Katrina Official Death Toll Outlook Changing, page 1

Today on Sunday 9/11/05 Lt. Gen Russel Honore, the US General in charge of the Military Katrina hurricane relief effort has said to CNN that the death toll will be "a heck of a lot lower" then the 10000 count Major Ray Nagin has said to expect. The official death toll for Louisiana is currently set to 154 and for all 5 states that were hit by Katrina the death toll is at 383.

www.cnn.com
Lt. Gen Russel Honore told CNN's "Late Edition" the death toll in New Orleans is unlikely to reach 10,000, a figure Mayor Ray Nagin had estimated based on how many people appeared to have evacuated and how many had stayed behind.

"I think it's going to be a lower number, much lower than the 10,000," said Honore. "A heck of a lot lower than that."

The number, Honore said, "came out at a very emotional time, with not a lot of facts, and I think from talking to the city officials and the communicating with the parish presidents, I think intuitively we were saying, that number will be much lower."

He emphasized that officials still do not know how many people died in the storm and flooding that ravaged New Orleans.

As of Sunday morning, the official death toll in Louisiana was 154. Officials in five states put the overall total of dead at 383.

Please visit the link provided for the complete story.

To some it might be looked upon as the government and military starting damage control and maybe even a coverup about the actual death toll of the hurricane.

Most deaths had been expected to have been caused by the Katrina aftermath instead of the initial strike and flooding when the levees broke. Now the government and military might be working to make it look as if the death toll caused by the slow response of FEMA is lower then originally expected.

In the same article, several other mayors then Ray Nagins(mayor of New Orleans) state their disgust with FEMA's response, men like Matthew Avara, mayor of Pascagoula and Ben Morris mayor of Slidell.

Also, after CNN itself filed a lawsuit against the US government for the rights to investigate and report on the recovery of bodies, the US government has stopped its efforts to ban all media from reporting on the search and recovery of bodies.

This attempt to ban the media from reporting on this was seen as a clear giveaway that the US government was trying to block the media from finding out and reporting on true death tolls while the only numbers then available to both press and public would come from the government itself.

I hope that the press keeps very good taps on how high the death toll truly is and doesn't only rely on government numbers about this. I have so little trust in this government left that I wouldn't take any information shared by them as true without checking and double checking the information with at least a dozen sources.

[edit on 11/9/05 by thematrix]

[edit on 27-9-2005 by DJDOHBOY]