Lurid reports of rape, murder in Katrina’s aftermath exposed as frauds

By Joseph Kay

A series of articles over the past week have confirmed that the widespread reports of massive looting, murder and violence in hurricane-devastated New Orleans were either concocted out of whole cloth or grossly exaggerated. In the first several days after New Orleans was inundated, these stories were disseminated by government officials at the federal, state and local level, and trumpeted by the media in banner headlines and lurid TV accounts.

Now that officials have been forced to admit that they had little or no evidence of armed thugs roaming the devastated city and mugging, raping and killing tourists and stranded residents, they and their media accomplices are seeking to explain away the disinformation campaign as the inadvertent result of confusion, fear and the breakdown in communications in New Orleans.