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July 25, 2008
Dead U.S. soldiers? What dead U.S. soldiers?
Forget finding Iraq on a map—can the average U.S. citizen tell you (within, say five hundred) how many of our soldiers have died there since the invasion in 2003?
I think we both know the answer to that question.
Is the military's clampdown on photographs of dead American soldiers partly to blame? Has it helped keep the public from demanding an end to the war?
While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers to be published once family members have been notified, in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos.In the first of such incidents, Stefan Zaklin, formerly of the European Pressphoto Agency, was banned from working with an Army unit after he published a photo of a dead Army captain lying in a pool of blood in Falluja in 2004.
Increasingly, photographers say the military allows them to embed but keeps them away from combat. Franco Pagetti of the VII Photo Agency said he had been repeatedly thwarted by the military when he tried to get to the frontlines.
In April 2008, Mr. Pagetti tried to cover heavy fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. “The commander there refused to let me in,” he said. “He said it was unsafe. I know it’s unsafe, there’s a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working.”
4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images (NY Times)
