Katrina Victims: Justice is Coming

Leslie Carde’s hard hitting documentary “America Betrayed” exposing how the Army Corps destroyed Greater New Orleans is being widely acclaimed as it garners more and more rave reviews like the one below from the recent issue of Episcopal Life.  The film is available in stores and online at Blockbuster, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Apple TV, and AmericaBetrayedMovie.com.

“America Betrayed” is a fine example of the documentary as an essential work of social justice by recording why the levees broke after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It follows in the filmprints of other fine flood films, such as “Trouble the Water” or Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” but those documentaries do not show the presence of the church -- this, despite the work of volunteers mainly from faith communities. However, in “America Betrayed,” the Episcopal Church is represented by the Rt. Rev. Joe Morris Doss, a Louisiana native and a lawyer, who since 10 days after the hurricane hit in 2005 has been one of many working on a mission to make the U.S. government take responsibility for what happened.

Filmmaker Leslie Cardé interviewed lawyers, environmentalists, geologists, whistle-blowers, politicians (U.S. Sen. Mary Landieu and then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama), historians like John Barry (The Rising Tide), and former employees of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Like my geology professor in 1964, no one has anything good to say about the Army Corps of Engineers (represented in newsreels of press conferences because it refused her requests for interviews).

Cardé’s angle is prosecutorial: she approaches the issue of government responsibility (or ir- ) as a lawyer would a jury. “America Betrayed” is the film to see in order to follow the ground-breaking civil suit, which began in federal court on April 20, 2009. The case considers claims by property owners against the Army Corps of Engineers that the Corps made the disaster worse by building the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a 76-mile-long navigation channel that shoots straight to the Gulf from New Orleans.

“America Betrayed,” unlike its sister films, warns the rest of the country riddled with decaying and uninspected infrastructures (bridges and levees): Cities like San Francisco and my own St. Louis are next. Near the end of the film, Doss, as part of the legal, faith and political communities, which have banded on the Gulf Coast since the levees broke, encourages a “Camp David-like summit” to deal with the issue of accountability “because it involves everyone.”

“America Betrayed” hits hard and solidly. It’s essential viewing for background, for history, for moral purposes. It offers perspectives for justice now and caution for the future.

Reviewed by Martha K. Baker, a film reviewer in St. Louis for 30 years.