Superdome deaths worse than beheadings in Iraq?

Stephen Spruiell at NRO’s Media Blog has a post up this morning that discusses an absolutely ridiculous claim made by CNN’s "American Morning" host Soledad O’Brien last Tuesday. Her quote (via the NY Daily News):

"It is a sad thing to watch military veterans cry as they tell you the beheadings in Baghdad were less horrific than what they saw as 30,000 people marched from the Superdome through a shopping mall and onto buses to who knows where."

Spruiell sets the record straight by noting a NOLA.com article which gives some facts apparently of which O’Brien is unaware (emphasis Spruiell’s):

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.

Read the whole thing.

In a related post, Michelle Malkin examines post-Katrina crimes as well and has a round up of links.

Evon says:

September 26, 2005 at 12:08 pm

The MSM is getting less and less reliable every day. I never watch CNN but it’s good to be informed from time to time what I’m missing. Thanks.

Walter E. Wallis says:

September 26, 2005 at 1:45 pm

I believe in the three strikes law for newspapers. Three uncorrected outrages and they’re gone. Running short of papers.

Tom in Texas says:

September 26, 2005 at 3:37 pm

Hello to all. First time here. I wanted to make a quick commment concerning the apparent “suicide” in the Superdome. I volunteered at the Reliant Center in Houston in Katrina’s aftermath (it is a convention center directly adjacent to the Astrodome, which is actually officially known as the Reliant Astrodome, if anyone cares). I heard countless stories from the evacuees there. One man in his mid 20’s told me of a man who raped a woman in the Superdome. He was subsequently tracked down by the woman’s boyfriend and his friends, beaten to a pulp, and thrown from the upper levels of the Dome — prehaps this is the “apparent suicide?” There is, obviously, no verification of this other than Jamal (the man I spoke to who claimed to witness the entire thing)and his family.
Other interesting tales include one of a man in the Superdome who raped a teenager and was beaten and turned over to the National Guard. The Guard proceeded to heave the unconscious perpetrator off a bridge into the flooded city of NO, where he presumably drowned. There were many people (at least 20) who told me they tried to cross the bridge into Gretna and were turned back by the sheriff’s department with shotguns and dogs.
The media obviously has a responsibility to verify tales like this before releasing them on its pages. That being said, I tend to believe them. I also personally hope that frontier justice style stories are true. If these men did the acts they are accused of, they deserved their punishment. They were a waste of water and food that belonged to deserving victims.

Sister Toldjah says:

September 26, 2005 at 9:55 pm

Tom, it’s going to be a long time (I think) before we know the full scope of what happened at the Superdome. My bet is that most of it will be unverifiable.