Coffin Pictures Published
Source: The Mercury News
April 23, 2004
The Pentagon's ban on images of dead soldiers' homecomings at all military bases was briefly relaxed Thursday, as hundreds of photographs of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base were released on the Internet by a Web site dedicated to combating government secrecy.
Earlier this week, the Seattle Times published a similar photo taken by a military contractor, who was later fired for taking photos of coffins of war dead being loaded onto a transport plane in Kuwait.
The Web site, the Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org), had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of caskets arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware. The Pentagon on Thursday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command's decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Department of Defense photographers.
Tami Silicio's photo of flag-draped caskets appeared on the front page of the Seattle Times on Sunday. Her husband, a co-worker, also was fired. The contractor, Maytag Aircraft, said Silicio of Seattle and her husband, David Landry, had "violated Department of Defense and company policies." The firing underscored the stringency with which the Pentagon and the Bush administration have pursued a policy to ban news organizations from taking photographs or news footage of the homecomings of the war dead. They have argued the policy was put in place during the first war in Iraq, and that it was simply an effort to protect the sensitivities of military families.
Executives at news organizations, many of whom have protested the policy, said Thursday night that they had not known that the Defense Department was taking photographs of the coffins arriving home, a fact that only came to light when Russ Kick, the operator of the Memory Hole, filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Pentagon has cited a policy instituted in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, as its reason for preventing news organizations from showing images of coffins arriving in the United States. While President Bush's opponents and anti-war forces have charged that the administration is seeking to keep unwelcome images of the war's human cost away from the American public, the Pentagon has said only individual services at a grave site give proper context to the sacrifice of soldiers and their relatives.
"The president believes that we should always honor and show respect for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice defending our freedoms," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Thursday night.
A New York Times/CBS News poll taken in December found that 62 percent of Americans said the public should be allowed to see pictures of the military honor guard receiving caskets of soldiers killed in Iraq as they are returned to the United States. Twenty-seven percent said the public should not be allowed to see those ceremonies.
Kick, who operates his Web site from Tucson, describes himself as "an information archaeologist." He was responsible for retrieving last year a previously censored Justice Department document criticizing the department for its diversity policies. He did not respond to phone calls at his home Thursday night. But in his explanation on his Web site he described filing a request for "all photographs showing caskets containing the remains of U.S. military personnel at Dover AFB."
The military had "very specific concerns" about Silicio's photo, according to William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the Colorado Springs-based military contractor that employed Silicio.
Silicio, a cargo worker who often loaded coffins on military planes bound for the United States, shot the photo in early April. As twin uprisings in Iraq led to a spike in U.S. war dead, she snapped a perfectly composed digital photograph of an aircraft packed with caskets. She told her best friend that her photo of coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq would allow parents of the dead to see that "their children weren't thrown around like a piece of cargo."
Losing her well-paid job in Kuwait was something that Silicio had been worried about before the photo was published, according to Barry Fitzsimmons, a photo editor at the Seattle Times. "She has a mortgage to pay and she really needs the job," said Fitzsimmons, who said he had a dozen phone conversations and exchanged 40 e-mails with Silicio before the photo was published. He and the newspaper's senior editors wanted to make sure she understood the possible consequences of publication.
"In the end, she felt she would be OK and she would be able to keep her job," Fitzsimmons said. "I think there is a little bit of being naive about the whole thing."
Silicio received no payment, but her name appeared under the photo.
ZUMA Press, a photo agency, is handling distribution of the photo. Rights to publish it have been purchased by a weekly news magazine, according to ZUMA. Until it appears in that magazine, the deal specifically prohibits it from appearing in the Washington Post, USA Today or the New York Times. Proceeds from the sale of the photo will go to a charity selected by Silicio, according to ZUMA.
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