Now that the press has been barred from photographing the dead, remaining New Orleans residents are being driven from their homes, and the city is under military rule, it turns out there aren’t so many bodies after all. If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a body floats up from its watery grave, and there are no reporters there to see it, does it exist?
— more philosophical musings below the fold —
Read it and weep.
Death Toll May Be Far Less Than Expected
September 09, 2005 4:21 PM EDT
NEW ORLEANS – Alarming predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans may have been greatly exaggerated, with authorities saying Friday that the first street-by-street sweep of the swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than feared.
“Some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred,” said Col. Terry Ebbert, the city’s homeland security chief.
He declined to give a revised estimate. But he added: “Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000.”
The encouraging news came as authorities officially shifted most of their attention to counting and removing the dead after spending days cajoling, persuading and all but strong-arming the living into leaving the city because of the danger of fires and disease from the fetid floodwaters…
After the citizens are gone, and the press has been threatened and denied access, who will count our dead?
…the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.
At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It’s a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.
So are there really fewer bodies than expected, or are a whole of lot Katrina’s casualties about to slip down the memory hole?
but what about the buildings? MSNBC had a report of entering a hospital/nursing home and finding 17 bodies in just 2 areas before they had to leave.
There are many areas that have been inaccessible other than by boat. As the water dries, what is going to be found in the homes, where there may have been people too weak or afraid to make it to their rooftops?
Or are they just going to call those buildings “abandoned” and bulldoze them with bodies inside?
That’s why what the Wiki folks are doing is so important, taking the scattered data from people looking for loved ones and putting it in a centralized place. Not only does it make it easier for those people to be reunited, it can give us a bigger picture of who is missing, and maybe eventually, who has never been found…
If the media does not demand their freedom to report and tape what is going on down there with the body count, as you say before they are bulldozed away, we will never know. Why are none of the other media outlets other than CNN suing for the right to be there and film whatever they damn well please. When is the media going to wake up and stop being complicit? This could well turn out to be the biggest coverup in hostory. Even during WWII they filmed the bodies so the worl would know the atrocities committed by Hitler.
Good point about the concentration camps. But, of course, the Germans lost the war, so they couldn’t demand respect for the people they killed like our government can.
When ARE the media going to wake up and stop being complicit?
Never.
The American media do not function as a separate “watchdog” institution now, and have not for some time. Particularly since the mergers of large media companies–begun under Clinton and continued under Bush–the media report nothing that would cause lasting damage to the American ruling class, nor to the “permanent government” of the very wealthy, corporations, and long-serving bureaucrats, who all collaborate to run the country no matter who controls the Presidency and the Congress.
If you want a watchdog media, you’re going to have to create your own. Blogging isn’t a threat to the ruling class, or your corporate oligarchy would have tried to shut it down.
Remember what happened to legendary reporter and anchorman Dan Rather when he butted heads with Bush? He’s been cast into ignoble retirement–as an object lesson to what happens to even famous “reporters” who actually try to do their job. Rather, for all of his other faults, has integrity and courage–but he was broken into little pieces and scattered to the winds with the all-too-eager complicity of CBS executives.
I have been fearing this. Being vigilant about the missing is the most powerful counter to thisl.
Mom, I got an F in Algebra– Oh my God you did?! No, I actually got a D– Oh well that’s great.
This stinks like a- we might have lost 10,000 (I heard up to even 40,000 dead)… Oh what a relief we actually only lost 5,000. We must not be doing that bad a job…
Either way the death toll is painful and unacceptable.
The official death toll in New Orleans is 118 as of Friday.
Why is that the official toll?
Are they waiting to count all the bodies or are they delaying the count?
Brussard has said the federal government is lying about the death toll.
In the long run, it will be very difficult to “hide” the number of dead. This isn’t Iraq, where there isn’t access to independent records. The Social Security Administration, for one, is going to have to tabulate the raw data and it will be available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act.
In the end, we will know with surprising accuracy the true number of dead. How many that will be I cannot guess, as I haven’t a rational basis for prediction. I take it that Bush’s idea is we should all jump for joy if “only” 5,000 are dead instead of 10,000, as if that represents some sort of triumph. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Bushies had some hand in pushing that “10,000 dead” figure so that it looks favourable by comparison to the real number.