The Interdictor — A Live Journal Report from a blogger in New Orleans, now mirrored by another blogger. These stories are going to get worse. I think blogging will be here to stay after these reports start to pile up.

The Real News
The following is the result of an interview I just conducted via cell phone with a New Orleans citizen stranded at the Convention Center. I don’t know what you’re hearing in the mainstream media or in the press conferences from the city and state officials, but here is the truth:

“Bigfoot” is a bar manager and DJ on Bourbon Street, and is a local personality and icon in the city. He is a lifelong resident of the city, born and raised. He rode out the storm itself in the Iberville Projects because he knew he would be above any flood waters. Here is his story as told to me moments ago. I took notes while he talked and then I asked some questions:

Three days ago, police and national guard troops told citizens to head toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge to await transportation out of the area. The citizens trekked over to the Convention Center and waited for the buses which they were told would take them to Houston or Alabama or somewhere else, out of this area.

It’s been 3 days, and the buses have yet to appear.

Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.

There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like — all of them in dire straights.

Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

The people are so desperate that they’re doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.

The buses never stop.

Mirror here

More bad news

NEW ORLEANS, Sept 1 (Reuters) – Rotting bodies littered the flooded streets of New Orleans on Thursday and mounting violence threatened to turn into all-out anarchy as thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina pleaded to be evacuated, or even just fed.

The historic jazz city has fallen prey to armed looters since Katrina tore through and it now more closely resembles Haiti or another Third World trouble spot in a refugee crisis than one of America’s most popular vacation centers.

And this:

“She’s still out there. There are rats roaming around, and I wonder if no one knows who this woman is and where her family is,” Cooper said. He also saw a family of four — a man, woman and two children — who were drowned in their living room when their house was flooded.

“Their salt-and-pepper figurines that they had collected were sitting on the shelf untouched,” Cooper said.

Cooper, who this year covered the south Asian tsunami in Sri Lanka, said the destruction looked comparable.

“It’s amazingly similar, horrifyingly similar. The scenes of whole villages gone is very much the same,” Cooper said. “Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, Waveland — it could have been Galle, Sri Lanka. But what makes it different is that this is the U.S. seeing bloated corpses out on the streets for days.”

I can go on, but the question that needs to be asked is how can ever expect to deal with any sort of terrorism attack which comes with no warning if this is the way we deal with an attack (of sorts) that comes with plenty of warning. There was plenty of time to get ready and plenty of time to be prepared. It was NOT a surprise. This is gross State, Local and Federal incompetence and it is getting worse by the minute. I think you can expect real rioting shortly. There is nothing to stop it.