Post by Moses on Apr 30, 2005 10:35:12 GMT -5
Flag-draped coffin photos released
Pentagon had resisted showing images of casualties
- Joe Garofoli, Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writers
Friday, April 29, 2005
The Pentagon released 360 previously secret photos Thursday of the flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq, reigniting a debate over the effect of such images on support for the war at home.
Pictures of flag-draped coffins massed in planes and on ships have been rare since the Defense Department banned the media in 1991 from photographing caskets while the military is transporting them home from combat.
The policy has become increasingly controversial during the Iraq war, with opponents accusing the White House of suppressing images of dead soldiers to avoid eroding public support for the conflict.
"This war has been so sanitized to the public," said Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville, whose son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, was killed in Iraq and who has become an outspoken critic of the war. "There are huge segments of the American public that don't even have to think about the war if they don't want to."
The Pentagon released the pictures Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by University of Delaware journalism Professor Ralph Begleiter, who said the images were public record. He had sought all military photographs of caskets carrying the remains of military personnel taken since the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.
The photos released Thursday depict ceremonial scenes of U.S. troops carrying the coffins of their fallen comrades. Most don't list a date or location, and the Pentagon blacked out the faces of soldiers around the caskets in many of the pictures for privacy reasons.
Begleiter said in an interview that he hadn't sought the photos to make a point politically.
"We spend a lot of effort trying to get to the cost of the war," he said. "But we haven't shown images of the most valuable resource we have -- the people we lost in the war."
Anti-war advocates hoped that the photos would "bring the cost of the war home," said Bill Dobbs, an organizer with United for Peace and Justice, a national umbrella organization of 1,000 community and religious groups that oppose the conflict. "Getting information like this out there helps."
But others questioned whether showing the photos would make any difference in public support.
"People who oppose the war will say the photos will support their position, and those who support (the Bush administration's position) will say the photos are a tribute to fallen heroes," said Phil Kipper, chairman of the broadcast department at San Francisco State University.
"That the Pentagon was forced to give these up under some duress shows that the Pentagon, and presumably the White House, didn't want this information to get out," Kipper said.
But because many of the photos depict largely ceremonial scenes, Kipper said, "I'm not sure of what the impact will be on people who are in the middle. It's not like the Vietnam War, where you had photos of hundreds of body bags lined up on the tarmac.
"It all depends how many times these photos will be shown over and over on the news," Kipper said.
Last year, after the Air Force mistakenly released a batch of photos to the Web site thememoryhole.org, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John Molino said withholding the pictures "reflects what the families have told us they would like by way of the treatment of remains of the loved ones who have made that sacrifice."
Some military members and their families, however, have criticized the policy, including Sheehan, who said an image of her son's coffin was among those released in 2004.
"The military doesn't tell you anything," Sheehan said. "If I hadn't seen that picture, I would have just thought they threw them in body bags and stacked them in a corner.
"We didn't know that the same flag that's folded up on our bookshelf was the same one that was covering Casey from the time he left Iraq," Sheehan said. "It gave us a little bit of comfort."
The University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey found last year that of respondents who served in the military in Iraq and their families, 54 percent said allowing the media to show pictures of anonymous flag-draped coffins would increase respect for the troops. Only 6 percent said the practice would decrease respect.
One military researcher, Army Lt. Col. Richard Lacquement Jr., until recently a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College, said the military policy is a de facto endorsement of the "Dover test" -- the belief that the sight of casualties coming home to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware has a powerful impact on the public.
But in fact, Lacquement said, that test may be faulty. While acceptance of casualties rises and falls depending on how the public believes the war is going, he said, surveys show that Americans' tolerance for death is often higher than military leaders or policymakers expect.
"People understand what war is -- people understand whether you show pictures or not that people die," Lacquement said. "The public in aggregate is sort of a thoughtful group that can see through the generalities."
E-mail the writers at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com and mstannard@sfchronicle.com.
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