NEW ORLEANS MAYOR ABANDONS CITY TO ANARCHY,

NEW ORLEANS MAYOR ABANDONS CITY TO ANARCHY,
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS TO TAKE OVER FLOOD RESCUE

The storm and flood catastrophe aftermath in New Orleans has to be
blamed directly on a breakdown in responsibility of the local government.
The mayor and all local government officials, along with all of the
municipal employees including the police department and the city's movers
and shakers, abandoned the city early. They shut off all electricity,
water, phones and any other services, and ordered everyone to "abandon
ship". No "women and children first". It was a mad scramble with "every
man for himself". Not even any guides to tell people which way to go.

Many people didn't have cars or other transportation so they couldn't
leave on the already choked roads out of the area. The stranded people
were left to the mercy of the elements and the looters who had stayed to
steal, vandalize and terrorize.

The mayor and governor threw up there hands hopelessly and dropped
out, leaving all responsibility to the federal government. Where were the
police and highway patrol that the federal government expected to be
already on the scene rescuing?

As soon as the winds died down, the federal government immediately sent
in the Coast Guard with helicopters to snatch people off roof tops, and
nearby National Guard to tend to evacuees in the Dome stadium. Almost all
boats in the area were destroyed by the storm, so it took a while to bring
rescue boats from elsewhere. Lack of local law enforcement was
conspicuous by its absence. All available personnel had to first be
directed at saving lives. Communication systems were gone so it was
difficult to organize rescuers. The out-of-town FEMA federal workers
didn't seem to locate local authorities familiar with the area to consult
about organizing federal efforts. Deepening flood water pouring over the
levees handicapped rescuers trying to enter the area.

Residents would have laughed if anyone had said two years ago that a
hurricane with over 150 mile per hour winds would hit that area The
levees would withstand up to phase three winds, but breaks in the levee
allowed unexpected flooding in 80 percent of the area. Last June Congress
appropriated several hundred millions dollars for repairing dikes and
waterway control in that area.

Admittedly, this tragedy was a stupendous disaster requiring
impossible achievements, but if it is found that the mayor of New Orleans
and many other officials there were as neglectful as it seems, they should
volunteer to resign. Hindsight is always clearer than foresight, so let's
see what the future really proves.

Thankfully, help and supplies are now pouring into the area, along
with thousands of troops to quell the many criminals terrorizing the area.
Gathering supplies, loading on trucks, and traveling to the scene are not
instantaneous. It takes a couple days to rally citizen soldiers for an
unexpected battle with anarchists.

This disaster turned out to be much worse than anyone could foresee.
There are no homes or jobs for most New Orleaners to return to. Many are
planning to move elsewhere. Even though the federal government did a
spectacularly good job with what little local aid they early had to work
with, you can count on political radicals like Teddy Kennedy and Howard
Dean to blame President Bush for everything they can think of, and Bush,
as usual, will say nothing and let them do it.

--REAL NEWS Editor thenewsman@ij.net
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Secrets and lies
By Denis MacShane
Published: September 2 2005 11:06 | Last updated: September 2 2005 11:06

Throughout history, intelligence agencies and secret agents are the most
easily mocked of public servants. Their necessary secrecy gives rise to
sinister interpretations. They have to bribe, seduce, blackmail or cajole
men and women into betraying their own country or cause. They make mistakes,
are venal. But they are necessary. The terror attacks are alerting a public
sleepy-eyed after reading too much John le Carre to the real-time importance
of intelligence. To understand what needs to be done we need to look at past
successes and failures. Luckily there is now a new wave of spy books - fact
rather than fiction - which examines in detail achievements and cock-ups.
These new volumes are much richer than the unending sequence of spy
thrillers, a genre that is running out of steam.

On one point, however, history and fiction concur. Wrongly focused
leadership, turf-fighting, bureaucratic squabbles between military and
civilian intelligence agencies, and recruitment from narrow castes have
regularly led and almost certainly still lead intelligence agencies into
dead ends.

In 1939, for example, Polish intelligence offered to the British the German
encoding machine, Enigma, plus the keys to keep decoding Wehrmacht secret
messages, 80 per cent of which the Poles could read. The British, obsessed
with the Empire not Europe, had focused on trying to read Japanese naval
codes and showed little interest in the fact the Poles were cracking German
codes before the war started.

