Cozmo D
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Posts posted by Cozmo D
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You have WAAAAY too much time on your hands... :davidblaine:
It's called self-employment my dear. I hope that you are blessed with it 1 day. :1-say-yes:
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Note to everyone on the forum:
I will call you out and put you on blast when you post foolishness of inaccurate information. Do your research before you post if you want to remain credible, cause I have no problem correcting you if you are wrong...
Thanks.
Hmmm... but you seem to have a problem CORRECTING YOURSELF WHEN YOU ARE WRONG!
And don't ever tell me to get my facts striaght. My facts are stright. They are on point. You still think that Bill O'Reilly raped someone, somewhere... You sound ridiculous...Your facts are straight huh? Most of the straight facts in this instance were the ones that YOU CHOSE TO IGNORE! Who sounds ridiculous now?
Ted, don't assume that you know anything about me just because you know what school I go to. There's a reason I don't go around parading my information. I don't know what gave you the right to do it for me, but slow your role, and slow it quickly. You really don't know anything about me. You don't know where I've been in the world nor do you know what I've experienced. I don't pretend to know everything, but I will speak on what I know, and I will call things the way I see it. I will also call into question the inaccurate information people purport to be fact, and there has been a lot of that in this thread. If you're not sure of something, don't post it. If you've heard something, but don't have any evidence for it when it is called into question, don't post it.Damm, what a bully! I see that I'm not the only person that you've threatened. What about all of the inaccurate information THAT YOU purported to be fact? What about all the garbage that YOU heard but didn't have any evidence of? When I called it into question you ridiculed me, even when I presented evidence AGAINST IT!!!
OH MY LAWDY JEEZUS WHAT A HYPOCRITE!!!!!!!!!!It's one thing to make a mistake, but to stand by something that has been shown to be inaccurate or ambiguous... We need to be more responsible in the things we post.So, how long are YOU going to stand by what "has been shown to be inaccurate or ambiguous"? Time to take your medicine son, Daddy ain't goin nowhere!
:bufordpusser:
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If he wanted to take the lead for his community, he should have addressed the hordes of young black men roaming the city, raping girls, carjacking, shooting at rescue helicopters... (rescue helicopters!), shooting at people waiting to be rescued infront of the superdome including the sick and the elderly, shooting at people while they are being rescued, shooting at law enforcement, looting gun shops...
People involved in the rescue efforts have said that they are afraid for their lives and some have refused to go into the city because of the violence...
There are police officers that have turned in their badges saying that they've lost their homes, they don't want to lose their lives...
You want to address some issues, lets talk about all the issues... don't be myopic.
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Why is the government sending troops trained to kill? Because there are predators roaming around, shooting and raping people. Carjackings... houses being broken into and people being attacked... You can't save massive amounts of people when you're being shot at and violently harassed. It's hard to save people when you yourself are afraid for your life and there is a lack of law enforcement officials. The government is trying to reestablish order while they are trying to save lives.
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We're talking about civilians trying to help people and being shot at... People passing out food and being assaulted. Kanye, address that. Others are addressing the racism but everyone seems to shy away from the issue of needless violence and assault.
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The problem with what Kanye said is that he spoke it at a time and a place that was inappropriate. Again, he should have sought to promote unity and to call on Americans to help their fellow Americans... It was not the time and the place to call out the president or criticize the government. He had a right to say what he said, but he chose a poor time and place to say it. And again, if he realy wanted to say something meaningful, he should have called on his brothers in Louisiana to work with one another and to stop the violence and the lawlessness. He should have called on them to work with those who are trying to provide aid, not hinder their efforts.
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The desperate efforts to impose some sense of order amid the chaos were further hampered by outbreaks of looting, particularly in New Orleans where one Wal-Mart store was ransacked with its whole collection of weapons taken.
"There are gangs of armed men in the city moving around the city," said Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief.
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People are being sent down to shoot people? Is Kanye daft? Troops are being sent down to reestablish order in the midst of violence and disorder, not for the purpose of shooting people...
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So troops should be told not to shoot? Let crime run rampant? Let those who raided the gun shops and the gun section at the Walmart have their way? Don't worry about the fact that these young men are raping people or shooting at them?
Let's be serious. Troops haven't been ordered to shoot at people taking soda... They've been told to reestablish order and to stop crime, shoot if they have to, all in an attempt to make the rescue efforts in Louisiana smoother and easier for surviviors and for those aiding in the relief efforts. People are shooting at rescue helicopters... what would you do? The police shot and killed 5 gunmen today who fired at navy core of engineer workers... You have to understand that these troops are necessary... It would be interesting to find out what Kanye has to say to these people shooting at rescue workers... He seems to be harsh on those who are trying to help and silent on those who are hindering the efforts.
Yes, you're right. Kanye said that Bush doesn't care about black people. My mistake.
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Again, just to draw attention to this... Troops earlier today shot and killed 5 or 6 out of 8 gunmen who fired at navy core of engineer workers trying to repair one of the levees...
"They've given them permission to go down and shoot us."
Good call Kanye... who gave these gunmen permission to shoot at relief workers?
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The violence was brought up as a contrast with Kanye's statement that troops are being sent to shoot black people. Troops are being sent to quel the violence and to reestablish order in the city. People are shooting at rescue workers. That is unacceptable. Kanye's statement intimated that troops aren't needed and that they are just being sent down there to shoot and harass black people. That statement is utterly ludicrous given the violence and disorder than is taking place in the city.
In hindsight, we can see that violence has decreased and that a certain level of order has been established in the city. Troops have not been needlessly shooting at and harassing black people. I'll leave it to some of you as to what to make of Kanye's statement now...
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I think some of you guys are under the impression that this was just petty crime and shoot to kill orders are too strident. Lets clarify. Here's a short quote from ABC.
Thousands of troops have struggled to counter armed looters and help tens of thousands of refugees flee New Orleans, where chaos reigns three days after Hurricane Katrina.
Here is what the black mayor of Louisiana did...
The lawlessness distracted from frantic efforts to evacuate the city, where Nagin took hundreds of exhausted police off search and rescue duties to fight the looting gangs.
Does someone want to say that the mayor was motivated by race to go after these looters?
Here's another quote...
There were reports of gunbattles and rapes with gangs of looters and carjackers roaming in the streets and bodies lying by the roadside. Some helicopters bringing relief supplies were shot at and arsonists set fire to some of the few buildings still standing in the city.
I just want to clarify that these weren't isolated incidents... One shooting here... one raping there... This was widespead.
So when the governor of Louisiana (not the federal government) gives shoot to kill orders, I don't think she's being whimsical.
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Also, you asked why Kanye would need to balance what he said on air. He mentions that troops are being sent to shoot black people. Does he mention why troops have been given shoot to kill orders. This is where the bias becomes glaring. In the face of the arson, looting, raping and general unrest in the city, his beef is with the fact that troops are being sent in to regain order, even if they have to use force. He doesn't have any beef with those who are hindering relief efforts.
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No spin. Kanye voiced an accusation. Not a concern. If Martial Law was to be fully implemented in NO, shoot to kill orders would have been the same. The shoot to kill orders were passed down by the governor of Louisiana, not the federal government. The decision is certainly not arbitrary. There is hard evidence that the step was needed, regardless of the race of the people. If buildings set on fire by arsonists and shootings taking place in the streets aren't evidence of the need for such a measure, what is? Troops aren't roaming around shooting people taking food. They are trying to keep the peace in a place where lawlessness is hindering search and rescue efforts. There have been no reports of troops shooting victims, innocent people, or people taking food. I have heard of troops shooting and killing men who shot at navy core of engineer workers and stopping arsonists. In hindsight, they have done an excellent and fair job in reestablishing some level of peace in NO. Why is it that people are afraid to look at the whole picture.
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You said that Kanye was simply voicing his concern of black people being grouped together when troops were told to shoot to kill. I pointed out that it was more of an accusation, and you have to question whether he understood what the full situation was in NO, or whether he chose to ignore it and make his accusation anyway. From the statement he made, he didn't convey concern that innocents and criminals may be grouped together; rather, it seemed that he had already made up his mind as to why troops were going in with shoot to kill orders, or at the very least, made it sound that way. The whole issue of that statement seems to be one of perception, or more accurately, how he chose to perceive the situation. In the face of the shootings, the arson, the raping, and the looting, he chose to make it sound like troops would be entering the city to shoot black people indiscriminately rather than to simply restore order, scaring away those who would use the tragedy for their own personal gain. I listened to the govenor of Louisiana give the "shoot to kill" order. For all her tough talk of M16s, troops weren't going to go in to shoot people taking bread and water, and in hindsight, they haven't done that. They haven't grouped the innocent with the criminals.
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I've posted how I think the media has handled this, but this really drew my attention...
the absolute avalanche of UNSUBSTANTIATED rumors of wide-spread violence and atrocities
Atrocities may be a strong word... but...
