Reply #20: Bring out your dead [View All]

[JoFerret]

Another great story

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1202335,00.html
Pictures of flag-draped coffins could kill Bush's re-election hopes

Mark Lawson
Saturday April 24, 2004
The Guardian

American elections are frequently a duel between two photographs. The candidate tries to find the right picture, the snap which encapsulates his campaign: the young Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK, or Ronald Reagan with his hand on his heart in front of a flag. His opponent hopes for the emergence of the wrong picture, the snap they didn't want on the poster: Gary Hart with a floozy on a yacht; Michael Dukakis looking like an Action Man model in a tank.
George Bush has so far struggled to locate his chosen photo: the turkey he was pictured serving in Iraq proved embarrassingly to be fake, the "Mission Accomplished" banner under which he parked his plane on an aircraft carrier now looks ludicrously premature. President Bush's handlers might have consoled themselves that there was at least no risk of a bimbo picture coming out but, this week, there was much worse. America started to see the photographs Bush was dedicated to suppressing.

Enclosed in the patriotic blaze of Old Glory, the coffins lie in rows in a hanger at Dover airforce base in Delaware. Each flagged casket contains the remains of another member of the American services killed in Iraq. The Pentagon refused to allow photo-opportunities for the soldiers' last posts.

But, in a development which must have made Bush wish he lived under the British system of state secrecy, 350 of these censored images of the dead have been released to an internet lobbyist under freedom of information legislation.

This is a defeat for what was surely one of the most brutish manoeuvres of modern politics. The White House has claimed that they were protecting the dignity of the dead and the privacy of their families, but many families were desperate for their lost to have their moment on the evening news.

The truth is that the invisibility of the military fallen was a decision driven purely by spin.

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