Heather Bellow writes to the New York Times:
Re “After Virginia Tech, Testing Limits of Movie Violence†(Business Day, April 30):
So the horror film industry is worried about profits in light of the Virginia Tech massacre. But it doesn’t seem to have a problem of conscience, producing the stuff in the first place.
One would think that the daily body count in Iraq (or at home) would be enough horror for the American people, who are lured into theaters with poster images of torture and mutilation…
Yes, that might actually be enough horror for the American people, if the America people actually saw that horror. But as Pat Arnow of FAIR reports, images of killed or injured American soldiers are being officially censored by the Department of Defense. DOD policy now states:
Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without service member’s prior written consent [which, as Arnow points out, is unlikely in the case of serious wounds]…. In respect for family members, names or images clearly identifying individuals ‘killed in action’ will not be released.
When the New York Times departed from this policy and published the photograph of an injured soldier, a General immediately issued a complaint, and the New York Times made a public apology for publishing the photograph.
Injured American soldiers are flown in under cover of night, so their arrival cannot be photographed. Photography of the arrival of caskets of slain soldiers at Dover Air Force Base is also prohibited.
Yes, the violence of the Iraq war might, hypothetically, fill the need for Americans to view images of horror. But that is an entirely hypothetical point.
And why is it prohibited? Because the families demand it. Casualties are not public property and their images are NOT available for anyone to take and use at anytime for any reason.
Remember, if the Media can determine that images and video of the 9-11 attacks are too harsh and raw for the American people to handle and cut their use…so too the Defense Department can say of combat casualties and prohibit them as well.
The families demand? Pa-leez. It’s a political decision pure and simple.
I agree that photos of the wounded, especially with idenitifying information, should not be published. They are not public figures and have the right to privacy, especially when they are not in a position to insist on it themselves, as in the photo of the dying soldier that was retracted. Bloody photos are also used as porn by the Islamists to gloat over, as well as a political weapon–remember Somalia? Al-qaeda is only too aware of the political propaganda uses of this type of photo.
Photos of coffins are another matter. This belongs in the public domain and the public awareness. An anti-war exhibition here last year lined up pairs of shoes in a public plaza to dramatize the numbers killed.
Photos of war dead ARE NOT images of PUBLIC Domain. Don’t go putting a bullshit spin on this. War dead images are always taken and NEED to be cleared by the Defense department due to privacy concerns from family.
It’s not a political decision you paranoid twit…I know of families all the time at Pope AFB and Fort Bragg signing non disclosure of images forms. Don’t go trying to peddle that shit. You are clueless on how military family issues work.
Photos of coffins are another matter.
I would not want my husbands casket, dead or maimed body used for the media’s propaganda. Would you want your dead advertised? It was at the families request, National Military Family Association, VFW, American Legion Auxillary etc. fought for that change because the caskets and dead were being aired before the families were notified. The media doesn’t give a shit about the families of the wounded and dead and never tell the whole truth anyway. I know both sides, I live it every day.
You people really don’t get it do you. Some times it is as simple as privacy and dignity. Live a day in my shoes guys – it is as simple as Honor, Dignity, Pride, and Freedom but unless you have served or are a direct family member you will never know so dont pretend like you do.
Jim, JC, PW, sometimes I am amazed at how ignorant you can be. See you when the wars over. Last straw.
Why should the families care about photos of flag-draped coffins? No, it’s the military that cares about that–to keep their casualties off the front pages and keep their little cash cow war with its salary continuation plans raking in the dough. Follow the money. If families are signing non-disclosure forms it is because the military forces them to sign and not becasue they are clamoring for it. Fortunately PBS shows pictures of the dead in silence after their news show–pictures provided by the families, presumably AFTER they get their death benefits.
I found out about my husband’s (non-military)death from the media. A former neighbor called me and said “watch the news”. I wasn’t living with him, so I called his mother and she didn’t know anything either. I called the coroner’s office in that county they were rude to me. Finally his sister was able to get official confirmation of his death and arrange to send the dental records. It shouldn’t happen like that to any family.
I found the continued news stories to be intrusive, upsetting, and unavoidable. You want to turn off the TV but you don’t. You buy the papers. Months later people bring you clippings. You thank them and you read, and it’s fresh all over again. That’s the way it works, war or no war. I don’t find coffins or urns to be disturbing in the same way–they’re cold, final, countable, impersonal. The public needs to see this representation of the true cost of the war.
Perhaps the subject is too close to you right now, Laurie, but Jim and crew may be doing more than anyone to bring your loved ones back home to you in one piece.
Naw, I don’t think so. I signed a disclosure form for my daughter that will deployed in November. I was NOT forced to do anything. I did not have to sign one for my son and daughter-in-law when they deployed because they were married. It’s the next of kin thing. Iroqoius, you are far too paranoid about the Military. Military families are far more intuit about affairs dealing with death and injury than you think.