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/01/katrina.impact/
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/01/katr...iper/index.html
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900S...CZ?OpenDocument
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?...3466&n=10063508
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/02092005/325/troo...t-violence.html
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Police Chief Eddie Compass said he sent in 88 officers to quell the situation at the building, but they were quickly driven back by an angry mob.
"We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten," Compass said. "Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon."
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"Please don't send the National Guard," Raymond Cooper told CNN by telephone. "Send someone with a bullhorn outside the place that can talk to these people first."
He described scenes of lawlessness and desperation, with people simply dragging corpses into corners.
"They have quite a few people running around here with guns," he said. "You got these young teenage boys running around up here raping these girls."
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"We were coming in from a parking deck at Tulane Medical Center, and a guy in a white shirt started firing at us," Curiel said. "The National Guard [troops], wearing flak jackets, tried to get a bead on this guy...
We got back to Charity Hospital with with food from Tulane and we said, 'OK the snipers are behind us, let's move on,' " Curiel said. "We started loading patients [for transport] and 20 minutes later, shots rang out."
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A member of that family, Africa Brumfield, 32, confirmed the incident but declined to be quoted about it, saying her family did not wish to discuss it. But she spoke of general conditions here.
"There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave," she said through tears.
I'm not sure whether you're simply playing devil's advocate, or whether you're genuinely trying to intimate that the violence and disorder in New Orleans wasn't really that bad; that the media was just sensationalizing the stories and people who were in the area suffering were making a lot of these things up... the few police officers who were left were simply spreading rumors... Are you saying that these numerous accounts from different sources can't be trusted? Seems like the govenor of Louisiana believed them enough to send in troops. Seems like the mayor of New Orleans believed them enough to remove police officers from search and rescue operations to focus on curtailing crime.
A day after Nagin took 1,500 police officers off search-and-rescue duty to try to restore order in the streets, there were continued reports of looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-0...htm?POE=NEWISVA
Unsubstantiated... rumors... They certainly seemed real to the people involved, not just the media.
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It's also easy to not want to believe that crimes are being committed. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the situation there. It doesn't change what the police officers have said, what those who are suffering have said and what the media has reported that they have said. It doesn't change the mayor's actions, nor the govenor's in putting some focus on reestablishing order. Now are all these people lying to you or do you just choose to ignore them?
Here's an excerpt of the "Army Corps of Engineers" incident. Something tells me that if you could say that it didn't happen at all, you would.
According to New Orleans Deputy Police Chief W. J. Riley, on September 4 police shot and killed five or six people walking on the Danziger Bridge. Initial reports said that the victims were Army Corps of Engineers contractors on their way to launch barges involved in the 17th Street Canal repair. Shortly afterwards, the initial report was retracted, and it was reported that the men shot by police were gunmen who had opened fire on the contractors. The Army Corps of Engineers also confirmed that its contractors were not killed by police, but gunmen who fired at them were killed. Original reports claim five killed, but later police confirm only two killed, two wounded and two arrested.
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Before I address your post... earlier, you noted that in the news reports, among other things, "not ONE is first person." I went on to supply you with a number of quotes from people on the ground in New Orleans. You may either want to clarify the "not ONE is first person" statement or retract it. You've seemed to side step that and have gone on to attack the credibility of those who were quoted, such as you did with the "guy with a white shirt" incident or citing "mass hystyeria". Unfortunately, you can't attack the individual's credibility and at the same time maintain that the statement isn't made in "first person."
Moving along...
These are from the Times Picayune... the New Orleans Newspaper...
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.
I just want to point out what the "dailykos" website said...
It turns out that the Convention Center was NOT overrun by armed gangs. It turns out that a 7 year old child was NOT raped and had her throat cut. Turns out that most of the rumor and innuendo about the Superdome and Convention Center descending into savagery was just that apparently intended to demonize the victims of this national disaster, who were poor and black and you know that those big buck negros just wanna rape and kill 7 year old children, right?
Now, they haven't said that these things are unproven or are still under investigation as your other quotes have. They said, very clearly, and repeatedly, that they did NOT happen. Now it's one thing to say that something hasn't been substantiated, but it's certainly something entirely different to say that these things have NOT happened at all. Seems like an attempy to demonize the media more than anything else... This site seems about as fair and balanced as Fox News.
Here's another
Federal officials make first arrest
By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer
Federal agents arrested a young Algiers man in the early Tuesday morning after agents said he shot at a military helicopter designed for rescue missions, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said.
The arrest Tuesday marked the first federal action against the lawlessness that preyed upon New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Wendell L. Bailey, 20, was arrested outside the building in which he had earlier taken aim with a .22-caliber handgun and fired at the helicopter that was flying in the darkness, federal prosecutors said.
A criminal complaint filed against Bailey Tuesday accuses him of the federal crime of trying to "damage and destroy any aircraft and with being a felon in possession of a handgun. If convicted on both charges, Bailey could be sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Letten held Bailey's case up as the first federal arrest and promised more would come.
"He will be prosecuted very aggressively, federally," Letten said at the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge, flanked by U.S. Attorney David Dugas of Baton Rouge and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives officials.
U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance, of the eastern district, signed the arrest warrant. Bailey was booked at the temporary detention center set up by state officials in the storm-torn downtown of New Orleans, and is due in federal court located in Baton Rouge federal court later today.
Special ATF agents were patrolling Algiers when they observed gunfire coming from an apartment window.
Two young men then walked out of the building and were heard chatting about shooting at a helicopter. "They won't be back now," one of them said, according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday.
Inside the apartment, ATF special agents found a .22-caliber Rhomn revolver and a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver both hidden beneath a mattress – along with a box of 9-mm ammunition.
Letten said that under federal law, Bailey's home address cannot be released. He said he did not have the specific address at which ATF nabbed Bailey. The second young man who was with Bailey was not arrested after ATF agents interviewed the unidentified man.
Bailey has prior convictions for dealing marijuana and cocaine, Letten said. He admitted to ATF agents at the scene that he was a felon on probation and he told them were the firearms were, Letten's office said.
At the time of the shooting, Letten said a number of civil and military aircraft were in the air helping with evacuation, search and rescue and delivering supplies.
State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr., the former criminal sheriff in Orleans Parish, plans to open up a second detention center in New Orleans, likely using an existing facility that was built to be a jail, Letten said.
And another....
Reuters' Denver-based photographer Rick Wilking arrived in New Orleans two days before Hurricane Katrina hit and stayed in the greater New Orleans area for six days. The following is his personal account of the storm and its violent aftermath.
By Rick Wilking
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - It was dawn when he showed up out of nowhere. "Hey man, there's a ton of media up here and they have a lot of stuff. I don't see any cops. There's no security."
The man in ragged clothes summoned his friends to attempt a "hit" on a convoy of a dozen media cars parked on the highway overpass near the New Orleans Superdome, three days after Hurricane Katrina hit.
Fortunately for us the conversation was overheard. As soon as we saw a mob making its way toward us and just as a network anchor was about to go live for a morning show, the word went down the line.
Before you knew it, the lights were struck, the wires tossed into trucks, the satellite dishes stowed, and photographers and reporters were speeding the wrong way down the interstate to the relative safety of a police checkpoint.
When we got there the police told us there had been nearly 80 carjackings in the last few days, many of them media vehicles surrounded by mobs and stripped clean or stolen outright, sometimes at gunpoint. They also told us a policeman had been shot in the head (he lived) and so they had a new "shoot to kill" policy in place.
I've covered dozens of natural disasters around the globe, from mudslides and floods in Europe to hurricanes and tornadoes in the United States. I always considered the assignments somewhat dangerous but not extremely so, because if you know what you are doing you can easily minimize the danger -- actually control your situation.
Not so in New Orleans, where after one day of covering a storm and its aftermath I found myself covering a human tragedy of enormous proportions, compounded by a blatant criminal element bent on taking advantage of a very bad situation.
Looting is almost always found in the initial hours after a storm -- particularly if the area hit is a poorer neighborhood. But armed gangs riding in pick-up trucks, shots being fired from the ground at military rescue helicopters overhead and media vehicles being hijacked are not things you expect.
Covering flooded New Orleans was hard enough with many major roads under water, no power and no phones, not even cellular, without having to watch your back at every turn.
All these people are making up things? Reporters are suffering from mass hysteria? Police officers and the National Guard. Really...
Lets not forget, the point of the topic of violence and crimes taking place in New Orleans is to establish that Blanco was right in sending troops in with shoot to kill orders to restore order.
Also, you made this statement...
Hmmm... guy with a white shirt. Must have been the only white shirt in New Orleans, considering everybody there had been wading in filth for days. Strange that he could make out the guy in the white shirt but the National Guard couldn't get a bead on the guy. I wonder if this guy actually saw all of this himself, or if he's basically repeating something that was told to him by his colleagues.I'm guessing that the person in the white shirt had to be wading in the water with that same shirt for the duration of the disaster huh. I'm guessing that he was in the open in the water with a white shirt shooting at people so that he in turn could be easily shot. On top of all of it, you've alread tried to cast doubt on his story saying maybe he's just repeating what was told to him inspite of the fact that he repeatedly used the pronouns "we" and "us" when speaking about the event signifying that he was involved.
