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Posted on 09/27/2005 11:36:58 AM PDT by andyk
NEW ORLEANS
On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."
Five days later, he told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. On the same show, Mayor Ray Nagin warned: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
The ugliest reports _ children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement _ soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.
The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations, including The Associated Press, carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.
But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.
They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are believed to have been murdered.
One of those victims _ found at the Superdome _ appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.
"It was a chaotic time for the city. Now that we've had a chance to reflect back on that situation, we're able to say right now that things were not the way they appeared," said police Capt. Marlon Defillo.
Sally Forman, a spokeswoman for Nagin, said the mayor was relying on others for his information about conditions at the evacuation sites. "He was listening to officials, trusting that information they were providing was accurate," she said.
To be sure, conditions at both sites were chaotic. Water was rising around the Superdome, home to 20,000 evacuees. Toilets were backing up, garbage was rotting, fights were breaking out. Food was in short supply at the convention center, where about 19,000 people took shelter from the rising waters. The temperature was climbing. The elderly and very young were desperate for food, water and medicine.
Police said they saw muzzle flashes at the convention center, and a National Guard member was shot in the leg when an evacuee tried to take his gun.
A week after the floodwaters poured into the city, an Arkansas National Guardsman told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans that soldiers had discovered 30 to 40 bodies inside a freezer in the convention center's food area. Guardsman Mikel Brooks told the newspaper that some of the dead appeared to have met violent ends, including "a 7-year-old with her throat cut."
When the convention center was swept, however, no such pile of bodies was found.
Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National Guard said reports of violence at the Superdome and the convention center were overblown. He was head of security at the Superdome and led the 1,000 military police and infantrymen who went in to secure the center on Sept. 2.
"The incidents were highly exaggerated" _ the result of fear and hopelessness, he said. "For the amount of the people in the situation, it was a very stable environment."
Thibodeaux said his guard unit received no reports of rape.
Bill Waldron, a homicide detective from Florida in New Orleans for a murder trial, was stuck in the convention center until Sept. 1. He said he saw a couple of fights between young men, but "no murders, no rapes." He said that he did see people dying, but that those deaths were most likely a result of the heat and lack of water.
"People were wanting just some type of authority to come in and say, `Hey, this is what's going to happen,'" Waldron said. "People were scared."
New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan said officials at the morgue in St. Gabriel have identified four apparent homicide victims from the city. All were shot and all were adults. Police arrested one person on suspicion of attempted sexual assault but received no official reports of rape.
Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, cautioned that it might be too soon to say whether there really were rapes at the evacuation sites. Because the evacuees and any perpetrators have been scattered across the country by Katrina, and now Hurricane Rita, victims may come forward later, she said.
"It is extremely difficult to get good statistics about rape under normal circumstances, and these are certainly not normal circumstances," she said.
Bill Ellis, a folklorist at Pennsylvania State University, said rumors in an environment like that at the evacuation centers are to be expected, given the frightening circumstances and paucity of authoritative information.
"Rumors become improvised news. You become your own anchorman," he said.
The chaos also seemed to affect some reporters and editors, said Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics to journalists at the Poynter Institute, a journalism research and education center in St. Petersburg, Fla.
"You get so hung up as a reporter on what the big picture is that you use generalizations that become untrue," McBride said.
"You get so hung up as a reporter on what the big picture is that you use generalizations that become untrue," McBride said.
Of course, that big picture is making the Bush administration look bad.
And, in the interest of furthering anything that might make Bush look bad, liberal reporters were quick to accuse Black refugees at the Thunderdome of all manner of violent and sick behavior. So, who's a racist again?
"Of course, that big picture is making the Bush administration look bad."
Yup. In their zeal to make the President look bad, they echoed any and all rumors as fact. Repeat the lies long enough...
What's that saying--"A lie will make it around the world before the truth even makes it off the starting line". Doesn't matter now what the truth is--the tin-foil crowds will run with the earlier reports and claim government cover-ups, black helicopters ferrying corpses away, etc.
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Substitute "some" with "most if not all"
I just knew that all those images of looting and pillaging were created on a soundstage by Karl Rove to further his secret agenda.
Interesting that in this day and age of instant news, that we should be prepared for much much more of this. Without time to have cooler heads prevail, we will be subject to lots and lots of rumors, the nastier the bigger the broadcast.
It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them. I am a sixty-four year old African-American. New Orleans marks the end of the America I strove for. I am hopeless. I am sad. I am angry against my country for doing nothing when it mattered.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randall-robinson/new-orleans_b_6643.html
No exaggeration here!
I think he was in Baton Rouge...Who knows?
You know, with all this instant information these days it actually takes about 3-5 days to actually get the truth from any story.
Gee you don't say? No.. AP wouldn't dare.. What disgusts me more are the the Freepers that were quick to pick up and spread such sensational unsourced unsubstantiated nonesense because it furthered thier agenda (whatever that may be.)You expect this sort of behavior from the msm, but this used to be a place that was skeptical of news accounts and could ferret out obvious overblown sensational crap.
And "exaggerated" with "fabricated".
The square one of this media folly "big picture" is now quite obvious and quite upsetting. In light of the proven left bias reporting and pure misrepresentation of the facts from/about our war on terrorism and Hurricane Katrina, are we to believe anything the media prints/says anymore? I don't!
Any bets on whether this person:
A) Votes?
B) Pays taxes?
C) Served on a jury?
D) Served in the military?
Yeah well we had quite a discussion about the spread of what I considered to be obvious unsourced unsubstantiated rumor in the immidiate aftermath of Katrina. Unfortunately, I would have to say the skeptical posters were outnumbered by those believing in cannibalism and child gang rape by a substantial margin.
So you don't think this was exaggerated?
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