The dome rumors

[Jason McCullough]

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_09_04_digbysblog_archive.html#112593748487298 276

BATON ROUGE, La. -- They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I'm staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.

"Because of the riots," the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.

"It's the blacks," whispered one white woman in the elevator. "We always worried this would happen."

Points out there's been no confirmation of those rumors about rapes and murders in the superdome. People who were they say they didn't see them or hear about them.

Racism ahoy. Ugh.

By Thursday, local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge—the only ones in the metro area still able to broadcast—were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized.

Scarcely any of it was true—the police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter. There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.

But all of it played directly into the darkest prejudices long held against the hundreds of thousands of impoverished blacks who live "down there," in New Orleans, that other world regarded by many white suburbanites—indeed, many people across the rest of the state—as a dangerous urban no-go area.

Now the floods were pushing tens of thousands of those inner-city residents deep into Baton Rouge and beyond. The TV pictures showed vast throngs of black people who had been trapped in downtown New Orleans disgorging out of rescue trucks and helicopters to be ushered onto buses headed west on Interstate Highway 10. The nervousness among many of the white evacuees in my hotel was palpable.

[Chris Nahr]

Well, was it a dangerous urban no-go area or not? That seems to be the salient point in deciding whether you should be afraid of people coming from there or not...

[playingwithknives]

The pictures of the corpses and descriptions of the bodies in the makeshift Superdome morgue seem to validate some of the claims. Children with their throats slit, and the like.

[Tim Partlett]

People who were they say they didn't see them or hear about them.

That's not actually true. I read an interview with British students who were trapped in the superbowl and they definitely did hear and see things, including rapes, shootings and knifings. They said it was hell. They heard of one child being found dead in the toilet with her throat cut. The 30 or so students had to form a coral because of threats of death from some groups in the superbowl who were targetting them because they were the only white people there.

[playingwithknives]

www.nola.com running a story on Superdome conditions, photo's are there too.


Bodies found piled in freezer at Convention Center

By Brian Thevenot
Staff writer

Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Monday, flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started pointing out bodies.

"Don't step in that blood - it's contaminated," he said. "That one with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man."
Then he shined the light on the smaller human figure under the white sheet next to the elderly man.

"That's a kid," he said. "There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut."

He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor.
"There's an old woman," he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. "I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death," he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.

Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. "It's not on, but at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.

[Nellie]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4214746.stm

Jenny Sachs, of Sheffield, told how soldiers had to smuggle her out of the Superdome in secret.

She was one of about 30 Britons who, realising they could not escape the city, had fled to the stadium for shelter.

"It has hit me more now I am at home, when you can have clean water, how bad it was," she said.

She said people had been raped and that others were beaten up.

"A guy was brought in who had seven stab wounds and was covered in blood."


"We were going to go inside the Superdome. I approached two members of the National Guard and they said to stay outside because they knew it was hell in there."

Mr Brocken said members of the National Guard took him and his family "under their wing" and saw that they were placed in the baseball stadium.

"Everyone talks about the National Guard in rather derogatory ways historically, but I've got to say that but for them, and one man in particular, I may well have lost my family."



Jamie Trout, 22, of Sunderland, told BBC News the five "horrific" days he and his two female friends had spent in the Superdome, before being freed by the US National Guard, had been "like something out of Lord of the Flies".

"It was very dangerous - rioting, looting of vending machines, racial abuse, absolutely terrible sanitary conditions."

They had been "intimidated by large groups of men" and, Mr Trout added, he had feared he would be killed.

The group had heard a child had been raped and found in the toilets with a broken neck, Mr Trout told BBC News.


"By Tuesday night you heard of some suicides, people had jumped from balconies, or people being pushed, there were all sorts of rumours flying around. I honestly didn't think I was going to wake up on Wednesday morning."

Rioting and looting had broken out when food supplies had run out, Mr Henry added.

"I saw between 50 and 100 people fighting over a bottle of Coca Cola.

[Jason McCullough]

* Someone there who "heard a child had been raped and found in the toilet" is not evidence, it's hearsay.
* Did she actually see the stab wounds, or the guy just covered in blood?
* Was the seven year old's throat actually cut, or did she die from broken glass?

I'm being skeptical about this because the US has a long history of creating freaked-out rumors about what angry blacks get up to in groups. I wouldn't be surprised if three-quarters of the stories end up being false.

[Bob Cherub]

lol... "long history of creating freaked-out rumors..."

