Bloodless Coup

Suppressing the Facts and Covering Asses

Baltar reminded me recently that I should read Laura Rozen more often. He was right, as usual. She is all over the administration's effort to keep the continuing story of New Orleans from being reported. I'm going to excerpt the bulk of one post, but she has several others that are extremely revealing in what they show about the personnel assigned to FEMA as well as the dizzying spin happening now. Follow the links embedded in the post (which are not transferred here). Rozen has put her phone to work, asking questions, and has advised the rest of us to do the same. Democracy. I'm lovin' it!

This sort of blatant censorship cannot be tolerated in America. I think this writer to Americablog has the right idea:

Hey there John,

First, thanks for being the voice of conscience through all of this horror we are experiencing here in the south.

I was concerned when I read your comments that the press was being moved out of New Orleans, so I called the White House to voice my concern. I was told by the WH operator that the reason was out of respect for the dead. I told her that I thought it was a bad idea to not chronicle this issue so that we could learn from it, correct what went wrong and make sure there is accountability.

Well the minute the operator heard the buzzword "accountability" she got very testy and insisted that it was not appropriate to show the dead. I told here we saw dead bodies everyday on the news from Iraq and she went a little nuts and said I was "being insensitive." I've got friends I can't find in New orleans and I'm being insensitive? These people need to get real and hear from more Americans.

Please tell people to call 202-456-1414, 202-456-1111 and tell the WH operators that the press need to stay.

Call the White House and your Senators and Congressmen, and demand that the administration stop trying to suppress reporting on the recovery operation in New Orleans, and demand that there be an independent investigation of the government's failures in its Katrina response, its FEMA and DHS hiring and staffing and operations. And a whole lot of civil disobedience and law suits from the media against the government are in order, starting with suing FEMA for trying to ban media access to recovery of the dead in New Orleans. The Bush administration made this country look like the Third World last week -- let's not let it continue on this path in the aftermath.

So, FEMA has no disaster relief professionals at the top, but is chock full of PR hacks. That would be my first choice for competent professionals to save American lives during a disaster.