The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality (98 page)

Our tiny pre-fab apartment, which was nothing more than a glorified mobile home, had been constructed to withstand maximum wind speeds of 90 mph. The blood-curdling announcement gripped us both.
 
Paralyzed by sheer terror, our bulging eyes stayed glued to the television as the voice continued.

  All South Dade residents are advised to stay put!
 
Do not attempt to leave the area!

Within seconds, we actually heard hurricane Andrew bearing down on us, slamming into us with all the force of a speeding locomotive.
 
The horrendous wall of winds crashed against our tiny apartment like an exploding bomb!
 
Glasses flew off the kitchen counter, shattering onto the quaking floor.
 
Hanging pictures plunged straight down the walls towards the ground.
 
The huge hanging mirror crashed on top of the television set, spraying the living room with shattered glass.
 
The entire apartment resembled a rickety old train, shaking fiercely out of control while rumbling down a railroad track.
 
The screeching winds quickly transformed into the piercing, monotone hum of a jet engine, sounding as if it had sucked us inside!
 
It was so deafening, all other noises ceased to exist.
 
It felt like a monstrous earthquake-and-tornado hitting at the same time!

Before either one of us could react, the metal front door of our apartment began to peel steadily downward towards the floor, like a piece of wet, limp paper.
 
Then the voracious jaws of Andrew attacked for the final kill.
 
A mega-giant, two-storey-tall, solid concrete transformer pole with electrical cables attached, torpedoed right through our living room wall and roof, exploding the entire building on impact!
 
And that was just the beginning.

There isn't a person on the face of this Earth who will ever convince me that hurricane Andrew was a "hurricane" by any sense of the definition.
 
Just ask any survivor of Andrew what the six-and-a-half-hour siege was like and the answer will always be the same.

"We didn't have any prior warning.
 
We heard hurricane Andrew suddenly bearing down on us like a speeding locomotive."

This is the same description given by survivors of monstrous F-5 tornadoes (packing winds of 350+ mph) the only difference being that tornadoes strike for just seconds, whereas hurricane Andrew struck and stayed for hours on end.

The injuries of those who survived were mind-boggling.
 
I had a broken jaw with eight teeth knocked out.
 
Huge shards of glass impaled my body so deeply, they were impossible to remove without the aid of a scalpel.
 
My head injuries were so severe that they permanently affected my eyesight.

But I was only one amongst thousands of severely injured victims who struggled to survive the aftermath.
 
For ten long days we were roped off from the outside world by United States military forces, leaving us stranded with no food, no water, no medical supplies, no shelter. Suffering from severe shell-shock, we waited and waited for rescue teams to arrive, but that just never happened.
 
None of the injured in the roped-off areas was ever rescued from the devastation.
 
It was the worst gut-wrenching betrayal I have ever experienced.
 
I saw grown men lying on the ground in the foetal position, moaning and groaning pathetically as they tried to hug and rock themselves.
 
My son was amongst them.

Don't get me wrong.
 
United States military forces were indeed present in the roped-off areas within hours of Andrew ending.
 
But they were not there to help survivors.
 
The National Guard along with the Coast Guard, the Army, FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), Metro Dade Police, state police and local police removed dead bodies and body parts as quickly as possible during those first ten days of the aftermath.
 
Horrified survivors watched as both uniformed and civilian- clothed men searched the rubble and filled body bags, which they then stacked in military vehicles or huge refrigerator trucks normally used to transport food, only to drive off and leave the stranded injured to fend for themselves.

Not until I managed to escape the aftermath did I discover that the ‘thermo-king’ sections of these same refrigerator trucks, jam-packed with wall-to-wall body bags, ended up being stored at Card Sound Navy Base, located in an isolated area just above the Florida Keys.
 
The inside temperature was kept cool by portable generators until the bodies were either incinerated or just plain dumped into huge open grave-pits.

Those working on the body pick-up operation were forced to take what is known as the Oath of Sworn Secrecy, which is strictly enforced by the government.
 
Many of them plunged into shock, once exposed to the ghastly devastation and countless mutilated bodies.

The horrors were way beyond human comprehension.
 
