Veterans for Common Sense

Poll: Americans Favor Bush’s Impeachment If He Lied about Iraq

By a margin of 50{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} to 44{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 6-9.

The poll found that 50{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} agreed with the statement:

“If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him.”

44{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} disagreed, and 6{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} said they didn’t know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 3.1{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} margin of error.

Among those who felt strongly either way, 39{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} strongly agreed, while 30{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} strongly disagreed.

“The results of this poll are truly astonishing,” said AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder Bob Fertik. “Bush’s record-low approval ratings tell just half of the story, which is how much Americans oppose Bush’s policies on Iraq and other issues. But this poll tells the other half of the story – that a solid plurality of Americans want Congress to consider removing Bush from the White House.”

Impeachment Supported by Majorities of Many Groups

Responses varied by political party affiliation: 72{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Democrats favored impeachment, compared to 56{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Independents and 20{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Republicans.

Responses also varied by age and income. Solid majorities of those under age 55 (54{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), as well as those with household incomes below $50,000 (57{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), support impeachment.

Majorities favored impeachment in the Northeast (53{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), West (51{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), and even the South (50{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}).

“I had to do an appendix operation without enough medicine. Only a few tubes of Novocain, but the wounded young soldier never cried out or yelled. He continued to smile to encourage me. Looking at the forced smile on his dry lips, knowing his fatigue, I felt so sorry for him … I lightly stroked his hair. I would like to say to him, ‘Patients like you who I cannot cure cause me the most sorrow, and their memory will not fade’.”

So begins the diary of Dang Thuy Tram, a North Vietnamese army doctor who fought Americans in the Vietnam war and died defending her hospital from US attack. Since the diary’s re-emergence this year after 35 years in the hands of a US veteran, it has become a phenomenon, selling more than 300,000 copies, generating numerous translations and a television show and causing a wave of patriotic nostalgia among young Vietnamese.

Those who have read it say it is the most compelling, honest account yet of a conflict that killed, by some estimates, between two and three million Vietnamese and other Asians, as well as 58,000 Americans. “She was my enemy but her words would break your heart,” says Fred Whitehurst, the former soldier who saved the diary from the incinerator. “She is a Vietnamese Anne Frank. I know this diary will go everywhere on planet earth.”

Dr Dang, from a prosperous family of doctors, volunteered for duty in a military hospital in the killing fields of Quang Ngai Province in central Vietnam in 1967. The diary begins there in April, the year after, when the Tet offensive had proved a turning point that convinced many the war against the Communists was unwinnable but which led President Richard Nixon to initiate one of the largest aerial bombardments in history.

As the bombing edged closer to her hospital, the diary records the mounting horrors Dr Dang witnesses in terms by turns worldly, compassionate and enraged. Worn out by the struggle to treat badly wounded comrades with aspirin and bandages, she writes in June 1970: “The dog Nixon is foolish and crazy as he widens the war … How hateful it is! We are all humans, but some are so cruel as to want the blood of others to water their gold tree.” In another entry, she writes how “death was so close” as the bombing “stripped the trees bare” and “tore houses to pieces”.

Shortly before she died, aged 27, the bombs killed five of her patients. Dr Dang helped move the remaining patients and staff to safety and fought an American ground unit which was attacking the now-deserted hospital. “She was shot in the forehead,” Whitehurst says. “She was told to surrender but laid down a field of fire. She was killed protecting her patients and nurses, fending off the heavily armed US Army with an old Chinese SKS single-shot rifle.”

As a 22-year-old intelligence officer, Whitehurst reviewed recovered enemy documents. He was about to burn Dang’s diary – “about the size of a pack of cigarettes” – when he was stopped by his translator, who said: “Don’t burn this one, Fred, it already has fire in it.” Whitehurst says: “I was so moved he respected his enemy that much I kept it.” Later, he had it and the other Dang diaries translated. “It was obvious to me that this was a very beautiful person. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get this back to her family’.” So began a strange and remarkable journey that ended this year when Whitehurst was welcomed by the family of his old enemy “like a son” and fêted as a national celebrity in Vietnam.

