as new orleans sank beneath the flood, the rest of the world was deluged with tales of wholesale mayhem perpetrated by and upon those too old, too young, too sick, too scared, too venal, too stupid, too bloodthirsty, too angry, too poor or too subhuman to get outta the place before they found themselves swimming in a stinking stew of shit and decomposing bodies.
the streets were full of thugs, armed with stolen weapons, attempting to blast rescue choppers outta the skies...willing to fight to the death in hopes of extending, if only for one more day, their reign of terror.
the sheltering superdome was filling up with the bodies of women and children who'd been raped into oblivion before their attackers finally took mercy and slit their victims' throats. the convention center was even worse.
nobody coulda made all that up, right?
despite the best efforts of the conservative citizens' council (formerly known throughout the south during the bad old days--which no longer exist, except as a fund-raising tool--as the white citizens' council) to prove otherwise, it appears as a lotta someones could...and did...just that.
according to the times-picayune Link
"After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.
The real total was six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.
That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know."
this article provides additional statements attributed to military and medical authorities which directly contradict the tales of outrageous carnage widely dispersed as fact and immediately accepted as gospel by the good and civilized people of america and the world.
"The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. Nagin told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state." "
(in an article i posted the day troops finally arrived and began rescuing the people stranded at the convention center, i included a sarcastic denial of any cannibalism in anticipation of the next round of rumors.)
even if there were only a handful of homicides, what about all those rapes?.
"Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities - many allegedly involving small children - may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, would be nearly impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites.
Numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes, in particular attacks on two young girls in the Superdome ladies room and the killing of one of them, but police and military officials said they know nothing of such an incident.
Soldiers and police did confirm at least one attempted rape of a child. Riley said a man tried to sexually assault a young girl, but was "beaten up" by civilians and apprehended by police. It was unclear if that incident was the one that gained wide currency among evacuees.
Baldwin, the National Guard commander of a special reaction team patrolling the Dome, also said he knew of only one attempted sexual assault of a child - but the details of his story, while similar, differed somewhat from that of Riley. It was unclear last week whether the two men spoke about the same incident.
Soldiers apprehended the assailant after a "commotion" in the bathroom exposed him, Baldwin said, but he knew nothing about the man being beaten. Furthermore, in a detail that raises questions about whether officials have full knowledge of any sex crimes, Baldwin said his men turned over one alleged child molester to New Orleans police - only to find him again inside the Dome two days later, reportedly attempting to molest other children.
"We ran into the same guy a couple days later," he said. "The crowd came to us and said, 'You better do something with this guy or we're going to do something with him.' ... That kind of re-confirmed (the first allegation), when the crowd came to us saying he was putting his hands on kids."
But other accusations that have gained wide currency are more demonstrably false. For instance, no one found the body of a girl - whose age was estimated at anywhere from 7 to 13 - who, according to multiple reports, was raped and killed with a knife to the throat at the Convention Center.
Many evacuees at the Convention Center the morning of Sept. 3 treated the story as gospel, and ticked off further atrocities: a baby trampled to death, multiple child rapes.
Salvatore Hall, standing on the corner of Julia Street and Convention Center Boulevard that day, just before the evacuation, said, "They raped and killed a 10-year-old in the bathroom."
Neither he nor the many people around him who corroborated the killing had seen it themselves."
the sniping...the sniping!! that hadda be factual. can't make up no bullets.
"Compass, however, promulgated some of the unfounded rumors himself, in interviews in which he characterized himself and his officers as outgunned warriors taking out armed bands of thugs at every turn.
"People would be shooting at us, and we couldn't shoot back because of the families," Compass told a reporter from the (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post who interviewed him at the Saints' Monday Night Football game in New York, where he was the guest of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. "All we could do is rush toward the flash."
Compass added that he and his officers succeeded in wrestling 30 weapons from criminals using the follow-the-muzzle-flash technique, the story said.
"We got 30 that way," Compass was quoted as saying.
Asked about the muzzle-flash story last week, Compass said, "That really happened" to Winn's SWAT team at the Convention Center.
But Winn, when asked about alleged shootouts in a separate interview, said his unit saw muzzle flashes and heard gunshots only one time. Despite aggressively frisking a number of suspects, the team recovered no weapons. His unit never found anyone who had been shot."
okay so maybe things werent as bad as we were led to believe. of course, we were also led to believe the victims were playin the victim card as they so often do when denied their free water & candy corns.
"As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.
"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.
But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.
"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them saying. "We're all family here."
About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.
"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.
As the Dome cleared out Sept. 3, Beron, the National Guard commander, fashioned a plan to deal with the dead. He knew of the six bodies in the freezer, but expected far more. He and an Ohio National Guard commander sent 450 Ohio troops to search every nook of the Dome, top to bottom. They told them to mark locations of bodies on a map of the Dome, to rope off suspected crime scenes, and leave a chemical light sticks next to each one so they could be retrieved later.
"I fully expected to find more bodies, both homicides and natural causes," he said.
They found nothing."
over the past week, i've seen articles in the new york times and la times in which both papers admitted to having accepted and repeated rumors similar--if not exactly the same--as those described in the times-picayune article. google news lists a whole page of other publications that are doing the same.
yall would know better than i whether fox news has admitted it went way overboard to portray the victims of katrina as mau maus...and some of yall were so driven by fox's efforts you seemed barely able to type out your condemnation quickly enuff. i'm guessing they're hoping the white conservative citizens' councils are gonna pull somethin outta their hoods.
once again, i truly hope none of the people who some of yall were so quick to condemn ever make their way to ju and see what you had to say about them.