THE HANDSTAND

THE HANDSTAND

DECEMBER 2005

LETTERS FROM AMERICA
KATRINA SACRIFICES EVIDENT, LANDLORDS LACK ANY MORALITY:
New Orleans was, as more than one former resident has said, the African city in North America. It is a city steeped in a culture that is specifically African American - from Jazz to blues to bounce. It is the number one African American tourist destination in the US. The Bayou Classic and Essence Festival, two vital Black community events, bring tens of thousands of Black tourists to the city every year. Walking around town, its hard to imagine these tourists coming back to the new New Orleans - a city was once 70% Black and now feels unwelcome and hostile, or at least uncaring - to its own past.

Last Wednesday alone, 335 evictions were filed in New Orleans courts - the amount normally filed in a month. There have been countless reports of landlords throwing tenant's property out on the street without any notice. New Orleans human rights lawyer Bill Quigley reports that "Fully armed National Guard troops refuse to allow over ten thousand people to even physically visit their property in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. Despite the fact that people cannot come back, tens of thousands of people face eviction from their homes. A local judge told me that their court expects to process a thousand evictions a day for weeks. Renters still in shelters or temporary homes across the country will never see the court notice taped to the door of their home. Because they will not show up for the eviction hearing that they do not know about, their possessions will be tossed out in the street. In the street their possessions will sit alongside an estimated 3 million truck loads of downed trees, piles of mud, fiberglass insulation, crushed sheetrock, abandoned cars, spoiled mattresses, wet rugs, and horrifyingly smelly refrigerators full of food from August."

A recent poll from Gallup reports that, even adjusting for differences in income, White and Black New Orleanians have had deeply different experiences of this disaster. Blacks were more likely to fear for their lives (63% vs. 39%), to have been separated from family members for at least a day (55% vs. 45%), gone without food for at least a day (53% vs. 24%) and spent at least one night in an emergency shelter (34% vs. 13%).

The New York Times and other papers have reprinted former FEMA director Michael Brown's emails from the time when our city was being flooded - stunning evidence of how little the agency cared about what was happening in New Orleans. "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god," reads a typical email from the day after the hurricane hit. Other emails showed Brown and his staffers to be more concerned with his dinner reservations in Baton Rouge and a dog sitter for his house than with anything happening in New Orleans.

The demographics of New Orleans have changed in gender as well as race. The thousands of contractors and laborers that have arrived from across the country - in addition to National Guard, police agencies, security guards, and other workers - are overwhelmingly male. Because most schools are closed, there are few kids below 17 or their families. Women I know who have returned report feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.

A large Latino immigrant population has come to work in the city's reconstruction. These workers have been demonized by everyone from Mayor Nagin to local talk radio. Grassroots medical volunteers report that some of the workers are forbidden by their employers from talking to anyone or even leaving their rooms at night. They are working in hazardous conditions, for low pay and little safety protection - already many have become ill, and they have no access to medical care, and face a hostile city.

There are still thousands of New Orleans residents who have not been convicted of any crime trapped in maximum security prisons and "no one in a position of power finds this pressing," says Ursula Price, a staff researcher with A Fighting Chance, an indigent defense group. She estimates at least 2000 prisoners from Orleans Parish Prison remain in Angola, the notorious former slave plantation in rural Louisiana. These are people who were picked up for "misdemeanor offenses such as public drunkenness, traffic violations, soliciting a prostitute," Price says. If convicted, at most they would have served less time than they have been in for. But, in Orleans Parish and Jefferson Parish, courts have been closed for most of this time, and public defenders have been laid off. "The system is not working with us," Price tells me. "I don't understand why prosecutors are in there arguing against release of someone on a misdemeanor charge. We have women who have had miscarriages, mental heath problems, physical health problems, and no one in power seems to care." The total population of Orleans Parish Prison at the time of hurricane Katrina was at least 7,000 people. In a city of just 500,000, that's a significant population.

The people of New Orleans are not just physically displaced, but also disenfranchised from their city in other ways. According to the Wall Street Journal, when FEMA officials were asked by Louisiana state officials for access to the FEMA database so that they could inform New Orleans evacuees about their right to vote in upcoming municipal elections, the response was a terse email -
"(FEMA) will not let you have a copy of the FEMA applicant list. Sorry!!!" What better way to let people know that the city is not theirs than to have an election to which they are not invited?

