WTF Is It Now?!?

November 3, 2003

Pentagon keeps dead out of sight
Bush team doesn't want people to see the human cost of war

Minutes after the attack on Sunday, Black Hawk helicopters swarmed over the scene to rush survivors to hospital while soldiers secured the site, ordering journalists to leave and confiscating film.

From the Toronto Star, mostly: In order to continue to sell an increasingly unpopular Iraqi invasion to the American people, miserable failure George W. Bush's misadministration 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. Bush does not attend the funerals of soldiers who gave their lives in his war on terrorism.

"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."

Lynn Cutler, a Democratic strategist and former official in Bill Clinton's White House, says this is the first time in history that bodies have been brought home under cover of secrecy. "It feels like Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson was accused of hiding the body bags."

But today's military doesn't even use the words "body bags." During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon began calling them "human remains pouches." It now refers to them as "transfer tubes."