The endless literature on Enigma and Ultra barely mentions the contribution
the Poles made in giving Churchill the priceless secret that helped win the
war. One reason was the disappearance in 1945 of all the files that recorded
the contribution Polish intelligence made to the Allied war efforts. As the
Soviet Union rose to world power status, official London placated Sovietism
by writing the Poles out of second world war history. Polish airmen and
soldiers were not even allowed to march in any of the victory parades at the
war’s end.

Now Tony Blair has written a joint foreword with the Polish prime minister
to a powerful collection of investigations into the work of Poles in helping
the Allies. Intelligence Co-operation Between Poland and Great Britain
During World War II may have a dry title but it has a political purpose of
bringing back to life a forgotten history of intelligence operations that
has lessons for today. Britain’s prime minister has gone out of his way to
champion Poland, making good the wrongs and slights of his predecessors, who
refused even to admit Stalin had ordered the massacre of Polish service
personnel at Katyn. Blair has sensed the new importance of Poland in Europe
and made sure a firm London-Warsaw alliance has been created.

The book is edited by one British and two Polish historians, with
contributions from a number of researchers, and seeks to make good the loss
of the files of the Polish intelligence. And what a story emerges. Not just
the Enigma machine but a full copy of the V2 rocket plus its top-secret fuel
were smuggled by Polish agents to London. The Polish intelligence network
had agents everywhere - from Japan to every corner of occupied and neutral
Europe. In France, they provided a complete order of battle of the Wehrmacht
and Luftwaffe ahead of the Normandy landings. Polish agents smuggled
themselves in and out of Auschwitz but their reports of the Holocaust were
given little priority in London and Washington.

The precise academic prose reveals the most amazing adventures. In Greece in
1941 a Polish agent, Jerzy Iwanow-Szajnowicz destroyed a German submarine
and sunk a destroyer. He sabotaged a factory producing aircraft engines so
that enemy pilots found their planes crashing over Africa. This real-life
James Bond, however, suffered the fate of so many agents. He was betrayed to
the Germans and killed while trying to escape. There was no C, or M or Q
able to save his life. In Afghanistan, the top Polish spy, Bronislaw
Telatycki survived. Britain gave him an OBE in 1946 “for important services
of a highly confidential nature which significantly helped to neutralise
Afghanistan as a centre of hostile activity”. Where today can we find the
agents to neutralise Afghanistan, let alone Iraq?

The book was written because of the mysterious disappearance of the Polish
intelligence files. Who destroyed them? The British, who decided for raison
d’etat to accept the reality of post-1945 Europe, which meant writing out of
politics the claims of the Poles to freedom and control of their own
country? As the war went on, the Poles switched intelligence efforts to the
new occupiers - the Soviets. How much information was in the files about the
spread of Soviet networks and communist collaborators in eastern Europe?
Maybe it was better that information was lost than read in Moscow. To what
extent did the Poles realise the penetration of British intelligence and
diplomacy by Soviet sympathisants such as Philby, Blunt, Burgess, Maclean
and Klugmann, protected by chums who lived by E.M. Forster’s maxim about
preferring to betray his country rather than a friend? Whoever put a match
to the Polish files stopped countless names going on to Soviet execution
lists but at a price of losing for decades a story of bravery, skill,
incredible mathematical work and a relentless desire to defeat tyranny.

If the academic researchers have given us back this slice of intelligence
history, the remarkable work by Sarah Helm on the female agents betrayed to
the Gestapo tells of the courage of women who served their country and the
cause of freedom, and the blunder after blunder of the men safe in London
who sent them to a foul death. Sebastian Faulks, Piers Paul Read and Laurent
Joffrin have written novels about women spies in wartime France but the
facts are stronger than the fiction.

Helm has left the ranks of professional foreign correspondents to become a
major writer with her book, A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and
the Lost Agents of SOE, which explores the mores and manner of sending
Special Operations Executive agents into France. Helm travels to Bulgaria,
the Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe to tell the story of Vera Atkins, who
became second in command of the French section of the SOE. Atkins
accompanied every woman to the airfields of southern England and made sure
the labels on their clothes matched those worn by women in occupied France.
Yet she was not British, but a penniless Jewish immigrant from Romania who
did not become a British citizen until the war’s end.

