Pentagon keeps American dead soldiers out of sight
From Toronto Star thru buzzflash
This report, greatly reduced, depicts starkly the awful truth about how the bushies try to hide the deadly facts about the American soldiers killed and/or wounded in Iraq. For those of us old enough to remember, it was such scenes of body bags during the Vietnam era that became the factor in changing public opinion about continuing in the vietanm sinkhole. (check out this report on tom paine verifying my own inclinations. Also Karen Kwiatkowski's polemic on lew rockwell's blog. ... It is also imperative that dying for the State be viewed as rewarding and profitable. It is nice that the House just passed an increase in the soldier’s death benefit from $6,000 to $12,000...)
From the Toronto Star : Today, to guard against a repeat, Bush team doesn't want people to see human cost of war; Even body bags are now sanitized as `transfer tubes'. I encourage you to read the entire article.
Charles H. Buehring, a “casualty” of the Iraq war, came home last week.
[Buehring] arrived at the air force base in Dover, Del., in the middle of the night, in an aluminum shipping case draped in an American flag… he became one of an estimated 60,000 American casualties of war that have been processed there over almost five decades…
But America never saw Lt.-Col. Buehring's arrival, days after a rocket from a homemade launcher ended his life at age 40 in Baghdad's heavily fortified Rasheed Hotel last Monday.
Americans have never seen any of the other 359 bodies returning from Iraq. Nor do they see the wounded cramming the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington or soldiers who say they are being treated inhumanely awaiting medical treatment at Fort Stewart, Ga.
To sell an increasingly unpopular Iraqi invasion to the American people,
President George W. Bush's administration sweeps the messy parts of war. — the grieving families, the flag-draped coffins, the soldiers who have lost limbs — into a far corner of the nation's attic. .No television cameras are allowed at Dover. .
Nor does Bush attend the funerals of soldiers who gave their lives in his war on terrorism.
…
If stories of wounded soldiers are told, they are told by hometown papers, but there is no national attention given to the recuperating veterans here in the nation's capital.
More than 1,700 Americans have been wounded in Iraq since the March invasion.
"You can call it news control or information control or flat-out propaganda," says Christopher Simpson, a communications professor at Washington's American University.
"Whatever you call it, this is the most extensive effort at spinning a war that the department of defence has ever undertaken in this country."
Simpson notes that photos of the dead returning to American soil have historically been part of the ceremony, part of the picture of conflict and part of the public closure for families — until now.
"This White House is the greatest user of propaganda in American history and if they had a shred of honesty, they would admit it. But they can't." .. .
