75,000 Body Bags Purchased For New Orleans

By Lynn Landes

Questions mount over Hurricane Katrina’s death count. Estimates are now well below 10,000 with the death toll currently standing at 648 for Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. So, why did the Bush Administration order 75,000 body bags?

Along that line, other things don’t add up. For instance, why did FEMA contact a crematorium in the local area; how could people identify their loved ones if only ashes remain? Why did FEMA rebuff efforts of volunteer morticians? Why did the feds try to ban reporters from covering the body recovery effort? Why have the feds employed mercenaries in New Orleans? Don’t we have plenty of volunteers, police and military in the U.S. to get any job done that needs doing? What’s really going on?

I don’t know with any certainty, but here are some theories:

Maybe the Bush Administration doesn’t want us to know how many people died because they just can’t take the political heat for being completely incompetent. That’s somewhat understandable. Maybe they ordered 75,000 body bags and hired Houston-based Blackwater mercenaries as more pork barrel projects. Nothing new there.

Or, maybe the feds want to hide bodies in an effort to grab land for their developer friends, or deny insurance claims for their friends in the insurance industry, as some people assert happened last year after Hurricane Charley in Florida. The Bush Administration can’t count on the police or military to carry out their dirty work, so they use private security firms. That’s in keeping with the Bush Administration’s MO (modus operandi).

Or, maybe they don’t want us to know exactly how some of these folks died. Maybe some New Orleans police did not abandon their stations. Maybe they were murdered while trying to protect their city. After all, Mayor Ray Negin made public statements saying, "The CIA might take me out". What was that all about? There are reports that there was a shoot-out between New Orleans police and contractors. And rumors are rampant that the 17th Street levee was bombed to protect the wealthier parts of New Orleans. Something along those lines occurred in the Great Flood of 1927.

In support of these theories, here are some news articles, opinions, and information:

April 1927: THE GREAT FLOOD OF 1927 —New Orleans dynamites Poydras levee — The Great Flood, New Orleans — "Communities on both sides of the river know that if the levee breaks on one side, the other side will be spared. Each side of the river fears sabotage, and sets up levee patrols to prevent intruders from dynamiting their levee. The patrols are prepared to shoot to kill.... National Guard is called in to patrol the refugee camps in Greenville. Word filters out of the camps that guardsmen are robbing, assaulting, raping and even murdering African Americans held on the levee. ...April 29: The torrent has moved south. With the river almost at the levee tops, New Orleans dynamites the Poydras levee, creating a 1500-foot break at an estimated cost of $2 million, to direct the flood waters away from the city and its half million inhabitants."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/timeline/timeline2.html

Aug 15, 2004: HURRICANE CHARLEY — Did FEMA spirit away corpses in Florida? Michael Edward reports, "The mass media, in collusion with government and insurance companies, purposely under-report the death tolls. FEMA simply spirits away the corpses in body bags before relatives can get into the area to identify their deceased." ... "By 10:00 p.m. on Friday, August 13, both Washington City and Tallahassee knew of the real devastation and of the many hundreds of local EDS/EMS confirmed deaths in the wake of Hurricane Charley. As a part of the emergency S.O.P, specific MP (specialist) command units were sent to Charlotte County from Ft. Leonard Wood and Ft. Stewart, most arriving just before dawn on Saturday, August 14. Their specific orders were to secure all the mobile home parks from the local and State authorities, and to seal off these areas from all but "authorized" personnel. By the time JEB BUSH arrived on Saturday, this had been fully accomplished in both Charlotte and Desoto Counties. Every County Deputy, city Police Officer, and all other local Emergency Services personnel had been "relieved" from their mobile home park duties by the Military Police command and re-assigned to other areas. ...The second purpose was to carry out search, recovery, and transport operations by "authorized" Federal teams. While residents were kept off the public streets, perimeters were established and non-residents were denied entrance, the mobile home parks were lit up by Army field generator units, searched, and bodies recovered. Those bodies were then transported out of the area on I-75 in refrigerated trucks marked "Emergency Response Services" with magnetic signs on the doors."

