Can The US Media Handle The Truth?

IF - and it's a big if - the US media let them go into print, there are going to be a lot more stories like this...

"Don't step in that blood - it's contaminated," he said. "That one with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man."

Then he shined the light on the smaller human figure under the white sheet next to the elderly man.

"That's a kid," he said. "There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut."

He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor.

"There's an old woman," he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. "I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death," he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.

Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. "It's not on, but at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.

...

One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years old. Though they could not confirm it, they had heard she was gang-raped.

"There was an old lady that said the little girl had been raped by two or three guys, and that she had told another unit. But they said they couldn't do anything about it with all the people there," Brooks said. "I would have put him in cuffs, stuck him in the freezer and left him there."

Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center, where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.

"I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq," said Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies sat decomposing. "In Iraq, it's one-on-one. It's war. It's fair. Here, it's just crazy. It's anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping people in the streets for food and water … And this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live."

Will the US media maintain their outrage or go back to the familiar self-censorship of the past five years. Newsday has a sampling of today's editorials. The Times Herald-Record of Middletown gets it right:

This must never happen again. Never again must the most powerful country on the planet drag its heels while one of its cities dies before the horrified eyes of the world. Never again must there be such an appalling lack of leadership in a time of national need.

As horrendous as the death and devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was to the Gulf Coast, the impact was magnified by the incredibly slow and inept response of government agencies at all levels to the disaster. Most glaring was the lack of leadership from the White House. At a time of national emergency, no public official offered a confident, reassuring message that help was on the way to victims and would be there soon. That's because it wasn't.