Here's a Guardian article that points out the very real possibility that
many (if not all) the reports of murders, rapes and armed gangs were
created by rumor and a press craving disaster in alll its flavors. I also find
it interesting that even the Mayor is claiming 10,000 dead, but so far
only a few hundred bodies have been found. The articles on bodies all
say things like, Just wait until all the waters recede - then the bodies
will show up. But bodies float for days after death. They don't sink.
---
Murder and rape - fact or fiction?
Gary Younge in Baton Rouge
Tuesday September 6, 2005
The Guardian
There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old girl who
was raped
and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid out amid the excrement in
the
convention centre.
In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from New Orleans
following
Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.
But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to be
apocryphal.
New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped child, or
indeed any
of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and convention centre.
New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said last night: We don't have any
substantiated
rapes. We will investigate if the individuals come forward.
And while many claim they happened, no witnesses, survivors or survivors'
relatives have
come forward.
Nor has the source for the story of the murdered babies, or indeed their
bodies, been
found. And while the floor of the convention centre toilets were indeed covered
in
excrement, the Guardian found no corpses.
During a week when communications were difficult, rumours have acquired a
particular
currency. They acquired through repetition the status of established facts.
One French journalist from the daily newspaper Libération was given precise
information
that 1,200 people had drowned at Marion Abramson school on 5552 Read Boulevard.
Nobody at the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the New Orleans police
force has
been able to verify that.
But then Fema could not confirm there were thousands of people at the
convention centre
until they were told by the press for the simple reason that they did not know.
Katrina's winds have left behind an information vacuum. And that vacuum has
been filled
by rumour.
There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the
convention
centre, wrote Associated Press writer, Allen Breed.
You can report them but you at least have to say they are unsubstantiated and
not pass
them off as fact, said one Baltimore-based journalist.
But nobody is doing that.
Either way these rumours have had an effect.
Reports of the complete degradation and violent criminals running rampant in
the
Superdome suggested a crisis that both hastened the relief effort and demonised
those
who were stranded.
By the end of last week the media in Baton Rouge reported that evacuees from
New
Orleans were carjacking and that guns and knives were being seized in local
shelters
where riots were erupting.
The local mayor responded accordingly.
We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went
on in New
Orleans, Kip Holden was told the Baton Rouge Advocate.
We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people.
The trouble, wrote Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune is that scarcely any of
it was true -
the police confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge
shelter.
There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.
Similarly when the first convoy of national guardsmen went into New Orleans
approached
the convention centre they were ordered to lock and load.
But when they arrived they were confronted not by armed mobs but a nurse
wearing a T-
shirt that read I love New Orleans.
She ran down a broken escalator, then held her hands in the air when she saw
the guns,
wrote the LA Times.
We have sick kids up here! she shouted.
We have dehydrated kids! One kid with sickle cell!
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