I guess we disagree on the definition of censorship.

Tami Silicio was fired from her job as a military contractor for giving the Seattle Times a photo of caskets being flown home from Kuwait, which the paper ran on its front page. The same month, the website The Memory Hole published photos of coffins arriving at Dover that it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.

Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, contractors being fired, journalists restricted from military facilities. Does this sound to you like the actions of a government asking nicely?

 

Seems to me like a case of having a little dignity. People have the right to mourn their loved ones in private and not have their caskets splashed all over the front page of the paper. Censorship is restricting information, not restricting private images the rest of the world need not be privy to. Journalists don't need access to military facilities. They compromise the safety of our men and women. And let's face facts, if they actually reported the events as they were actually happening, maybe they wouldn't be sneered at by the powers that be. Case in point, the burn pits which were reported on CNN as a "horrible battle with many casualties".

Flag covered caskets are not news, we need to see the faces of these boys, not their remains. And it was not the government who requested the ban on photographing them I'm afraid, it was veterans' organizations.

 

Does that include Michael Jackson's family, do they also have the right to grieve in private and not have some hack politician making slanderous statements about the man when he hasn't even been buried yet?


I think photographing the caskets as they are taken off the plane, and taking pictures of a funeral are two completely different things. And in either case, it is the media's job to exercise discretion. And if the media are invading people's privacy, the proper remedy is to petition the courts for a restraining order.


Tami Silicio was fired from her job as a military contractor for giving the Seattle Times a photo of caskets being flown home from Kuwait, which the paper ran on its front page. The same month, the website The Memory Hole published photos of coffins arriving at Dover that it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.

Please explain how these individuals compromised military security. They were punished for showing their readers something the military and the government didn't want us to see.

 

As ex wife of life long soldier, step mom to three ormore and mom to one....I WANT people to see what the aftermath is. They NEED to see the reality of it all. I hate using Heather as an example but should something happen to her I want people to see that there is a reality there that the majority in the states have no clue as to what is really going on besides what some feel the need to sugar coat.

I have seen coffins come home. I have seen flags folded, heard 21 gun salutes. Most never will unless they happen to rent a movie here and there and for some reason knowing that the coffin in a movie is just a prop just doesn't bring the reality home.

When my phone rings in the middle of the night my heart pounds so loud I can hear it, my mouth goes dry, I start to shake and a part of me says "Do not answer it" If you do not hear what they have to say then it does not exist.

Every soldier who comes home covered in a flag has dignity. I would rather see his coffin with the flag and know that another came home that way then sit here on my butt watching tv saturated with MJ crapola and know absolutely NOTHING about the numbers coming home other than what I read on page 27 of a google search.

That soldier deserves to have the people of the United States see their coffins come home because that person GAVE their very breath for the United States of America. I believe they deserve for all of us to mourn their loss. We all cannot attend their memorial service in their hometown or Arlington but we sure as hell can attend via television. And do that we all should.

 

No, they were punished for disobeying orders and breaking rules that they agreed to abide by.

Apparently you have never been in the military or worked for the military, They tell you to do something, you do it. They tell you NOT to do something, you DON'T do it. Penalties can be harsh. It is a pretty simple concept. There are millions of pictures online of the type of planes that fly out of my base, but if I go out on the flight line and start snapping my own, I can get disciplined. It wouldn't be for compromising military security, it would be for breaking the rules and disobeying an order.

The photos that were published after a FOIA process were obtained legally and were thus free to be published.

 

I learned something in all my years affiliated with the military. If they want you to have they will give it to. If they want you to say they will give you the words to use, If they want you to do it they will tell you to do it and nothing more or less, If they wanted you to have feelings they would say you could but you cannot so leave it at that. The list goes on and on.
I was the worst CSM wife in history but yet I was the best. i took no crap because that is who I am and I am not one to take orders from ANYONE. and I showed a general that a heart was more important than anything else. that if you had heart everything else would follow. (long long story)
If you bust the militarys ***** they will bust you right back. No ifs and butts or maybes.
If they want pictures of the dead and dying they will put them out there. They do not want that because then it becomes real. It becomes something that they do not want to have to answer too.

 

The politicians prefer to hide and de-emphasize casualties. We live in PC, hypersensitive age. Notice how war is marketed, with the consequences carefully sanitized by (most) US corporate media.

Imagine if a current version of this famous WWII photo, which was not censored when censorship was normal, were published today:

http://gadabyte.com/ww-ii/images/pac.../Buna_dead.jpg

Tarawa:

http://blog.newsok.com/worldwartwo/f.../09/tarawa.jpg

Normandy:

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/i...00/s189924.jpg

Americans could (gasp!) actually face bad news, and it didn't break the war effort. Those guys on those beaches don't look any different, excepting uniform style, than the men and women who "buy the farm" (to use a vintage G.I. phrase) now. To see their sacrifice is to honor it, rather than hiding it for being a distasteful image.

As for journalists, we need them to keep the military honest.
Blind trust in the military disregards how the military really works, and that bears careful watching.

Remember the failure to provide properly armored vehicles in Iraq, the public uproar caused by its exposure in the press, and the resulting corrective actions from uparmored HMMWVs to MRAPs? MANY soldiers and Marines died and were maimed because they were knowingly sent into battle in light and/or unarmored trucks when there had been plenty of examples (Mogadishu, Chechnya, etc, not to mention VIET NAM!) of what happens when an enemy with mines and RPGs decides to blow up your soft transport.

Note that there is more open debate among the military than perhaps ever before (Small Wars Journal is a good place to read some of it). Civilians should learn what goes on (OPSEC considerations permitting) and become informed about a war that will likely last decades.

 

I bow to thee
Mose excellent post

 

Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.

Tiny Terror has claimed that journalists were compromising security. Now you are telling me that journalists are actually employees of the military and those in power do not need to have a reason to censor what they can and cannot report.



If the administration was forced to reveal those photos in a court of law, then what right did they have to censor the images in the first place?

 

I never said that journalists are employees of anything. But when they accompany military units as embedded journalists, they agree to certain conditions. Violate those conditions and I feel you deserve to be banned from future access since you could not be trusted.

As to your second point, it is called an appeal process. The images were not released (or censored in your terms), someone took it to court and prevailed, the images were released and thus published. Sounds like the system worked, no?

 

So in fact it was the military who compromised the lives of its personnel, and not the journalists who brought this story to the public's attention.


What about journalists who choose not to compromise their journalistic integrity, and report the facts as they see them? How is the public supposed to get news from reporters we can trust, and are not just reporting what the government wants us to see? Isn't that what we're fighting for?