"We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they’re TV trucks around.

Things are so bad, Bush is now censoring all reporting from NOLA. The First Amendment sank with the city." Operation Flashlight - an independent Blog from Lousiana

"Freedom of the Press Drowns in New Orleans Floodwaters: "If the government is now actively barring members of the press from covering the tragedy in New Orleans, as Williams and others are now claiming, we have reached the point in American history where all our vaunted freedoms—you know, the ones we are trying so hard to export to Iraq and Afghanistan—are nothing more than window-dressing, the remnants of an America that actually believed in its own stated principles. In the new America, the one where everything was changed by 9/11 and where freedom isn’t free, not embarrassing President Photo-Op is more important than keeping the greater population informed about the situation in what used to be New Orleans." 1115.org with a closer look

"Astrodome Radio Station Blocked: HOUSTON -- KAMP 95.3 "Evacuation Radio Services", a low-power FM station for Hurricane Katrina evacuees housed at the Astrodome, is still stuck in limbo. Although the group trying to organize the station has wrangled three 90-day licenses from the FCC, as of Thursday, they were being stymied by a handful of temporary administrators content to maintain radio silence.

While basic needs -- food, water, clothing, shelter -- have been met with remarkable hospitality, the survivors of the hurricane inside the Astrodome complex say they continue to suffer from a lack of information. Parents struggle with paperwork to enroll their children in school while simultaneously attempting to locate housing and employment, not to mention lost family members. Most evacuees sit alone on cots, passing the time playing cards or dominoes. Short blasts of information periodically echo from the Astrodome's " Wired

"Reports continue that communications in and around New Orleans are being purposely jammed (and severed) by the US government. The jamming is having an adverse impact on emergency, disaster recovery, and news media communications. The jamming is even affecting police radio frequencies in Jefferson Parish, according to an Australian news report. The President of Jefferson Parish Aaron Broussard told Meet the Press today that FEMA cut his parish’s emergency communications lines and he had to have his sheriff restore the severed lines and post armed deputies to ensure that FEMA did not try to cut the communications lines again. Broussard’s statement: “Yesterday–yesterday–FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, ‘No one is getting near these lines.’ UPDATE: We can now report that the jamming of New Orleans' communications is emanating from a pirate radio station in the Caribbean. The noise is continuous and it is jamming frequencies, including emergency high frequency (HF) radios, in the New Orleans area. The radio frequency jammers were heard last night, stopped for a while, and are active again today. The Pentagon must locate the positions of these transmitters and order the Air Force to bomb them immediately.

However, we now have a new unconfirmed report that the culprit may be the Pentagon itself. The emitter is an IF (Intermediate Frequency) jammer that is operating south southwest of New Orleans on board a U.S. Navy ship, according to an anonymous source. The jamming is cross-spectrum and interfering with superheterodyne receiver components, including the emergency radios being used in New Orleans relief efforts. The jammed frequencies are:

72.0MHZ (high end of Channel 4 WWL TV New Orleans)

45.0MHZ (fixed mobile)

10.245MHZ (fixed mobile)

10.240 Mhz (fixed mobile)

11.340 Mhz (aeronautical mobile)

233 MHZ (fixed mobile)

455 IF (jammer)

Read the reports by Wayne Madsen (LT, USN, National Security Agency 1984-85)

Also: azadism.com