I'd love to see this detailed long history. Is this documented somewhere or are you just making shit up again? Kinda like hearsay ya know. Jason, you're getting so full of shit we're gonna have to start calling you Diaper.

[VegasRobb]

lol... "long history of creating freaked-out rumors..."

I'd love to see this detailed long history. Is this documented somewhere or are you just making shit up again? Kinda like hearsay ya know. Jason, you're getting so full of shit we're gonna have to start calling you Diaper.

The History Channel did a really good documentary on the history of illegal drugs and how they got that way.

It's a sad thing, but most of the drug laws in the US come from whites fearing the mixture of drugs and blacks (cocaine, marijuana, heroin) and other minorities. They even pointed out that whites fretted about white women using the drugs and falling under the way of minorities.

What better way to mobilize people against blacks than to say that they're going after the white women. How can they be stopped? Restrict the drugs!

[Jason McCullough]

From known liberal David Brooks:

Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed.

In 1889 in Pennsylvania, a great flood washed away much of Johnstown. The water's crushing destruction sounded to one person like a "lot of horses grinding oats." Witnesses watched hundreds of people trapped on a burning bridge, forced to choose between burning to death or throwing themselves into the churning waters to drown.

The flood was so abnormal that the country seemed to have trouble grasping what had happened. The national media were filled with wild exaggerations and fabrications: stories of rivers dammed with corpses, of children who died while playing ring-around-the-rosy and who were found with their hands still clasped and with smiles still on their faces.

Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared.

.....

In 1900, another great storm hit the U.S., killing over 6,000 people in Galveston, Tex. The storm exposed racial animosities, for this time stories (equally false) swept through the press accusing blacks of cutting off the fingers of corpses to steal wedding rings. The devastation ended Galveston's chance to beat out Houston as Texas' leading port.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html?incamp=article_popular

Along the same lines, rumors of mass negro uprisings printed in the paper were a regular occurence in the south up until the 1960s.

As a follow up, even if it *was* true, what sort of fucked up collective guilt racism results in people being terrified of bedraggled evacuees they don't even *know* are from the fucking superdome? Jesus. Maybe I should immediatelly get mad any time I see someone in westerner wear down in Waco - they probably want to kill black people by dragging them behind their truck!

[Jason McCullough]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1563532,00.html

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.


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.

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!"

[Jason McCullough]

http://www.reason.com/links/links090605.shtml

And it's entirely possible that, like the chimeric Baton Rouge hordes, exaggerations about New Orleans' criminality affected policy, mostly by delaying rescue operations and the provision of aid. Relief efforts ground to a halt last week after reports circulated of looters shooting at helicopters, yet none of the hundreds of articles I read on the subject contained a single first-hand confirmation from a pilot or eyewitness. The suspension-triggering attack—on a military Chinook attempting to evacuate refugees from the Superdome—was contested by Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown, who told ABC News, "We're controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on." What's more, when asked about the attacks, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff replied: "I haven't actually received a confirmed report of someone firing on a helicopter."

[Moore]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1563532,00.html

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.


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.

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!"

"he's got a sickle! get him!"

[Alan Dunkin]

From the sidebar in this ESPN article (http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2154151), really doesn't lend itself to either camp:

Toni Blanco and Alecia Wright lived with those who sought refuge from Katrina in the Superdome.

They went back Tuesday to take a look -- the massive building dark, eerily empty and reeking of human waste. Personal effects were scattered everywhere, and the field was littered with debris. Two rays of light poked through the holes that were blown in the dome that allowed rain to pour in.

"The pictures or the television can't show the stench, the smell of urine and water mixed on the floors, the feces," Blanco said. "It was unimaginably horrible."

Blanco is deputy commander of the New Orleans Police Department's sexual crimes unit. She's been on the force since 1981. Wright is one of the unit's detectives.

Nothing prepared them for five days in the dome when they and about four dozen other officers were supposed to keep order amid the chaos. On the first night, a man threw himself to his death. There were rumors of sexual assaults, but the police could barely keep order much less investigate.

"You felt helpless in the sense there was absolutely nothing we could do for the city," Blanco said. "I'd just tell people that we just have to have hope in the Lord."

Blanco walked up a darkened escalator, trying to avoid dried vomit, to the luxury suites. She and other officers commandeered one the first night, but after the hurricane hit, it was flooded and they had to leave.

Saints owner Tom Benson's suite was filled with bottles of top shelf liquor, ornamental iron and fine furniture.

