I’ve had very mixed feelings over the whole regulating of showing soldiers’ coffins coming back to the US brouhaha. On the one hand, the Bush Administration cracking down on a Clinton-era policy sure smacks of “If we keep ’em in the dark and don’t give ’em photo ops, the hoi polloi won’t get peeved at us.” It’s not the only stunt of that sort the Bushies have pulled, which lends credence to the suspicion.
On the other hand, were I one of the families of the fallen, I might be a bit irked at pictures of my loved one being used for political purposes, regardless of how I felt about the war. There is that which stands in defense of the Bush Administration’s stance.
Last week, a whole slew of new photos of returning war dead popped up on the Internet at the Memory Hole.
>>>Since March 2003, a newly-enforced military regulation has forbidden taking or distributing images of caskets or body tubes containing the remains of soldiers who died overseas. [read more]
Immediately after hearing about this, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the following:
All photographs showing caskets (or other devices) containing the remains of US military personnel at Dover AFB. This would include, but not be limited to, caskets arriving, caskets departing, and any funerary rites/rituals being performed. The timeframe for these photos is from 01 February 2003 to the present.
I specified Dover because they process the remains of most, if not all, US military personnel killed overseas. Not surpisingly, my request was completely rejected. Not taking ‘no’ for an answer, I appealed on several grounds, and—to my amazement—the ruling was reversed. The Air Force then sent me a CD containing 361 photographs of flag-draped coffins and the services welcoming the deceased soldiers.
Score one for freedom of information and the public’s right to know.
Which was much the tune played on various sites pointing to the Memory Hole pictures. “See? The truth will out! People will realize the deep dark secret that soldiers are dying in Iraq, and will then rise up to throw the ShrubCo types out of office! Huzzah!”
Except … those may not be actual pictures of American war dead.
NASA sent out the following bulletin on Friday:
Columbia Crew Mistakenly Identified As Iraqi War Casualties
Many news organizations across the country are mistakenly identifying the flag-draped caskets of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s crew as those of war casualties from Iraq. Editors are being asked to confirm that the images used in news reports are in fact those of American casualties and not those of the NASA astronauts who were killed Feb.1, 2003, in the Columbia tragedy.
An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia’s seven astronauts.
News organizations across the world have been publishing and distributing images featured on the web site.
So — an error in the FOIA data returned to the Memory Hole poster? A devious anti-war plot? A devious government plot? A devious NASA plot?
At any rate, an odd twist in the tale.
UPDATE: As of this afternoon, the Memory Hole site has segregated out the photos it says are the astronaut ones. It notes also that, while there is no confirmation that the other military coffins are from Iraq, circumstantial evidence indicates they are.
What’s interesting is that the site seems defensive about whether these are war dead from Iraq vs from Afghanistan. There are no identifiers shown, but the circumstantial evidence (and the ratio of deaths) seem to make it likely that at least some are from Iraq. The site seems unclear whether the outrage is regarding all war dead coffin photos being suppressed (which would seem to need no further analysis), or just those from Iraq (which would seem an odd distinction). Which seems … odd.