Frontline, The New Orleans Times-Picayune and ProPublica are reporting that in the jumbled days after Hurricane Katrina an order circulated allowing the New Orleans police to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department. Some officers who were aware of the order say they refused to carry it out. Some viewed it as fundamental change on the use of deadly force, which only allow police to fire in protect themselves or others from clear physical threat. The accounts of orders to "shoot looters," "take back the city," or "do what you have to do" are fragmentary and it remains unclear who originated them. So far, no officers implicated in shootings have used the order as an explanation. What is clear is that when local government, was wiped out, and state government was paralyzed, by a massive hurricane, the "authority of last resort" - the federal government - was ignoring the horrors while President George W Bush first went to a birthday party in Arizona and then a country music concert in California. By the time Bush's advisers finally sat him down and forced him to watch a DVD of news coverage they had assembled, 4 days of horror had passed and almost 2000 American citizens were dead. During this first nightmare week the mostly black citizens of New Orleans hit hardest by the flooding received from all levels of government neglect and bullets rather than food, water and shelter.