The convention center was empty when Thevenot arrived, except for about 250 members of the Arkansas National Guard and other rescue officials in the immediate area. The last evacuees had been bused out over the weekend. Thevenot interviewed guardsmen, who showed him four bodies that had been deposited inside a food service entrance of the building. “[Mikel] Brooks and several other guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 bodies in the convention center’s freezer,” Thevenot reported in the Times-Picayune the following day, adding that Brooks told him one of the bodies was a “7-year-old girl with her throat cut.”

Lt. Col. John Edwards, the commander of Brooks’ unit, told Salon he first heard of the Times-Picayune story about two weeks later. “This was news to us,” Edwards said of the alleged dozens of bodies in the freezer, which were never found. Only four bodies were discovered inside after the convention center was evacuated, and only one of them was a suspected homicide, according to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina left the American media with its biggest story since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some reporters, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper, earned praise for challenging equivocating public officials and a slow government response that left thousands stranded in desperate conditions. But the media also displayed shortcomings of its own: Two of the most prominent and disturbing types of stories from the New Orleans disaster zone — violent criminals committing atrocities inside the two main refugee centers downtown, and rogue gunmen firing at rescue helicopters — turned out to be wildly exaggerated, and in many cases plain false.

Even today, questions remain about various incidents, and why the unconfirmed horror stories were treated as fact and gained such wide currency. It is clear, however, that the media was only the last link — if the most influential one — in a chain reaction that led the world to believe gang rape, rampant shootings and infanticide were fast compounding the city’s devastation. Many of the overblown reports trace back through poorly informed public officials, to overworked police officers and national guardsmen, to frightened evacuees themselves. The flooded city of New Orleans, experts say, was hit with a perfect storm of conditions in which fear, despair and wild rumors, like a contagious disease, can thrive. Latent racism, some suggest, further distorted the picture of devastation and chaos presented around the world.

Lt. Col. Edwards says he conducted a review around Sept. 16, interviewing every member of the Guard who was on patrol Sept. 5. Brooks and the other guardsmen claimed that they never told anyone they had actually seen bodies in the freezer, but rather that they’d heard other emergency personnel talking about it in a food line set up for police, guardsmen and other rescue workers outside Harrah’s New Orleans Casino. Edwards invited Thevenot to talk with the guardsmen again, and on Sept. 26, the Times-Picayune published a follow-up report, co-written by Thevenot. It clarified that the paper’s initial report about events at the convention center — picked up by media worldwide — had been wrong, as had been other accounts of unchecked mob violence around the city.

Thevenot was one of the few Picayune staffers who had remained in New Orleans from the time Katrina hit, working in what he describes as “stone-age conditions.” He and other journalists had been working up to 16-hour days without showers or fresh changes of clothes, and had to dictate a number of their stories to editors in Baton Rouge over phone lines that worked only sporadically.

“We worked, as we now know, amid a swirl of misinformation,” Thevenot says. He says he pressed the guardsmen to show him the bodies in the freezer, but that they wouldn’t permit him access. “None of us had access to official, authoritative sources on most subjects we reported until days after the storm. Even some of those official sources proved unreliable, as they worked in the same swirl of rumor as we did.”

Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, says one reason that stories from New Orleans turned out to be wrong was that reporters were unusually reliant on uncorroborated information from individual sources, whether government officials, soldiers or evacuees. “For the most part the structures that might undergird accurate reporting were often literally underwater,” Woods says.

But in the many cases in which the media repeated accounts of atrocities as fact — without noting that they were unconfirmed — more could have been done to accurately inform audiences. Reporters, editors and anchors, says Woods, should have been more forceful about asking, “How do you know that?” — and at the very least have made sure the public heard the answer to that question.

The tales of mayhem from the Superdome, which had been turned into a massive refugee center, were also erroneous. On Sept. 1, CNN ran a report on its Web site quoting an evacuee there who spoke of “people simply dragging corpses into corners.” “They have quite a few people running around here with guns,” CNN quoted the unidentified man as saying. “You got these young teenage boys running around up here raping these girls.”

By Sept. 6, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” aired interviews with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and police Chief Eddie Compass, who repeated accounts of utter depredation as fact, from which they would later backpedal. The show also featured correspondent Lisa Ling talking to unidentified evacuees who had fled to nearby Metairie, La.; they told Ling there were shootings inside the Superdome and dead bodies on the ground. “There were boys waiting in the bathroom for the children,” one unidentified woman said, “and they’d have — they raped the children, have sex with them. One of the girls they raped, then they killed her.”

