News Compass

Iraq War: Images Pentagon Tried to Prevent Americans from Seeing

From Agence France-Presse, Thursday 13 January 2005, 10:08 and AP Newswire

A US National Guard unit has defied a Pentagon request that sought to stop television news crews filming six flag-draped soldiers' coffins arriving in Louisiana.

The soldiers:

Sgt. Bradley Bergeron, 25,
Staff Sgt. Christopher Babin, 27, and
Sgt. Armand Frickey, 21,
(all of Houma)
Sgt. Warren Murphy, 29, of Marrero,
Sgt. Huey Fassbender III, 24, of LaPlace, and
Sgt. 1st Class Kurt Comeaux, 34, of Raceland.

All but Comeaux received posthumous promotions.

The Pentagon has barred US media from filming the coffins of US service members arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

But the Louisiana National Guard allowed a CBS news crew on Wednesday to film the arrival of six soldiers' coffins at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse, near New Orleans, Louisiana.

Despite the Pentagon request, Lieutenant-Colonel Pete Schneider, a spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard told CBS: "What we thought was, we're going to do what the family asked us to do."

Footage broadcast by CBS showed an honour guard carrying the soldiers' flag-draped coffins out of an aircraft, watched by grieving families, to six waiting hearses.

Relatives sob Wednesday at the sight of flag-draped caskets containing the bodies of six Louisiana National Guardsmen killed by a bomb in Iraq.

One by one, the six caskets were removed from an Air Force cargo plane and loaded into separate hearses as family members watched from a hangar at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base near New Orleans.

The six were killed Jan. 6 in the first of two deadly bombings that took the lives of eight members of the 256th Infantry Brigade of the Louisiana National Guard. In both attacks, bombs blew up heavily armored vehicles.

It was the largest number of US troops killed in a single attack since last month's bombing in a military mess hall at a base near Mosul that killed 14 US soldiers.

There were no speeches.

"They trained together, they fought together, they went to war together, they died together. The families wanted them to come home together," Hunt Downer, assistant adjutant general in the National Guard, told reporters before the plane arrived.