"We were coming in from a parking deck at Tulane Medical Center, and a guy in a white shirt started firing at us."
"We got back to Charity Hospital with with food from Tulane and we said, 'OK the snipers are behind us."
"We started loading patients [for transport] and 20 minutes later, shots rang out."
Sad atttempt... and the shooter could have been white. Maybe that would have changed your view on the story.
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I'll post what you said again. Now I'm specifically posting what you said, not what I think you may have thought or what I think you may have wanted to say.
BUT, these people were overwhelmingly black. So, it is easy to believe all of these horrible rumors about what was going on...
In another post, you said
Yet, the racist perceptions of much of our nation, including many many blacks, somehow managed to morph them together as if they were one and the same. We seemed to believe that these crimes were committed by those who were suffering, instead of by criminals who were adding to their suffering. In fact, it seemed that the very blackness of many of the victims was at fault. Black people don't listen to warnings so they deserve to be stuck there. Black people shoot at rescue workers so they deserve to be left there. Black people loot whenever they get a chance so they deserve no provisions.
You brought the issue of race into this discussion about violence and disorder in New Orleans. This was your initial argument... "these people were overwhelmingly black. So, it is easy to believe all of these horrible rumors about what was going on." My position was and still is that regardless of the race of those involved in crimes and lawlessness, order had to be established to help those who so desperately needed help. You made it race specific. The natural question to ask then is what if white people were the ones we were looking at? Would you then say that your statements would have been...
BUT, these people were overwhelmingly white. So, it is easy to believe all of these horrible rumors about what was going on...
The underlying current of your argument has as much to do with race as it has to do with "facts."
You're absolutely right, and if the shooter had been black, the white community would've thought either the same thing, or that it had been a racially motivated robbery. So, what's your point?
Edit: After re-reading this I realized that the shooter must have been a police officer, which changes the circumstances. So, you're saying that if it was the 1 black student amongst all of these white ones the black community would have suspected race played a part, which is correct. However, if it was one white student amongst mostly black ones, the white community would have thought that he was probably shot by mistake, or that the poor kid had fallen under the influence of these black kids, or that he deserved what he got for running with the black students in the first place.
No, that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that if it was a black person shot by a white person, period, the black community would have perceived it as racism, whether the person shot was surrounded by whites, blacks, asians, or latinos, even in the absence of any evidence of racism. The color of the officer's skin would have been motive enough.
Officials called on Boston University to suspend students of the school who took part in the riot. The majority of students that took part in the riot were white. If the majority of students that had taken part in the riots were black, the black community would have looked upon the call for suspensions as harsh and prejudiced.
You're absolutely right, and the white community would have complained that they weren't harsh enough, and there would have been calls for more security and an increase in weapons bought in the area. So, what's your point?
Funny how many whites said the same things concerning these white students. Many of those students were kicked out of school, and those who were found committing serious crimes got jail time, the harsher penalties that were called for.
A few years ago, the party hours at Harvard University were cut back. Residents in the community claimed that music was often too loud and that students were often loud, drunk, and disorderly late at night. Upon receiving word, the initial perception of the situation in the black community was that this had something to do with race... that was until they found out that all school organizations that threw parties were affected.
And what was the initial perception in the white community? Link please.
There was no racial perception in the white and asian communities. No one liked it. Students complained. The reduction still stands.
So yes, perhaps you understand that racism is imbedded in the American psyche, but what you seem not to understand is that it effects ALL Americans! If you did then you would realize how it even now effects YOU! For here you are now, insisting on believing that these heinous crimes happened to the degree and scale that was reported, regardless of the gross absence of evidence, regardless of the words of the Police Superintendent, regardless of your own common sense. Even if this evidence was to somehow miraculously appear now it would not change the fact that you gave into your racist perceptions in the absence of that evidence, it would only make you feel vindicated in your prejudice.
Earlier you posted the following...
you are obviously saying that I have a racial or racist viewpoint, which is belittling, insulting, and completely non-evident in anything and everything that I have written so far
Though I honestly said nothing of the kind.
Now you have charged me with having "racist perceptions" and basically a racist viewpoint on these matters. The hypocrisy in your statements is evident, but I'll give you some leeway. I'm sure you simply used stronger words than you meant to. I hope this is truly the case. Any charge with the word "racist" in it is very serious. Tone down your rhetoric.
The reason that I believe that there was a great deal of crime has nothing to do with the race of those involved, absolutely nothing at all. You are woefully off base. I can't stress that enough. If those effected by the hurricane where mostly white, hispanic, or asian and the same things were being reported in the same volume as they are now, my honest response would be the same. The National Guard would need to be sent in to restore order with shoot to kill orders if the situation were the same. The problem in this case is that the reports are numerous as are the sources. Reporters, doctors, rescue workers, police and city officials have all reported quite a bit of crime. The real issue however is that citizens of New Orleans themselves have reported that there has been a lot of crime. Now you've attributed that to mass hysteria, but you're reaching, and you know it, whether you admit it or not. Are these black citizens trying to demonize other black citizens? People have reported that rescue helicopters were shot at. One person has been arrested so far. Was the press attempting to demonize blacks by reporting the shootings? Even in the face of numerous reports from numerous sources, am I to ignore what those on the ground are saying because it doesn't sound good or because I don't want to believe it?
You go on to say this...
Even if this evidence was to somehow miraculously appear now it would not change the fact that you gave into your racist perceptions in the absence of that evidence, it would only make you feel vindicated in your prejudice.
It seems that you have already decided that much of the crime that the press, even the New Orleans press, and citizens have reported hasn't really happened. Your use of the phrase "miraculously appear" bears witness. Is it so unlikely that some of these things have happened that it would take a miracle for evidence to appear?
You have bent over so far in the other direction that you discount things that are well documented.
And then you go on to say that I am prejudiced because I believe what citizens are saying? Again, it has nothing to do with race for me. It has everything to do with what these people are saying and the preponderance of the claims and reports in general. They say that they are hungry and thirsty, and that they are being mistreated by troops... I will believe them. Why then shouldn't I believe them when they say crime has taken place? Because the police superintendent who has lost much of his police force has said that they haven't found evidence yet, even though bodies have been reportedly found in both the convention center and the superdome? This has nothing to do with race for me, and in going so far as to address my "prejuduce," you are way out of line. Tread lightly.
I don't believe in shoot to kill orders when it comes down to dealing with problems in this country. The net result is usually dead Americans. The average peace officer or member of the military knows fully well when and how to kill anyway, and demonstrate their abilities often. "Shoot To Kill" orders are usually translated by those that are given them to mean "shoot now, ask questions later".
No, the net result is usually stability. Think the worst, but this was proven in New Orleans. Troops weren't shooting people stealing bread. They weren't shooting people indiscrimintately as some want to think. They went in with shoot to kill orders and were still shot at. How much more bold would criminals have been if they believed that the national guard would have been passive? The severity of the situation, both the crimes taking place and more importantly, the need to help those who were suffering, called for the decision.
So yes, much of the media coverage of this tragedy was racist, much of the response to it was racist, and much of OUR reaction to the entire episode was racist, and it was all brought about not by any person or persons, but by OUR racist American perceptions.
How was the media coverage racist? How was the response, both from the American people and the govenment racist? False or vague blanket statements declared in certainty are still false or vague.
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I was speaking about perceptions and you know it.
Did I say that you weren't speaking about perceptions? Don't shy away from the point. The fact remains that you were the one to introduce race to the discussion of crime and violence and you are well aware of this. Your initial argument wasn't about mass hysteria or citizens spreading rumors. It was about how people are more likely to believe these stories because those involved are black. You went on in another post to say that there was "not ONE" first person statement about crime, further trying to prove you point that people were relying on their racist perceptions. It turns out that there are SEVERAL first hand statements... Obviously wrong, and quickly covering up, you went on to try to discredit them, going so far as citing mass hysteria. I don't have to tell you how ridiculous and illogical that is. You should already know. Before you post anything in response to this, think about it, go back to your previous posts if you have to. I don't want to have to come back to this.
And I agreed with you. What you refuse to admit is that the white community would have perceived it in a racial context as well, albeit likely one that was different than that of the black community..
No, you didn't simply agree with me. You added something that I didn't say and I had to correct you. The point of the example is that even though there may be no true racial issue in a given scenario, it can be quickly manufactured, whether black or white. This is what we have in New Orleans with the slow relief response. A slow response, which lacked any racial motivation, was given one. One would think that the mistakes and the incompetence leading to the slow response would be reason enough for the slow response, but ontop of that, those downing in their own racist perceptions chose to attatch racism to this... not because there was really any racism, but simply because blacks were involved. Instead of speaking about the racism that ultimately led these victims to poverty and helplessness, a few focused on the non-existant racism in the slow relief effort itself.
