With the passage of time, it has become apparent that most of the “evidence” on the basis of which the Democrats launched their hysterical post-Katrina attack on the Bush administration was wrong. As the facts come into focus, the dominant question that emerges is: how could the mainstream media have done such a poor job in reporting on Hurricane Katrina?
Here’s the latest: The lurid reports of widespread criminality in New Orleans, and especially of crime and chaos at the SuperDome and Convention Center, were almost entirely untrue:
Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA…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,” [Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas] 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….
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and law-enforcement officials.
That the nation’s frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city’s top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.
The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees
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