A less likely candidate for a project of reconciliation would be hard to find. Whitehurst was, by his own admission, the gung-ho son of a military family who volunteered to fight the Vietnamese communists. “I’m a loyal American and I was raised in a very strict military family. I believed in the domino theory [which held that if one country came under the influence of Communism, others would follow like dominos, unless stopped]. Well, it didn’t happen.”

Whitehurst says his respect for authority began to disintegrate in Vietnam and was destroyed during his subsequent career as an FBI chemist, which ended when he exposed corruption and malpractice in, among other investigations, the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing; the über-patriot had become one of America’s most celebrated whistleblowers. “The FBI HQ is like something out of an old movie about the Soviet Union,” he wrote afterwards. “Everybody is terrified to breathe.”

His bitter fight with the FBI cleared a path for publication of the diaries. “My desire all these years was to get the words back to her family, her country. Beyond this blasted thing called government, there is humanity and damn it if there isn’t we’re all going to hell. Maybe I could publish a book and use any funds for some good? But the FBI wouldn’t allow its agents to collaborate with Communists. In the end, I didn’t give a damn about the FBI.”

Now a lawyer, Whitehurst showed the diaries to his brother Robert, also a Vietnam veteran who had married a Vietnamese. Robert became “obsessed” with the diaries and returning to Vietnam, but like many vets, Fred was terrified of going back. “I had a lot of issues when I came home,” he says. “I saw and did a lot of crap. The memories left me crying and upset, and for five years I screamed in my sleep all the time.”

The brothers took the diaries to a conference on the Vietnam war in Texas Tech University in March this year, where they met Ted Englemann, another vet looking for what he calls “closure” to the war and who was travelling to Hanoi the following month. He made digital copies of the diaries and with the aid of local Quakers, found Dr Dang’s family, including her 81-year-old mother. By the time the Whitehurst brothers visited the family this summer the diaries had been published and Fred and Dr Dang were famous.

Initially fearful of what was waiting for them, Fred Whitehurst was astonished at the welcome they received. “We did to Hanoi what the Germans did to London in the Second World War. We were the invaders, for whatever reason. But the nation embraced us. The prime minister met us and thanked us, and as for the family: their father went into shock after his daughter’s death from which he never recovered and that burdened that family enormously. They loved their daughter so much and still adopted me; the love of that. I was treated better there than I was by my own country.”

The diary has caused a sensation, with everyone who has read it, from the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, who led the resistance to the French colonialists, when Vietnam was Indo-China, from the 1940s through to the French defeat and withdrawal after the 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu, then against the Americans until the fall of Saigon in 1975, to the present Prime Minister, Phan van Khai. Whitehurst was interviewed on state television and said the diary “belongs to the world”. Asked to explain why he would fall in love with an enemy soldier, he replied: “I said the tears on your face are the same as the tears on mine. We all cry together.”

Although this is not the first Vietnam war diary published, many Vietnamese say Dr Dang’s account has struck a chord with young people because it comes raw with human emotions and unvarnished by government propaganda. Much of the official Vietnamese history of the anti-US conflict celebrates the heroic sacrifices of loyal Communist cadres, immune to the fear, hate and longing for love that all soldiers feel.

Dr Dang switches from the language of a lovelorn teenager who desperately misses the mysterious “M” to earnest revolutionary, recalling the words of “Uncle Ho” [the Vietnam Communist leader Ho Chi Minh] and Lenin: The revolutionary is a person with a heart very rich and filled with love. “I am that way already.” Nguyen Duc Tinh, a radio announcer from Hanoi, says: “She writes the truth about her feelings, and despite everything she loved people. It comes straight from her heart. I think a lot of young Vietnamese are impressed at the way she was ready to sacrifice her life. I hope people around the world will read it to understand the truth about the Vietnam war.”

The last entry in the diary, written days before Dr Dang died, is unbearably poignant. “I am grown up and already strong in the face of hardships, but at this minute why do I want so much a mother’s hand to care for me, or really the hand of a close friend, or just that of a person I know who is all right? Please come to me and hold my hand when I am so lonely, love me and give me strength to travel all the hard sections of the road ahead.”

