[Previous entry: "Times-Picayune: An Open Letter to the President"] [Next entry: "Insurgents Seize Key Town in Iraq"]

09/05/2005:

"New Orleans Begins a Search for Its Dead; Violence Persists"

Troops patrolled the streets, rescuers hunted for stragglers and New Orleans looked like a wrecked ghost town yesterday as the evacuation of the city neared completion and the authorities turned to the grim task of collecting bodies in a ghastly landscape awash in numberless corpses.

In a city riven by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout yesterday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee, and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants outright and a fourth in a later gunfight, the police said, adding that a fifth suspect had been wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.
nytimes.com

"The numbing facts"??? "a city riven by violence"??? "yet another shootout"??? I haven't heard about any others! This is the Times' violent hyperbole in full effect used to obscure the fact that NOPD shot 5 people dead with "no explantion", which is indeed nothing new in New Orleans.

"Highly Strung" Cops
Local officials warned that law enforcement officers and their armed deputies were "highly strung" and anyone thinking of entering to loot might not make it out alive. Warren Riley, the deputy police chief, said that officers shot eight people, killing five or six of them, after the gunmen fired on a group of contractors working for the Army Corps of Engineers.

...After five days of hesitation, the national guard and troops were staging what amounted to an invasion of the abandoned city with 4,000 soldiers searching house-to-house for survivors and another 7,200 airborne combat troops and marines on the way.

Another NY Times Article
"They've already lost their cars," he said. "All they have left is their house. They don't want those animals stealing from them. Write that, animals. Anybody that would take advantage of this is hardly better than animals. Not the people who are taking food and water and clothing. Those stealing TV's and shooting at police. What can you do with a TV? There's no electricity."
I heard a journalist say that people took tv's with the idea of selling them so they could get out.