Because your perceptions are racist does not make YOU a racist, this has been my point from the beginning.
you are obviously saying that I have a racial or racist viewpoint, which is belittling, insulting, and completely non-evident in anything and everything that I have written so far
And yet you persist with the hypocrisy... you say are offended and insulted when you falsely assume that I accuse you of having a racist viewpoint, but then you turn around and say the very same thing to me. And then you post something totally different from the point of my post. I'll say it again. Don't be a hypocrite.
I believed these stories as well at first, but became increasingly skeptical as I observed none of it, and no evidence of it was forthcoming. I would be just as skeptical regardless of the races involved.
You've conveniently forgotten. I posted an article as well as a link concerning the arrest of someone suspected of shooting at a rescue helicopter. I also posted the article from the New Orleans paper of the bodies found in the Convention Center. I also posted an article about a reporter's first hand account. It wasn't very sunny. Posted police confirmation of police officers having been shot at, and one was actually shot in the head. Navy contractors have been shot at. I posted that as well. I posted a doctor's first hand accound of how things were. It's not that there isn't evidence or information. You're just highly dismisive of it.
I DOUBT them...severely.
So you doubt the citizens and rescue workers "severely"... So you think that these victims may be lying in large numbers, all over New Orleans... I see.
So, we got lucky, and only a few Americans died. This time. Sometimes we have lucked out, sometimes we haven't. Doesn't change how I feel about it.
And the govenment could have attempted the alternative and had a lot more Americans die in this specific tradegy, including a few national guard troops.
"They got lucky" is one of the most famously used phrases when someone has been shown to be wrong.
I've already pointed it out to you, but your mind is closed to it.
No, you actually haven't. You've claimed it, but you've made no logical argument to support it. In the arguments you have made, you've made it clear that you are decidedly one sided on the matter, going as far as to ignore incorrect statements that you have made. You need to reexamine who's mind is truly closed.
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You've provided excuse after excuse and dismissals, even of first person statements and stories that you said didn't exist in the first place. You said, "not ONE is first person." You were wrong, but instead of simply admitting that and moving on, you attempted to deflect...
As for my usage of first person, most of the people on the ground that you quoted were relaying things that they were told. Regardless, it's not my statements that are in question here, but what TRULY happened in New Orleans. You write better than I do, hell, you write better than my lawyers, but this is not a debate. If what you're after is to be voted the smartest person here, you can have my proxy.
The truth is that I have posted a number of statements in this thread that were first person. First person statements from reporters who described what they witnessed, first person statements from witnesses. I even posted a confirmation of an arrest of someone who is suspected of shooting at a rescue helicopter, and a confirmation of the story involving the navy contractors. There are indeed first person statements. You say that it is not your statements that are in question, but when you say things that are false and then you repeatedly say that you deal in "facts," it is hard to take what you say seriously. What's worse, you tried to distance yourself from what you said without first acknowledging it, trying to move the focus of the topic onto me as evidenced in your response.
I added something that you had left out in order to skew the question of racist perceptions to appear as if only black people suffer from them.
I didn't attemt to skew anything. The point of the example was to show that even when there is no racism at all, where it played no role, the perception of some will be that racism was involed anyway. Are white people guilty of this as well. Of course. The examples I used were specifically relevant to the relief response after Katrina however. In an earlier post, you pointed out that in response to the slow relief efforts after Katrina...
Of course, white people will then say "but it could have happened to anybody"... but black people will answer, "but naturally it happened to us!
At the same time, in the tear gas shooting that we have already established as having nothing to do with racism, if the person who was shot were black, the exact same thing would have been said. White people would say that anyone could have been shot... black people would respond that it naturally happened to a black person. Again, the point is that even when there isn't racism, some will perceive there to be, whether black or white, and this seems to be the case with the slow relief response in New Orleans.
You did, and nowhere in anything that I have written is such a viewpoint evident. On the other hand, what you have written is crawling with it. No hypocrisy there.
First, please post the quote where I said or intimated that you had "racist perceptions." I'd be more than happy to rebuff your claim. I have a post in mind, and I have already addressed what I said and what I meant, but I'd be more than happy to correct you again. I'll let you do the homework. I'm not one to mince words. If I truly believed that you had racist perceptions, I would have said it by now, and it would have been explicit, regardless of whether you would feel insulted or hurt. Please proceed to post that quote of mine and explain yourself.
Second, please post examples of things that I have said that are "crawling" with revelation of my "racist perceptions." You made a statement, back it up. I'd be more than happy to set you straight on this as well.
I believed these stories as well at first, but became increasingly skeptical as I observed none of it, and no evidence of it was forthcoming. I would be just as skeptical regardless of the races involved.
I haven't forgotten anything. You posted a link concerning the arrest of someone who was shooting at helicopters days afterwards and outside of New Orleans. WTF does that have to do with the discussion? You posted an EXCERPT from an article about the bodies, with only ONE body witnessed that supposedly had succumbed from violence, and that spoke of another. You posted an article about a reporter who did NOT witness ANY violence. The Navy contractors story was all over the news, it also happened afterwards. You posted the doctor's account, which you find highly plausible and I find somewhat suspect. So, out of all that rampaging carnage you present "evidence" of ONE body, ONE mention of a body, ONE shooter in a white shirt, and ONE report of shots fired. Of this "evidence", NONE of it has been physically backed up. Yet, I shouldn't be skeptical? Even giving every one of these full credence, it falls far short of being indicative of the raping, murdering and pillaging rampaging hordes that we heard so much about. In fact, judging from this "evidence", the crime rate in New Orleans actually DROPPED.
What does this have to do with the discussion? Algiers is a suburb of New Orleans affected by the hurricane. A young man was arrested for shooting at a rescue helicopter there. According to you, there's supposed to be no evidence of such things taking place. Well now someone has been arrested for it. You said that that these things we unsubstantiated. You said that there were no first person accounts. You said that there was no evidence. I have provided specific instances of a few reports and first hand accounts of people saying that many of these things actually did happen. I won't waste time doing all of your homework for you. If you are truly openminded, you will seek further information. Don't limit yourself to only what I have provided.
Also I'm not sure if you expect news agencies to publish pictures of someone laying in waste, or if you expect a cameraman to chance upon a rape taking place and say, "Oh, look, lets go film it." You seem to ignore the fact that New Orleans has undergone a massive hurricane and flooding and that many of the protocols set in place to investigate crimes and to report crimes are almost completely non-existent and non-functioning. Take a look at the link below.
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2448
BTW, you used "victims". Do you mean "crime victims"? You mean you have found some? Link please.
No, I didn't mean crime victims. I meant the victims of the hurricane. However, I'm glad you brought this up. Could you please link to anything where witnesses have said that crime was mind, minor, or non-existent. Have any witnesses said that most of these reports are false? I would like a link for those please. I've looked, and I was unable to find any.
Also, in case you missed this in the link I provided above, I'm providing a more explicit link...
You asked for a crime victim. This person was a victim of the hurricane, the flood, the government's incompetence, and lastly, rape.
Charmaine Neville, has reported that she was raped. Below is one of the first hand accounts that isn't supposed to exist according to you.
http://2theadvocate.com/stories/090405/new_soul001.shtml
"Referring to getting raped, Neville said, "What he took from me was nothing, because he can't take my spirit, he can't take my soul. My soul is New Orleans."
Really? Would you like to examine history and see how these things usually turn out?
Your problem is you're trying to prove that you're right. I'm trying to get to what's right. You're in this little battle of wits all by yourself. I could care less about scoring points, facts are ALL that I care about.
Yes, please provide information on the last severe natural disaster in which a reasonable level of crime broke out in the aftermath and National Guard troops were sent in with orders to reestablish order and with shoot to kill orders, and then tell me how it turned out. Thanks. Also, I've already addressed your affinity to "facts" in this post. Feel free to scroll up to reference my statements if you feel the need.
I've presented plenty of logic, and examined every point and C&P and link that you have presented in depth as well. I'm not the one who presented the early statement of the Police superintendent as evidence but then dismissed the later statement by the same man because he "has lost much of his police force".
Perhaps we'll revisit your logic. In the meantime I didn't dismiss Compass' latter statment. I did point out that much of his police force, 200 or so officers as reported, have abandoned the force. It would be hard to find evidence of rapes and shootings when there is no official way to report crimes, when people are moving around from shelter to shelter, and when police were busy fighting what must have been imaginary criminals. I expect that all of this would be even harder when much of the police force is missing. I also suspect that police officers didn't bring along rape kits to substantiate these claimed rapes and I suspect that they haven't gone around asking "Who's been raped." Also, taking Compass' statement, Charmaine Neville's is an unsubstantiated rape.
You seem to enjoy doing this tedious tit-for-tat bull**** instead of taking in the big picture. Well, I'm a big picture kind of guy, and frankly you just think a little too small for me.