I can vouch for this, as I accidentally stepped on the severed hand of a young child when I initially crawled out of the debris, only to witness shortly thereafter two dead teenagers and the decapitated body of a baby girl.

Fighting mental shock became such a big problem for the body pick-up teams that a special group of psychiatrists had to be brought in to help them cope with it.
 
I believe this in itself is the reason why many who worked on the body collection didn't comprehend the tragic consequences this would inevitably lead to in the future.

The survivors of hurricane Andrew and the rest of the American people were betrayed by their own government.
 
But the betrayal also extended to foreign nationals.
 
At the time Andrew struck, South Dade was inhabited by a large population of Mexican illegal immigrants.
 
The United States Department of Immigration was fully aware of their presence but quietly turned its back on the situation, knowing full well that South Dade farmers couldn't afford to harvest their crops without the help of the Mexican illegals.
 
The heavily populated migrant camps were situated at the edge of the Florida Everglades.
 
The people who lived there vanished without a trace during that fated night.
 
Many bodies were found way out in the Everglades.

When I lectured at the Clearwater Convention in Florida in 1999, a man in the audience stood up and introduced himself as Chief Petty Officer Roy Howard.
 
He proceeded to address the audience with this exact statement, which is now a matter of public record:

‘Just for your information, I was called up to active duty after hurricane Andrew went through South Dade County.
 
I spent nine weeks down there.
 
Now I will certify for the benefit of our audience here that the death figures that were officially published are totally inaccurate.
 
According to the information which I received from my own sources within the National Guard, the figure I was quoted when I was down there was 5,280-something.
 
And they were quietly disposed of in incinerators that were hurriedly put together by both the National Guard and FEMA..’.

As the Chief Petty Officer stated, ‘5,280-something’ bodies were confiscated by the United States National Guard.
 
In addition to this, the Coast Guard independently confiscated 1,500 bodies from the lakes and surrounding waters.
 
Neither one of these figures embraces the number of dead bodies confiscated by other branches of federal and state government directly involved in the body pick-up operation.
 
This leaves the number of dead confiscated by various US authorities in South Dade still unknown.

The total number who died during hurricane Andrew is obviously staggering, yet whenever the ‘official death toll’ is mentioned in the media, a figure of anywhere between 15 and 59 is quoted.
 
The population of the 21 communities annihilated by Andrew's eye-wall had been officially recorded by the Dade County Census Bureau as 415,151 before Andrew struck.

Bodies of human beings confiscated and disposed-of like rubbish, as if their lives had no more worth or meaning than a piece of discarded litter - it's horrifying to be suddenly confronted by the same kind of atrocities as perpetrated by the Nazis.
 
Once again repeating history, a master-minded cover-up was dutifully carried out by armed military forces, right smack in the midst of horrendous human suffering.

To complete this historical comparison, in the same way that many residents who lived near Nazi concentration camps were unaware or in denial of the atrocities close by, so too were many residents who were located just outside the catastrophic devastation left behind by Andrew's eye-wall.

So what actually did take place when Andrew survivors tried to get help from those collecting dead bodies in the aftermath?
 
Well, I for one can give a first-hand account.

About the third day into the aftermath, a long line of police cars cautiously drove into my area during the late afternoon.
 
We had not had contact with any other people from outside the devastation up until this point.
 
There were approximately 12 to 15 police cars comprising this caravan, each marked from different locations throughout the state.
 
Each car was driven by a man dressed in a dark police uniform and had three other plain-clothed men riding as passengers, making a total of four men in each vehicle.

Someone from our group spotted the caravan and ran to get me, knowing that I had been badly injured and urgently needed emergency medical help.
 
My twenty-five-year-old son and one other adult male survivor helped escort me to the caravan.
 
We hurried towards the lead car.
 
It stopped moving when we approached the driver's side.
 
The officer sitting behind the wheel rolled down the window.
 
For a few moments he rudely ignored us, at one point giving us an impatient look of disgust.

This is the exact conversation and course of events that took place….

“Please, sir, I need medical help,” I begged, barely able to speak.
 
The officer sitting behind the wheel sighed heavily.
 
He turned his head away from me and gazed out his windshield. The other three men in the car quietly looked at me.

“Sir, please, I need to get to a hospital...,” I begged frantically.