WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Survivors from New Orleans told a congressional panel on Tuesday they felt abandoned by government at all levels after Hurricane Katrina hit the city and had been subjected to racial slurs and menaced by guns when they sought food and water.
Obviously Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were behind this.
"We were abandoned. City officials did nothing to protect us," Patricia Thompson, a New Orleans evacuee now living in Texas, told a House of Representatives panel investigating the response to the storm.
Hmm City Officials being blamed? Somebody call Oprah!
"We saw buses, helicopters and FEMA trucks but no one stopped to help us. We never felt so cut off in all our lives," Thompson said.
And they couldnât walk? And how did she recognize teh trucks as FEMA? I don't think they had signe on them and I thought I heard they didn't show up for days.
She described "demoralizing and inhumane" treatment by police telling the panel: "We were cursed when we asked for help for our elderly. We had guns aimed at us by the police who were suppose to be there to protect us."
Again the police are a LOCAL agency. CALL OPRAH NOW!
Thompson said her 5-year-old granddaughter cried in terror when a policeman pointed a gun at her and she worried about whether she had put up her hands correctly.
"I know the police were scared, but they had no right to treat everyone like criminals," she said.
LOCAL Police from the city. Again NOT FEMA, CALL OPRAH!
The witnesses blamed local, state and federal officials for inadequately responding to victims in New Orleans and told the committee they thought racism was the root cause of their harsh treatment after the storm caused massive flooding in the city more than three months ago.
Harsh treatment by LOCAL officials. Anyone seeing a pattern here?
Of the five African Americans who testified, only Terrol Williams, a former federal worker, said he did not think the botched response was rooted in racial attitudes. He said authorities were unprepared and a mandatory evacuation should have been ordered sooner.
Traitor! He was shot by McKinney after testifying.
Leah Hodges, a community activist, recalled trying to help a group of stranded senior citizens. The military took them to an evacuation point on a highway where they spent the night, awakening to a "bunch of hard red necks scowling and growling at us in military uniforms ... pointing guns at us and treating us worse than prisoners of war," she said.
These were obviously the local RNC goons.
Hodges described waiting in the burning sun in conditions she likened to a concentration camp. Rep. Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican, asked her to stop making that comparison.
"I'm going to call it what it is. If I put a dress on a pig, a pig is still a pig," she responded heatedly.
Ok I wonât dress it up: âYou are a liar.â
Miller countered, "Not a single person was marched into a gas chamber and killed."
In another exchange, Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, pressed witness Dyan French to explain why she believed the New Orleans' levees had been bombed.
French, a community leader who opened her home to help storm victims, responded that she heard two loud booms right before the floodwaters overwhelmed her neighborhood.
Could have been bombs or could have been Ray Nagins Rocket powered car taking off for Dallas.
Rep. Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican heading the House's investigation into the botched government hurricane response, said New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin would testify next week.
I am sure he will own up to his culpability in this fiasco (and right after that pigs will grow wings and fly).
While I truly believe it was not fun to go through a class 3 hurricane, I doubt that any responder made a decision based on race. If what they said was true then the LOCAL people have some issues to deal with. I would really like to see Gov Blanco in front of this panel (under oath) to answer some questions about her actions or more importantly lact of action.