The LA Times reports,

Doubts Now Surround Account of Snipers Amid New Orleans Chaos

Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.

But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city's east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.

A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.

Michael Rivero of What Really Happened.com comments,

At the time I observed that there appeared to be an effort to kick up a race riot in New Orleans, in order to destroy sympathy for the black victims of the flooding as a means to deflect criticism of Bush for diverting flood control and disaster relief funds to his illegal war in Iraq.

While this remains a possibility, it has to also be emphasized that the first Associated Press reports about this incident stated that the US Defense Department relief contractors on their way to repair levies were in fact shot at by New Orleans police and at least five were killed.

FLASHBACK: Five dead 'were army workers'

At least five people shot dead by police as they walked across a New Orleans bridge yesterday were contractors working for the US Defence department, according to a report by The Associated Press.

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal, the new agency said, quoting a defence Department spokesman.

The story was then changed to make it appear as if the police were protecting the contractors from civilian snipers, and the deaths were not mentioned.

The black kids shot at by police for no reason quoted in the LA Times piece were probably caught up in the melee, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Why would New Orleans police be ordered to shoot and kill Defense Department contractors who were trying to repair canal walls?

New Orleans was a giant benchmark for how all natural disasters will be dealt with in future.

FEMA and the federal government deliberately sabotaged relief efforts in order to deepen the crisis, including blocking water and fuel supplies.

FEMA cut communication lines in one parish, causing Sheriff Harry Lee to reconnect the lines and place armed guards around them to thwart FEMA.

The federal government deliberately hampered relief and recovery efforts in order to provide the justification for Americans to accept gun confiscation and foreign troops on US soil.

Federal agents went door to door in middle class neighborhoods completely undamaged by the floods and demanded residents hand over their legally owned firearms.

Although court cases after the fact were won by second amendment groups, the mass confiscations conditioned many Americans to associate 'helpful relief efforts' with total federal disarmament of the American people.

In addition, convoys of Mexican troops, some armed, entered the US for the first time since 1846.

Again, this conditioned Americans into thinking that foreign troops can be equated with dealing with crises and that their presence is acceptable.

Subsequent statements by President Bush only made it more clear that federal government was determined to abolish Posse Comitatus and impose martial law during times of natural disaster.

The relief contractors on the Danziger Bridge were there to fix flood defenses that many suggest were blown by the government in the first place.

Their efforts would have scuppered the federal government's plan to keep New Orleans in a state of panic and disorder, therefore the most likely explanation is that they paid for their good intentions with their lives.

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Doubts Now Surround Account of Snipers Amid New Orleans Chaos
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