and flooding never can be fully eliminated by protective structures, no matter how large or sturdy those structures may be”.

The authors advised that as there can be no absolute protection against storm surges and flooding, the authorities should consider encouraging people to move away from areas at risk. Where this is not possible, “significant improvements in flood-proofing measures will be essential”.

This would include raising the standard height for ground floors of properties, strengthening critical infrastructure such as power and telecommunications and improving evacuation plans.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Not that my opinion is worth a whole hill of beans. I haven’t lived there in decades and folks whose roots are deep and timed into the city ain’t ever paying much attention to outsiders.

If you leave it up to the rats, New York City beats New Orleans any day. This surprising finding comes from new research by Tel Aviv University zoologists and geographers, who are working together to invent a novel way to test urban designers’ city plans. Instead of using humans as guinea pigs, the scientists went to their nearby zoo and enlisted lab rats to determine the functionality of theoretical and existing plans…

“We’ve found that routes taken by rats and other members of the animal kingdom tend to converge at attractive landmarks, the same way people are attracted, for example, to the Arc de Triumph in Paris,” says Prof. David Eilam from TAU’s Department of Zoology. “Our research takes the art used by humans to create their towns and cities and turns it back to the animal world for testing. We can look at how rats will react to a city’s geography to come up with an optimal urban plan.”

By building mini-models of city layouts at the Tel Aviv University Research Zoo, Prof. Eilam and his colleagues found that grid-like city layouts ― like that of Manhattan ― are much more rat- and people-friendly than cities with unstructured and winding streets, like those in New Orleans…

“We put rats in relatively large areas with objects and routes resembling those in Manhattan,” explains Prof. Eilam. The rats, he found, do the same things humans do: They establish a grid system to orient themselves. Using the grid, the rats covered a vast amount of territory, “seeing the sights” quickly. In contrast, rats in an irregular plan resembling New Orleans’ failed to move far from where they started and didn’t cover much territory, despite travelling the same distances as the “Manhattan rats.”

True. I’ve known a number of humans who aren’t any brighter than lab rats. I’m not convinced this is the way to go about planning a living, growing, dynamic city. Maybe it works in Manhattan or Tel Aviv. That’s not saying a lot for the future of humanity.

I’ve always really liked this pic [from chessbase.com], full of courage and determination. I hope she will never lose this indomitable spirit.

Her opponent is Jude Acers during one of his simuls. I was thinking of him today on account of the evacuation of New Orleans. Take care, Jude!

Related Link: Jude Acers’ Katrina Experience Revisited