But, I'll tell you what. Time is going to prove whether the violence there was over-exaggerated and over-sensationalized or not. If I'm wrong, I'll come right here and admit it, right here out in the open for all to see. Will you do the same? We'll see....
Lol, thanks for the kind words.
Incidentally, this whole thing is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is a shame that you think it is. People have actually suffered and are suffering the things we have discussed. It goes far beyond being right or wrong, but for someone who looks at the big picture, you haven't seemed to grasp that yet. I hope you do. We will indeed see what took place, whether crime was sparse and mild or whether it serious enough for the national guard to be sent in with shoot to kill orders. I'll be here.
I realize now that Tim asked me to come chime in on this discussion because I was needed. He knew that I would bring an unflinching, independent, unbiased and open-minded opinion to the discussion, without being swayed by sentiment or intimidated by bullying. He also knew that I would bring an honest viewpoint, one that was capable of adjusting to facts and willing to re-evaluate itself. You see, Tim knows that as much as I love a good verbal sparring match, I am much more concerned with being correct than winning points. Whenever I have to admit I was wrong about something it is a VERY good day, because that means that not only have I learned something, I have CORRECTED my thinking about it.
So Mr. Fly, what do you have to say to your forum mates? You showed everybody here FOR WEEKS how much bigger than them you imagined yourself, so now it's time you showed them just how big you really are. So far you're coming up mighty small...
:shrug:
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Media needs to separate fact & fiction
Thanks to a long report in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, we now know that most of the incredible tales of savagery in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were simply made up by panicky residents and passed along by the media.
On Sept. 2, a CNN report cited an unidentified police officer who said he saw bodies riddled with bullet holes and one man with the top of his head completely shot off. Another unnamed officer, a sergeant, said he had to pass by the bodies of other police officers who had drowned doing their job. So far as we know, none of this was true.
One of two Times-Picayune staffers who wrote the article was guilty of some dubious reporting himself. His Sept. 5 article began, "Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Monday, flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun and started pointing out bodies." Unlike the CNN report, this piece named an actual person as the source, but it was written as if the reporter were authenticating all that Brooks claimed. Brooks says, "Don't step in that blood - it's contaminated." Pointing out bodies, Brooks says, "That's a kid. There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut." Under great pressure, reporters sometimes forget to ask pertinent questions, such as how did Brooks know the blood was contaminated, or that the dead girl - one of the most-mentioned phantom figures in all the Katrina reporting - was exactly 7 years old? In fact, the reporter saw four bodies, not the 30 to 40 that were reported, and no dead girl.
The New York Times reported: "Like passengers on a doomed ship, they [superdome evacuees] were desperate to get out of the noxious, violence-ridden stadium." Noxious it was, but the "violence-ridden" condition is harder to pin down. The Superdome "just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard told the Los Angeles Times. "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people." Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré told the Washington Post that reporters got bogged down trying to tell people how bad things were rather than "gathering facts and corroborating that information."
So why was so much of the reporting so wrong? Obviously, reporters were working under terrible conditions, with telephones out and much of the city under water. New Orleans' only important reachable authorities, Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, issued hysterical statements that reinforced some of the worst rumors. Nagin decried "animalistic" behavior with "drug-starving crazy people ... degraded into these devils." Compass went on "Oprah," saying, "Little babies [are] getting raped."
Another factor is the debate within the news media about whether reporters should stick to dry facts or report with heart and emotion. New Orleans was a grand opportunity for emotional reporting.
The New York Times did at least two pieces praising emotionalism. One hailed CNN's Anderson Cooper under the headline "An Anchor Who Reports Disaster News With a Heart on His Sleeve." Another praised the crisis reportage for being "buoyed by a rare sense of righteous indignation by a news media that is usually on the defensive." Personally, I don't need reporters to supply righteous indignation. I can handle that on my own. What I need is reporters who separate rumor from fact and just tell me what they know for sure actually happened.
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Rap star: Resist dumbing-down movement
By Corey G. Johnson The Daily Reflector
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Chuck D, leader of the award-winning rap group Public Enemy, told ECU students Wednesday to resist a dumbing-down movement taking place in American culture.
"Minds are the real estate of the new millennium," Chuck D said to the diverse crowd of nearly 250 at Wright Auditorium. "The worst thing that can happen is to have someone thinking for you."
Sponsored by the Ledonia Wright Cultural Center and the ECU Student Union Cultural Awareness Committee, the speech was organized largely in response to what students said they wanted to hear, Lathan Turner, assistant vice chancellor for student life, said.
"Even though some consider him controversial, many see him as insightful, informative and in most cases, motivational," Turner said. "Chuck D's name kept showing up in our focus groups in the top ten list of desired speakers."
Speaking from the theme, "Race, Rap, Reality and Technology," Public Enemy's lead lyricist tackled a plethora of topics from the Hurricane Katrina disaster to what he called the "virtual pedophilia" of sexually-suggestive programming being targeted to youth.
He called Viacom-owned MTV and BET – empty TV and the Booty and Thug network.
"BET markets their award show as playing during prime time. Prime time usually means you're watching with your family and kids," he said. "Then the next thing you know, Destiny's Child is up onstage doing a lap dance. Did the decision to go from being a 'Survivor' to doing lap dances take place in some boardroom."
Chuck D also accused corporate powers of "lobotomizing" black public figures in music and television. As a result, he said rap music in 2005 doesn't feel the same to him.
"A lot of today's artists' number one obligation is to their contract." he said. "They are going to do what their masters say."
He applauded rapper Kanye West's courage for publicly voicing criticism during the reason Hurricane Katrina disaster but warned that West might lose his mainstream status in the backlash.
West previously suggested the slow federal response to rescue New Orleans citizens was a result of "George Bush not caring about black people."
"He's got to know that he will no longer be considered in Britney Spears' land," he said.
He also suggested the controversy surrounding West's remarks is proof of how far consciousness has devolved.
"You shouldn't be surprised that an artist has something to say instead of BS," Chuck D said. "Kanye West did what a 28-year-old grown, voting man should do. But how is what he is saying considered crazy when you got songs like Face Down, (Behind) Up playing at 1:30 everyday?"
Chuck D also mocked students who try to bring street thuggism into the university.
"There are two cottage industries that result from thuggism – prison and dead. And both of them are making a lot of money," he said. "There is no such thing as a collegiate thug, so stop fronting."
He challenged the students to take advantage of their educational opportunities in order to develop their own mind.
"Don't be indecisive. Leave here with your own mind," he said. "You can't afford not to."
Yelitza Ortiz, 18, of Fayetteville, said she was first introduced to Chuck D and Public Enemy four years with the song "Fight the Power." She said Wednesday's speech was an eye-opener.
"I went into the speech not knowing what to expect, but there were things he said about the pop culture that I would have never thought of before," Ortiz said. "It really made me think."
Corey G. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@coxnc.com or 329-9565.
Hey BigTed, can I have a link to this article please? Glad to see Chuck laying down the knowledge, but then I expect it from him. :word:
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We will indeed see what took place, whether crime was sparse and mild or whether it serious enough for the national guard to be sent in with shoot to kill orders. I'll be here.
:hmm: [crickets]
Still waiting for Compass, Nagin, or Blanco to say that troops weren't needed. Still waiting for someone to prove that troops were sent with the express purpose of shooting black people indiscriminately...
Kanye West never said that "troops were sent with the express purpose of shooting black people indiscriminately" and you know it. That is just your grossly skewed and exaggerated interpretation of what he said. The question never was whether troops were needed, and you know that too. Almost every natural disaster of even a fraction of the scale of Katrina is answered with the National Guard. Everybody wanted the National Guard in there. In fact, the chief complaint was that they were NOT sent in. The question was the "shoot to kill" orders, as you yourself said in your final word that I quoted above.
You also said that my opinion, based on the FACT that there was a dire lack of corroborating evidence to most of the rampaging violence, rape and murder, was "decidedly one sided on the matter". Well, perhaps you have now learned the valuable lesson that if evidence exists on only one side of a discussion then indeed the truth is usually very much "one sided".
So now, that brings us to YOU my young friend. You have taught me much in this discussion, mainly a lesson in futility. Let's see if YOU have learned anything. There are quite a few things that I have in mind, but humility stands in the forefront. Now mind you, you are here amongst YOUR peers. I doubt there are any here who question your intelligence, but I'm sure right about now most are watching to see if you can admit when you are wrong. And that is a very important issue, because the intelligent person who cannot admit a mistake will find their intelligence neither respected or trusted by others. Face it, it was observed by all that, yes, you were very good at seizing on mistakes in my grammar or overzealousness in my statements, but when it came to attacking my logic those techniques were woefully inadequate. All of your twisting of my words and meanings, and even your threats fell far short of that goal. In fact, the only thing more inadequate was your completely illogical position, built solely on rumors that directly contradicted all available facts.
