Dyan French on CSPAN earlier claimed she heard the Levy being blown up.

[frankly_fedup2]

I'm watching the replay of Mrs. Dyan French and Leah Hodgeson CSPAN are standing up to the tight-ass senators. I'm glad they are telling them their story.

They claim the levy was blown up. Mrs. French lives within a mile of where the Levy breached. One Republican senator asked her if she saw it. She said she had a family member or neighbor that had been in the military before who stated the "BOOMS" they were hearing were explosions. Then she stated that the water came like the Atlantic Ocean just flooded into her house, at least 10-feet high.

The senators are, basically, calling them liars and stating they shouldn't say these things unless then saw this happen or had evidence. Mrs. French bluntly tells them all, "I just told you what happened." Who are you to tell me what I saw and what I did not see?" Ms. Hodges claims that they were pushed back at gunpoint by the military. Mrs. French is letting them know they are not going to call her a liar. I love it when somebody calls any senator, congressman, or even prez or Vprez (Go F*** yourself Mr. Cheney).

Mrs. Dyan French said they had to hide to keep from getting killed. She claims they were (Coast Guard, Police, Military, etc.) killing people. She is also claiming about the New Orleans Police Department were the ones who were stealing the Cadillacs, sports cars, and looting the stores. Mrs. French's son lives uptown and went and got his guns that were immediately confiscated they said.

Those sitting up there on this committee are pissed off, but these ladies are telling them what they think of them and their disrespect toward them as they are trying to tell their story. It looks like a lot of them have gotten up and left.

[Cocoa]

1. Eugene Levy?

did they blow him up real good? :-)

[IndyOp]

2. I believe Mrs. Dyan French and I *pray* the whole awful truth comes out!

There are still over 6,000 katrina victims "missing" --

:puke: :nuke: :scared: :cry: :puke: :nuke: :scared: :cry:

[frankly_fedup2]

5. OMG! Are you a witness to some of these atrocities that these

ladies and Mrs. French's son have testified too?

I had no idea that over 6,000 people are still missing.

I'm sitting here watching MSNBC, Scarborough crap, just happened to turn the channel, and I bet you cannot imagine what is on? Aruba and the young lady that is missing.

Now you mean to tell me that is more important then the people in NO still missing and those still without homes. More important then our troops dying everyday? More important then the American People being ripped off daily?

More and more everyday. More lies, propaganda, graft, and more deaths. And these are CHRISTIANS?

[OKthatsIT]

3. Any links to this testimony?

[WarNoMore]

4. A previous post---

I had stated in a post in the week of Katrina that a caller to Rachel Maddow had stated that the levees were blowm up.

[No Exit]

6. Let's see... the part about the cops stealing the Cadillacs is true;

I saw an article that interviewed the owner of the Cadillac dealership, days after the storm. Some of the cops were found driving the Cadillacs in other states!

The part about the cops looting other stuff was true. They caught some of this on camera--I saw CNN coverage of police officers looting, and there was another group of officers that were taking stuff and stashing it in a room on an upper storey of a downtown hotel. But there were plenty of OTHER people besides cops doing looting.

Had to hide to keep from being killed? Possible. Remember the big crowd of people, led by two white San Franciscans, who tried to cross the Mississippi River bridge to get out of Orleans Parish (New Orleans city limits) and into the west bank part of Jefferson Parish (different county, with a different town: Gretna)? It was a huge crowd of sick, wet, messed up people. They tried to find refuge somewhere near the French Quarter, and authorities recommended to them that they start walking over the bridge, b/c "they've got facilities for you over there." They were met on the middle of the bridge by Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies with guns. The deputies shot the guns off, but no one was hit. The people retreated and tried to camp at the foot of the Orleans Parish side of the bridge. Hours later the Jefferson deputies came to their camp and took their food and roughed some of them up. Formal complaint filed, white couple interviewed several times on TV.

Levee deliberately blown up? I don't know. I don't think anyone--state, federal, or local--down there was together enough at that point to be thinking anything as organized as "let's sacrifice N. Dorgenois Street area so we can save the white areas!" (Besides, the more affluent areas near that same canal were completely flooded also, as it turned out.) But if she said she heard an explosion, that part I believe. It may have been from the collapse of the levee when the storm surge hit it. Who knows. One thing's for sure: they DID get at least 10 feet of water rolling in fast.

[tirechewer]

7. I read this on the CNN website

The story was titled "I knew it was over with" and it was written by a reporter named Christie Oglesby. I copied the article and stuck it to a word pad on my computer, but I didn't save the link. Maybe with the reporter's name, someone can find it in the CNN archive.

I kept it because of this quote.