But according to members of the Louisiana National Guard who were present at the Superdome throughout the crisis, none of these atrocities was verified to have taken place. The guardsmen checked evacuees into the Superdome starting Sunday, Aug. 28, and patrolled the facility until the last evacuees were bused out on Sept. 4. Though isolated cases of assault or rape could remain difficult to verify, there was no pervasive lawlessness. According to Maj. Ed Bush, a Guard public affairs officer who was there from start to finish, no gang members were running around with guns, and no shots were ever fired, except for one instance in which a guardsman accidentally shot himself during a scuffle in a darkened locker room. Of the six people that died there, according to Maj. Bush and other reports, none were murder victims.

“Trust me, we would have known,” Bush said, regarding the reports of rampant gunfire. The reaction from the crowd, he says, “would have been instantaneous, [triggering] massive panic.”

The rumors swirling around the Superdome forced the guardsmen to expend a good deal of energy dispelling the tales of rape and murder, Bush says. He emphasized that the vast majority of evacuees there were “very well behaved.” People would rush up to him and ask, “Don’t you know there’s people being killed in the bathroom? What are you going to do about it?”

“It’s hard to believe that in one building you could have such a fear of the unknown,” Bush says. “It’s almost like the boogeyman was everywhere.”

The miasma of fear was in fact predictable, says Patricia Turner, a scholar in African-American studies at the University of California at Davis who has researched how rumors proliferate. “The odor, lack of hygiene, the heat — death comes with the same odor that apparently was in the air, just choking people in there,” Turner says. Worse yet, she says, was the lack of information. “I think that human beings are inclined to create stories that satisfy a lack of news and closure to things.” People have a set of norms they associate with worst-case scenarios, she says, including the breakdown of social order and acts of raw brutality. As rumors get passed along in such an atmosphere, people often “validate” what they’ve heard by claiming to have witnessed it themselves.

Lennie Echterling, an expert on crisis intervention and a professor of psychology at James Madison University, calls this phenomenon an “emotional contagion.” In crisis situations, he says, people’s suggestibility goes way up. According to Echterling, neurological studies have shown that when confronted with dangerous or disturbing circumstances, the amygdala, a neural structure in the brain strongly linked with emotions, takes over, and can defeat rational thinking and response. Echertling says a person looking at a poisonous snake at the zoo shows how this works: He or she will typically jump back in fear if the snake strikes, despite knowing that the reptile is safely behind a glass barrier.

But while the tales of mayhem and murder were spread by frightened evacuees, they were further perpetuated by the media itself, in a kind of feedback loop: According to Maj. Bush, those stuck inside the Superdome were also hearing the reports on AM radios they’d brought with them — apparently conflating what was happening at the nearby convention center. After the crisis abated, officials confirmed that armed thugs had been largely in control of the convention center until the Arkansas National Guard arrived on the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 2. Deputy Police Commissioner Randy Winn later confirmed that his SWAT unit went into the convention center about 10 times, responding to reports of gunshots, though they said they heard shots and saw muzzle flashes on only one occasion.

Maj. Bush said news organizations often generalized what was happening in the city. “Did it all probably get lumped together to where it got confused if it was heard over an AM radio?” he asked. “I’m sure it did.”

The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath raised the question for many of whether the fact that the population of stranded evacuees was overwhelmingly black helped unleash the flood of false stories. The editor of the Times-Picayune, Jim Amoss, told the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 27 that “if the dome and convention center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”

Turner says Amoss had a point, though she says the impact of class cannot be overlooked, as the vast majority of people stuck in the downtown centers were poor and had no other option but to land there. “The desperation, the poverty and the race of the evacuees” combined, Turner believes, made the media, and perhaps its audiences, more credulous about the atrocities.

Steve Rendall, senior analyst at media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said excessive focus on black looters in the immediate wake of the storm — especially by Fox News — served to equate African-Americans with crime and set the tone for later coverage. That made the stories of widespread violence at the convention center and Superdome “more believable and thus reportable for journalists,” Rendall says.

As for the evacuees’ role in the rumors, both Turner and Rendall point to African-Americans’ long history in the South of experiencing racism and victimization — including the Tuskegee experiments and the deliberate flooding of some of New Orleans’ poorer parishes in 1927. The latter buoyed anti-black conspiracy theories after Hurricane Betsy submerged poor neighborhoods in 1965 — areas like the Ninth Ward, which were also devastated by the fallout from Katrina this year.

At the height of the crisis in New Orleans — from Wednesday, Aug. 31, to Friday, Sept. 2 — newspapers, radio stations and TV channels were also filled with reports of rogue gunmen firing on rescue helicopters.

A Fox News report from Sept. 2 quoted an unidentified ambulance official who said a shot was fired at a military helicopter at the Superdome. “There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters,” Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, told Fox. Additionally, the Associated Press, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN and the Los Angeles Times all reported as fact on at least one occasion that shots were being fired on helicopters, while a Washington Post article stated that “angry crowds have repeatedly shot at rescue crews.”