Many in New Orleans are struggling with an even more basic and vital concern - the recovery of their loved ones. Less than a quarter of the bodies so far reported discovered in New Orleans have been turned over to families. The rest are at the New Orleans coroners, currently relocated to St. Gabriel's Parish. "Officials in coroner's offices in several parishes reported that they sought to keep their victims from going to St. Gabriel," reports today's Times-Picayune, which describes one families long ordeal in recovering their mother's body. Just one more area where people of New Orleans are left behind.

While this tragedy multiplies, while evictions mount and exploitation increases, the former residents of New Orleans have their choice of a dizzying array of forums, hearings, panels, tribunals, town halls, committees, subcommittees, commissions, meetings, marches and demonstrations, most of which are seeking the input of the people of the city

In space of two days last week, I went to a public meeting with a representative from the UN High Commission on extreme poverty. I went to a meeting of the housing subcommittee of the urban planning committee of the mayors blue ribbon commission on rebuilding New Orleans. I joined a rally at the State Capitol featuring Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, and various Government officials. At each event I saw hundreds of poor folks from New Orleans. I also met representatives of a community group for East New Orleans residents displaced to Baton Rouge - they report that 500 people come to their weekly meetings.

This Monday, I will march across the bridge from New Orleans to Gretna, to join in protests called by a wide array of national organizations against a crime Cynthia McKinney has said "might become the worst American civil rights episode of the 21st Century," the blockade by Gretna police of the only exit out of New Orleans for thousands of evacuees. I also plan to join the People's Assembly initiated by the People's Hurricane Fund on December 8-10.

There are many outlets for action, as well as plenty of anger and energy, but also a deep skepticism. The people of New Orleans have a justified distrust of the people and institutions who have arrived with promises and resources. Hundreds of well-meaning volunteers have come in to town, and many have done vital work, but in some cases this has increased tensions. "Some people have come here with this attitude, 'we're bringing organizing to New Orleans.' They don't seem interested in what was here before," reports one community organizer.

These divisions are not only concentrated on the grassroots - disagreements within the mayor's commission on rebuilding New Orleans have become increasingly public, with some representatives complaining to the New York Times of not being invited to private breakfasts between the mayor and other commission members.

"The truth is," said one longtime activist, "people have a lot of anger and grief, and they don't where to direct it." We are all tired, frustrated and sad, but the struggle for justice continues.

==== Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine. This is his tenth article from New Orleans. You can contact Jordan at NewOrleans@leftturn.org. Jordan's previous articles from New Orleans are at http://www.leftturn.org/articles/SpecialCollections/katrina.aspx
UPDATE:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two federal agencies have settled a dispute that will put about 1500 Hurricane Katrina families into rent-free houses. Fannie Mae offered the homes, located in nine Southern states, for 18 months. Those states are Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

The mortgage company wanted to be able to keep showing the houses to prospective buyers.

FEMA said no- arguing that it would violate the privacy of evacuees. When FEMA announced last week that it wants hurricane victims out of hotels soon, Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi stepped in. That prompted Fannie Mae to drop its demand about showing the homes.

FEMA says it's moving quickly to put families into the housing, much of which is single-family homes. Some 200 homes are immediately available.

First bird flu death reported in Anaheim, CA. - Nation Stunned!

Two charged in Iraq contract bribe scheme Thu Nov 17, 2005 2:39 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former official with the U.S. governing administration in Iraq and a contractor have been arrested on charges involving a bribery and fraud scheme, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

The defendants were identified as Robert Stein, comptroller and funding officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority - South Central Region in 2003 and 2004, and Philip Bloom, the owner of numerous construction and service companies.

Beginning in December of 2003, Stein and Bloom conspired to rig bids so that numerous CPA contracts were awarded to Bloom's businesses, according to court documents. The total value of the contracts awarded to Bloom exceeded $13 million.

According to affidavits filed in federal court in Washington in support of the arrest warrants, Bloom paid Stein and others hundreds of thousands of dollars in money and gifts so that contracts would be awarded to Bloom and his companies.

The bribes and gratuities paid to Stein included payments for the purchase of automobiles, jewelry and real estate, according to the court documents.

Stein, 50, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, is in custody there after his arrest earlier in the week, Justice Department officials said. Bloom, a U.S. citizen living in Romania and Iraq, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey, on November 13 and appeared on Wednesday before a magistrate judge in Washington.

The arrests resulted from an eight-month investigation. Stein and Bloom were charged with conspiring to commit money laundering and fraud. If convicted, they both face up to 30 years in prison, the officials said.

The CPA was headed by U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer, and ceased to exist in June 2004, when the United States handed over sovereignty to the Iraqis.

Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified

By ELAINE SCIOLINO and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

11/04/05 New York Times-- -- ROME, Nov. 3 - Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino(see insert below)on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday.