"As they slept, a barge in the Intracoastal Canal broke the levee three blocks from their house on August 29, Robert Green said. The rapid-rising flood ripped houses in the neighborhood from their moorings just after 4 a.m., sending them swirling through streets and breaking apart as they crashed into other houses and the large oaks that line the street."

The subject of the article was how a woman named Deanna Thomas found out that her 3 year old daughter, Shenae Green had died in the flood that came from the levee before Katrina made landfall. The sound of a barge hitting that levy would have sounded like an explosion. I read the same thing somewhere else in a different context, but I did not think to save it. I thought it very odd that a barge in a place that was so very close to a vulnerable levee would not be better secured. Everyone knew the storm was coming, and the barge broke loose before it even hit with full force.

I don't know how that happened. I can't even guess. I'm sorry I can't reproduce the whole article, but I understand they don't want us to do that here for copyright reasons. If anyone wants it, send me a private message and I'll do a cut and paste for you so you can read it, and maybe find it again.

[No Exit]

8. Thank you! I remember reading an article about those people

And here is the article you cited:

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/katrina/green.family/roof.update/index.html


I didn't remember the part about the barge. That sounds likely, b/c barges often cause accidents in the gulf area near New Orleans. For example, the story was often told of how a barge once knocked out a big section of the Causeway (a bridge across Lake Pontchartrain that is over 20 miles long) and a car full of people couldn't stop in time and plunged to their deaths in the water.

I can imagine that a barge slamming into the levee (propelled by the hurricane) would cause a big sound like an explosion, and a very sudden rush of water.

[tirechewer]

11. Thank you so much

That was very helpful of you.:) I copied the link and added it to the story so that I can refer to it in the future.

I had watched the coverage very closely, but I had never heard of the barge hitting the levy either.

It was not until after the dust had settled that I read that article and saw that paragraph. Then I read a few lines on a blog about the barge and that the incident should be investigated to determine how it happened.

I live in California and have never had experience with a hurricane, but if the winds preceding Katrina helped push the barge into the levee it would have sounded like all Hell was breaking loose. The surge of water followed almost immediately. If you were there, it would be easy to have thought it was an explosion.

I saw the way that Freeper senator was talking to the people who were testifying too. He would not let the woman speak without interrupting her, and he was continuously talking over her. I think she held her composure very well. I would have yelled at him pretty good if he had talked to me that way.

If you ask someone a question, you should let them answer, and then ask your next thing if you don't understand. And how about asking politely? Is it just me, or have the Bush administration and their close personal friends in Congress taken just plain rudeness to new heights.

That woman had been through enough. She didn't need to be demeaned on top of everything else.

[No Exit]

12. Yes, they had been through enough. They had been through horrors

that that republican senator will never experience and which he couldn't imagine, as he sits (to borrow a few words from Aaron Broussard of Louisiana) in his climate-controlled office, sipping good coffee.

There is just no way to dismiss any of those women's accounts as even the slightest exaggeration (or "lie", if we take Mr. Shays' clear implication). There is no exaggeration when any survivor talks about this thing. It was clearly the type of disaster where a person is instantly faced with the prospect of immediate death. The (even now) decomposing bodies still in those ruined structures assure us of that.

Now, those women, especially the ones who came from the housing projects (that doesn't include Dyan French, but she certainly doesn't live in any kind of "luxury"--not even close), they are extremely tough. Did you hear when one of them said, "The teenagers go to visit their grandma who lives in the projects, and they get arrested for trespassing"? It's true. You have to be ultra-tough to even stay alive where those women live. I doubt pansy Chris Shays and his pathetic chest-beating had any lasting effect on those women.

Let him stand in the crowd during a Mardi Gras parade--if there ever IS a Mardi Gras parade in N.O. again--and we'll see how tough Mr. Big Republican is.

[Igel]

9. One can accept her facts without accepting her inferences.

She says she heard a loud noise or 'boom'. That's an observation. There's probably corroboration.

She says they were explosions. That's an inference.

There's a very, very large divide between the fact and the inference that it's her responsibility to fill in, if she wants to make that argument. But she hasn't. She leaves us with a fact and an abductive inference.

Abduction's great for producing hypotheses, but is in no way a permissible part of an argument for a conclusion's being necessary. (Abduction's one of those things left out of the US high school curriculum that should be prominently included in, oh, 9th grade or so.)

[RazzleDazzle]

10. They're levees

and I bring it up only because your version, creative tho it may be, caused me serious confusion, and it took a while for me to sort it out.

Singular is levee.

[yellowcanine]

13. Maybe Levy is a Jewish levee. I know, weak. Best I can do now.