Bad Facts Beyond Superdome

Here's a Reason Magazine interview with Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who had first-hand knowledge of the events inside the Superdome during the Katrina crisis. I presume he is of no relation to the Commander-in-Chief. Excerpt:

Bush: ...I mean, those 20,000 people no longer had TV or really any contact with the outside world, for the most part, from their point of view.

And then there was a lot of things that made my job a lot harder in the way of what they would hear on the radio. A lot of them had AM radios, and they would listen to news reports that talked about the "dead bodies at the Superdome," and the "murders in the bathrooms of the Superdome," and the "babies being raped at the Superdome," and it would create terrible panic, of which I would have to try and convince them that no, it wasn't happening.... You could use logic, but I mean there was so much desperation and so much fear already, because of what had happened to us.

Someone would say, "You know they're killing people in the bathroom; they found a girl's body and she'd been raped and her throat was slit and they found her in the bathroom," and you could say, "Well, did you see it?"

"No, I heard."

"Well, what bathroom?"

"Well, I don't know; one of those over there."

Everything was some other place, and "I heard it"...and none of it was true.