*** ORBUSMAX GUEST OP/ED ***

The Double Standard Of Government Censorship - By Jon Eekhoff

April 26, 2004

Tami Silicio lost her job yesterday. She wasn't a victim of "outsourcing". She wasn't "downsized". Her company didn't "restructure". She was fired, the old fashioned way, for breaking company rules.

Silicio used to work for Maytag Aircraft, just one of the many private companies now doing jobs for the US military. Silicio was fired because she did something that showed a lack of compassion, she took a picture.

Since 1991 the Pentagon has banned all pictures of soldier's caskets returning to the US. This policy has been followed for more than 13 years, by the Clinton administration and now the Bush administration, without cracking. When the Seattle Times published the Silicio picture in Sunday's paper it was breaking a government censorship that should have been broken years ago.

Pictures of caskets are newsworthy. Pictures of caskets tell a story that we seem unwilling to tell in the United States, boys and girls are killed in war, not just any boys and girls, but our boys and girls. A picture is truly worth a thousand words and the picture of twenty caskets draped with American flags, in the back of a cargo plane, spoke volumes.

Over 100 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq in April. That count does not include civilians working in Iraq for the US military and it only tells a portion of the real number of US soldiers who have been permanently maimed in the line of duty. This human cost of war is not something that can be calculated by the Pentagon and therefore must be ignored.

The Pentagon has good reason to censor pictures of dead soldiers, not because it would be insensitive to grieving families, but because those pictures show the true cost of war: human life.

We see images of war on the news every night, but those images are not of dead Americans. We can stomach images of dead people as long as they aren't born in the US. Sometimes we can even celebrate those images, remember Saddam's bullet-filled sons? How about all of the smart-bomb footage for the first Gulf War? The Pentagon uses images of war, but turns an about face when it comes to showing dead Americans.

Our sensitivity for our own people is understandable, but when the Pentagon uses images of war selectively--filtering out images that might upset us and celebrating images that support their agenda--we are victims of censorship.

John Kerry and George W. Bush are both using images of war to prop themselves up before a frightened American people. Maybe we should be sensitive to those who lost family members in Viet Nam and not allow Kerry to show any pictures of him getting war decorations. Maybe Bush should not be allowed to land a plane on an aircraft carrier and prance around in his flight suit announcing "Mission Accomplished".

If we really want to show sensitivity to families of soldiers, we might consider bringing those troops home. Iraq has already become a quagmire of problems for the Bush administration, a quagmire that they now seem ready to turn over to the UN or any other body that is dumb enough to get involved.

War is a dirty, smelly mess. It cannot be sanitized by the Pentagon, and shouldn't be. If we are going to engage in war we should not be treated like children who "can't sit at the big table" with the adults. We should be able to see what war is really like, unpleasant images included. Then we can make informed decisions about war and the sacrifices of war.

I remember watching war movies when I was a child. There was something heroic about the black and white films that showed how brave men went willingly into war and fought against demonized enemies. These movies were made in a time when war couldn't be brought into our homes by the electronic media. These movies formed images in my mind about the nobleness of war, about how good overcomes evil through force. These movies now seem campy and simplistic, but these are the movies that the Pentagon would like us all to believe are realistic interpretations of war. They would like us to believe that each soldier went willingly to battle, fought without fear and died bravely. No one wants to imagine a world where lives are tossed away in a war without a noble purpose and even worse would be a war fought without any purpose.

The picture of those twenty dead soldiers, in those twenty caskets should upset us. The picture should shock us to our senses. This is a real war, with real dead people. It is not a creation of Hollywood, or a creation directed by the Pentagon. How many people must die in Iraq before we finally say, "Enough!"?

-----------------------------------------------------------


Jon Eekhoff is a teacher in Western Washington, and one of the 5 greatest basketball players to hail from Lemoore, California.