With the way your progressives carry one and the conspiracies you all claim about the government, you would think you all would be strong defenders of the 2nd amendment….make sure that you could overthrow the government when it really goes out of control.
Sorry, Laurie O., but I don’t respond to emotional blackmail.
If you want to read carefully what I wrote in the post, please do. It looks like you read a lot of your own assumptions into the post.
“I would not want my husbands casket, dead or maimed body used for the media’s propaganda.”
Since when have people had a choice in the content of propaganda?
They died serving their country in an unjust war. I expect they were brave and I truly hope my friend Zach currently serving doesn’t have to return home dead.
IF he did however then the reality of the coffins remains for people to weigh up themselves.
If you really believe this is worth that many lives then it won’t bother you.
There’s a difference between desensitisation and dehumanisation. There’s nothing truly wrong with being able to cope with horrific imagery. There IS something terribly wrong with starting to think of soldier deaths as just statistics.
So i guess Arlington National Cemetery and the Vietnam Wall, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and all those statues commemorating war are to be removed too, eh Harrold? You party-line hack. Just keep backin’ your dictator and celebrate death, eh? You are one disturbed person. What is this war going to accomplish? What’s the goal? How do we know when we’ve “won?” It just goes on and on so Haliburton and the neocon cabal can keep making tons of cash at the expense of the Iraqi people and the American taxpayer. Who benefits? The military-industrial complex, period. Oh, and the coffin makers.
Tommy boy, niggers murder more people in the USA every 2 months, than have been killed in a 4 year overseas war, yet you don’t complain about it? What gives?
Tom…you stupid shit…there is a differenece between a cemetary and a fucking just arrived casket! Family hasn’t seen there loved one yet. A cemetray is open for all. Keep talking your shit, Tommy, keep it up. One day you are going to spew your demented crap, say I have a right to say it and someone will excerise their right to be tried a jury of their peers for pounding you to a bloody mess.
Hare…I guess respect for the familes means nothing to you then, eh? The greater good means more? Then you won’t mind opening up your families pain to the public when it happens…God forbid, like the rape of a loved one perhaps…violent crime that needs attention…perhaps because of the ills of the inner city maybe…or what not. Don’t start that double standard thing, its sword as TWO sharp edges…
And again we see the bright side of Harrold, saying yet again that hitting people who disagree with you is the American way.
You know, Harrold, if you want to beat someone into a bloody mess, why don’t you come to my door? My address is 1287 Hunter Avenue, Columbus, Ohio. Are you brave enough to have the whole proceeding be on camera for the cops? Or do you only threaten to beat people into bloody messes when you can sneak around and not get caught?
What do you expect, for me to cry into my pink cable-knit sweater and spill my latte onto my sushi thanks to my trembling, girly fingers? I don’t think I’ll ever see you at my door. And that’s my answer. You’re just blustering, and we know it, and it’s kind of pathetic and sad.
Jim…you’re an ass who can’t read….the quote from above is “…and someone will excerise their right to be tried a jury of their peers for pounding you to a bloody mess…” I didn’t say I would, someone would. If you imply that I would then you are really too uptight about anyone that’s not in your “thought court”. You seem to like to write for a pass time. Read Elements of Style to understand some concepts of prose.
And by the way…I would edit out your address from the above comment. Some real lunatic might just use that challenge. And they really might not mind the jail time.
I got the distinction. You didn’t follow my distinction.
A) You endorsed, yet again, people hitting someone for disagreeing with them. You gleefully encouraged Tommy to keep speaking up with the anticipation that someone would smack him down.
B) I encouraged you to take your smack talk and bring it into action, if you dared. I said you were a pathetic, sad, blusterer if you weren’t willing to do it yourself in front of the cameras.
You’re worse than someone who hits other people for disagreeing with them. You hope other people will do the job of hitting people who disagree with you. What a chicken-shit way to live.
I’ve been writing my address publicly for years, partly as a way of demonstrating to fear-obsessed people that chicken-shit blusterers like you are no reason to stop speaking out. I ain’t dead yet. I’ll never see you at my door, because you’re all talk and no action when it comes to threatening people for disagreeing with you. You’re just another smack-talking chump in a long line of smack-talking chumps who’ve visited this website.
I’ll make you a deal: you read the U.S. Constitution, and I’ll take down my address.
Jim…if YOU read the Constitution…you wouldn’t be a Progressive….
And as for endorsements….you AND this site promote…endorse…those that “smakcs” of anarchy…that “smacks” of solcialism….of communism….your followers are a twisted sad sack of useless debris. You call all those that disagree with you all Nazis, and Hate Mongers, with no reprimand from you or your close ilk.
You are a pious turd.
Remember this buck-o, that you and the three or four that post here regularly are all there is. You all speak to yourselves, and comment on each others work. A “Free Republic” website wannbe. Irregular Times is a general failure, because of the lunacy you all right about.
You can “call me out” like a school yard kid, that’s fine. Call me what you like. But in the arena of ideas, you are nothing. And in the court of public influance, that’s all that matters.
