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NEW ORLEANS — After five days managing near riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA — Beron doesn’t remember his name — came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

“I’ve got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome,” Beron recalled the doctor saying.

The real total?

Six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the handoff of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice.

State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been murdered inside the stadium.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and law-enforcement officials.

That the nation’s frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city’s top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.

The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees — mass murders, rapes and beatings — have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

“I think 99 percent of it is [expletive],” said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. “Don’t get me wrong ??? bad things happened. But I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything … 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.”

Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina — making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.

“I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites,” he said. “It’s unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn’t the case. And they [national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. … It’s not consistent with the highest standards of journalism.”

As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation’s media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center.

Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.

In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of “babies,” and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of “hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people” inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies “we couldn’t count.”

The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an “almost animalistic state.”

Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.

“The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible,” Compass said, admitting his earlier statements were false. Asked the source of the information, Compass said he didn’t remember.

Nagin frankly acknowledged he doesn’t know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Superdome and the Convention Center — and may never. “I’m having a hard time getting a good body count,” he said.

Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities’ response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to situations that turned out not to exist.

Military, law-enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees — about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center — overwhelmed their security personnel.

The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds in the Dome, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence.

“Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated,” said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. “If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them — then that became 18.”

Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified — and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant.

Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome’s locker rooms, where he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through about six inches of water, Watt’s attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt’s leg came from his own gun — he accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to jail, Baldwin said.

Inside the Convention Center, Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Thursday. He said thugs hot-wired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, nor did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on about six occasions.

Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Col. Jacques Thibodeaux to put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center around noon on Friday.

It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. They found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any murders, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.

One widely circulated story, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsman, held that “30 or 40 bodies” were stored in a Convention Center freezer.

But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah’s Casino, said Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, who conducted the review.

Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities — many allegedly involving small children — may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, will be nearly impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites.

While numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes, in particular the rape of two young girls in the Superdome ladies’ room and the killing of one of them, police and military officials say they know nothing of such an incident.

    I’m amazed that anyone is amazed that it took George W. Bush three days to show up in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
    That’s exactly how long it took him to show up at Ground Zero after 9/11.
    So it mystifies me that the pundits and the cable gasbags keep telling us that George W. Bush missed his “bullhorn moment” in New Orleans.
    No, he didn’t.
    Because his bullhorn moment in New York City was just as late and just as disgraceful as his fumbling handling of the Katrina carnage.
    I wish I had a bullhorn to shout just how tired I am of hearing about how wonderful George W. Bush’s “bullhorn moment” was.
    It will go down as one of the worst moments in American history because when he stood on the smoldering ruins amid the dust of the dead it was through that bullhorn that Bush’s Big Lie was first shouted to the world that the people who knocked down those buildings would soon be hearing from us.
    It might have been a fairly good, better-late-than-never moment if all Bush had done was use that bullhorn to launch a war on Al Qaeda. It might have escalated into a great piece of historical stagecraft if we’d just gone into Afghanistan and stayed the course on a noble quest to kill Osama Bin Laden and all his Al Qaeda cowards who murdered our people.
    But the words that echoed through Bush’s bullhorn into the smoldering 16 acres of lower Manhattan, the words that resounded across the grieving outer boroughs and the sorrowful suburbs and the stunned globe, were but an orchestrated setup for a grander diabolical scheme.
    Because we fast gave up the hunt for Bin Laden for a bait-and-switch war in Iraq that had nothing to do with the rubble upon which Bush stood at Ground Zero shouting bull through his bullhorn.
    Bush has now declared that half-a-buck stops on his desk for Katrina.
    But he doesn’t ever mention that Osama Bin Laden is still out there roaming free and plotting more American murders. That stops on his desk, too.
    Historians will refocus that bullhorn moment as the point of origin to exploit a terrible attack on America for a preconceived war in Iraq that had nothing to do with our dead.
    Historians also will remember that directly after the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 2001, killing 2,749, our fearless leader, with all that Texas Air Guard combat training, hopped aboard Air Force One and lammed to, um, Omaha.
    Talk about heroic.
    And as real heroes dug in the rubble for signs of life, shortening their own lives in the toxic air, Bush hid out. Then three days later, when the coast was clear, he arrived to shoot a Karl Rove-inspired reelection commercial and to launch a war in Iraq.
    The invasion of Baghdad started in New York in that “bullhorn moment” three days after Sept. 11.
    That final battle of the war in Iraq was lost in New Orleans when Bush showed up three days after Katrina.
    As bodies floated down the street, and tens of thousands were stranded without food, water and medical supplies in the convention center, the white flag in the war in Iraq was waved when Bush told Federal Emergency Management Agency boss Michael Brown, an incompetent crony, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
    Now, with Bush’s approval rating at 40%, with more than 50% disapproving of his handling of Iraq, the Security Moms and NASCAR Dads for Bush are silent. Even the Swift Boat Vets can’t save Bush from drowning in his own ineptitude.
    For what the floods of Katrina revealed was just how out of his depth George W. Bush is as presidential stock.
    I often ask successful conservative businessmen friends if they would let George W. Bush run their private businesses. They almost always smile and admit they wouldn’t. And yet they voted for him torun the most powerful nation on the planet.
    It would be funny except that almost 1,900 Americans troops have been killed to create an Islamic state that spirals toward a possible civil war in Iraq since Bush’s wonderful “bullhorn moment.”