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Photos NOT ALLOWED to be Seen by the American Public: Coffins of Dead US Soldiers Returning Home

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A U.S. contractor and her husband have been fired after her photograph of 20 flag-draped coffins of American troops going home from Iraq was published in violation of military rules. "I lost my job and they let my husband go as well," Tami Silicio, who loaded U.S. military cargo at Kuwait International Airport for a U.S. company. Read here for more

Hundreds of photographs showing the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers have popped up on the Internet thanks to a First Amendment activist, prompting the Pentagon to halt any further release of similar images. But it was Air Force officials who decided to release the photos to Russ Kick after he appealed their denial of his Freedom of Information Act request for the shots.

Kick posted 350 photos, mostly of flag-covered coffins, on his Web site, The Memory Hole . A Defense Department policy dating back to 1991 bars the media from covering the arrival of remains to Dover to protect the soldiers' families. Read here for more

Images of war dead proliferated in Vietnam, and throughout the 1980s, the government regularly allowed the media to take pictures of coffins returning from Lebanon, Grenada and Panama to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the primary arrival point for returning American soldiers killed overseas.

But in 1991, as the United States embarked on its first major war since Vietnam, the policy shifted. In January of that year, the administration of the first President Bush began prohibiting media outlets from taking pictures of coffins being unloaded at Dover. It instituted a total ban in November of that year.

"There was an attempt to not have another Vietnam in the sense that the administration was not going to allow the media to sell the war, one way or the other," said John Louis Lucaites, a communications and culture professor at Indiana University who teaches a class called "Visualizing War."

In 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the ban after media outlets and some other organizations sued to have it lifted. Citing the need to reduce the hardship and protect the privacy of grieving families, the court held that the ban did not violate First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press.

The National Military Family Association, one of the largest military-advocacy groups, supports the policy. "The families that we've heard from are more interested in their privacy and would hope that people would be sensitive to them in their time of loss," said Kathy Moakler, deputy director of government relations for the organization. Read Here for more

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