Captured Reality

Last Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that the existing ban on the photography of U.S. military caskets returning from Iraq would be altered to allow news coverage of the caskets with express consent from the families of the deceased. This ban had been in place for 18 years, enacted under the administration of President George H. W. Bush during the Gulf War. As the regulation stood, all photography of caskets of war dead was prohibited. Under these new provisions, caskets can be photographed only with the consent of the soldiers’ families. While this is a promising development, the revisions do not go far enough. The United States owes a debt of obligation to both its soldiers and its citizens to universally allow caskets to be photographed by the media.

These types of bans arise more out of political considerations than a concern for the honor of the dead. During the Vietnam War, photographs of military caskets proved politically dangerous to war supporters as they allowed the public to view and understand the mortal realities of combat. According to USA Today, the term “Dover Test,” for the Air Force base in Dover, Del., where the coffins arrived, came to indicate a test of the public’s tolerance for rising casualties in Vietnam. The modern ban came out of a fear that these kinds of images would influence public opinion on warfare. The banning of media photography of soldiers’ caskets because of such political considerations deprives the public of the true knowledge of the human costs of war.

Such bans also do a disservice to our nation’s soldiers. An attempt to sanitize the realities of warfare by disallowing photography of their caskets obscures their sacrifice and does greater dishonor than the caskets’ display. The photography of military caskets can and should be done in a respectable manner that adheres to laws protecting soldiers’ anonymity while allowing the public to recognize their supreme sacrifice for our nation. If done in such a manner, the photography of our war dead should require no process of family consent that will serve as another barrier to the proper coverage of war’s realities.

We acknowledge, however, the necessity of controls on photographs of dead or wounded U.S. troops. Such photography threatens anonymity considerations and could also cause intelligence breaches that would bring more harm to American soldiers. Moreover, it would sacrifice the respectability and moral superiority of our nation’s soldiers by displaying profane images of the dead in the same way that our enemies often parade around their captured and killed.

The Obama administration should take the changes they have made to this ban even further. Renouncing all restrictions on the respectful photography of military caskets will tear down a bastion of the repression of free press. It will allow the American public to understand the war in a real and reverential manner, and it will grant our soldiers the honor and dignity that their ultimate sacrifice deserves.