According to Officer Austin Banks of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a 20-year-old resident of the Algiers district in the West Bank area of New Orleans was arrested on Sept. 5, after neighbors said they witnessed him firing at a helicopter. Federal authorities found two revolvers and a box of ammunition in his apartment, and the suspect has been charged with shooting at a military aircraft by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baton Rouge.

But according to military and Coast Guard officials, no other reports of helicopter shootings have been corroborated. Maj. Bush of the Louisiana Guard says that Task Force Eagle, the military command in charge of all the planes and helicopters that entered the New Orleans area, had no confirmed reports of people firing at aircraft. A civilian had told a guardsman that he’d witnessed a helicopter taking fire while approaching the Superdome, but the report turned out to be false. Likewise, Lt. Col. Edwards of the Arkansas Guard, which operated around the more volatile convention center, knew of no such incidents.

Capt. Bob Mueller, who was in charge of the Coast Guard’s relief efforts in New Orleans, provided Salon with a similar account, saying there were no verified reports of anybody firing upon Coast Guard helicopters. And as Knight Ridder reported on Oct. 3, representatives from the Air Force and the Department of Homeland Security have also been unable to confirm a single incident of gunfire at helicopters.

Woods, of the Poynter Institute, says that because information in post-Katrina New Orleans was so difficult to verify, that made it all the more critical for reporters to press their interview subjects about the information they were providing. He credits the Times-Picayune staff, which managed to operate under extreme conditions, for continuing to report out stories of the aftermath — including the ones they got wrong initially.

Thevenot says he was grateful for the opportunity to go back and correct the record. “Among the Picayune New Orleans team, we all heard far more outrageous tales of violence and death than we actually reported,” he said. “Most of it stayed in our notebooks, unconfirmed and unpublished.”

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

That wasn’t the only sign of weakness. When White House spokesman Scott McClellan dropped the ultimate Bush administration insult on reporter Helen Thomas Thursday, suggesting that she was “opposed to the broader war on terrorism,” Terry Moran of ABC leapt to his colleague’s defense. A remark that would have seemed ominous had it been uttered two years ago — like Ari Fleischer’s warning that a reporter’s comments on the Bush daughters had been “noted in the building” — appeared comical now.

Moran and McClellan then embarked on the following exchange:

Moran: “On what basis do you say Helen is opposed to the broader war on terrorism?”

McClellan: “Well, she certainly expressed her concerns about Afghanistan and Iraq and going into those two countries. I think I can go back and pull up her comments over the course of the past couple of years.”

Moran: “And speak for her, which is odd.”

McClellan: “No, I said she may be, because certainly if you look at her comments over the course of the past couple of years, she’s expressed her concerns — ”

Thomas: “I’m opposed to preemptive war, unprovoked preemptive war.”

McClellan: “She’s expressed her concerns.”

As for the phony video conference, it’s not unusual for such an event to be rehearsed, especially in this rigidly on-message administration. What was unusual was that the White House allowed the rehearsal to float into the ether where the news networks could see it. Or perhaps these moments before and after Bush appearances are always floating out there, but news organizations have been too timid or indifferent to air them.

There was no question that the episode was embarrassing, however, and that it added to the administration’s image problem at a time — post-Katrina and mid-Harriet Miers — when it is in desperate need of a breather from the constant stream of bad news.

In the rehearsal, as reproduced by the AP, Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, coached the soldiers on who was going to take which questions.

“OK, so let’s just walk through this,” Barber said. “Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?”

“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.

“Captain Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.

In this light, the back-and-forth that took place following Bush’s first question rings more than a little false:

President Bush: “And so, like — I mean, and so the vote is in less than 48 hours — or about 48 hours, I guess. And so how do you — how would — are you confident? I mean, how do you feel the operations are going?”

Captain Kennedy: “Mr. President, I’m going to field that question to Captain Smith.”

President Bush: “I didn’t want to give you — I didn’t want to throw you a hardball there, Captain.”

Captain Smith: “Morning, Mr. President. I’m Captain Dave Smith from Grand Rapids, Mich. …”

Hardball? Really? It looked like more of an eephus pitch.

One person who definitely plays hardball is Plame affair prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Karl Rove walked out of his appearance Friday without being indicted, but he hasn’t been told that he won’t be indicted either, according to his lawyer. The grand jury moves toward its finish now, and with the prospect of his brain getting sucked out of the White House, the news cycle doesn’t promise to get any easier for rumbling, bumbling, stumbling George W. Bush.

Cohen, who said he’s bothered by the fact that no one in Fitzgerald’s office is leaking details of the grand jury proceedings to him, claimed that the revelation of Plame’s identity is just business as usual in the hardball world of Washington politics. Fitzgerald’s case could wind up preventing administration secrets from getting out to the public by discouraging future leakers, Cohen argued. (This latter point is well taken; the short answer to Cohen’s assertion is that the leakers in this case were committing crimes, not exposing them.)

