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Banning Photos Added to Public's 'Distrust' of Bush Regime
Published on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 by the Toronto Star / Canada
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Banning Photos Added to Public's 'Distrust' of Bush Regime
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by Tim Harper
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WASHINGTON—Over the past three years, more than 2,500 U.S. military coffins have returned home to this country and not a single arrival ceremony has been captured by a media outlet. But despite the policy of U.S. President George W. Bush, now apparently being mimicked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, hundreds of such photos are available at the click of a computer key and have been published on the front pages of U.S. newspapers. Ultimately, it's done nothing to desensitize Americans to the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. Flag Draped Coffins Returning from Iraq, 2004. The US government has tried to limit the public's access to photographs of large numbers of such coffins.
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The battle over the rights of American citizens to see the price of foreign-policy decisions made by their government have resulted in epic battles over freedom-of-information legislation, cost two defence contractors their jobs, and produced countless newspaper editorials.Still, it is not clear if Bush benefited from the policy and his unpopular war in Iraq appears destined to become his presidential legacy."It certainly was not decisive in the loss of credibility for this government," said Christopher Simpson, an expert on political messaging at Washington's American University. "But it was one instance, when taken with a host of other instances, which has led to a great deal of distrust in this government."As Iraq war casualties began to mount, the Pentagon cited a longstanding policy, dating back to the first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, in barring media from recording images of coffins arriving in the United States.The policy, however, was not followed by the 1993-2000 administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton, who attended a number of ceremonies honouring fallen U.S. soldiers.The Pentagon issued its directive shortly after the U.S. invasion in March 2003, banning "arrival ceremonies of, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases.The directive is reported to have its roots in a livid Dick Cheney, then the U.S. defence secretary, who objected to a U.S. television network that showed a split screen of a laughing U.S. President George H.W. Bush and American coffins arriving at an airbase in Dover, Del. , in 1991. Lawmakers since then have debated whether military forays could pass the "Dover Test." As of yesterday, 2,389 Americans had died in Iraq and 285 had died in Afghanistan.Large U.S. newspapers publish daily death tolls for Americans in Iraq. The Washington Post regularly covers military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery and periodically publishes pages of pictures and brief stories of the lives of those who have died in the two wars.
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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