Senate endorses more sanitized warfare coverage

[Guest DubWiser]

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Senate endorses ban on war dead coverage

 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate refused Monday to change a Pentagon policy banning media coverage of America's war dead as their remains arrive in flag-draped caskets.

 

"It's an outrage," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who had sponsored legislation to restore coverage of homecoming ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

 

The New Jersey Democrat said the Pentagon directive that requires strict censorship, "issued just as the Iraq war began ... prevents the American people from seeing the truth about what's happening."

 

The 54-39 Senate negative vote came as the American death toll in Iraq reached 845 Monday.

 

The vote defeated an amendment to the authorization bill for the Defense Department that would have required the Pentagon to produce a protocol in 60 days to regulate media coverage of the returning dead.

 

Banning press and public access to the arrival of casualties in Dover was started in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, during the term of President Bush's father.

 

The policy continued through President Clinton's eight years in office, although it was not strictly enforced and there was no conflict on the scale of the either the Gulf War or the war in Iraq during Clinton's tenure.

 

"During the Afghan war during this administration, flag-draped coffins were filmed [at Dover], and during the Kosovo conflict President Clinton was on the tarmac to receive the dead," Lautenberg said.

 

Citing privacy questions on the eve of the war with Iraq a year ago, the Pentagon reiterated the ban and began enforcing it at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Photos often had been allowed at Ramstein before the current Bush administration.

 

Sen. John Warner, Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued the ban should continue to "to preserve the most important priority, and that's the privacy of the families ... and not open up this matter to greater scrutiny by the press."

 

The debate over whether Americans should see coffins of the war dead flared in April after The Seattle Times published a front-page photograph of coffins in a cargo plane in Kuwait and a First Amendment activist posted on his Web site dozens of like images from Dover, home to the nation's largest military mortuary.

 

A poll at that time found more than six in 10 Americans thought the homecomings should be covered.

 

Can't see the dead, can't see the wounded. Almost like it's not really happening...

 

Well, at least we got extensive coverage of those Iraqi Amputees and their swank Luke Skywalker hands... ...that's the important stuff.

[Guest INXS]

It's a smart move for the government but of course it is basically propaganda. I wonder how many people are aware that over 800 US troops have died in Iraq and 10,000 + Iraqi's have been killed as well?

[edotherocket 0]

...didn't we just have a thread about the whole "10,000 dead Iraqis" thing?

[NoCalMike 0]

it will be interesting to see what the conservative talking heads say about this considering they are demanding that the nightly news splash the beheadings all over the news in their entirety, and keep reiterating how important it is for see this.

[Art Sandusky 0]

It's been a thing for a long time to never show dead soldiers in their caskets until they're being taken off of the plane back in America. I don't need to see pictures of caskets to know people are dying, there's no problem with this being upheld.

[Stephen Joseph 0]

Umm, everyone knows about it INXS. Its on the news 10 times a night.

 

Look. These troops are dead, Let them come back to their families without any angles from either side.

[Guest Cerebus]

Wait a second...

 

Soldiers are...DYING in Iraq?

 

I thought Dan Rather was LYING to me at the end of every broadcast of CBS News.

 

I thought all those names Ted Koppel read out were pulled out of the phonebook.

 

I thought all those links on every major news station websites to a list of the American war dead were nothing but left wing propaganda.

 

I am shocked. Truley shocked.

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

More shocked then when you found out John Kerry served in Vietnam?

[Guest MikeSC]

More shocked then when you found out John Kerry served in Vietnam?

Get the hell outta town!

-=Mike

...If you tell me that Cheney once worked for Haliburton, I'll go nuts...

[Jobber of the Week 0]

-=Mike

...If you tell me that Cheney once worked for Haliburton, I'll go nuts...

You're going to hardly believe this, but supposedly he was very close to the top office.

 

I was shocked and amazed. He striked me as such a blue-collar man.