Saturday, June 25, 2011

Is This How the Takeover Will Come When the Cities are Ripped Apart by Rioters?

Check out what Ray Nagin, the Mayor on New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, writes in his new book, Katrina’s Secrets: Storms After the Storm. Via a report fromNola.com:


Among the more shocking revelations is the former mayor’s account of the evening of Aug. 30, 2005. Nagin writes that he and his top aides were in the Hyatt’s fourth-floor command center when about 20 men entered, “dressed in black combat outfits and adorned in bulletproof vests, rifles, and leg straps holding at least two very large handguns each.

“Their presence was shocking, menacing, bizarre, and surreal,” he writes, adding that one barked out: “‘We’re here to protect the mayor. Everybody else get out.’”

The armed men wouldn’t say who sent them or why, though Nagin surmises they may have worked for mega-defense contractor Blackwater. “If they were here to protect me, I sure did not feel that as my gut told me there was another agenda at play, and it clearly did not have our best interests at heart, period,” he writes.
The guards managed to access Nagin’s 27th-floor suite and install “all kinds of wires” they claimed were “for a satellite connection.” Ultimately, though, their efforts were thwarted when “Greg (Meffert) and crew stopped (them) cold,” Nagin writes, referring to his former chief technology officer.
“And after several rounds of going back and forth, our unwelcome visitors got the message that we were not going to allow them to take over or gain access to my room to plant bugging devices.”
Is this the type of visits mayors in other U.S. cities should expect, when inflation goes wild and cities are ripped apart? Will they in the future allow a chief technology officer to stop their mission?

2 comments:

  1. When (not if) it gets ugly- it's going to be REALLY ugly, particularly in large urban areas. Why do you think the gov't wants you tax you to commute further when it's so much easier to take the bus/train/bicycle? You are corralled in one area of high density and low mobility- easier to control (or ignore) when the stuff hits the fan.

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  2. I'm surprised the chief technology officer wasn't tasered and beaten and forced to apologize for his 'assault.'

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