The Bush administration's policy of barring news photographs of the flag-covered coffins of service members killed in Iraq won the backing of the Republican-controlled Senate on Monday when lawmakers defeated a Democratic measure to instruct the Pentagon to allow pictures.
The 54-39 vote came after little formal debate, with seven Democrats joining 47 Republicans to defeat the provision.
PHOTO: EPA
Two Republicans, senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and John McCain of Arizona, voted in favor of letting news photographers have access to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where coffins containing the war dead from Iraq arrive.
"These caskets that arrive at Dover are not named; we just see them," said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was a prisoner of war for five years in Vietnam. He added, "I think we ought to know the casualties of war."
But President Bush has insisted that the policy banning the photography protects the privacy of the families of the dead, a view reiterated by lawmakers who opposed the measure.
Some Republicans, including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, complained that Democrats were trying to score election-year points with the effort. Grassley noted that the policy had been in place since the first Bush administration, in 1991. "This policy has been in place for 13 years," he said. "Nobody has raised a complaint about it until now."
But the policy has not been consistently followed; President Bill Clinton took part in numerous ceremonies honoring dead servicemen. In March 2003, just as the US embarked on its war with Iraq, the Pentagon issued a directive stating that there would be no news coverage of "deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases.
The measure defeated on Monday was proposed by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, as an amendment to a US$447.2 billion Pentagon spending plan for 2005 now under consideration in the Senate. Lawmakers hope to finish work on the bill on Tuesday.
Lautenberg's amendment would have instructed the Department of Defense to work out a new protocol letting the news media cover the arrival of the war dead in a manner that protected families' privacy.
"A majority of the Senate are now working on behalf of the president to conceal from the American people the true costs of this war," Lautenberg said in a statement after the vote. He said his amendment "would bring an end to the shroud of secrecy cloaking the hard, difficult truth about war and the sacrifices of our soldiers."
The issue of pictures of the war dead has been a delicate one for the administration in recent months. In April, a collection of more than 300 images of coffins landing at Dover were made available after a Web site, www.thememoryhole.org, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for any pictures of coffins arriving at Dover from Iraq.
The images were taken by Air Force photographers and released by the Air Force Mobility Command. The Pentagon later said the release of the pictures was wrong. But Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, who voted against Lautenberg's amendment on the ground that it would interfere with families' privacy, said he thought the Air Force photographs "were fine." He added, "I thought that was done very respectfully."
VAGUE: The criteria of the amnesty remain unclear, but it would cover political violence from 1999 to today, and those convicted of murder or drug trafficking would not qualify Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez on Friday announced an amnesty bill that could lead to the release of hundreds of prisoners, including opposition leaders, journalists and human rights activists detained for political reasons. The measure had long been sought by the US-backed opposition. It is the latest concession Rodriguez has made since taking the reins of the country on Jan. 3 after the brazen seizure of then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Rodriguez told a gathering of justices, magistrates, ministers, military brass and other government leaders that the ruling party-controlled Venezuelan National Assembly would take up the bill with urgency. Rodriguez also announced the shutdown
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) purge of his most senior general is driven by his effort to both secure “total control” of his military and root out corruption, US Ambassador to China David Perdue said told Bloomberg Television yesterday. The probe into Zhang Youxia (張又俠), Xi’s second-in-command, announced over the weekend, is a “major development,” Perdue said, citing the family connections the vice chair of China’s apex military commission has with Xi. Chinese authorities said Zhang was being investigated for suspected serious discipline and law violations, without disclosing further details. “I take him at his word that there’s a corruption effort under
China executed 11 people linked to Myanmar criminal gangs, including “key members” of telecom scam operations, state media reported yesterday, as Beijing toughens its response to the sprawling, transnational industry. Fraud compounds where scammers lure Internet users into fake romantic relationships and cryptocurrency investments have flourished across Southeast Asia, including in Myanmar. Initially largely targeting Chinese speakers, the criminal groups behind the compounds have expanded operations into multiple languages to steal from victims around the world. Those conducting the scams are sometimes willing con artists, and other times trafficked foreign nationals forced to work. In the past few years, Beijing has stepped up cooperation
The dramatic US operation that deposed Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro this month might have left North Korean leader Kim Jong-un feeling he was also vulnerable to “decapitation,” a former Pyongyang envoy to Havana said. Lee Il-kyu — who served as Pyongyang’s political counselor in Cuba from 2019 until 2023 — said that Washington’s lightning extraction in Caracas was a worst-case scenario for his former boss. “Kim must have felt that a so-called decapitation operation is actually possible,” said Lee, who now works for a state-backed think tank in Seoul. North Korea’s leadership has long accused Washington of seeking to remove it from power
RSS