Shooting War

Marine casualties, June 26, 2008 suicide bombing,
Anbar Province, Iraq
--Zoriah Miller
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The New York Times recently ran a piece on Zoriah Miller, a photographer who has been disembedded from a Marine unit after posting his photos of dead Marines on his web site (4,000 U.S. Deaths and a Handful of Images.) While he is still credentialed to work in Iraq, "several military officials acknowledged that no military unit would accept him." We ran one of his photos here.

Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine Corps commander in Iraq, objected to Miller's photos of the Marines killed in a June 26 suicide bombing and "is seeking to bar Miller from all United States military facilities throughout the world."

"Miller said he spent three days on a remote Marine base editing his photos, which he then showed to the Company E marines. When they said they could not identify the dead marines, he believed he was within embed rules, which forbid showing identifiable soldiers killed in action before their families have been notified. According to records Mr. Miller provided, he posted his photos on his Web site the night of June 30, three days after the families had been notified."

This sort of censorship is a far cry from the open reportage of WW II, Korea or Vietnam.

Don McCullin, a British war photographer who worked in Vietnam in the late 1960s and Iraq in 2003 believes that the "total access" that photographers had in Vietnam was critical to their success in reaching the public. McCullin said,

"I was with the 5th Marines at Hue for two weeks . . . They took about 70 dead. I photographed the dead and wounded without any restrictions. They would not stand for it today. They treat you in these embeds like a dog on a leash."

These are not pretty pictures of healthy young Americans. They are not staged photo-ops, but they present an authentic picture of war. Why is the American public being treated to this sort of paternalism?