BBC still lying about Katrina

The BBC is still peddling lies one year on.

Those who had no means to escape before the storm struck - mainly the poor and elderly - where left behind. The scenes of misery and desperation that followed shocked the world.

Both of those assertions are lies and the BBC knows it.

Here the BBC describe the flooded buses NO Mayor Nagin was supposed to use to evacuate those people.

Then someone sent me a photo that had been circulating on blogs of yellow New Orleans school buses inundated in their parking lot.

They had clearly not been used for evacuation as they should have been according to the city and state plan.

This showed that the mayor, praised without much stint until then, had something to answer for.

And whose fault was that? Not President Bush's.

That "someone" who sent in the picture was me.

The photo of the unused school buses in New Orleans came by way of a site called the USS Neverdock, so-called because it is always in action, I suppose.

It was only after a concerted email and comments effort by me and Biased BBC, that Paul reported the truth.

Likewise the "mainly poor and elderly" victim assertion isn't entirely correct and not in context. Take the poor and the black claims. Source.

A study of the locations where bodies were recovered showed that they were not disproportionately concentrated in low-income neighborhoods. According to the story, ''42 percent of the bodies found in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes were recovered in neighborhoods with poverty rates higher than 30 percent. That's only slightly higher than the 39 percent of residents who lived in such neighborhoods."

And race? In a database on 486 Katrina victims, ''African-Americans outnumbered whites 51 percent to 44 percent. In the area overall, African-Americans outnumber whites 61 percent to 36 percent."

As for the elderly...

Age did matter. People 60 and older made up about 15 percent of New Orleans residents but 74 percent of the known victims. Many reports suggest that this sad statistic is due not to callous abandonment of the most helpless but to the fact that many elderly people, who had weathered many previous storms, refused to evacuate.

Live interviews with those who refused to leave bear this out.

Then the mayor refused an offer to take people out by train.

“We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm’s way,” said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. “The city declined.”

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.

Search my blog using Katrina and you'll find the real truth about Katrina and the media smear campign against Bush.