Lurid reports of rape, murder in Katrina’s aftermath exposed as frauds

Now that officials have been forced to admit that they had little or no evidence of armed thugs roaming the devastated city and mugging, raping and killing tourists and stranded residents, they and their media accomplices are seeking to explain away the disinformation campaign as the inadvertent result of confusion, fear and the breakdown in communications in New Orleans.

In fact, the picture of rampant lawlessness and violence conjured up by the government and the media served definite and entirely reactionary political purposes. President Bush himself picked up the theme of “lawlessness” shortly after he curtailed his Texas vacation—well after the city had been inundated and the dimensions of the human disaster had become clear—and returned to Washington.

In an interview on ABC Television’s “Good Morning America” program on September 1, he said, “[T]here ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this.”

In making these comments, Bush was continuing a theme already developed by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, both Democrats. On August 31, just two days after the hurricane passed over the city, Nagin declared that gangs of looters “are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas—hotels, hospitals, and we’re going to stop it right now.” He moved to shift virtually the entire police force from search-and-rescue to anti-looting duties.

Governor Blanco announced the same day that “we will restore law and order.” She bemoaned the fact that “disasters like this often bring out the worst in people.” A day later, she announced that a force of National Guard troops was entering the city: “They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded,” she declared. “These troops know how to shoot to kill... and I expect they will.”

Nagin, together with Police Superintendent Edwin Compass III, sounded an even more sensational note the following week. The two appeared on the “Oprah” television show on September 4. Compass declared, “The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they’re being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them on the streets.” He repeated accounts of “little babies getting raped” in the Superdome, where thousands of stranded hurricane victims had been left by the authorities to suffer in sweltering heat for days on end without food, water or electricity.

Nagin spoke of an “almost animalistic state” inside the Superdome, where, he claimed, “hooligans” were “killing people, raping people.”

There is no evidence that these horrible events took place. According to a September 26 article in the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, “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.”

The Times-Picayune noted that during early September, the media in the US and internationally was reporting widespread killings and rapes by gangs in both the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. However, an investigation by the newspaper found that just 10 bodies were recovered from the two venues. Of the six found in the Superdome, “four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide,” the newspaper wrote, citing Louisiana National Guard Colonel Thomas Beron.

It is believed that only one of the deaths in the Convention Center may have been a murder. The reports of widespread sexual assaults were likewise unfounded. According to a New York Times article of September 29, “During six days when the Superdome was used as a shelter, the head of the New Orleans Police Department’s sex crimes unit, Lt. David Benelli, said he and his officers lived inside the dome and ran down every rumor of rape or atrocity. In the end, they made two arrests for attempted sexual assault, and concluded that the other attacks had not happened.”

New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan said that in the city as a whole, only four murders had been confirmed during the week after the hurricane hit, which is about average for the city.

These findings expose the utter falsehood of the stories that were floated at the time, particularly by police officials. Compass spoke of residents toting weapons in crowds, shooting at each other and at police.

“People would be shooting at us, and we couldn’t shoot because of the families,” Compass told Chris Elsberry of the Connecticut Post as late as September 19. “All we could do is rush toward the flash.”

But Jeff Winn, the leader of the SWAT unit that Compass said had seized 30 weapons in this way, denied that anything of the sort happened. According to the Times-Picayune, Winn “said his unit saw muzzle flashes and heard gunshots only one time. Despite aggressively frisking a number of suspects, the team recovered no weapons.”

The numerous reports of people shooting at helicopters that were trying to rescue people have likewise turned out to be untrue. As for the massive looting that was supposed to have occurred, this too was exaggerated. Most of the looting that did occur was directed at gaining access to food and other necessities. In at least one case, in which a Wal-Mart store was looted, the removal of goods was begun by police, under instructions from their commanders to take what they needed.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/lies-s30.shtml