http://worldvisionportal.org/wvpforum/viewtopic.php?p=467

Sept 7: 2005: HURRICANE KATRINA - The Great New Orleans Land Grab - "What is being implemented now is nothing less than a sophisticated scheme to purge and ethnically cleanse what Whites have termed "Black and ’welfare bloated’ New Orleans"."

http://www.aztlan.net/new_orleans_land_grab.htm

Sept 2: FEMA bars volunteer morticians from entering New Orleans

link to www.zwire.com

Sept 5: FEMA contacts local crematorium — Jacksonville Beach, Florida, First Coast News (ABC 25 and NBC 12) reported, "With the gruesome prospect of handling the disposition of as many as 10,000 bodies, FEMA is contacting local crematoriums" ... "The remains need to be taken care of professionally and swiftly," said Michael Shalz of the Quinn-Shalz Funeral Home in Jacksonville Beach." Although Shalz conceded the most relatives need time to identify the dead, he added, "...this would be an opportunity that could take care of the immediate needs, hopefully reduce any problems with public health." Who or what constitutes an immediate need?

link to www.firstcoastnews.com

Sept 9: FEMA orders 75,000 body bags —The Modesto (California) Bee (working with the Associated Press-AP) reported, "The federal government is trying to purchase an additional 50,000 body bags for use in the Hurricane Katrina cleanup and in Iraq, according to an official for a Modesto manufacturer. Previously, the Federal Emergency Management Administration purchased 25,000 body bags and shipped them to New Orleans."

http://www.modbee.com/local/story/11196519p-11948351c.html

Sept 11: U.S. can’t ban media from New Orleans searches, judge orders - CNN filed suit for right to cover search for bodies of Katrina victims. CNN reported, "U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison issued a temporary restraining order Friday against a "zero access" policy announced earlier in the day by Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who is overseeing the federal relief effort in the city, and Terry Ebbert, the city’s homeland security director. In explaining the ban, Ebbert said, "we don’t think that’s proper" to let members of the media view the bodies....Rather than fight a lawsuit by CNN, the federal government abandoned its effort Saturday to prevent the media from reporting on the recovery of the dead in New Orleans."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/law/09/10/katrina.media/index.html

Sept 10: Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans - Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the (Houston-based) Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091005a.shtml Contractors ’Run Loose’ in Iraq - Recent shootings of Iraqi civilians, allegedly involving the legion of U.S., British and other foreign security contractors operating in the country, are drawing increasing concern ... Their heavy presence stems in large part from the Pentagon’s attempts to keep troop numbers down by privatizing jobs that would once have been performed by American forces.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091005e.shtml

Sept 11: Dead Contractors and Levee ’Explosives Residue’ Story http://www.rense.com/general67/exple.htm "NEW ORLEANS, La — Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall. By Hal Turner 9-9-5"

Also see: An Associated Press report, which has now disappeared, stated that at least five USA Defense Department personnel where shot dead by New Orleans police officers in the proximity of the breached levee. (Please Note: The original media reports concerning the shootout are now being changed or "cleansed" in a cover-up. We found one original report at

link to www.guardian.co.uk

Lynn Landes is publisher of Ecotalk (www.EcoTalk.org) and a news reporter for DUTV in Philadelphia, PA. For the past year she has been covering voting technology and democracy issues. Formerly Lynn was a radio show host for WDVR in New Jersey and a regular commentator for a BBC radio program. She can be reached at lynnlandes@earthlink.net This article is copyright by Lynn Landes, and originally published by opednews.com, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media if this entire credit paragraph is attached.

link to www.opednews.com

A corpse lies draped over a fence in the Ninth Ward Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, in New Orleans. Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans bodies are still being retrieved. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)