the blog quebecois

Oh my. Deprive our solicitous media of the opportunity to tap dance on the coffins of slain soldiers, will you? Judging by the pissing and moaning I've been hearing all day about it (The CBC couldn't find anyone besides the Minister of Defence who agreed with the government's decision. Huh! Fancy that!), that's exactly what they had intended to do.

Ottawa Citizen:

Liberal defence critic Ujjal Dosanjh blamed Mr. Harper for the decision to bar the media from CFB Trenton, calling it "absolutely un-Canadian."

Mr. Dosanjh accused the Conservatives of adopting the same tactics as the Bush administration -- keeping images of the death of Canadians in Afghanistan out of the public consciousness so they won't undermine public support for the mission, the way U.S. support for the Iraq mission has waned.

Well, whaddya know? Dosanjh got it half-right, for a change. Right policy, wrong Bush.

Seattle Times:

The Pentagon has banned the media from taking pictures of military caskets returning from war since 1991, citing concern for the privacy of grieving families and friends of the dead soldiers. The Bush administration issued a stern reminder of that policy in March 2003, shortly before the war in Iraq began.

In 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the ban after media outlets and some other organizations sued to have it lifted. Citing the need to reduce the hardship and protect the privacy of grieving families, the court held that the ban did not violate First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press.

The National Military Family Association, one of the largest military-advocacy groups, supports the policy. "The families that we've heard from are more interested in their privacy and would hope that people would be sensitive to them in their time of loss," said Kathy Moakler, deputy director of government relations for the organization.

Censorship of these types of images is nothing new; showing their war dead was proscribed by all Allied governments in World Wars I and II. Soldiers' remains were mainly in those times buried overseas, so the issue of photographing returning caskets didn't come up. Had it, I doubt that newsmen of the day would have been terribly upset over prohibiting the practice -- unlike some of the opportunistic hyenas of today, at least they realized that they were on the same side:

A war of the half-truth, fought against a total lie.*

(* Apologies to Arthur Koestler, whom I paraphrase, being unable to find the exact quote.)