Reply #129: my letter to LA Times: Ignore FEMA request [View All]

[yurbud]

Re: "FEMA Wants No Photos of Dead," from Sept. 7, I urge all press photographers to ignore FEMA's request. Their job is preparing for and cleaning up after disasters--not taking away our civil rights and covering for the criminal behavior of the Bush administration. This is exactly what they have done in Iraq. They have tried to block and intimidate reporters from showing the damage this war has done to Iraqis, and went so far as to ban photos of coffins arriving at Dover Air Base, even when the families did not object.

When they come up with these policies, they are probably thinking back to the uncensored images from Vietnam that sparked the anti-war movement, or Emmett Till's mother allowing her son's disfigured face to be photographed so all of America could see the horror and ugliness of lynching, photos that arguable began to turn the tide against Jim Crow.

The public needs information to participate knowledgeably in our own government. When the Bush administration keeps it from us with secrecy, censorship, threats, and intimidation, they castrate at home the very democracy they claim to be trying to plant in Iraq.

Show us the bodies, so we can decide a proportionate punishment for those who didn't do their job and callously allowed so many Americans to die, and don't let the criminals decide what evidence gets into the court of public opinion.