Draped in the Flag

I wonder how many of the soldiers you served turkey to in Baghdad on Thanksgiving are dead now, Mr. Bush? Maybe some of them are even in this picture that you don't want the American people to be able to see:



A policy adopted by the Pentagon during Daddy Bush's first Gulf War in 1991 prohibits news organizations from photographing caskets being returned to the United States. Allowing the public to see row upon row of these flag-draped coffins, they say, would be insensitive to the grieving families.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy confirms Bush's support for this policy: "In all of this, we must pay attention to the privacy and to the sensitivity of the families of the fallen, and that's what the policy is based on and that has to be the utmost concern."

Which is bullshit, of course. The names and faces of the fallen in Iraq are shown in the print and broadcast media every day--real names and actual faces. These images of coffins are completely anonymous. There are no names, no faces, no personal identification of any kind.

No, it's not for anyone's privacy that Bush wants these images suppressed. He wants them suppressed because he knows they are powerful in their stark simplicity. Oddly enough, it is the anonymity itself which helps lend them power, as the hearken back to our long collective visual memory, dating to Vietnam, World War II and beyond, of similar pictures of war. Vital human beings, soldiers, now reduced to silent flag-draped cargo.

This president who so loves draping himself in the flag, does not want us to see these images of flag-draped coffins of those who have died in the service of his ill-advised policies.

Oh, and woe to any who try to cross the Bush administration's censorship. The flag-draped coffin issue originally arose when the Seattle Times published a similar photograph on its front page last Sunday. That photo had originally been taken by Tami Silicio, a 50 year old American working in Kuwait for the Maytag Aircraft Corporation, a government contractor providing ground handling services for military air bases. She since has been fired from her job. For good measure, they fired her husband too.

Silicio says she shared the photo because she hoped it would portray the care and devotion with which civilian and military crews treat the remains of fallen soldiers. In return, she was squashed by the petty vindictiveness of the Bush administration.