So, what shall it be? Are you a man yet? Or are you still the smart aleck boy genius who's so sure he's got life all figured out, that he would try to scientifically explain the yellow rain to those of us who know piss when they see it.
By the by, one more thing in closing. That one rape victim that you found, Charmaine Neville. Did you investigate her ENTIRE statement, or were you just happy to find somebody who actually claimed that they had been raped? Let's examine it, shall we? After all, maybe I'm wrong and you're not obstinate...just gullible.
Charmaine: I was in my house when everything first started. I was in my house. Yes, I live in the [unintelligible]area at the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. When, when, when, when the hurricane came, it blew over the left side of my house from the north side of [unintelligible], and I -- the water was coming in the house in torrents. I had my neighbor, an elderly man who's my neighbor and myself in the house, and with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water but the water was coming in too fast, so we ended up having to leave the house.We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door open on the roof of the school to help people to get them up onto the roof of the school. Later on we found a flat boat and we went around in the neighborhood in the flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school. We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people. But then, things started getting really bad. By the second day, the people that were there that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food, no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming into our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters go across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us, "Hi," and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food, any water, nothing.
Alligators were eating people. They had all kind of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water. We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people, people that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old folks' homes. I tried to get the police to help us but I realized we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the district police station. The boat, the guy who was driving the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to get to places where they could be saved. We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them, but they never would stop and help us.
Finally, it got to be too much. I just took all of the people that I could. I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs that I rolled them from down there at Ninth Ward to the French Quarters, and I went back and I got more people. There were groups of us, you know, there was about 24 of us, and we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarters since we heard that there was phones in the French Quarters and that there wasn't any water. And they were right. There was phones but we couldn't get through. I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come [inaudible] the neighborhood where we were that were helping us to save people, but other men, and they came and they started raping women and [inaudible], and they started killing them. And I don't know who these people were. I'm not going to tell you I know who they were because I don't, but what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened.
People are trying to say that we stayed in the city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this. We didn't have resources to get out. We had NO WAY TO LEAVE. When they gave the evacuation order, if we could have left, we would have left. There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in the homes down in the down, in the downtown area. When we finally did get to --
Priest: Downtown or the Ninth Ward?
Charmaine: The Ninth Ward. In the Ninth Ward, and not just in my neighborhood but in other neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward, there are a lot of people who are still trapped down there. Old people, young people, babies, pregnant women, I mean, nobody's helping them. And I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so that we could steal and loot and, and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. We'd do SOS on the flashlights. We took everything. And it came to a point, it really did come to a point where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the helicopters. They figured maybe they weren't seeing. Maybe if they hear this gunfire, they would stop then, but that didn't help us. Nothing like that helped us.
Finally I got to Canal Street with all of my people that I had saved from back there. There was a whole group of us. I -- I don't want them arresting nobody else -- I broke the window in an RTA bus. I've never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and then everything else into that bus [rising hysteria, sobs] and we drove and we drove and we drove. And millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus with them.
Priest: [inaudible].
Charmaine: All I did was what He gave me about the willpower to do.
Now mind you, she has since admitted that she didn't drive the bus, but was on it. We now know that the hundreds of bodies that she had to walk over and the babies floating in the water and the alligators eating people wasn't true. We now know all of the homicidal raping of women didn't happen. So, how much of her story should we believe? Maybe she did take that crowbar and burst open that door. Maybe she did rescue all of those policemen. Maybe she did roll those 2 legless women into the French Quarter. Maybe she did rescue all of those people. Maybe she did load all of those people in wheelchairs and then everything else onto that bus. Maybe she did get raped. Maybe she did...and maybe she didn't.
I'd sure hate to see you or anyone else convicted of rape on that kind of testimony.
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We will indeed see what took place, whether crime was sparse and mild or whether it serious enough for the national guard to be sent in with shoot to kill orders. I'll be here.
:hmm: [crickets]
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News of Pandemonium May Have Slowed Aid
Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims.Claims of widespread looting, gunfire directed at helicopters and rescuers, homicides, and rapes, including those of "babies" at the Louisiana Superdome, frequently turned out to be overblown, if not completely untrue, officials now say.
The sensational accounts delayed rescue and evacuation efforts already hampered by poor planning and a lack of coordination among local, state and federal agencies. People rushing to the Gulf Coast to fly rescue helicopters or to distribute food, water and other aid steeled themselves for battle. In communities near and far, the seeds were planted that the victims of Katrina should be kept away, or at least handled with extreme caution.
"Rumor control was a beast for us," said Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who was stationed at the Superdome. "People would hear something on the radio and come and say that people were getting raped in the bathroom or someone had been murdered. I would say, 'Ma'am, where?' I would tell them if there were bodies, my guys would find it. Everybody heard, nobody saw. Logic was out the window because the situation was illogical."
CNN reported repeatedly on Sept. 1, three days after Katrina ravaged New Orleans, that evacuations at the Superdome were suspended because "someone fired a shot at a helicopter." But Louisiana National Guard officials on the ground at the time now say that no helicopters came under attack and that evacuations were never stopped because of gunfire.Later that morning, during a briefing carried live on local radio and local and national television, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said, "We have gotten reports, but unconfirmed, of some of our deputies and sheriffs that have either been injured or killed." Of the thousands of law enforcement officials who converged on New Orleans, only one was shot. The wound to the leg was self-inflicted in a struggle, a spokesman for the Guard said last week.
The Washington Post, in a Sept. 1 front-page article, noted that evacuees at the Superdome were repeating rumors of rapes and killings but quoted Maj. Bush as saying "none of that" occurred. A Sept. 15 front-page story said the precise number of people who died in the convention center was not known at the time, but officials believed it could be as many as 10.Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, said that reporters got bogged down trying to tell people how bad the situation was rather than "gathering facts and corroborating that information."
"The television stations were reporting that people were literally stepping over bodies and violence was out of control," said Blanco press secretary Denise Bottcher, who was at the governor's side. "But the National Guardsmen were saying that what we were seeing on CNN was contradictory to what they were seeing. It didn't match up."Violent crimes with a weapon, such as aggravated battery, numbered only a few dozen, Letten said. Officials made arrests for a double homicide and two rapes in Jefferson Parish and one rape in Orleans Parish, said Pam Laborde of the Louisiana Department of Corrections. Federal agents arrested a man for shooting at a helicopter, on Sept. 5. But several officials, including Blanco, now believe that some of the gunfire people reported in the city was attempts to signal rescuers because residents have told them so. -
u kinda sound like the sugarhill gang
I'm insulted! :lolsign:
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That Batle Track from you is great!I like you`r style..
And..:mygod:.....That Song "Computer Age"..Thats is banging!
This may seem like I`m`sucking up but i realy mean that! :word:
Thanx man. :)
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Actually, I have a contact at the largest hiphop paper in Sweden with about 100 000 readers... if you need some promotion, some mentioning, I might be able to get them to feature an interview with you, just tell me if you are interested and I can speak with the boss of the paper.
Hey, that would be GREAT! I'd love to do it Lerkot, thanx a lot!
We actually have some new remixes of "Destination Earth (1999)" being released out of Sweden on Deeplay Soultec Records within a month or so. They're House mixes but we're real excited about them.
Thanx again man! :2thumbs:
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I would like to hear something.Where could i listen to some stuff?
Oh and a question..Are you still recording?
http://www.jamonproductions.com. Go to The Vault, plenty to check out there.
Yeah, I'm still recording. I'll be recording until they wrestle my keyboard away from me. :1-say-yes:
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Thanx Y'all! :)
All except for Chief. Chief can kiss my big round booty! :damnlorettas:
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This looks like im sucking up now but im really interested. How successful were u back in the day, when jam on it came out, it was the same year i was born so its probably why i havnt heard of u. Im guessin u were pretty successful since mos def covered u and Will sampled u. But did u have good chart success and stuff?
We had a few records that did well on the R&B charts, and Jam On It actually did well on the Pop charts, which was almost unheard of for Rap back then. Pierre Cardin and Jermaine Dupri covered Jam On It as well, and lots of people have sampled it, as well as other records of ours. We were on a national tour with Cameo and were also on the original Fresh Fest with RunDMC, The Fat Boys, Whodini and Kurtis Blow. We must have done at least 100 shows with RunDMC, a couple of shows with them opening for us. In fact, the very first show we ever did with them, the promoter only had enough to pay 1 group, so he paid us and stiffed them. They got mad and pulled the plug on the tape player right in the middle of our show. We were also with them the night Run first pulled his "who's house is this" routine (he was hella drunk).
Oh...and WE were the FIRST Hip-Hop band...not Stetsasonic. :davidblaine:
Is there any DVDs of your concert footage? I'd love to see that!
Unfortunately, no. The people who we were signed to spent next to no money on marketing and promotion for us. If they had we would have been 10X as big today. They were too busy robbing us blind.
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cool thanx for the info, Tim said u wouldnt mind answering stuff, one more question, are u really from outer space haha.