The youngest Dang sibling, Kim Tram, is fielding requests to publish the diary in English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and French. Next month, she will travel to the US with her mother to pick up Dr Dang’s diaries from Texas Tech University. Just 14 when her sister died, she says she remembers her as “gentle and fragile”. She added: “I never imagined how hard and dangerous her life was. I was not surprised to know her longing for our parents, for our home in Hanoi. But now I’ve read her words I can sense her loneliness.” Kim Tram says she is grateful to have met Fred Whitehurst. “I consider him a kind-hearted and honest man with a mind of great depth. I really respect him. And like him.”

And the man who held on to the diaries all those years wonders how much the world has changed. “An Iraqi mother will one day be in the same position as Mother Dang. Why are we in Iraq? I don’t know. When you commit men to war, it has to be based on truth; to enrich yourself off other men’s blood is wrong. I’m a Republican, dyed in the wool, but our President didn’t have the courage to go to Vietnam. He let his Daddy get him out. You can’t know the vulgarity of war until you’ve been there, until you’ve been splattered with your friend’s blood.”

I just read an excellent book on World War I, and it made me incredibly sad. World War I was the beginning of all the horrors of the 20th century and of problems we still have to deal with in the 21st century. It all started there.

What’s so sad is that we really learned nothing – not from World War I, not from World War II, not from Korea or Vietnam or the Cold War. It’s almost as if world leaders in every country manage to get through school without learning anything about the past.

The Experience of World War I, by J.M. Winter (Oxford University Press), lists some of the errors that helped to bring on or make worse the horrors that killed 10 million people, mostly young men in the armies and air forces.

One error was demonizing the enemy. What that does is preclude negotiations. You can’t negotiate with Satan, so if you brand your opponent an unmitigated evil demon, then you guarantee conflict. As you can see from the way both Bushes demonized Saddam Hussein (after the U.S. assisted him in the 1980s), this error continues to be repeated.

Another thing that grew out of that war was crushing dissent by questioning the dissenters’ patriotism. That, too, still goes on.

Of course, there’s also lying. It is an old cliché now that truth is the first casualty in war. Truth is killed not only by outright lies but also by excessive secrecy and propaganda. I wouldn’t believe the Bush administration if it issued a press release that the sun rises in the east.

There’s the prostitution of the press and the clergy. Every war, in the beginning, is cheered on by the press and from the pulpit. It’s only later, if things go badly, that the press might begin to carp a little, forgetting entirely its earlier boosterism on the behalf of war.

Then there’s the punitive peace. The Versailles Treaty, which ended World War I, produced World War II and was the mother of the Third Reich. It was punitive and humiliating to Germany, which had not felt defeated and thought it would sign an armistice, not a surrender document. It gave Adolf Hitler every grievance he needed to rise to power. After the first Gulf War, we imposed the same kind of humiliating peace on Iraq. I said at the time that Bush I had, in effect, guaranteed Saddam’s survival because Iraqis would so resent the conditions imposed on them that none would dare to be thought of as an ally of the U.S.

Of course, World War I also gave us the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and millions around the world would die as a result of that. It created the mess in the Middle East when Great Britain decided that Jewish colonization of Palestine would be a workable idea.

World War I shattered the existing world order. Empires collapsed or entered their death throes. Faith in religion was shattered. Aristocracies became meaningless. The world economy soon collapsed. Communism and fascism rose from the war’s ashes and for a while contended with the West for supremacy. Politics was militarized. It gave us the tank, the first bombings of civilian cities, chemical weapons, the machine gun, aerial warfare and mass murder on a genocidal scale – all of those things that continue to consume blood and treasure like a vast, dark hole.

It’s been only 86 years since the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The world is still broken and in ferment. The neocons’ celebration of a new Pax Americana was grossly premature. The new world order so many have sought has yet to take firm shape. The future remains uncertain.

It seems we are still, as Matthew Arnold put it, “on a darkling plain/swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/where ignorant armies clash by night.”

