There's been a lot of nonsense going around about what happened to New Orleans in particular and the Gulf Coast in general in the wake of Katrina. (Much of it is being spread by people who are looking for any sort of excuse not to care about drowning black people.)
Let's sort out the biggest myths, and post the information we need to debunk them. I'll provide examples of what I'm looking to do.
More after the jump.
(UPDATE: Diary name changed, in light of the excellent suggestions made by Pericles in his diary today.)
Myth: Crazed looters tried to shoot down a Chinook at the Superdome!
Fact: A Louisiana National Guard officer said that there was a report of one gunshot allegedly being fired at a Chinook -- which, by the way, is designed to withstand RPGs, and thus laughs at gunshots -- but the FAA says that they have received no such reports:
Laura Brown, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman in Washington, said she had no such report.
"We're controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on," she said, adding that the FAA was in contact with the military as well as civilian aircraft.
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Myth: It didn't matter that Bush took away the levee money, because that wouldn't have stopped Katrina.
Fact: The levees, once fully refurbished, would have turned back a Katrina-force hurricane -- and refurbishing would have been finished two years ago if Bush hadn't taken the money away.
Ample evidence for this is found in a previous Kos diary, here.
More recently, anecdotal evidence appeared over at Wonkette's blog, though (UPDATED as of 1:16 pm CDT) it's in doubt whether the information within the e-mail can be trusted, as it seems to refer to a different part of the levee system from those sections that actually gave way.