It’s very difficult to believe that at this stage any intelligent commentator could in good faith dispute the idea that the leaking of Plame’s identity was wrong and dangerous. But according to Cohen, since it was not the intent of Karl Rove, “Scooter” Libby and other administration officials to out Plame and “have her assassinated,” there was nothing wrong with leaking her name. How can Cohen know so little about the world of intelligence?

Put aside any possible threats to Plame’s life. The leaking of her identity means that anyone who ever interacted with her while she was operating under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, whether fellow agents or foreign intelligence assets, has come under suspicion. Their lives were put in jeopardy and they may find it too risky to continue providing the U.S. with vital information. The outing of Plame also sends the message abroad, as former CIA analyst James Marcinkowski asserted at a hearing on Capitol Hill in July, that “politics in this country does in fact trump national security.”

“What has suffered perhaps irreversible damage is the credibility of our case officers when they try to convince our overseas contact that their safety is of primary importance to us,” Marcinkowski said, referring to the ability of CIA officers to recruit spies in the Middle East. (Read the transcript of Marcinkowski’s testimony here, courtesy of the Nations David Corn.)

All of this, of course, comes in the context of the fact that the United States’ lack of human intelligence is universally acknowledged to be its greatest liability in fighting global terrorist networks, including al-Qaida in Iraq. Our human intelligence needs to be strengthened, not undermined. Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson responded to Cohen’s article yesterday on his blog. Johnson ended his post with a point that ought to be clear by now but that many pundits and politicians in Washington still don’t understand: “The best thing Patrick Fitzgerald can do is a send a clear message to politicians in both parties that when it comes to political hardball intelligence assets must be kept out of the game. At the end of the day our nation’s security is no game, it is a matter of life and death.”

This has to be worrisome news for Republican strategists, who already have their hands full with the Valerie Plame affair, Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and the troubles of Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, David Safavian and Jack Abramoff. In July, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman made a public appeal to the black community that included an apology for the GOP’s past use of divisive racial tactics. Now, Republicans have dug themselves into an even deeper hole courtesy of the president, whose response to Hurricane Katrina gave the impression that he wasn’t concerned with the plight of poor blacks.

The new poll has President Bush’s overall approval ratings dipping below 40 percent. What’s more, fewer than 30 percent of respondents think the country is headed in the right direction. There is evidence that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers hasn’t gone over very well with the country either, with only 29 percent saying she is qualified to serve on the court.

Along with the president’s sinking popularity, the poll found that 48 percent of respondents want a “Democratic-controlled Congress,” while 39 percent prefer Republicans to be in control. The nine-point difference is the “largest margin between the parties in eleven years.”

The e-mail, which Luskin said he discovered sometime after Rove’s testimony in 2004, was crucial to the investigation of special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald because it contradicted Rove’s statements to the FBI and the Plame grand jury, in which he never mentioned his conversation with the reporter, Isikoff writes.

As for Miller, the notes she turned over to the grand jury after she testified less than two weeks ago pertain to a conversation she had with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, in June 2003. These notes are of interest in part because they predate former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s New York Times Op-Ed of July 6, the event that started the affair by allegedly triggering the White House to retaliate and reveal the identity of Wilson’s wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame. Did Miller know Plame’s identity before Wilson went public in July? In Wilson’s book, “The Politics of Truth,” he asserted that his name was “openly circulating among the press” in the weeks before his article was published. (He had served as a background source in numerous articles that year, including one by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.)

Meanwhile, the letter Miller received from Libby last month that freed her to testify before the grand jury Sept. 30 has become the subject of intense scrutiny on the Internet. Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher is among the scribes who are wondering whether the bizarre last paragraph was intended as some sort of code. In case you missed it, here’s how it ran:

“You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover — Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work — and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers — With admiration, Scooter Libby.”

If Libby was not trying to slip Miller a message about how she ought to testify, as Mitchell and others have theorized, then what are we to make of this cryptic prose poem? One conclusion we can safely draw is that Miller and Libby are more than professional acquaintances. Based on that presumption, the relationship between Miller and the neoconservatives in the Defense Department and in Cheneys office who orchestrated the Iraq war appears more and more suspect.

This murky relationship, upon which the New York Times has to a very real degree staked its reputation, is certainly worthy of more attention from the Times itself, which has repeatedly been scooped in reporting on developments in Miller’s case. So it was with bemusement that we read the article by the Times’ public editor on Sunday, which was devoted, not to Miller or indeed anything news related, but to “what the Times news staff thinks” about its readers.

Public Editor Byron Calame, charged with being the representative of the readers vis-à-vis the Times, told readers in his column that “your curiosity was the characteristic that editors and reporters mentioned more than any other.” Can Calame guess what readers are curious about right now?