For a Syrian, Samir Nashar is close to being a dream democrat. He’s liberal, secular, rich—and brazenly outspoken. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has “lost his credibility,” Nashar boldly told a NEWSWEEK reporter who visited him recently at his home in Aleppo. Three months ago, Nashar and six friends decided to form a political group called the Alliance of Free Nationalists. Yet even Nashar says that his tiny democracy movement can barely muster support. The group is “still waiting for a legitimate party law,” he says, and most Syrians are too scared of the secret police to push for it.

But if Syrian democrats like Nashar were empowered, more radical elements might be too, and that could be a nightmare for Washington. “You might get what you wish for. But not quite what you wish for,” said one diplomat in Damascus who requested anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. The prospect of regime change in Syria worries even Israel, Syria’s longtime enemy. If al-Assad’s rigidly secular regime were toppled, the nation’s mosaic of competing sects and ethnicities could explode into conflict. Islamist radicals—including a group called Soldiers of the Levant—are already gaining influence in Syria, where they were once ruthlessly crushed. This comes as Qaeda-linked groups are trying to spread the jihadist contagion regionally, according to an alleged letter from Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri last week.

Critics say that the Bush administration isn’t encouraging Syria’s democrats just now—but neither is it willing to work with Syria’s dictator. And in the absence of any cooperation between governments, jihadists are moving across Syria’s 310-mile border with Iraq to join the insurgency. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to Washington, told NEWSWEEK that Damascus ended all security and intelligence cooperation with America several months ago, and it has not resumed.

Why? The ambassador says that while Damascus is still detaining jihadists on its own, it got “fed up” with the Bush administration’s public al-Assad bashing, even after Washington had privately lauded Syria for handing over Saddam’s half brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan, earlier in the year. Moustapha also confirmed an account from a U.S. intel official who said Damascus was angered when Washington exposed one of its operatives. “We are willing to re-engage the moment you want—but on one condition,” Moustapha says. “You have to acknowledge that we are helping.”

That’s not likely to happen. While U.S. officials stop short of accusing al-Assad of actively aiding the insurgency, they say he has permitted jihadist transit and training camps to exist in the open. After the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, warned last month that “time is running out on Damascus,” U.S. officials even debated launching military strikes inside the Syrian border against the insurgency. But at an Oct. 1 “principals” meeting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice successfully opposed such a move, according to two U.S. government sources who are not authorized to speak on the record. Rice argued that diplomatic isolation is working against al-Assad, especially on the eve of a U.N. report that may blame Syria for the murder of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri.

The goal seems to be to “get [the regime] by the throat, and then really squeeze,” says Josh Landis, a Fulbright scholar in Damascus who runs an influential blog called syriacomment.com. Maybe it’s working: diplomats in Damascus say they’ve seen signs in recent months that al-Assad is trying to police Syria’s southern border better.

But Moustapha says Syria could do much more if intelligence was shared as it once was. Some U.S. intel officials agree. They say that valuable cooperation is being sacrificed at a critical moment when Iraqis are to vote on a new government and insurgents seek to undermine that effort. “We won’t take yes for an answer from Damascus,” says one intel official who declined to be identified because his work is classified. In the last few years before contacts were cut off, he says, Syrian intelligence helped avert two major attacks on U.S. targets, including a Navy base in Bahrain. U.S. pressure, he adds, may be “radicalizing the country.” That is one risk, perhaps, of engaging with no one in Syria—neither dictators nor democrats.

The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in a row over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling occurrence. But for most tropical meteorologists the truly astonishing “storm of the decade” took place in March 2004. Hurricane Catarina — so named because it made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina — was the first recorded south Atlantic hurricane in history.

Textbook orthodoxy had long excluded the possibility of such an event; sea temperatures, experts claimed, were too low and wind shear too powerful to allow tropical depressions to evolve into cyclones south of the Atlantic Equator. Indeed, forecasters rubbed their eyes in disbelief as weather satellites down-linked the first images of a classical whirling disc with a well-formed eye in these forbidden latitudes.

