If you don't get it you are just not capable of getting it.
THE SENIOR COUNSEL AND HEAD OF COMMISSION, HAVE BASICALLY SAID IN 2010, THAT THE INVESTIGATIVE REPORT, THE ONE COMPLETED BY THE COMMITTEE IN THE 9/11 COMMISSION, IS AT THE VERY LEAST UNTRUE.
Now, if the report was to provide facts, and it doesn't, then YOU are the one basing your assumptions of all that happened, on a bunch of generalizations and lies. Not me. Not anyone who simply asks for the facts.
Planes hit the building. That's a fact. Everything else you think you know you don't because you only know the 'facts' as the government has given you. The government gave you a report that is not true. This has been admitted by members of the committee who did the investigation. So what don't you get? There is no conspiracy here. There's a request for another investigation and a report based on facts. Based on the truth. We don't have the truth so everything you think you know, is just what you've been fed and at this point, what YOU believe is not the book of hard evidence you believe.
Someone here said it would take too many people to cover up such an event...they may be right, I don't know. I do know the Catholic Church covered up a lot of things for a lot of years and just lately the conspiracy and cover up around Katrina was finally outed - in the case of 9/11 the report itself has been exposed as a lie. That's a fact. That's not made up by a bunch of conspiracy theorists or some other undeserved and labelled group of people who just want some solid information. sammieswife.
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(Lee Celano ljc/JJ/Reuters)
A New Orleans policeman searches for stranded residents in the Gentilly neighbourhood of New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina struck
They are known as the Danziger Seven, a brotherhood of police officers bonded by a shameful secret but protected by a “blue code” of silence. Only now, four and a half years after they shot dead two innocent people during the anarchy that came after Hurricane Katrina, has the deceit by New Orleans police officers begun to unravel after three cracked under the pressure of a federal investigation.
On September 4, 2005, officers from the New Orleans Police Department fired at a group of unarmed survivors of the storm and flooding that had ravaged the city. One of the dead was Ronald Madison, 40, a mentally disabled man. To cover their tracks the officers and their colleagues fabricated reports, planted evidence and framed their victims. Lance Madison, 49, Ronald’s brother, who was among those injured, was jailed for several weeks on bogus charges of attempted murder after officers claimed that he had fired first, despite his never having a weapon.
Last month two homicide detectives caved in and gave evidence. “I have neither imagined nor heard of more treacherous or despicable conduct by law enforcement officers,” US District Judge Lance Africk said, after Jeffrey Lehrmann, the former lieutenant and one of the two original whistleblowers, pleaded guilty when he was charged with covering up a crime.
“You, and others like you, through an elaborate conspiracy of deceit and obstruction, have caused an inordinate degree of mental anguish and pain ... You have compounded the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in an immeasurable way. You have disgraced your badge.”
In their testimony Lehrmann and his former colleague Lieutenant Michael Lohman, 42, described colleagues concocting statements from non-existent witnesses, making up names and details and referring to a gun that they had planted at the scene of the shooting as a “ham sandwich”.
“They treated it like a joke ... it’s absolutely stunning to hear about the casual way in which these officers went about destroying people’s lives,” said Mary Howell, a civil rights lawyer who represents the Madison family.
Yesterday one of the shooters was charged with obstruction of justice and knowledge of a crime. Michael Hunter, 33, is the first police officer present when the killings happened to face a court.
Six days after Katrina left much of New Orleans under water, devoid of communications and leadership and in a state of chaos and paranoia, police were called to the Danziger Bridge, which spans the Industrial Canal in the east of the city. They were responding to reports, which proved false, that two officers had been shot. They claim that when they arrived they came under fire and were forced to shoot in self-defence.
However, the Madisons were unarmed and had simply been attempting to cross the bridge to seek shelter at their brother’s dental surgery. Police claim that Ronald was shot once as he reached to his waistband and turned towards them to shoot. Yet a post-mortem examination found seven bullets in his body, including five in his back.
