By Brian Bohl
Dire economic news continues to dominate headlines and carve an indelible spot atop most legitimate polls assessing the public’s top concerns. The recession also continues to knock an on-going two-front war down the list of priorities. But as the world’s attention shifts away from Iraq and Afghanistan in favor of downward spiraling financial growth charts, a development early in the Obama administration quietly put an end to an 18-year law that sparked a debate over privacy versus the public’s right to know.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates lifted a ban that had been in place since 1991 prohibiting photographers and videographers from taking images of coffins belonging to American service members. For the first time since President George H. W. Bush ordered the ban nearly two decades ago, American flag-draped coffins may be photographed, but only if the families of the dead agree.
That is the provision that makes the ban’s termination a positive step for both the public and soldiers’ families. George W. Bush’s administration insisted the ban stayed in place to protect the privacy of military members who dedicated their lives to the United States and the family and friends who grieve their passing. But some families of the dead say the pictures of the coffins can serve the public good and shouldn’t be off-limits for publications.
Dover Air Force Base in Delaware is the landing spot for many coffins arriving from Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s also the location where the emotional resonance and importance of the photographs is most underscored. Wars produce death. Casualty numbers cannot represent what images reinforce: the idea that real people with parents, brothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, husbands and friends are dying for our freedom overseas.
Pictures serve as reminders that real, flesh-and-blood people, not faceless drones in a generic troop surge or platoon, are the ones fighting in unfamiliar territory against people who hate the United States and the democratic ideals we cherish. Almost 5,000 members of the military have died in the two wars. Casualty numbers consistently scrawl across television screens and are listed in thousands of print accounts about the wars, but this desensitizes the public to the bloody reality and the high toll armed conflict produces. Photographs reestablish the human connection and serve the important purpose of forcing the electorate to constantly ask their elected leaders if the price of war continues to be justified.
The argument set forth by the two Bush administrations and even some Democrats is that the ban on photographs allows families to avoid sharing heartbreaking moments with the entire world. But that choice belongs solely with the individual families, who still are allowed to say yes or no on the photograph’s publication.
This is the only way this issue should have ever been addressed. Keeping disturbing images under wraps can be advantageous to the politicians in power, regardless of political affiliation. Though it happened to be a Republican president when this issue came to a head in previous years, the protocol should not be altered from what Gates’ instituted a few weeks ago. During a war, especially an unpopular military action like in Iraq, photographs of Americans being killed in action reflect poorly on the politicians who authorized the action.
Hence, it is easy to see the incentive for public officials to minimize the flow of information, or in this case the availability of photographs, from reaching the desks of editors, producers and the Web. But it would be political suicide to use that as the reason to prohibit pictures of coffins, so those bureaucrats and presidential flacks invoke family privacy as the rationale for limiting access to photographers. Yet that is nothing but a transparent ploy to avoid showing the true cost of war.
Brian Bohl is a master’s candidate for journalism. You may e-mail him at
