September 27, 2005

Katrina Mayhem Myths

It's been three weeks since the levees broke, and New Orleans was turned into a lake. One of the more dramatic stories was of the literal raping, killing, and pillaging that happened at the Superdome and convention center. It's interesting that no witnessness or alleged victims have come forward to personify the horrors that supposedly happened in those places. That's because much of the violence was false. The idea that the Superdome during the Hurricane Katrina flooding turned into a little Baghdad is a myth propagated by a MSM intent on advancing conventional wisdom instead of seeking truth.

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 murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, 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 recalled the doctor saying.

The real total?

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 handoff 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 murdered inside the stadium.

When will we hear CNN's Anderson Cooper decry the performance of himself and the MSM? Will he use the same passion and anger that he saved for his criticism of FEMA and the Bush administration?

Two MSM explanations for the bad coverage: broken telephones and racism:

Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

The truth changes how to proceed with New Orleans' rebuilding. Conventional wisdom was that it might not be wise to pour a few hundred billion in federal funds into fixing the Big Easy if all that was going to be repaired were the areas of black underclass that turned into barbarians at the first leak from Lake Pontchartrain. Noemie Emery wrote on 09.06.05:

The reason New Orleans slid so quickly from civilization into Third World conditions was that it was pretty much a Third World city already, and didn't have too far to go. In its violence, in its corruption, in its reliance on ambience and tourism as its critical industry, in its one-party rule, in its model of graftocracy built on a depressed and crime-ridden underclass that was largely kept out of the sight and the mind of vacationing revelers, it was much more like a Caribbean resort than a normal American city. Its crime and murder rates were way above national averages, its corruption level astounding. The latter was written off as being picturesque and perversely adorable, until it suddenly wasn't, as it paid off in hundreds of buses--that could have borne thousands of stranded people to safety--sitting submerged in water, and police either looting or AWOL.

Conservative criticisms of New Orleans blacks being the result of Great Society welfare programs also need to be rethought.

A better reason to not dole out billions to New Orleans and Louisiana is because the state and local governments don't have a good history of wisely spending previous funds.

The moral of the story: a lot of people didn't heed John Cole's advice.

"Reports of Anarchy at Superdome Overstated"

"Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy"

[via Charlie Sykes]