Tom has extended experience with FEMA, in Florida, last year. So whereas my outrage at the media reports (NPR, Washington Post) describing the National Guard’s ice-hearted disregard for the chaotic, befouled, dangerous misery of the evacuees in the Ernest Morial Convention Center derives from a fundamental sense of human decency — Tom speaks from the bitter aftertaste of his own sips of the poisonous draught force-fed the desperate residents of New Orleans.
Micahel Chertoff, August 31: “I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don’t have food and water.”
Michael Brown September 2 [?]: “I think it was yesterday morning when we first found out about [the Conference Center]. We were just as surprised as everybody else. We didn’t know that the city had used that as a staging area.”
Oh, and this.