Reply #14: WHO was "shooting at rescuers"?

[NorthernSpy]

Hate to break it to you, but those hysterical stories about rapemurdermayhem have been revealed as bogus (as some of us have maintained all along):

Lurid reports of rape, murder in Katrina’s aftermath exposed as frauds
By Joseph Kay
30 September 2005

(...)

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.

(...)

“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.”

I strongly recommend reading the rest of it.


And from ZNet:

They way the media covered the first few days still stings. This headline from today's New Orleans Times-Picayune says it all: "Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated - Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated." The article goes on to state, "Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened." The one national guard soldier who was shot turned out to have shot himself. Between the Convention Center and Superdome, there were ten bodies found. Despite the reports of mass killings, only one of the deaths appears to be a homicide. However, it was these rumors that were used to demonize the people of New Orleans, and since most of the media has offered no correction, the representation still stands.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=8852


By now, you'll have noticed that all that slanderous false news played a critical role in justifying the attempts at gun-grabbing, among other abuses of authority. Kind of reminds me of Waco, where rumors of child sexual abuse among the Branch Davidians created a public hysteria that made it possible for the government to act in ways that we would not ordinarily accept.