Fresh news and commentary on issues surrounding the disaster, plus an Iraq media analysis and the Weekly Recap
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In addition to the usual Weekly Recap, this special edition of TNS Weekend includes a short series of reports and briefs highlighting some gravely underreported aspects of the tremendous catastrophe gripping the US Gulf Coast. We have also included links to content on other websites: personal accounts of the
Then, as a break from the main event, but not a break from horrendous tragedy, we include a media analysis piece by Dane Baker, looking at the coverage of last week’s mass trampling in Iraq.
Finally, a few notes about what is coming up this week at The NewStandard.
Weekend Announcement
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Top Stories
By Jessica Azulay | Environment and Health
Emergency management officials predicted with remarkable prescience the effects of a massive hurricane hitting New Orleans; but they did little with their knowledge, other than plan to leave the poor behind.
By Jessica Azulay | Civil Liberties and Security
Rescue missions prioritized tourists and hotel employees, evacuating them first from the Superdome, then from a swank hotel, forsaking tens of thousands in worse circumstances in the process.
News In Brief
U.N. Relief Supplies, Teams Sit Waiting for Bush to Say ‘Please’
Even though the United Nations has at the ready disaster relief teams, generators, water storage tanks, high-energy biscuits, water purification tablets, airplanes, tents and other supplies for emergency relief, the Bush administration has not asked the world body for help. [MORE]
Bankruptcy Bill Threatens Katrina Survivors; Relief Faces Opposition
When Congress passed a controversial bankruptcy bill back in April, it did not approve a proposed amendment that would have made it easier victims of natural disaster to gain protection from creditors. [MORE]
Hurricane Katrina: Catastrophic Insights
We have collected some of the best analytical coverage of what appears to be one of the worst natural disaster in US history.
News Report:
Scott Gold, LA Times
First-hand Account:
Jordan Flaherty, Left Turn
Commentaries:
Glen Ford, Black Commentator
Dru Oja Jay, The Dominion
Norman Solomon
Haunting Preludes:
Joel K. Bourne Jr., National Geographic
September 2004
Jon Elliston, Independent Weekly
Media Analysis
Finger-pointing Comes Naturally With Someone Else to Blame
Dane Baker looks at US media coverage of another tragedy, in one the other country for which the United States govenment has security responsibility.
One of the first lessons of reporting on nightmares overseas is: when it comes to US foreign policy, the mirror of American self-criticism is to be avoided wherever possible.
A textbook case is recent coverage of the deadly trampling in northern Baghdad, in which Western accounts carefully avoid talk of American responsibility, directly or indirectly. Where the blame lies, we cannot know, as long as reporters and their editors fail to address all the possibilities.
The root cause of this terrible tragedy, during which nearly a thousand Iraqis perished in a matter of minutes, is widely commonly attributed to unnamed "survivors": A rumor of a suicide bomber swept through the crowd, causing panicked attempts to flee the bridge. We also read that "hordes of Shiite pilgrims" on the bridge "were jammed up at a security checkpoint set up months ago to restrict movement" across it, a factor that, it is conceded, "may have played a part in the tragedy" (, Associated Press).
A discerning reader, determined to find out about where the barriers came from, would have to search deep into an LA Times article to find out that one survivor complained, "We asked the army troops to lift the concrete barriers from the road, but they told us the Americans put them in and they can’t move them" ("", Los Angeles Times).
Concrete barriers required individuals to pass through one at a time, leaving thousands of frenzied Shia Arabs trapped as the hysteria grew. A New York Times account () noted that "Iraqi Army soldiers fired their weapons into the air as the stampede began, in an effort to control the panic that some witnesses said had only made it worse."
In the aftermath, the New York Times reported (), "Many mourners were too overcome with sorrow to assign blame," as families search for loved ones in area morgues and hospitals. Iraqi and Western officials apparently weren’t as "overcome with sorrow," immediately attributing the melee to insurgents, particularly "rebel mortar fire target[ing] the nearby Kadhimiyah mosque," which occurred two hours before the tragedy (, Agence-France Presse, 9/2).
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, "speaking on behalf" of the European Union, called it "a most shocking and terrible tragedy, initiated by terrorism, and its scale almost defies imagination," as the Associated Press dutifully relayed ("", AP, 9/1). Iranian President Ahmadinejad called Iraqi leaders "to express his deep regrets for the ‘terrorist attacks’," and NATO’s Secretary-General blamed "the fear and panic that terrorists are sowing in Iraq" for the incident.
Factual reasons behind such accusations are nowhere to be found in official statements, or the articles that regurgitate them.
Not content with indirect blame, the New York Times implied the humanitarian disaster was itself a terrorist act. "But it was too early to say how the Shiites, who have shown remarkable restraint in the face of attacks by Sunni insurgents in the past, would respond to the stampede," reported the New York Times .
While some Iraqi officials lay blame at the government’s feet, any US connection is carefully excised from discussion. So we read an Associated Press account published questioning "whether poor control and inefficient security services may have contributed to the horrific death toll." Again, the article omits information about how the concrete barrier got there in the first place.
Nowhere in Western reports can we find mention of the culpability of occupation forces, who apparently failed to provide proper training to Iraqi forces – indeed, those at the site seemed to exacerbate the panic rather than disperse it – and whose failure to provide even the semblance of security yields a populace understandably on edge. Incredibly, LA Times reported "growing frustration among Iraqis of all backgrounds about the [Iraqi] government’s inability to control violence and restore public services, such as electricity" (emphasis added).
