Month: April 2004

Russ Kick of the Memory Hole says:

>>> 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.

Further info:

“Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins”

The first three photographs to break the embargo

Link via Cursor

F.A. Hayek, alleged icon of so many contemporary liberventionists, on the martial nexus between socialism and pop conservatism. Courtesy of Lew Rockwell.

OK, everyone should be able to squeeze at least one blog entry out of their bookmarks, so here are mine. Actually, these aren’t my bookmarks (I’ll spare you the boredom of that overgrown list), but my “Daily Routine” at Backflip, the first sites I click through each day. Get ready to harrumph, detractors! Continue reading “Metablogging”

I promised to keep you posted, no matter how tedious this becomes. Salon weighs in with a review of the controversy (you’ll have to watch an ad to get access), as well as some useful ruminations on visual propaganda and the believe-what-you-want culture of the internet. Of course, that culture is hardly unique to the internet; old media have been peddling manipulated and decontextualized photos forever, usually of atrocities supposedly committed by the Hitler of the Week. Remember this gem from the war on Serbs? (Remember when Charles Paul Freund was more than a warbot?)

Tammy Silicio and her husband have been fired for this photo:

Tami Silicio and David Landry, a co-worker she recently married, were fired Wednesday by Maytag Aircraft Corp. of Colorado Springs, Colo., for violating federal government and company rules, said William L. Silva, president of Maytag and executive vice president of its corporate parent, Mercury Air Group Inc. of Los Angeles. He would not elaborate.

“I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out,” Silicio said. “I have to admit I liked my job and I liked what I did.”

Landry wrote in an e-mail to The Times that he was proud of his wife, adding that they would soon return home.

In a policy that has drawn intense debate since it was adopted in 1991, the Pentagon bars news organizations from photographing caskets being returned to the United States, citing the sensitivities of bereaved families.

The company rule she violated was likely something like What The Pentagon Says Goes.

If you were a rebel in Fallujah, and you knew this:

An armoured column of about 1,000 soldiers from the 1st Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment reached the outskirts of Karma today, a small village six kilometres north of Fallujah.

They were attempting to clear food delivery routes from Baghdad to US bases to the west, said an AFP correspondent at the scene.

An attempt to clear the route last week met with fierce fighting that left 100 insurgents and one US soldier dead, according to the coalition.

US bases west of Baghdad started rationing food from Sunday because of dwindling supplies caused by insurgent attacks.

And you knew their convoys were moving like this, and big reconstruction contractors like this were pulling out, just how much credibility would you give to people who go from rhetoric like this, to whining like this:

A US Marine general warned yesterday that insurgents in the powderkeg Iraqi city of Fallujah had only days to turn in their weapons, and said that had been handed over so far was a load of “junk”.
[…]
Asked how long the insurgents had to hand over their weapons, Conway said: “days, not weeks”.

Submit or Die! And you have…um….less than a week to turn in weapons that aren’t all rusted pieces of junk. So says the mighty American Marines.