My pleasure, and yes, yes I am. :1-say-yes:
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It was first on a DJ Clue mixtape, then it came out as a single on Tommy Boy. I don't think it ever came out on an album.
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This looks like im sucking up now but im really interested. How successful were u back in the day, when jam on it came out, it was the same year i was born so its probably why i havnt heard of u. Im guessin u were pretty successful since mos def covered u and Will sampled u. But did u have good chart success and stuff?
We had a few records that did well on the R&B charts, and Jam On It actually did well on the Pop charts, which was almost unheard of for Rap back then. Pierre Cardin and Jermaine Dupri covered Jam On It as well, and lots of people have sampled it, as well as other records of ours. We were on a national tour with Cameo and were also on the original Fresh Fest with RunDMC, The Fat Boys, Whodini and Kurtis Blow. We must have done at least 100 shows with RunDMC, a couple of shows with them opening for us. In fact, the very first show we ever did with them, the promoter only had enough to pay 1 group, so he paid us and stiffed them. They got mad and pulled the plug on the tape player right in the middle of our show. We were also with them the night Run first pulled his "who's house is this" routine (he was hella drunk).
Oh...and WE were the FIRST Hip-Hop band...not Stetsasonic. :davidblaine:
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Thanx Tim, I really appreciate it man! :) Glad you're feelin it Julie. :)
Hey James, guess you've got no excuses!
Here's a link to their site. http://www.electroutopia.co.uk/
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Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated
Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated
6 bodies found at Dome; 4 at Convention Center
By Brian Thevenot
and Gordon Russell
Staff writers
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.
That the nation's front-line emergency management 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 media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, 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.
"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports about the Dome and Convention Center.
"We swept both buildings several times, because we kept getting reports of more bodies there," Cataldie said. "But it just wasn't the case."
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina - making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages.
"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."
As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: evacuees firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people killed for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members" killing and raping people inside the Dome. Unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies, "we couldn't count."
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. Nagin told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic 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.
Military, law enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees - about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center - overwhelmed their security personnel. The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. Security was nonexistent at the Convention Center, which was never designated as a shelter. Authorities provided no food, water or medical care until troops secured the building the Friday after the storm.
While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence, as legend has it.
"Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated," said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. "If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them - then that became 18."
Soldier shot - by himself
Inside the Dome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified. Even that incident, in which Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion was injured, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested a suspect.
Watt was attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, which he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as he walked through about six inches of water, Watt was attacked with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun - he accidentally shot himself in the commotion. The attacker never took his gun from him, Baldwin said. New Orleans police investigated the matter fully and sent the suspect to jail in Breaux Bridge, Baldwin said.
As for other shootings, Baldwin said, "We actively patrolled 24 hours a day, and nobody heard another shot."
Doug Thornton, regional vice president of SMG, which manages the Dome, walked the complex from before the storm until the final evacuation and kept a meticulous journal. In a Sept. 9 interview, he said he heard reports of rapes and killings, but they were unconfirmed and came from evacuees and security officials.
"We walked through the facility every day, and we didn't see all this that was being reported," said Thornton, one of about 35 Dome employees who rode out Katrina in the building and lived there in the days after the storm hit. "We never felt threatened. It's hard to determine what's real and what's not real."
No victims
Inside the Convention Center, the rumors of widespread violence have proved hard to substantiate, as well, though the masses of evacuees endured terrifying and inhumane conditions.
Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the Convention Center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Sept. 1, the Thursday after Katrina. He was appalled by what he saw. Thugs hotwired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze from every room in the building, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, and neither did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on at about six occasions.
NOPD Capt. Jeff Winn's 20-member SWAT team responded on about 10 occasions to calls from the Convention Center, usually after reports of shots being fired. The group found people huddled in the fetal position, lying flat on the ground to avoid bullets or running for the exits. They also heard stories of gang rapes, armed robberies and other violent crimes, but no victims ever came forward while his officers were in the building, he said.
"What's true and what's not, we don't really know," he said.
Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center Sept. 2 at about noon.
It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. What the soldiers found - elderly people and infants near death without food, water and medicine; crowds living in filth - shocked them more than anything they'd seen in combat zones overseas. But they found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any killings, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.
Another commander at the scene, Lt. Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, said the crowd welcomed the soldiers. "It reminded me of the liberation of France in World War II. There were people cheering; one boy even saluted," he said. "We never - never once - encountered any hostility."
One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, said Edwards, who conducted the review.
It's possible more than four people died at the Convention Center. Fore, the center's vice president, said he saw another body outside the building early in the first week after the storm, covered in a shroud on the pavement along Julia Street, near the back of the Convention Center. It's unclear whether that body ended up in the nearby food service entrance, where the four confirmed bodies were found later.
Also, several news organizations reported the body of 91-year-old Booker T. Harris, which sat covered in a chair on Convention Center Boulevard for several days after he died on the back of a truck while being evacuated.
Just one of the dead appeared to be the victim of foul play, said Winn, one of few law enforcement officers who spent any time patrolling the Convention Center before it was secured. Winn, who did the final sweep of the building, said one body appeared to have stab wounds, but he could not be sure. Baldwin also said only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, apparently referring to the same body as Winn described. Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals, also confirmed just one suspected homicide at the Convention Center, though he said the victim had been shot, not stabbed.
A Washington Post report quoted another soldier who concluded that three of the four people appeared to have been beaten to death, including an older woman in a wheelchair.
But Spc. Mikel Brooks, an Arkansas Guardsman who said he wheeled the woman's dead body into the food service entrance, said she appeared to have died of natural causes. Brooks went on to say that the woman had expired sitting next to her husband, who shocked him by asking him to bring the wheelchair back.
The Post also cited evacuee Tony Cash and three other unnamed sources saying a young boy died of an asthma attack, but multiple officials could not confirm that death.
One attack thwarted
Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities - many allegedly involving small children - may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, would be nearly impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites.
Numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes, in particular attacks on two young girls in the Superdome ladies room and the killing of one of them, but police and military officials said they know nothing of such an incident.
Soldiers and police did confirm at least one attempted rape of a child. Riley said a man tried to sexually assault a young girl, but was "beaten up" by civilians and apprehended by police. It was unclear if that incident was the one that gained wide currency among evacuees.
Baldwin, the National Guard commander of a special reaction team patrolling the Dome, also said he knew of only one attempted sexual assault of a child - but the details of his story, while similar, differed somewhat from that of Riley. It was unclear last week whether the two men spoke about the same incident.
Soldiers apprehended the assailant after a "commotion" in the bathroom exposed him, Baldwin said, but he knew nothing about the man being beaten. Furthermore, in a detail that raises questions about whether officials have full knowledge of any sex crimes, Baldwin said his men turned over one alleged child molester to New Orleans police - only to find him again inside the Dome two days later, reportedly attempting to molest other children.
"We ran into the same guy a couple days later," he said. "The crowd came to us and said, 'You better do something with this guy or we're going to do something with him.' ... That kind of re-confirmed (the first allegation), when the crowd came to us saying he was putting his hands on kids."
But other accusations that have gained wide currency are more demonstrably false. For instance, no one found the body of a girl - whose age was estimated at anywhere from 7 to 13 - who, according to multiple reports, was raped and killed with a knife to the throat at the Convention Center.
Many evacuees at the Convention Center the morning of Sept. 3 treated the story as gospel, and ticked off further atrocities: a baby trampled to death, multiple child rapes.
Salvatore Hall, standing on the corner of Julia Street and Convention Center Boulevard that day, just before the evacuation, said, "They raped and killed a 10-year-old in the bathroom."
Neither he nor the many people around him who corroborated the killing had seen it themselves.
Talk of rape and killing inside the Dome was so pervasive that it prompted a steady stream of evacuees to begin leaving Aug. 31, braving thigh-high foul waters on Poydras Street. Many said they were headed back to homes in flooded neighborhoods.
"There's people getting raped and killed in there," said Lisa Washington of Algiers, who had come to the Dome with about 25 relatives and friends. "People are getting diseases. It's like we're in Afghanistan. We're fighting for our lives right now."
One of her relatives nodded. "They've had about 14 rapes in there," he said.
The official word
In many cases, authorities gave credibility to portraits of violence broadcast around the world.
Compass told Winfrey on Sept. 6 that "some of the little babies (are) getting raped" in the Dome. Nagin backed it with his own tale of horrors: ''They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.''
But both men have since pulled back to a degree.
"The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," Compass said, conceding his earlier statements were false. Asked for the source of the information, Compass said he didn't remember.
Nagin frankly acknowledged that he doesn't know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Dome and the Convention Center - and may never.
"I'm having a hard time getting a good body count," he said.
Compass said rumors had often crippled authorities' response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to respond to situations that turned out not to exist. He offered his own intensely personal example: The day after the storm, he heard "some civilians" talking about how a band of armed thugs had invaded the Ritz-Carlton hotel and started raping women - including his 24-year-old daughter, who stayed there through the storm. He rushed to the scene only to find that although a group of men had tried to enter the hotel, they weren't armed and were easily turned back by police.
