Trapped Tourists Lose Chartered Buses

SFGate reported Five days after Susan Dewey arrived in New Orleans to celebrate her birthday, she was so desperate to get out that she banded with hundreds of other tourists to hire 10 buses for $25,000 to rescue them. After waiting hours, they learned government officials had commandeered their buses to evacuate others.... The handful of managers left at the hotel told guests they had booked 10 buses for $25,000 to evacuate them and those from the Crowne Plaza Astor Downtown. Each passenger paid $45. The hotel staff began lining up elderly and ill people outside about 7:30 p.m. "I couldn't count how many wheelchairs you saw," Dewey said. The guests waited until 9:30 p.m. when a manager told them the buses were confiscated by the military.

We have heard many stories of looters with guns taking whatever they wanted, but this time the looters with the guns were the military. The people that paid money to bring those buses into the area should have been evacuated first, and then if the buses wanted to go back and pick up more people that would have been fine.

I wonder if the Governor's order to "Shoot to Kill" also applied to the government officials and/or military that stole the 10 buses.

James Joyner blogged These are desperate times which, I'm told, call for desperate measures. Having the American military shooting suspected looters on sight, however, is an outrageous precedent from which we may not recover. Indeed, were I still on active duty, I would refuse this order as illegal. Not only does the use of the military for domestic law enforcement rather clearly violate the posse comitatus law but shooting unarmed civilians violates all the ethics of professional soldiering that I learned. It is ironic, too, that we are treating an American city suffering from the worst natural disaster in memory as a hot fire zone while our soldiers fighting in Iraq are under much, much tighter rules of engagement.

Digby blogged The national guard and the coast guard are trained to operate in hostile environments where people are shooting at them. And big city police forces are no slouches either. Yet they completely cancelled the rescue operation because some bozo shot at a helicopter. And the national guard now refuses to escort patients who are being transferred from hospitals that have no power, food and water. Gosh I sure hope someone is guarding the oil ministry.