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10/04/2005:

"Families Lose Loved Ones Again -- in a Bureaucratic Mire"

10/02/05 "Los Angeles Times" -- -- BATON ROUGE, La. — When he could finally leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped east of New Orleans to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father. Slogging through the muck, he found his father's corpse face-down in the hallway.

As devastating as that discovery was, at least Reysack had the body. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won't return it to Reysack for burial, he said, they won't even confirm that they have it.

Reysack's family published an obituary and held a memorial service — all without a body.

"My family has had to endure that memorial service knowing Lord knows when we'll get my father's body … and put this behind us," Reysack said.

A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands, families of the dead have been traumatized again by the ordeal of trying to pry their loved ones' bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed corpses.

Many of those bodies don't have names, the remains so badly damaged by floodwater that fingerprints and other methods of identification are useless. But although authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses, they are still holding onto them — to the dismay of family members scattered across the country.

The state official in charge of the morgue, Dr. Louis Cataldie, said through a spokesman that he was concerned about the flow of information from the morgue. At a news conference here last week, he acknowledged that many families were suffering.

"These are horrible times," Cataldie said.

Even funeral home directors, who routinely retrieve bodies from authorities, say they have been turned away at the heavily guarded morgue in St. Gabriel, La.
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The Occupation of New Orleans
The appearance of fully-armed mercenaries on the streets of New Orleans tells us that the city is currently under occupation. Whenever foreign troops are deployed within an urban area it can only mean one thing; the loss of sovereignty. It’s no different here. Blackwater mercenaries are part of a privately owned army that has seized control of the streets from their rightful owners, the people of New Orleans. They are an integral part of a much broader plan to militarize the nation and turn America into a garrison-state.

Blackwater employees may work for the United States government, but, in fact, they represent the exclusive interests of an elite cadre of corporate globalists who are transforming America into a base for future operations. New Orleans is simply the testing-grounds for their radical theories of establishing order. It provides a pilot-program for working out the kinks that inevitably arise from revamping society from the ground up. So far, the project is moving ahead better than anyone could have expected, mainly due to the media’s skillful diversion of the public’s attention from the militarization-process to the many human-interest stories of suffering and rebirth. It is a cynical way of exploiting misery and obfuscating the truth.

Just like Iraq, the propaganda-system has been the most successful part of the entire campaign; working flawlessly to provide a storyline that runs counter to the facts as we know them.

New Orleans is the first American city to come under the direct control of the global-corporate oligarchy. By taking advantage of loopholes in the current law created by terrorist legislation, Rumsfeld has been able to insert both the military and private security organizations into a major metropolitan area without as much as a peep from his critics. There’s simply been no opposition from any quarter to a draconian move that will have sweeping affects on the future of liberty in the US.