It was a bright, warm, blue-skied December afternoon in Central City, New Orleans, and in this neighborhood of humble shotgun houses and overgrown empty lots, a convoy of white trucks and trailers idled incongruously while unmarked police cars blocked intersections nearby.
The town emptied, and a convoy of thousands left for Lebanon, the winding dirt road across the mountains backed up with cars and trucks.
They were stationed in massed ranks at the bottom of the long field, in front of the road along which the convoy of empty lorries would arrive, fill up with coke inside the Orgreave plant, then leave again for Scunthorpe.
The freed prisoners sped off in noisy convoys through empty, darkened streets while most Palestinians and Israelis were asleep.
It tallies property plundered from the prisoners: gold teeth and hair by the trainload and convoys of empty baby carriages that, one former prisoner recalled, "were pushed in rows of five, and the procession took more than an hour to pass".
Very soon those who were fit enough would move on to hospitals further North, leaving empty beds for the next convoy.
On 15 June, the convoy passed six empty lifeboats from the torpedoed transport.
The highway to Lhasa ran alongside us, empty except for an occasional military convoy.
In a sign of public outrage at the failure of the security services, Abadi was given an angry reception on Sunday when he toured Karrada, the district where he grew up, with residents throwing stones, empty buckets and even slippers at his convoy in gestures of contempt.
