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"Reasonable" African Americans in New Orleans believe that
the Bush administration engineered the levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina
in a bid to save the city's white sections by flooding black neighborhoods,
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said Sunday.
"I was stunned in New Orleans at how many black New Orleanians would tell
me with real conviction that somehow the levee breaks had been engineered in
order to save the French Quarter and the Garden District at the expense of the
Lower Ninth Ward, which is almost all black," Robinson told NBC's "Meet
the Press."
"These are not wild-eyed people," Robinson insisted. "These
are reasonable, sober people who really believe that."
The levee break conspiracy theory parallels the plot outlined early last week
by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
"I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25-foot-deep crater under
the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town
and keep the white part dry," Farrakhan told a North Carolina audience.
The Washington Post columnist's report suggests that Farrakhan's poisonous theory
appears to have gained currency.
Robinson said that while he doesn't believe the levee breaks were deliberately
engineered, the fact that so many blacks do "tells you something about
our racial divide in New Orleans."