And what kind of operation was she involved in? British agents were
parachuted into France barely able to speak French. Despite the huge success
of the Germans in penetrating and turning the SOE operations in Holland,
little effort was made to change systems that had proven to be useless. A
simple test could check if a radio operator had been caught or not. Each was
told to transmit two secret codes. If captured one could be given to the
Germans but unless both codes were included it had to be assumed that the
messages were being sent following capture. Yet when one of the most
important networks was captured by the Gestapo - possibly as a result of
betrayal - and the radio messages came back without the second code, the SOE
just assumed a silly mistake had been made and kept sending agents,
containers, money and arms into the hands of the grateful Gestapo.

No one knows or has been able to offer a definitive account of how much rank
incompetence, how much brilliant German counter-espionage, and how much
treason and the fear of torture were responsible for these disasters. After
1945, the SOE was turned into a pantheon of heroes - and the courage of
these men and women is not in dispute. Yet the cleverness of Helm’s book,
which reads as a thriller, so eager is the reader to know what happened
next, is that she shows how little we really know despite all of the books
and films about the SOE. Helm is ambivalent about her heroine but the story
of Atkins’ life remains extraordinary. Having sent brave women to their
deaths, she became determined after the liberation of Europe to find out
exactly how they died.

And here the story is at its most distressing. Atkins donned her mannish
bomber jacket and toured post-1945 Germany and France to find out what
really happened. The women agents were held in prison in Paris until Berlin
ordered their execution. Atkins found drawings of the women made by fellow
prisoners as they arrived at the camps where they were killed. Their heads
are held high, their hair neat, their jaws strong. Their deaths were brutal,
with evidence that one was fed into a crematorium oven while still alive.

The truth Helm recounts is much more gripping than the fiction we have been
reading about spies since Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Agent. The
journalist Henry Porter has written his latest novel, Brandenburg, about the
last days of the Stasi in Berlin in 1989. The reader knows the Berlin Wall
will come down and with his denouement gone, Porter works overhard at
sustaining interest.

My Life in the CIA, written in remarkable prose by Harry Matthews, is a very
different novel. Nominally about a part-time CIA agent, it is more in the
Graham Greene genre of the spy as a cynical but not-quite-helpless pawn who
is manipulated by unknown forces and makes more mistakes than he uncovers
secrets. As a memoir of literary Paris in the 1970s and a homage to the
seasons and humours of France, it is a delightful read.

Intelligence is knowing what the enemy plans to do or is capable of doing.
Leslie Woodhead’s book, My Life as a Spy, is a friendly memoir of the one
serious effort to put right Britain’s notorious non-knowledge of other
languages. In the 1950s, he - together with thousands of bright young
school-leavers such as Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn - was packed off to
learn Russian as part of his national service. Woodhead recalls the grip
that cold war mentalities had 50 years ago. Perhaps it worked. As Britain
listened to everything the Russians were saying, did policy-makers work out
that the Ruskies were not going to invade? Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik defused
the looming threat of Sovietism. The end came 25 years ago when a Polish
electrician called Lech Walesa climbed over a shipyard wall in Gdansk and
launched a challenge to communist rule in eastern Europe that was based on
democracy and civil society, not tanks and spies.

At about the same time, an angry Saudi was moving to Afghanistan to help the
US-financed jihadis in their onslaught on the Russians who had so foolishly
invaded this proud Muslim country. The 10-year campaign in the 1980s was the
perfect training for Osama bin Laden to get into place his al-Qaeda
movement. While one totalitarianism was finishing, another was being born.

Today we need to train thousands of young British citizens, of all faiths
and ethnic backgrounds, in the languages, cultures and cults of the new
enemy. We need brave men and women to infiltrate the malign movements that
threaten us. The spy, decoder and special agent are more than ever needed.
And Britain could do worse than to look to new friends such as the Poles and
east Europeans, who have a great knowledge of the Arab world and are not
frightened of foreign languages, as we work out the best tactics to defeat
our new enemies.

Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and was a Foreign Office minister
from 2001 to 2005.