Hard Realities and Wilfull Ignorance

Knight Ridder takes a detailed look at administration bungles over the Gulf disaster (not the Persian Gulf one, the other one).

Sidney Blumenthal: "No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looks at the Mississipi GOP Governor Haley Barbour's track record and recalls the biblical saying, For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind:

"The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore."

Meanwhile, Robert Fisk reports on the ongoing misery of the 100% man-made disaster in Iraq:

Bodies drifted for hours downriver from the Qadimiya district of Baghdad. ...Children could be seen drowning in the Tigris in what was the greatest loss of life in Iraq since the invasion of the country in 2003. Hundreds of sandals, foot packages and headdresses were heaped on the bridge after the deaths; hospitals were overwhelmed by the number of corpses brought to their mortuaries. At one point, Shia pilgrims could be seen hurling themselves from the bridge into the Tigris as they became crushed between panicking civilians.

Others fell from the end of the bridge and landed on the shore, their bodies crashing down amid the swings of a riverside children's park. "I saw an old woman, who was completely panicked and crying, throw herself from the bridge," Khalid Fadhil, a goldsmith who witnessed the stampede, told a reporter from The Washington Post. "I saw another man falling on the bricks of the shore who died immediately. I saw seven people were brought dead near the end of the bridge, smothered. Other people were running and shouting 'Allahu Akbar'."

US authorities say they never saw the tragedy, so maybe it never happened.