Compass, however, promulgated some of the unfounded rumors himself, in interviews in which he characterized himself and his officers as outgunned warriors taking out armed bands of thugs at every turn.
"People would be shooting at us, and we couldn't shoot back because of the families," Compass told a reporter from the (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post who interviewed him at the Saints' Monday Night Football game in New York, where he was the guest of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. "All we could do is rush toward the flash."
Compass added that he and his officers succeeded in wrestling 30 weapons from criminals using the follow-the-muzzle-flash technique, the story said.
"We got 30 that way," Compass was quoted as saying.
Asked about the muzzle-flash story last week, Compass said, "That really happened" to Winn's SWAT team at the Convention Center.
But Winn, when asked about alleged shootouts in a separate interview, said his unit saw muzzle flashes and heard gunshots only one time. Despite aggressively frisking a number of suspects, the team recovered no weapons. His unit never found anyone who had been shot.
Many soldiers and humanitarian workers now agree that although a number of bad actors committed violent or criminal acts, the evacuees responded well considering the hell they endured.
"These people - our people - did nothing wrong," said Sherry Watters of the state Department of Social Services, who was working with the medical unit at the Dome and noted the crowd's mounting frustration. "No human should have to live like that for even a minute."
Crowds pitch in
As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.
"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.
But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.
"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them saying. "We're all family here."
About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.
"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.
As the Dome cleared out Sept. 3, Beron, the National Guard commander, fashioned a plan to deal with the dead. He knew of the six bodies in the freezer, but expected far more. He and an Ohio National Guard commander sent 450 Ohio troops to search every nook of the Dome, top to bottom. They told them to mark locations of bodies on a map of the Dome, to rope off suspected crime scenes, and leave a chemical light sticks next to each one so they could be retrieved later.
"I fully expected to find more bodies, both homicides and natural causes," he said.
They found nothing.
Staff writers Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa contributed to this report.
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Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 25 - After the storm came the siege. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, terror from crimes seen and unseen, real and rumored, gripped New Orleans. The fears changed troop deployments, delayed medical evacuations, drove police officers to quit, grounded helicopters. Edwin P. Compass III, the police superintendent, said that tourists - the core of the city's economy - were being robbed and raped on streets that had slid into anarchy.The mass misery in the city's two unlit and uncooled primary shelters, the convention center and the Superdome, was compounded, officials said, by gangs that were raping women and children.
A month later, a review of the available evidence now shows that some, though not all, of the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations, the product of chaotic circumstances that included no reliable communications, and perhaps the residue of the longstanding raw relations between some police officers and members of the public.
To assemble a picture of crime, both real and perceived, The New York Times interviewed dozens of evacuees in four cities, police officers, medical workers and city officials. Though many provided concrete, firsthand accounts, others passed along secondhand information or rumor that after multiple tellings had ossified into what became accepted as fact.What became clear is that the rumor of crime, as much as the reality of the public disorder, often played a powerful role in the emergency response. A team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state trooper's report that a mob of armed, marauding people had commandeered boats. It turned out to be two men escaping from their flooded streets, said Farol Champlin, a paramedic with the Acadian Ambulance Company.
On another occasion, the company's ambulances were locked down after word came that a firehouse in Covington had been looted by armed robbers of all its water - a report that proved totally untrue, said Aaron Labatt, another paramedic.
A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes, said Maj. Gen. Ron Mason of the 35th Infantry Division of the Kansas National Guard.
"It's part of human nature," General Mason said. "When you get one or two reports, it echoes around the community."
Faced with reports that 400 to 500 armed looters were advancing on the town of Westwego, two police officers quit on the spot. The looters never appeared, said the Westwego police chief, Dwayne Munch.
"Rumors could tear down an entire army," Chief Munch said.
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.
"I think it was urban myth," said Lieutenant Benelli, who also heads the police union. "Any time you put 25,000 people under one roof, with no running water, no electricity and no information, stories get told."
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Some Reports of N.O. Violence Exaggerated
A week after the floodwaters poured into the city, an Arkansas National Guardsman told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans that soldiers had discovered 30 to 40 bodies inside a freezer in the convention center's food area. Guardsman Mikel Brooks told the newspaper that some of the dead appeared to have met violent ends, including "a 7-year-old with her throat cut."When the convention center was swept, however, no such pile of bodies was found.
Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National Guard said reports of violence at the Superdome and the convention center were overblown. He was head of security at the Superdome and led the 1,000 military police and infantrymen who went in to secure the center on Sept. 2.
"The incidents were highly exaggerated" _ the result of fear and hopelessness, he said. "For the amount of the people in the situation, it was a very stable environment."
Thibodeaux said his guard unit received no reports of rape.
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Police Chief Abruptly Resigns in New Orleans
During the first few days, as local officials grappled with the overwhelming disaster, Mr. Nagin and Mr. Compass were outspoken about how desperate the situation in their city was, though some of those statements are now coming under scrutiny, with some critics saying they exaggerated the situation.An editorial in The Times Picayune today faulted the two New Orleans officials for their leadership during those first few days, and for their public statements about the direness of the situation.
"It's understandable that in the tense and fractured days after Katrina, frightened people reported rumor as fact, and soldiers, police and even elected officials believed what they heard and passed it on." the editorial said. "In the hell that descended after Katrina, almost anything, no matter how horrific, seemed possible.
"But now that we know better, it's essential that people like Mayor Nagin and Superintendent Compass set the record straight, just as forcefully. That might mean saying, 'I spoke too soon" or even, 'I exaggerated,' " the editorial said.
The newspaper said that during an interview by Oprah Winfrey, Mr. Compass said "that babies were being raped."
"Thank God it didn't happen," the editorial said.
Last Thursday, as he waited for Mayor Nagin to begin a press conference, Superintendent Compass held court with reporters, and he was asked about reports of rapes and murders at the city's Convention Center and the Superdome, where people had fled to escape the flooding.
He said those reports had been overstated.
"We have no official reports to document any murder," Superintendent Compass said. "Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."
Yet on Sept. 1, he told reporters that at the convention center: "We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten. Tourists are walking in that direction, and they are getting preyed upon."
MaxFly...Ohhhh the hypocrisy!
in Caught in the Middle
Posted
Here is my "not one person" post in it's entirety:
As EVERYBODY HERE CAN SEE so you can't twist my words anymore, I was specifically talking about the stories that YOU posted here. I STAND BY MY STATEMENT STILL! The only statement that PURPORTS to be first person is the one from the doctor. I tried to show you how it is common that people who are a part of a team or group will refer to what happens to that group as "we", even if they didn't personally take part, and of course you ridiculed me. Now we find that a portion of his "first person" statement NEVER HAPPENED, so we have to assume that either the good doctor was A) lying, B) grossly exaggerating, or C) was relaying what was told him by his colleagues and was misinformed or misunderstood. I will give the doctor the benefit of the doubt and choose C).
YOU insisted that these horrors took place even in the face of surmounting evidence to the contrary. When I asked you why, you had no answer, but stuck to it just the same. When I made the point that this was evidence of a racist taint to your perceptions, you got offended but insisted on ignoring all of the evidence anyway. Now you claim that, even though all of these horrors were completely unsubstantiated by anybody, sending in troops with "shoot to kill" orders was the right thing to do. You say that "they went in and reestablished order" when it is now obvious that disorder was extremely over-exaggerated. You say that it hasn't been demonstrated that the "shoot to kill" orders were wrong, when it has now been proven that those orders were given based solely on RUMORS!
Your words betray your mindset.
You have been proven to be WRONG. You have been proven to be a HYPOCRITE. You have been proven to be a BULLY. You have been proven to be GULLIBLE. You have been proven to be OBSTINATE. You have been proven to be ABSENT OF ANY HUMILITY. And WORST OF ALL, you have been proven to be willing to believe THE ABSOLUTELY MOST HORRIBLE THINGS OF BLACK PEOPLE, EVEN IN THE FACE OF EVIDENCE TO ABSOLVE THEM!!!
Kanye West said that they were sending troops down there to kill us. He was implying that the "shoot to kill orders" were unjustified. Turns out that he was right. You, on the other hand, still approve of sending troops with "shoot to kill" orders amongst the suffering innocent based solely on rumors, EVEN AFTER knowing this to be the case. Better hope that the police are never dispatched to your home under the same situation.
Tim, I noticed that the other topic was locked and that you seem to want me not to "get too excited". I'm sorry that I had to take your boy down a few pegs man, but he deserved it. It seems like he still hasn't learned, but if at least it got him to stop bullying his fellow forum members it would be a start. However, seeing that he is a Mod (God knows why :shrug: ) and I'm not really anything but a newbie I realize that I may be a disruptive presence. Anyway, just say the word and I'm ghost man.