At the other end of the bridge Leonard Bartholomew, his wife Susan, their children, nephew and friend James Barsat, 19, were trying to find food when police bullets hit five of them. Mr Barsat was killed.
“We’re all on the ground and all you can see is blood everywhere. You can hear everybody hollering, moaning,” Mrs Bartholomew told National Public Radio a year later in her only interview. “My right arm was on the ground lying next to me ... it had been shot off.” Her nephew, Jose Holmes, 19, claimed that after he was struck by two bullets an officer leant over the concrete barrier where he had sought shelter, put a rifle to his stomach and pulled the trigger twice.
When other police arrived to investigate the shooting, including Lehrmann and Lohman, they realised that their colleagues had been involved in a “bad shoot” of unarmed people. The cover-up that followed included falsifying statements from the Bartholomews saying that Mr Holmes had shot at police first.
According to Lehrmann, one sergeant drafted testimony from a fictitious witness, Lakeisha Smith, that the Madisons had been looting and robbing and that Ronald had been about to shoot police when he was felled.
Meetings were held for officers to confer on getting their stories straight, spent bullet casings were kicked off the bridge to destroy evidence and officers “discussed how they could use Hurricane Katrina as an excuse for failures in the investigation of the Danziger Bridge shootings and thereby use the storm to help make the entire situation ‘go away’, ” court documents reveal.
In 2006 the seven officers involved in the shootings were charged with murder and attempted murder. However, colleagues and police unions rose in anger, vaunting them as wronged heroes. A judge dismissed the charges in 2008, citing misconduct by prosecutors. This led to public outrage and intervention by federal authorities who have promised an all-out hunt for the truth.
“The intensity of the investigation is increasing,” David Welker, a FBI special agent said, adding that the investigation would “aggressively pursue the evidence wherever it leads”.
“Going into Hurricane Katrina, the police department was already in very serious trouble,” Mrs Howell said.
“There are a number who have conducted themselves in an honest and decent way but it’s not an insignificant number that were involved in some kind of misconduct, killings and framings. It’s not a few bad apples; it’s a serious reflection on the entire department.”
She added: “This police department has to be cleaned out ... this cover-up was in cold blood, it was calculating and it involved multiple officers.”
Lehrmann and Lohman will be sentenced at a later date. Mr Hunter faces eight years in prison and a $500,000 (£330,000) fine if convicted.
Other police-involved killings and unexplained deaths are also being looked into amid accusations from the public, lawyers and community leaders that the New Orleans Police Department is “rotten to its core”.
“This has opened up a Pandora’s Box,” Dr Romell Madison, the brother of Lance and Ronald, said. “The process of closure has started, but I’m more delighted about the fact that crimes like this that didn’t only affect me but a lot of other people here in New Orleans will be looked at.
“I know members of the police force, some of them and their families are my patients and they confide in me that the truth will come out. I tell them I just hope it comes out in my lifetime.”
Big Easy hard times
— Hurricane Katrina approached the Florida coast on August 25, 2005, and picked up pace as it veered towards Louisiana, hitting land four days later at 125mph (200kph)
— About 80 per cent of New Orleans was flooded, 770,000 people displaced and more than 1,500 killed
— Tens of thousands took refuge in the Superdome, New Orleans’s vast sports stadium, and in the days after the hurricanes reports spread of looting, violence and sexual assault. Many rumours were false, but Louisiana gangsters who fled to Houston increased the murder rate there by 28 per cent during their stay
— At the peak of the relief effort, more than 40,000 troops were deployed along the Gulf coast. The recovery effort cost $110 billion. The population has still not returned to pre-Katrina levels
— Louisiana residents hailed a big step in the city’s recovery in February when their American football team, the Saints, won a stunning victory over the Indianapolis Colts in the 2010 Super Bowl — the first time in its 42 years in the National Football League that the team had reached the final
Sources: Bloomberg; Reuters; Times archives