In a series of recent meetings and publications, researchers have debated the origin and significance of Catarina. A crucial question is this: Was Catarina simply a rare event at the outlying edge of the normal bell curve of South Atlantic weather — just as, for example, Joe DiMaggio’s incredible 56-game hitting streak in 1941 represented an extreme probability in baseball (an analogy made famous by Stephen Jay Gould) — or was Catarina a “threshold” event, signaling some fundamental and abrupt change of state in the planet’s climate system?

Scientific discussions of environmental change and global warming have long been haunted by the specter of nonlinearity. Climate models, like econometric models, are easiest to build and understand when they are simple linear extrapolations of well-quantified past behavior; when causes maintain a consistent proportionality to their effects.

But all the major components of global climate — air, water, ice, and vegetation — are actually nonlinear: At certain thresholds they can switch from one state of organization to another, with catastrophic consequences for species too finely-tuned to the old norms. Until the early 1990s, however, it was generally believed that these major climate transitions took centuries, if not millennia, to accomplish. Now, thanks to the decoding of subtle signatures in ice cores and sea-bottom sediments, we know that global temperatures and ocean circulation can, under the right circumstances, change abruptly — in a decade or even less.

The paradigmatic example is the so-called “Younger Dryas” event, 12,800 years ago, when an ice dam collapsed, releasing an immense volume of meltwater from the shrinking Laurentian ice-sheet into the Atlantic Ocean via the instantly-created St. Lawrence River. This “freshening” of the North Atlantic suppressed the northward conveyance of warm water by the Gulf Stream and plunged Europe back into a thousand-year ice age.

Abrupt switching mechanisms in the climate system – such as relatively small changes in ocean salinity — are augmented by causal loops that act as amplifiers. Perhaps the most famous example is sea-ice albedo: The vast expanses of white, frozen Arctic Ocean ice reflect heat back into space, thus providing positive feedback for cooling trends; alternatively, shrinking sea-ice increases heat absorption, accelerating both its own further melting and planetary warming.

Thresholds, switches, amplifiers, chaos — contemporary geophysics assumes that earth history is inherently revolutionary. This is why many prominent researchers — especially those who study topics like ice-sheet stability and North Atlantic circulation — have always had qualms about the consensus projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on global warming.

In contrast to Bushite flat-Earthers and shills for the oil industry, their skepticism has been founded on fears that the IPCC models fail to adequately allow for catastrophic nonlinearities like the Younger Dryas. Where other researchers model the late 21st-century climate that our children will live with upon the precedents of the Altithermal (the hottest phase of the current Holocene period, 8000 years ago) or the Eemian (the previous, even warmer interglacial episode, 120,000 years ago), growing numbers of geophysicists toy with the possibilities of runaway warming returning the earth to the torrid chaos of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM: 55 million years ago) when the extreme and rapid heating of the oceans led to massive extinctions.

Dramatic new evidence has emerged recently that we may be headed, if not back to the dread, almost inconceivable PETM, then to a much harder landing than envisioned by the IPCC.

As I flew toward Louisiana and the carnage of Katrina three weeks ago, I found myself reading the August 23rd issue of EOS, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. I was pole-axed by an article entitled “Arctic System on Trajectory to New, Seasonally Ice-Free State,” co-authored by 21 scientists from almost as many universities and research institutes. Even two days later, walking among the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward, I found myself worrying more about the EOS article than the disaster surrounding me.

The article begins with a recounting of trends familiar to any reader of the Tuesday science section of the New York Times: For almost 30 years, Arctic sea ice has been thinning and shrinking so dramatically that “a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean within a century is a real possibility.” The scientists, however, add a new observation — that this process is probably irreversible. “Surprisingly, it is difficult to identify a single feedback mechanism within the Arctic that has the potency or speed to alter the system’s present course.”

An ice-free Arctic Ocean has not existed for at least one million years and the authors warn that the Earth is inexorably headed toward a “super-interglacial” state “outside the envelope of glacial-interglacial fluctuations that prevailed during recent Earth history.” They emphasize that within a century global warming will probably exceed the Eemian temperature maximum and thus obviate all the models that have made this their essential scenario. They also suggest that the total or partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a real possibility — an event that would definitely throw a Younger Dryas wrench into the Gulf Stream.

