America’s War Dead Become Invisible
As GOP Closes Cameraman’s Shutter

By William Finucane

Once upon a time, when America was fighting in Indochina, bodies arriving at one or two American airstrips were too much for the military to handle, especially since the solemnity and dignity that was due the deceased was often being sacrificed to loud and unruly protest demonstrations. As a result, the United States Supreme Court allowed two major airports to block off any photographers or cameramen that wanted to photograph the flag draped caskets of the fallen soldiers.

This was a temporary and limited censorship – it only applied to two major air fields – and it was intended to respect the fallen and their families.

Now, however, President George W. Bush has put forth a sweeping proviso: no military dead are to be filmed by television anywhere in the United States. This is not to ease the grief of the survivors. Nor is it to clear television equipment from airports and prevent accidents.

No, this nationwide order is aimed at just one thing: hiding the terrible cost of war.

Ironically, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield was delivering a speech in which he said that war was, unfortunately, a producer of death, his boss was removing the evidence of death from American living rooms.

Well, isn’t that just being chivalrous, not showing the dead?

No, it isn’t.

We are not talking about preventing voyeuristic gawking at dismembered bodies. We are talking about preventing the public from viewing rows of flag-bedecked coffins being walked with military reverence from an airplane toward ground transportation that will take them to their final resting place.

There is true honor being shown to these fallen soldiers. But the flag draped coffins are also a very real illustration of the actual loss of American men and women killed in this nation’s latest controversial war.

They are a measure of the war’s horror, inescapable.

Unless we hide them, that is. If there are no pictures, especially no electronic pictures, then in a way, they won’t exist, save to their immediate family and friends.

Hitler could not have thought up an easier way to mask the face of war. Simply don’t show it. And while that might work well in a dictatorship, it is just the opposite of what United States citizens expect.

While it might be more comfortable not knowing how many men and women died in trying to fight this war in Iraq, it is essential to have such information to make a democracy function. People need to know the bad news. They need to know it even more than they do the good news. American voters file their ballots every four years for the president, and nothing is more vital in the deciding how to cast that ballot than having the truth about government policies and actions.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the no camera policy dates from about November 2000 – the last days of the Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration – but was ignored until now. Of course it will be left to former President Clinton to explain the reasons such a policy was put in place on his watch. But for now it’s simply convenient to once again assert that if there’s anything wrong, it started with the Democrats.

Yet that doesn’t change the hard fact that when American bodies returning from Iraq began pouring into airports, enforcing this dormant provision became a quick fix for a president interested in shutting the eyes of America to its dead.

At this point, members of the high court should take another look and ask themselves whether they think the nation’s chief executive can cut off the news – for that is what this is all about – from the American people. The hard truth is that even though Mr. Bush is clearly a favorite among a majority of Supreme Court justices, this is something he cannot do, and the court should stop him