America's Jenin

Officials in New Orleans expected to find hundreds of bodies at the Superdome and Convention Center. They found ten, making this one of the least successful examples of ethnic cleansing in history:

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 killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, 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 recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was 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 turning over 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 killed inside.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.

The media, and many commentators, were prepared to believe the worst about the people holed up at the Superdome - partly because it would sell newspapers, and partly because it would give them more dead bodies to lay at the feet of the evil Dubya. As word gets out that the worst horror stories were exagerrated rumours, just watch as the same people say they were promoted by racist conservatives trying to make black people look bad.

Posted by damian at September 26, 2005 07:58 AM | TrackBack