Reply #188: She did NOT claim that 5000 people were shot in the head.

[Time for change]

She claimed she heard an allegation to that effect and she thought it was worth investigating. Here are some of the things that were documented in regard to the goings on in the aftermath of Katrina:

Jeremy Scahill describes the following activities by Blackwater USA, a prominent Bush administration contractor, during the response to Hurricane Katrina, from his book, “Blackwater – The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”:

The company beat the federal government and most aid organizations to the scene as 150 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear spread out into the chaos of New Orleans… All of them were heavily armed…. A possibly deadly incident involving hired guns underscored the dangers of private forces policing American streets… The security guard said their convoy came under fire from “black gangbangers”… The guard said he and his men were armed with AR-15s and Glocks and that they unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. “After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped.”

And A. C. Thompson recently wrote an article in The Nation titled “Katrina’s Hidden Race War – In New Orleans’s Algiers Point, white vigilantes shot African-Americans with impunity.” It is a ghastly story of how, freed from the reach of the law, under cover of a catastrophe, a bunch of racist white men in a white enclave of New Orleans formed a militia to prevent black people from using their neighborhood as a sanctuary from death. Several horrific examples are provided in the article. Thompson describes how the racist militias thought of themselves:

Nathan Roper, another vigilante, says he was unhappy that outsiders were disturbing his corner of New Orleans and that he was annoyed by the National Guard’s decision to use the Algiers Point ferry landing as an evacuation zone… The storm victims were “hoodlums from the lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city”, he says. “I’m not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You see it in their eyes… There was a few people who got shot (black people shot by the militia) around here… I know of at least three people who got shot”.

The historian Lance Hill provides some perspective on what happened, noting that “Some white New Orleanians think of themselves as an oppressed minority”:

Because of the widespread notion that blacks engaged in looting and thuggery as the disaster unfolded, Hill believes, many white New Orleanians approved of the vigilante activity that occurred in places like Algiers Point. "By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt – that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion… It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period."

I'd rather that Congress be overzealous in investigating these things than underzealous.