Were the false reports used to justify the presence of Blackwater, et
al?

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

By Joseph Kay
30 September 2005

A series of articles over the past week have confirmed that the
widespread reports of massive looting, murder and violence in
hurricane-devastated New Orleans were either concocted out of whole
cloth or grossly exaggerated. In the first several days after New
Orleans was inundated, these stories were disseminated by government
officials at the federal, state and local level, and trumpeted by the
media in banner headlines and lurid TV accounts.

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.

As always, the US media has played a despicable role. AP reporter
Michelle Roberts noted in an article on September 27, "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."

Both right-wing and "liberal" news sources took the rumors and
government statements at face value. The New York Times recorded in an
article on September 19 some of the statements made by television
commentators. On September 1, Fox News anchor John Gibson said there
were "all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs
shooting at rescue crews." Later that night, MSNBC talking-head Tucker
Carlson declared hysterically that "People are being raped. People are
being murdered. People are being shot. Police officers are being
shot." These are only a sample of the sort of comments that were
ubiquitous at the time.

On September 2, in a banner headline that stretched across the entire
front page, the Washington Post declared New Orleans to be "A City of
Despair and Lawlessness." The newspaper's lead editorial of that day
bemoaned the fact that "looters and carjackers, some of them armed,
have run rampant."

Given the inhuman and life-threatening conditions in which tens of
thousands of New Orleans residents were left, and the incompetence and
indifference of the authorities at all levels of government, the
wonder is not that looting occurred, along with some acts of violence,
but that they were relatively limited.

What accounts for these extraordinarily exaggerated accounts? They
served three interrelated purposes. First, to counter and blunt the
enormous outpouring of sympathy for the victims of the hurricane,
accompanied by public outrage at the government's lack of preparations
and inept response. This sympathy was felt particularly strongly for
the impoverished and largely African American section of the
population that was left stranded in the city, either in the squalid
conditions of the Superdome and Convention Center, or trapped on
rooftops of homes engulfed by the flood.

By criminalizing the population, the government, at a local and
national level, sought to draw attention away from its own
responsibility. The implication was that the victims themselves were
to blame. The idea was promoted that those who remained in the city
did so because they had willfully refused to follow evacuation orders,
even though it had long been known that tens of thousands would be
unable to follow these orders for lack of transportation. This attempt
to paint the victims with the brush of criminality had more a hint of
racism.

Second, the government and the media attempted, in the first days
after the hurricane, to blame hooligan violence for the failure of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency and other official bodies to mount
rescue and relief operations. In particular, the reports of
helicopters being shot at as they attempted to bring relief were hyped
for this purpose.

The media line in these first critical days was that rescue efforts
were rendered impossible by the lawlessness that had seized hold of
the stricken city. "Law and order" had to be restored before starving
and dying people could be helped.

Finally, the sensational accounts paved the way for the transformation
of New Orleans into a militarized city. As has become increasingly
clear, the Bush administration is seeking to use the hurricane
disaster as a pretext for the elimination of remaining restrictions on
military involvement in domestic missions and law enforcement. Plans
to increase the power of the military within the US have long been in
the works, institutionalized in the Department of Homeland Security
and the US Northern Command, but the devastation of New Orleans has
provided an excuse for their realization.

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


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Many Americans may not be aware of this wide spread recruitment of SS
and
Gestapo alumni into our intelligence agencies but it has had a
profound
effect on the shaping of our domestic and foreign policy, often with
ruinous
consequences. The legacy of this incorporation of Nazis into the CIA
and
U.S. military has been a half a century of support for fascist
regimes,
juntas, death squads, torture and the overthrow of democratically
elected
governments around the world.

http://archive.democrats.com/view2.cfm?id=9099

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