Antiwar.com Blog

Jo Wilding speaks in Baghdad with several of the refugees from Fallujah.

“This is my honeymoon,” Heba said, in the crowded corridor of bomb shelter number 24 in the Al-Ameriya district of Baghdad. Married just under a month, she fled Falluja with her extended family. “There were bombs all the time. We couldn’t sleep. Even if you fell asleep, nightmares woke you up. We just gathered the whole family in one room and waited.

“It is better here than in Falluja. We hear bombs but they are far away and not so many. But there is no water in here: we have to go outside for water for drinking, cooking and washing ourselves and our clothes and we buy ice. There is no fridge, no fans, no air conditioning, no generator and only one stove for us all. We have to go to the garden for a toilet and that’s a problem at night. Everyone has diarrhoea from the ice that we bought.

“Now I am a bride but I couldn’t bring any of my clothes.” As if there would be any privacy anyway, the 88 members of 18 families piled on mattresses in the long narrow passage from the door to the kitchen at the end … read more

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.