In short, the occupying army has no responsibilities whatsoever – it is up to Iraqis to save themselves, despite any disadvantages the US military may have bestowed upon them.
Little wonder that many Americans continue believing in the sanctity of US foreign policy when the popular press fails to pursue even the most basic questions surrounding US involvement in overseas current events. Even stories in which possible US culpability is nuance offer the chance to trace these uncomfortable connections.
Weekly Recap
Just some of the stories we covered this week...
Gulf Coast Crisis
On Wednesday morning, we hit on two aspects of the Katrina catastrophe story many told us caught them off guard. First, we looked at the chaos on the ground in New Orleans and elsewhere from the perspective of the survivors, rather than that of the authorities. We saw people trying to survive, and others trying to put their lives back together -- and we told of the obstacles those people faced, which often included the authorities themselves as well as private businesses..
Then we reviewed some recent history. Hours of searching turned up a striking pattern, related by TNS editor Jessica Azulay: Washington knew all too well the threat posed by a major hurricane if it were to strike New Orleans, but recent years were spent aggressively de-funding the prevention measures necessary to protect the city.
Work and Money
After the Washington Post gave in to public pressure and cancelled it's sponsorship of a war celebration planned to coincide with the fourth anniversary of 9/11, the paper's conservative rivals at the Washington Times decided to take over -- a move that seemed fitting enough, it appears, that it hardly stirred notice.
The Homeland Security Department continued to fight a judge's orders to keep limits on its exploitation of workers.
Sickened by what they considered inadequate contract, hundreds of bottom-rung staff at San Francisco public schools called in ill for the first day of classes. The group of mostly janitors, secretaries and cafeteria workers decided to remind their employers and the public of their importance.
Also in San Francisco, young workers at the Cheesecake Factory won a $4.5 million settlement over an array of problems involving working conditions at sites around California. The organization that led the charge, , is among the more fresh-minded developments in the organized labor movement.
What the AFL-CIO lacks in freshness it makes up for in reach, and sometimes in ingenuity. This week the Federation announced it had reached its millionth non-union participant -- laborers whose workplaces are not organized but who wish to be part of the union movement nonetheless.
But the AFL-CIO had bad news, too: immigrant workers are dying on the job at an increasing rate, despite an overall decline in on-the-job deaths nationwide.
Defense contractors had great news, though -- at least for people who run them. The pay gap between CEOs and average employees is continuing to widen, especially in the war industry.
Despite all this cheery news, a million Americans entered official poverty last year, just in time for Congress to put $35 billion in social spending on the chopping block, though antipoverty groups are banding together to fight. And to top it off, reporter Michelle Chen brought to our attention a glaring shortage in the Section 8 housing program that is cutting off tens of thousands of American households each year.
Civil Liberties and Security
Prisoners being held without constitutional rights at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility resumed the hunger strike they gave up after the Pentagon conceded to demands revolving around conditions at the facility. The prisoners say nothing changed. In related news, a few things did change regarding the process by which prisoners at Gitmo are allowed to face their accusers, but human rights groups said the reforms were insubstantial and meaningless.
Documents acquired by the ACLU revealed that police have had three nonviolent activist groups under invasive surveillance, and they were discussed at an FBI symposium as terrorist organizations.
In Kansas, parents my soon have to "opt-in" just to have their children receive instruction in not having sex. In about a quarter of the state's public schools, lessons on safer-sex-if-you-must -- let alone sex-positive education -- will be unavailable no matter what they "opt," because abstinence-only programs hold a monopoly.
The fight against the Patriot Act's secretive "national security letters" took a step forward this week when a judge ordered documents in the case of an anonymous librarian to be unsealed. As we reported last week, the librarian was issued a gag order on the case, preventing him from testifying to challenge the law that is gagging him.
Environment and Health
The Food and Drug Administration is continuing to resist accepting the advice of its own advisory board, instead doing the politics thing by once again putting off a decision on the over-the-counter viability of the Plan B emergency contraceptive pill. Commissioners are trying to figure out a way to keep it out of the hands of a population that already has some of the most difficulty gaining access to the drug: women under age sixteen. One commissioner couldn't stand the foot-dragging. The FDA's head of women's health quit this week, saying she couldn't work for a scientific agency that ignores science.
In related news, advocacy groups are shaking up the Department of Justice, as they did in January, demanding that DoJ's 130-page manual for sexual assault forensic examinations inform rape survivors that they can pre-empt pregnancy by taking a couple of pills.
A federal court said the federal government is violating its own rules by allowing the overfishing of the darkblotched rockfish. And the attorneys general of California, New Mexico and Oregon are kicking back at Washington for loosening rules that protect 58 million acres of pristine Western forest from the road building that leads to resource extraction and, well, something other than pristine Western forest.
Coming Soon
Expanding TNS's Reach. In addition to added efforts surrounding the Katrina disaster, we have spent the weekend working hard on the new In Other News... feature for the website and Daily Dispatches. As described two weekends ago, In Other News... will be a collection of links to some of the best journalism elsewhere on the web -- important stories we would like to cover if our budget permitted, but which are reported at least adequately by other outlets.
Upcoming Stories. This week we will bring you a story on a pilot program to track immigrants using scanable radio frequency tags. And staff journalist Michelle Chen is presently working on two articles. One looks at the so-called "faith-based initiatives" that are federally funded, pushing and sometimes bending the thin line that supposedly separates church from state. The other will look at a few interesting community approaches to dealing with the widespread problem of meth amphetamine addiction.
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