Freedom of the Press. Unless it hurts our poll numbers.Follow

Smasharoo posted at 9:43 AM



Totem Posted at 2:07 PM


Is there an echo in here :) ?

Moved to make sure no more are released, I guess.

Well. I could honestly care less whether pictures of flag draped coffins are available for viewing by the public or not. However, this is still rhetoric:




Suppport? In what way is Bush doing this? What is he doing for those families that is less then what any other president in history has done for the families of fallen soldiers? Tell me that Smash.

Your argument is full of assumptions:


You assume everyone believes this is a pointless war, so the mere fact of those soldiers being there (and dying) is somehow a commander in chief "failing" his military.

You assume that the families of those soldiers actually don't mind pictures of flag draped coffins.

You assume that the administration is somehow lying when it says that pictures are not released at the request of families of fallen soldiers.


You've provided not a shred of evidence to support these assumptions except your own insistence that they are true.


And your whole: "We're honoring the soldiers with these pictures" argument is bogus and you know it. If that were the case, then what is wrong with photographers taking pictures during funeral services? They're open to the public for the most part. I've certainly seen enough of them on the evening news Smash. Is that not honoring them?


Let's be honest here. It's not about the flag drapped coffin. It's about one thing and one thing only: Showing a number of them, together, stacked up in a plane. That serves only *one* purpose: To drive home the numbers that are dying by concentrating those numbers in one place. Don't give me "Honoring the fallen", it's purely about de-popularizing the war.


There's a whole segment of the US population that desperately *wants* this to be like Vietnam, purely so they can be "right". And if it doesn't end up being that way all by itself, then "by golly!", they'll do everything they can to make it seem that way. Let's keep throwing the relatively low casualty rate into the faces of the public. Hmmm... That's not working. People still support the war and the president. Well... Maybe if we find and release pictures of a bunch of flag drapped coffins, that will do the trick!


It's pretty sad really. If you can't make your point without resorting to emotion laden imagry, then your point probably isn't worth making. And when you do that at the expense of other people's privacy and feelings, you are really being slimy. But that's just my opinion...

Edited, Fri Apr 23 16:44:29 2004 by gbaji

You seem to have two different styles of writing. The first one is coherent and readable (like most of your recent posts) while other times you have mostly incoherent run on babble that's really difficult to comprehend. Above is an example of the latter. I'll try to discern it and give you a response.

I'll pose the same question to you that I did to Jophiel. Would you like to go to war with all of those countries? Although you're not coming right out and saying it you seem to want equal treatment to countries that we're not “best buddies” with which would be invade and de-throan all of those dictatorships.

By the way, you still haven't answered my question.


So now you're privy to all the intell that the president gets? How do you know there wasn't some piece of information floating around in classified documents that warranted the invasion? You of all people should know there's more classified and top secret information that a majority of the world would even think about.

Agree. That was grandstanding. However, he wasn't making a point with that. He wasn't swaying anyone's opinion. He was putting an exclamation point on something already done, not trying to get people to do something different.




Also agreed. And they got a lot of flack for that.


Um... Also, there's no disquising that those photos are part of an election campaign. While I personally dislike and pretty much ignore when folks use emotion instead of reason to persuade people, I also understand that many people are swayed by emotion more then reason (else it wouldn't be a problem!). I don't think you can blame a campaign planner for doing something that works.


But Smash was trying to claim that this wasn't about a campaign. It wasn't about politics, or someone with a political agenda. It was supposedly about "the truth" (tm). I'm just calling BS on that is all. Can we all agree that this has nothing to do with "truth", and everything to do with a group generating anti-war propaganda?

Edited, Fri Apr 23 17:21:24 2004 by gbaji

I was going to post a large long winded rebuttal, but Gbaji has made most of the points that I wanted to make anyway. Gbaji is however much more optimistic, than I, about having a nice ending to this story. I find it hard to believe that Iraq will emerge like a butterfly out of all of this. I think America will abandon this effort eventually, and those pictures, and ones of that kind, will make it happen sooner than later.

Quote from Gbaji:

This says it perfectly and is why those pictures should not be released.

I had you pegged as a "function, not fashion" sort of fellow. I quess I was wrong. Or maybe, since this supports the point I was making, and you were no longer dealing with unsubstatiated claims, maybe you feel that I was breaking the rules of this debate. Of course, you did leave it open that it could actually be unreadable in linux. You left that a little ambiguous, probably to allow a trap door to escape from.

Ok. Let's look at it this way:


Government has a vested interest in preventing people from seeing emotionally charged photos of dead US servicemen, as that could promote anti-war sentiment.

Anti-war folks have a vested interest in making sure people see the aforementioned photos, as it aids their cause.

Neither is being any more "bogus" then the other. However, the government is acting in accord with the presumed wishes of the elected representatives of the people. The anti-war folks are not.

The government is not required to take action that will undermine it's own activities. That's just silly. This is not about freedom of the press. The government is releasing figures for casualties in Iraq. They are contacting the families of those who've died. They are, in short, doing everything they are required to do. To suggest that they should also present those deaths in the most dramatic and anti-war way possible is ridiculous. To go further and imply that because the Government doesn't do so means they are "hiding something", or inhibiting "freedom of the press" is beyond ludicrous.


This whole thing is the equivalent of the anti-war people saying: "You're not anti-war, so you must be hiding something...". At what point in this whole bizaare rhetoric-filled political process did we come to the conclusion that if you don't actively present things in a way intended to favor the other guys position, that you are somehow lying? That's just silly...


If you want to hype up the deaths in Iraq, go for it. But to blame the government for *not* hyping them is a bit much, don't you think? That's just an all time low IMO.

No I think my point was more that random web pages that look like a nine year old using FrontPage created them with unatributed data don't inspire me with lots of confidence regardless of whose side of an argument they support.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/170213p-148587c.html

"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the twin tower attacks. "It is unconscionable."

No longer a guess.

QED, *****.

No, it proves that there are family members who were outraged by the ads. QED, it's not arguable.

Hence, your position that it might be that no one was offended by them is disproved.

End of discussion. It's not about majorities. It's about dssgracefully using the death of someone's spouse agiainst their wishes for political gain.

Might be that there are families that would be disgusted by the pictures of the coffins. I've yet to see ANYTHING that indicates that, however, so unlike the 911 add I guess we can say conclusively...

That it's just a radnom ******** guess on your part, eh?

Lets do a body count of all wars faought in or by this country since the Civil War.

Now with those numbers in mind I'd say the people taking the pictures to sell papers have a far more dark motive than those trying to keep them out of circulation. This is nothing more than propoganda plain and simple. Everyone knows war is hard. It's cowards that want you to change your mind with these images.

So you're saying the Air Force had a dark motive when they took those pictures? Because that's where most of them came from, by the way.

Those bastards.