No, I’m impious, if you want to get specific. I am primarily a liberal, and only secondarily a progressive. I am in business, not in the COMINTERN. I scoff at anarchists on the rare occasions I mention them. And which is it: are “our followers” a “twisted sad sack of useless debris” or nonexistent? We don’t have followers, we have readers, of which you are interestingly one, who clearly can and do make up their minds on their own.
If you’re going to dish it out, get out of your own head and try to be accurate.
Yes, Jim is sometimes a pompous ass, and no, we don’t always agree with him, but in this case he is right. If your only “reasoned response” to an argument is to try to provoke someone else to beat the crap out of the person making the argument, you don’t have much of a case.
If Harrold has three family members about to get stuck in Iraq, he probably doesn’t want to hear that their blood is being used to buy financial prosperity for the offspring of Halliburton bigwigs like Cheney.
So, Harrold, when you get done beating Jim to a bloody pulp, or getting someone else to do it for you so you don’t have to get your hands dirty, what about answering Tom’s questions: “What is this war going to accomplish? What’s the goal? How do we know when we’ve “won?—
Harrold, you seem kind of…scary. Lay off the mafia-assassin-hitman stuff and people may approach you on the street again.
And also, even though I can’t do much, I’ll always do what I can. I’d also like to avoid the draft. You know why, deep down, the thought of a person like me choosing the demo-progressive side makes people like you somewhat wary?
Because I’m the next generation. I’m pissed that we may have to clean your war up, pissed that you ruined our economy, pissed that the environment is in tatters, and, last but not least, pissed that we have scared other world powers to the point of not wanting to help us participate in an unneccesary war against people we should’ve had under wraps a long, long time ago…
I think you fully managed to miss the point of everything I said.
I didn’t say that people don’t deserve more respect from the media, I asked when they last got it.
If you want to imply that I have double standards, implying that I should fear the media should something violent and horrible happen to a loved one is an inappropriate way to go about it.
If something as terrible as rape or murder happened to a loved one I would be more concerned about WHY rather than the media’s reaction.
Besides, with the amount of media attention to that famous BEHEADING I fail to see how coffins could be any worse. They’re not corpses, they’re not disgusting, they’re a sign of respect for the deceased, same as graves.
Simple fact is, the troops–living and dead–are used all the time as fodder for pro-war propaganda. Bush uses them as a backdrop for his “Mission Accomplished” speeches, then we hear how we can’t “cut and run” because it would dishonor the dead. Don’t say the war is being managed poorly and we aren’t winning it, or it will hurt the poor troops’ feelings.
I’m sorry, Laurie, but the “honor of the troops” is a staple of pro-war propaganda. It’s not just personal and it’s not just about the families–I agree it should be, but it isn’t. The war mongers are only too happy to shamelessly put them on display alive and healthy in shiny new uniforms when they promote the war, but they hide the dead away, never attend a funeral, have no idea (and/or don’t care) that wounded veterans are being housed in moldy rodent-infested hellholes and forgotten until they read it in the newspaper.
Agreed, families should have a say in how their dead are depicted. But it goes beyond that. Publicizing the honor of the troops and privatizing their pain is a public relations game, and I’m sorry to say so but military families are caught up in it and getting played by the Bush administration.
http://www.irregulartimes.com/magniloquence.php
Go wild.
Harrold, you limp-dicked idiot, you couldn’t pound sand with a mallet. Your threats are indicative of your angry personality – the mark of a true Rethuglican. War, war, war, hate, hate, hate, me, me, me. You suck as a human. Grow a brain.
Wow! Harrold you brought out the true colors of the socialist libs on here!!
Yet they are too fucking stupid to recognize the very same behaviour they accuse people who disagree with their agenda of possessing.
Shaddap tommy boy, you cowardly piece of shit!
Cite the passage in which I threaten to assault people who I disagree with, or in which I state that assaulting people for disagreeing with me is a good idea.
Surely you are not “too fucking stupid” to do that.
You talking to me jimmy bob? Or Harrold?
By the way, I didn’t read where Harrold wrote that “hitting people who disagree with you is the American way.”
Did you read that jimmy bob, or are you so fucking stupid, you feel the need to put words into other people’s post to make yourself look like you actually have a point to your libshitz double speak?
Right, so you CAN’T do it. Got it.
Wat u tawkin’ bout willis?
My only issue with your spin on this is that it is not at all what I had in mind when I wrote that letter to the Times. I was speaking quite specifically to this collective problem we all have of being enamored of gore and the proliferation of it via Hollywood. They profess to be against the war. Against gore, essentially. I was merely pointing out the hypocrisy of Hollywood, and their value of the dollar above all else. They speak out of two sides of their mouths. This issue of whether to show remains, etc. is a separate one. Important, yes. But not what I was writing about. Americans know of the body count, but are not seeing it. Perhaps there should be a way for people to know and see more of the devastation. I don’t disagree there. However, this has nothing to do with Hollywood and the almighty dollar.