Forging the Case for War
Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?
by Philip Giraldi
10/29/05 "The American Conservative" -- -- From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until the details of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go to press, Fitzgerald has made no public statement.) But recent revelations in the Italian press, most notably in the pages of La Repubblica, along with information already on the public record, suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate. Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.
The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to construct a nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after 9/11, when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his newly appointed chief of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI), Nicolo Pollari, made an official visit to Washington. Berlusconi was eager to make a good impression and signaled his willingness to support the American effort to implicate Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his position for less than three weeks, was likewise keen to establish himself with his American counterparts and was under pressure from Berlusconi to present the U.S. with information that would be vital to the rapidly accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA officials to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to Britain’s MI-6. But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it dating from the 1980s. In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.
Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State.
The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by providing information to friends in the media.

On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the documents.

Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the CIA Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent straight to Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went directly to the NSC and the Vice President’s Office.

On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.
President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.

In January 2001, there was a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome. Documents were stolen but no valuables. The break-in was subsequently connected to, among others, Rocco Martino, who later provided the dossier to Panorama. Italian investigators now believe that Martino, with SISMI acquiescence, originally created a Niger dossier in an attempt to sell it to the French, who were managing the uranium concession in Niger and were concerned about unauthorized mining. Martino has since admitted to the Financial Times that both the Italian and American governments were behind the eventual forgery of the full Niger dossier as part of a disinformation operation. The authentic documents that were stolen were bunched with the Niger uranium forgeries, using authentic letterhead and Niger Embassy stamps. By mixing the papers, the stolen documents were intended to establish the authenticity of the forgeries.

At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.
It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi worst-case.
The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.November 21, 2005 Issue Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

The spymaster, Gen. Nicolò Pollari, director of the Italian military intelligence agency known as Sismi, disclosed that Mr. Martino was the source of the forged documents in closed-door testimony to a parliamentary committee that oversees secret services, the lawmakers said.
Senator Massimo Brutti, a member of the committee, told reporters that General Pollari had identified Mr. Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency." He did not say Mr. Martino was the forger.
The revelation came on a day when the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it had shut down its two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents.
The documents were the basis for sending a former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, on a fact-finding mission to Niger that eventually exploded into an inquiry that led to the indictment and resignation last week of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
Mr. Martino has long been suspected of being responsible for peddling the false documents. News reports have quoted him as saying he obtained them through a contact at the Niger Embassy here. But this was the first time his role was formally disclosed by the intelligence agency. Neither Mr. Martino nor his lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, were available for comment.

There had long been doubts within the United States intelligence community about the authenticity of the yellowcake documents, and references to it had been deleted from other presentations given at the time.
Senator Luigi Malabarba, who also attended Thursday's hearing, said in a telephone interview that General Pollari had told the committee that Mr. Martino was "offering the documents not on behalf of Sismi but on behalf of the French" and that Mr. Martino had told prosecutors in Rome that he was in the service of French intelligence.
A senior French intelligence official interviewed Wednesday in Paris declined to say whether Mr. Martino had been a paid agent of France, but he called General Pollari's assertions about France's responsibility "scandalous."
General Pollari also said that no Italian intelligence agency officials were involved in either forging or distributing the documents, according to both Senator Brutti and the committee chairman, Enzo Bianco.
Committee members said they were shown documents defending General Pollari, including a copy of a classified letter from Robert S. Muller III, the director of the F.B.I., dated July 20, which praised Italy's cooperation with the bureau.
In Washington, an official at the bureau confirmed the substance of the letter, whose contents were first reported Tuesday in the leftist newspaper L'Unità. The letter stated that Italy's cooperation proved the bureau's theory that the false documents were produced and disseminated by one or more people for personal profit, and ruled out the possibility that the Italian service had intended to influence American policy, the newspaper said. As a result, the letter said, according to both the F.B.I. official and L'Unità, the bureau had closed its investigation into the origin of the documents.
The F.B.I. official declined to be identified by name.

Thursday's hearing followed a three-part series in La Repubblica, which said General Pollari had knowingly provided the United States and Britain with forged documents. The newspaper, a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also reported that General Pollari had acted at the behest of Mr. Berlusconi, who was said to be eager to help President Bush in the search for weapons in Iraq.
Mr. Berlusconi has denied such accounts.

La Repubblica said General Pollari had held a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Hadley, now the national security adviser, has said that he met General Pollari on that date, but that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue. "Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed," Mr. Hadley told a briefing on Wednesday in Washington. "And that's also my recollection."At the time, Mr. Hadley took responsibility for including the faulty information in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address.

David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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