Real Americans

This is the photo the White House doesn't want you to see. (Be sure to send it around.)

And as we saw today, they are a bunch of vindictive bastards about it.

One of the Seattle radio stations yesterday carried an interview with a Pentagon spokesman regarding the photo. He declined to suggest that there would be any retribution to the Times for running it, but merely made the somewhat coldly menacing remark that "we were disappointed." Today, we learned what that meant.

The spokesman, incidentally, emphasized that the policy had been in place since 1991.

That would have been during the first conflict with Iraq ... stage-managed by Bush Sr., who had a similar obsession with controlling the press. (For all the gory details of how the first Gulf War became the model for controlling the press inside the war zone, see John MacArthur's Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.)

As Malcolm Browne observed in 1991, "Real war stinks of rotting corpses."

Americans need to ask whose interests are really being served by trying to keep soldiers' coffins out of the public view. It should be apparent, in fact, that the Bush administration is using the families (whose feelings they constantly cite as justification for the policy) as a shield for their own miserable failures.