More Katrina Horror

The mainstream news media has been doing a pretty good job documenting the ravishes of Hurricane Katrina. Despite FEMA's demand that no images of dead bodies be published or broadcast (since retracted), newspapers and TV networks have been showing some pretty horrible stuff.

Stories of heroics and sorrows have appeared frequently. Now comes a very disturbing story from Australia's Daily Telegraph.

Patients put down
September 12, 2005

DOCTORS working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leave them to die in agony as they evacuated.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

One New Orleans doctor told how she "prayed for God to have mercy on her soul" after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials.

One emergency official, William Forest McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana and the doctors spoke only on condition on anonymity.

How many euthanized people could have been saved if FEMA and Bush had been up to the task of dealing with this natural disaster? And for all the dimwits blowing hot air about how the survivors in New Orleans "deserved" what they got because the didn't evacuate, please explain how a terminal patient was suppose to evacuate the city. Entirely Bush's fault? No. But if he wants to take credit for anything that goes right on his watch, he ought to be held responsible for what goes wrong.