Posted by
Defend America on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 8:41:37 AM
Without Bush, media lose interest in war caskets
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
September 29, 2009
Remember
the controversy over the Pentagon policy of not allowing the press to
take pictures of the flag-draped caskets of American war dead as they
arrived in the United States? Critics accused President Bush of trying
to hide the terrible human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"These young men and women are heroes," Vice President Biden said in
2004, when he was senator from Delaware. "The idea that they are
essentially snuck back into the country under the cover of night so no
one can see that their casket has arrived, I just think is wrong."
In April of this year, the Obama administration lifted the press
ban, which had been in place since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Media
outlets rushed to cover the first arrival of a fallen U.S. serviceman,
and many photographers came back for the second arrival, and then the
third.
But after that, the impassioned advocates of showing the true human
cost of war grew tired of the story. Fewer and fewer photographers
showed up. "It's really fallen off," says Lt. Joe Winter, spokesman for
the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Dover Air Force
Base in Delaware, where all war dead are received. "The flurry of
interest has subsided."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Without-Bush-media-lose-interest-in-war-caskets-8310113-62427012.html