"We were told we had to stay out of this suite," Blanco said.

Someone had been in there, though. The liquor was mostly gone, cabinets rifled through and the toilet overflowing.

Frankly such things are going to be really hard to prove - the place is an evidence nightmare, people would be afraid to come out and say anything - let alone be believed - and everyone is scattered to the four winds. They don't even know where they're going when they were put into buses.

--- Alan

[Jazar]

"The pictures or the television can't show the stench, the smell of urine and water mixed on the floors, the feces," Blanco said. "It was unimaginably horrible."

Glad to have New Orleans back to normal.

[playingwithknives]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/auryn24/298313.html

Hit next at the top for all 4 parts of a Methodist Hospital nurses ordeal.

Nothing brutal, still sounds like hell though.

edit : Also, our NOPD (cops) that we had stationed at the hospital, along with our National Guard boys (who were all teenagers and didn't help out worth crap) decided to use their "marshal law" and boat to Walgreens to get us supplies. They got some food products and water (which we got a small bottle of gatoraide and sparkling water, that's all. never saw anything else), but also went to Dillards and "used marshal law" to acquire expensive Polo shirts, jeans, Fendi purses, perfume, candles in which they traded (?) to family members on the floor. It didn't help patients or staff. I was disgusted about this. Our own cops LOOTED. They are all crooked. That's why I want out of Louisiana. You can't trust anyone.

I hope this type of thing is followed up in the months to come. Its sickening.

[Jason McCullough]

Liqour, vomit, urine, and feces everywhere I can see and no one is arguing about; the toilets were broken and there wasn't shit else to do. But you'd think they'd find evidence of things like 8 year old girls getting raped, killed, and shoved in a toilet.

[Jason McCullough]

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/07/katrina_rape_murder_.html

Interview about the astrodome with all sorts of strange shit. For example, this amazing collection of ridiculous rumors about the astrodome:

10:57 Raw transcript of comments by NOLA evacuee Clara Barthelemy: "The 17th street levee was bombed by the Army Corps of Engineers to save the more valuable real estate in the city… to keep the French Quarter protected, the ninth ward was sacrificed… people are afraid to speak out… everyone who was near there heard the bombings… they bombed seven times. That's why they didn't fix the levees… 20 feet of water. Gators. People dying in water. They let the parishes go, not the city center. Tourist trap was saved over human life. A six year old girl was raped in here.. 9 year old boy killed. A man in the shower beaten. No hot food. No help for elderly."

Another evacuee: "Over 20 rapes per night happening inside this place. They bring in national guard for media purposes. Bush wants us to stay here to raise his ratings. Some workers are stealing the good stuff, like shoes."

????

[Nellie]

Is it unreasonable to suggest that with a lack of electricity for things like radios, tvs etc so that you can get any news, and a lack of any apparent official control on the ground either enforcing general order or providing any information as to what is going on that a rumour mill is likely to start?

Whilst I'm sure it is entirely possible that the rumour mill might have circulated stories about nice things, it is far more likely to centre around other "nasty" things that a friend of a friend of a friend saw happen instead.

[steve]

I saw an interview with someone on TV who claimed the levees were bombed. They even brought on an indepdendent expert to refute the claim.

[Joel]

I was standing next to Jake while he transcribed the bulk of those Astrodome comments into his Treo (the stuff from BoingBoing). I'm not entirely happy with the way they were initially presented on BB, just because I don't think it's unfair to say some of those people were batshit crazy or just really dumb. But it does go to show you how useful an information clearinghouse would be.

The 'ACoE blew up the levee' rumors have been floating around since Tuesday. There is a historical precident for this very action, but again, it's impossible to tell truth from fiction when all these evacuees have to do for hours at a time is pass around news from person to person.

I think it's important for these quotes to get out and be recorded, but it's also important for people to realize the things that contribute to hysterical rumors. (This doesn't having anything to with any specific post here, per se. Just adding my commentary since I was talking to these same people in the Astrodome.)

[Jason McCullough]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002520986_katmyth26.html

Reports of anarchy at Superdome overstated

By BRIAN THEVENOT and GORDON RUSSELL

NEW ORLEANS — 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.

[Johan O]

Well Jason, the bodies lay in a stadium full of hungry congoids. Even with your pinkovision goggles you should be able to sort out what happened to the missing 90+ bodies.

[Jason McCullough]

That is so bad. I actually had to look it up.