This is NOT all better now George

With the rotors of President George W. Bush’s helicopter sounding overhead, New Orleans’ poor and downtrodden recounted tales of murder, rape, death threats and near starvation since Hurricane Katrina wrecked this city.

Ending days of abandonment since the hurricane struck on Monday, the U.S. National Guard handed out military rations and a bottle of water to thousands of evacuees — the first proper meal most had eaten in days.

But as the masses lined up outside, herded by Army troops toting machine guns, inside the convention center where these people slept since Monday was the stench of death and decay.

Leroy Fouchea, 42, waited in the sweltering heat for an hour to get his ration — his first proper food since Monday — and immediately handed it over to a sickly friend.

He then offered to show reporters the dead bodies of a man in a wheelchair, a young man who he said he dragged inside just hours earlier, and the limp forms of two infants, one just four months old, the other six months old.

“They died right here, in America, waiting for food,” Fouchea said as he walked toward Hall D, where the bodies were put to get them out of the searing heat.

….

A National Guardsman refused entry.

“It doesn’t need to be seen, it’s a make-shift morgue in there,” he told a Reuters photographer. “We’re not letting anyone in there anymore. If you want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq.”  {The news black out in effect…}

As rations were finally doled out here on the day President Bush visited the devastated city, an elderly white woman and her husband collapsed from the heat.

“I had to walk two blocks to get here and I have arthritis and three ruptured discs in my back,” said Selma Valenti, 80, as her husband lay beside her, being revived by a policeman in riot gear. The two had eaten nothing since Wednesday

Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.

“They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us,” she said, sobbing. “They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came — that’s what the people in charge told us this morning.” {Is this true? They sent the buses away Thursday night?}

Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder.

Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and murdering children.

She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the convention center.

“She was raped for four hours until she was dead,” Joseph said through tears. “Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night.”

Several others interviewed by Reuters told similar stories of the abuse and murder of children, but they could not be independently verified.

Friday night in New Orleans was never like this.

Known for its raucous Mardi Gras festival, distinctive jazz, Francophile culture and unique architecture, New Orleans is still in crisis from floods that devastated the city following hurricane Katrina, leaving thousands homeless and desperate to leave. And on some less glamorous streets, the stench of death permeates everything.

As dusk fell on Friday evening, a woman’s bloated and brutally distorted figure lay prostrate on the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street in a poor neighborhood.

The black woman lay, arms flaccid, feet splayed, one shoe gone, her face distended from swelling and her chest swollen as gas filled her decaying corpse. Someone had covered her body in a plaid blanket in an anonymous gift offering some dignity.

A woman across the street shouted at photographers taking pictures of her, “She’s been there for five days, since Monday.” Then she approached to beg for bottled water, or anything at all that might help.

A convoy of five sport utility vehicles passed by, each packed with police training rifles with laser sights on the scant few residents out walking. They sped past the corpse without taking any notice.

….

At the nearby Superdome, where thousands who had lost everything in the floods camped out this week awaiting evacuation, another black woman’s bloated body lay in full view face down in shallow floodwaters even as hundreds of National Guard troops were stationed there to keep the site secure.

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In the downtown business district, U.S. Marshals guard a nondescript building, setting up their headquarters and base of operations at the almost 20-story-high BellSouth building.

One federal agent who asked not to be named said the building is the hub for all long-distance telephone communications for the Southeastern United States.

Without the technology housed in that one structure, he said, there would be no long-distance calls in the region — something that would blight commerce even further and a dynamic making the bland concrete edifice “a vital national security interest.” {but not enough of one for anyone to be prepared in advance of course}

On the corner where that building stands, a frantic woman approached a federal officer and pleaded to be allowed past, saying, “I heard there were evacuation buses at the Superdome.” In her arms was a 5-year-old child, his naked, black back scarred and pitted with welts and burn marks, his arms wrapped tightly around her neck.

After days of broken promises, U.S. troops have finally started moving emergency relief supplies into New Orleans and are now trying to halt widespread looting and horrific violence even as they feed evacuees and move them to shelters in Texas.

Survivors were still trying to leave the city on Saturday. Corpses lay in the streets, including a woman’s bloated body lying face down in shallow floodwaters at the Superdome, a stadium where thousands endured brutal conditions after taking shelter there.

Thousands of people were told overnight to get out of the city convention center, where feces and urine filled corridors and up to 22 bodies were stored inside a makeshift morgue. There was still no medical care for evacuees at the convention center, who desperately waited for a bus ride out of the city.

“There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave,” said 32-year-old Africa Brumfield.

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As army troops and National Guard units establish control of New Orleans, they will seek to drive looting gangs off the streets and disarm them, but Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco warned the streets are not yet safe.

“There’s still some danger because power’s not up and the nights are dark,” she said. “We have a lot to go through before we get comfortable.”