Psyops and Disinfo in New Orleans

Here is how the disinfo boys and girls work. In an article in the Los Angeles Times, we now find out that all those lurid stories about rampages, rapes and murders in the Superdome are not true.

But by now the damage is done. The reports were circulated by the media, confirming white folk's fears of rampaging blacks. Fascist talk radio and blogs picked it up and ran with it for weeks so that now it is part of accepted mythology. The mythology works for the Powers that Be on several levels. Once again, any possibility united front of average people against a psychopathic power structure is prevented by pitting whites against blacks using deep subconscious fears. It makes U.S. citizens seem "foreign." It also is designed to make people welcome military takeovers in "emergency" situations, with the definitions of 'emergency' no doubt becoming broader and broader as time goes by.

Then, weeks later, it turns out that none of it was true. But will the media blast that news everywhere like the erroneous reports were? Of course not. NPR, the L.A. Times and a few elite outlets will run one-time pieces, a few op-ed columnists will comment on it and that will be it. Don't hold your breath for Drudge, Limbaugh or O'Reilly to retract anything. So, unlike the L.A. Times, I don't think that this happened by accident. It has the earmarks of a psyops disinfo operation.

Here is some of the L.A. Times article:

Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy

Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong.

By Susannah Rosenblatt and James RaineyTimes Staff Writers

September 27, 2005

BATON ROUGE, La. — Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane.

The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans' main evacuation shelter. Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports."

It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Bush said Monday of the Superdome.His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified "rapes," and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of "scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials."

Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.

The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement."

It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."

Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

The New York Times repeated some of the reports of violence and unrest, but the newspaper usually was more careful to note that the information could not be verified.