Quote from ARogueTrader:
Having to stoop to such levels simply illustrates a complete lack of class on your part.
While I disagree with our president on many different policies, I don't view him as fully removed from the feelings of loss and sadness when one of our soldiers perish.
Pentagon keeps dead out of sight
Bush team doesn't want people to see human cost of war
Even body bags are now sanitized as `transfer tubes'
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
WashingtonâCharles H. Buehring came home last week.
He 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.
When the military truck drove his remains across the tarmac, workers paused and removed their hats.
He was met by a six-member honour guard acting as pallbearers, to allow a "dignified transfer" to the Charles C. Carson mortuary, where he became one of an estimated 60,000 American casualties of war that have been processed there over almost five decades.
"It reminds us we are at war," says Lt.-Col. Jon Anderson, who describes business at the Dover mortuary as "steady."
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.
In order to continue to sell an increasingly unpopular Iraqi invasion to the American people, President George W. Bush's administration sweeps the messy parts of war â the grieving families, the flag-draped coffins, the soldiers who have lost limbs â 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.
Buehring of Winter Springs, Fla., described as "a great American" by his commanding officer, had two sons, 12 and 9, was active in the Boy Scouts and his church and had served his country for 18 years.
No government official has said a word publicly about him.
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 â 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 ....
"This is a big government and a big Pentagon and they could have someone there to meet these bodies as they come back to the country."
But today's military doesn't even use the words "body bags" â a term in common usage during the Vietnam War, when 58,000 Americans died.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon began calling them "human remains pouches" and it now refers to them as "transfer tubes."
and then I stand corrected, but the content still stands
