There it was, right there on CNN the afternoon of December 6. Ishmael Mohammed, an attorney for the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, quoted a young woman named Denise, talking about her experience in the New Orleans Superdome: “The National Guard did not serve or protect. They were constantly threatening us and herding us by machine guns like cows. I saw a teenage boy beaten up by a National Guard officer in front of a crowd of thousands of people.” Denise confirmed accounts of “white and Asian tourists… rushed quietly out one side of the barricade that held thousands of exhausted, financially underprivileged black families with babies.” Tammy, a thirty-something African-American woman who was attempting to escape the city by car, said police stopped, arrested and jailed her and her two daughters for weeks. “Lie down on the ground, you black monkey bitch,” she claims one of them yelled. Patricia Thompson, a 53-year-old New Orleans evacuee, testified that soldiers aimed their machine gun target lasers at her granddaughter’s forehead, and that New Orleans cops routinely spat racist insults at storm victims. Others spoke of looting and gratuitous murder by police gone berserk.
— Ted Rall, on Yahoo! News Op-ed