Former New Orleans Mayor, Ray “Chocolate City” Nagin is back with a new book. He describes the his paranoia during he post Katrina disaster. Mr Chocolate City claims that because he had criticized President Bush, that the CIA would come and kill him. He describes being in a crisis command center and thought it was a set up.
Nagin also worried about becoming a target of sinister forces after his famous Sept. 1, 2005, rant on WWL-AM, which the former mayor writes was prompted by reports that Blanco and U.S. Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Vitter had bragged “about how well things were going,” even as evacuees continued to suffer at the Superdome and Convention Center.
“I thought to myself, ‘I’m a dead man! I have just publicly denounced the governor, U.S. Senators, FEMA and the president of the United States,’” he writes. “I started wondering if during the night I would be visited by specially trained CIA agents. Could they secretly shoot me with a miniature, slow-acting poison dart?
[….]
Nagin admits he also suffered pangs of paranoia on the Monday after the storm, when he visited the USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship that docked near the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and served as a base of federal operations.
There, he was escorted to an infirmary where two medical staffers “had orders to examine me and give me shots.”
“I was still a little paranoid and again started imagining a secret CIA plot where in six months I would be gone,” he writes. “After thinking for a minute, I said to them, ‘Okay, you can give me shots, but I want you to do the same for my two security guys.’
Read he rest: Ray Nagin describes post-Hurricane Katrina paranoia in his new book
I never can understand why people in Big Cities are paranoid about the CIA. Growing up in Queens, NY, I heard conspiracies about the CIA selling crack or killing JFK. The reality is that, they don’t have a reputation for being very efficient or that secretive. With the real threats America faces, why would they waste their time going after some incompetent New Orleans Mayor. What induced this paranoia in Mayor Nagin? Maybe too much Chocolate and too little Vanilla.