If they are right, then we are living on the climate equivalent of a runaway train that is picking up speed as it passes the stations marked “Altithermal” and “Eemian.” “Outside the envelope,” moreover, means that we are not only leaving behind the serendipitous climatic parameters of the Holocene — the last 10,000 years of mild, warm weather that have favored the explosive growth of agriculture and urban civilization — but also those of the late Pleistocene that fostered the evolution of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa.

Other researchers undoubtedly will contest the extraordinary conclusions of the EOS article and — we must hope — suggest the existence of countervailing forces to this scenario of an Arctic albedo catastrophe. But for the time being, at least, research on global change is pointing toward worst-case scenarios.

All of this, of course, is a perverse tribute to industrial capitalism and extractive imperialism as geological forces so formidable that they have succeeded in scarcely more than two centuries — indeed, mainly in the last fifty years — in knocking the earth off its climatic pedestal and propelling it toward the nonlinear unknown.

The demon in me wants to say: Party and make merry. No need now to worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much toilet paper, when, soon enough, we’ll be debating how many hunter-gathers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or the tropical forests of the Yukon.

The good parent in me, however, screams: How is it possible that we can now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our children’s children will themselves have children? Let Exxon answer that in one of their sanctimonious ads.

Mike Davis is the author of many books including City of Quartz, Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the just-published Monster at Our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) as well as the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).

New Orleans Police Beating Caught on Tape

At least one police officer repeatedly punched a 64-year-old man accused of public intoxication, and another officer assaulted an Associated Press Television News producer as a cameraman taped the confrontations.

There will be a criminal investigation, and three New Orleans Police Department officers will be suspended Sunday, arrested and charged with simple battery, Capt. Marlon Defillo said.

“We have great concern with what we saw this morning,” Defillo said after he and about a dozen other high-ranking police department officials watched the APTN footage Sunday. “It’s a troubling tape, no doubt about it. … This department will take immediate action.”

The assaults come as the department, long plagued by allegations of brutality and corruption, struggles with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the resignation last month of Police Superintendent Eddie Compass.

The APTN tape shows an officer hitting the man at least four times in the head Saturday night as he stood outside a bar. The suspect, Robert Davis, appeared to resist, twisting and flailing as he was dragged to the ground by four officers. Another officer then kneed Davis and punched him twice. Davis was face-down on the sidewalk with blood streaming down his arm and into the gutter.

Meanwhile, an officer ordered APTN producer Rich Matthews and the cameraman to stop recording. When Matthews held up his credentials and explained he was working, the officer grabbed the producer, leaned him backward over a car, jabbed him in the stomach and unleashed a profanity-laced tirade.

“I’ve been here for six weeks trying to keep … alive. … Go home!” shouted the officer, who later identified himself as S.M. Smith.

Police said Davis, 64, of New Orleans, was booked on public intoxication, resisting arrest, battery on a police officer and public intimidation.

Davis, who is black, was subdued at the intersection of Conti and Bourbon streets. Three of the officers appeared to be white, and the other was light skinned. Defillo said race was not an issue.

Three of the five officers involved were New Orleans officers, and two others appeared to be federal officers. Numerous agencies have sent police to help with patrols in the aftermath of Katrina.

Under normal circumstances, it takes unusually offensive behavior to trigger an arrest on Bourbon Street. But New Orleans police have been working under stressful conditions since the hurricane.

Officers slept in their cars and worked 24-hour shifts after the storm. Three-quarters lost their homes and their families are scattered across the country.

Many officers deserted their posts in the days after Katrina, and some were accused of joining in the looting that broke out. At least two committed suicide.

Conditions have improved — officers now have beds on a cruise ship — but they don’t have private rooms and are still working five, 12-hour days.

Compass, the police superintendent, resigned Sept. 27. Despite more than 10 years of reform efforts dating to before he took office, police were dogged by allegations of brutality and corruption.

On Friday, state authorities said they were investigating allegations that New Orleans police broke into a dealership and made off with nearly 200 cars — including 41 new Cadillacs — as the storm closed in.