A tangential thought:

Shouldn’t the DOD pay for itself if Healthcare has to pay for itself.

The US Military is the greatest Government Entitlement of them all.

Cowards isn’t exactly the word I would’ve chosen, but it’ll do.

Peterr, the civil war links don’t work. (at least for me)

A more direct thought:

War is not real until people experience it. All these pro-war or indifferent-to-war people who never been in combat have no idea what the reality of war is like. Unlike the people of Europe who have clear and vivid memories of experiencing war 1st and 2nd hand and pass these vivid memories to the next generation. Why do you think Europe is SO much more pacifict than the US. And don’t you think the Pentagon knows this.

Yeah, I asked that same question in a thread about Iran… I suggested one ask the average right-wing blowhard gunning for an Iran war how he’d pay for it. Watch his head explode, IF he doesn’t babble some nonsense about how a combination of reducing the size of non-defense government, tort reform, eliminating all social services and unions and reducing the corporate and top 1% tax rate to 0% would take care of everything…

We should have future history books without photos? Really good point, and we need to fight back on this.

Funny how we all wondered about the return of the draft for 8 years. The elimination of the American dream and the maintenance of a permanent national state of emotional DefCon 2 are slowly driving every American youth into either prison or the military.

I think I’ll go read “Player Piano” again…

some right-wing blowhard…[claiming] some nonsense about how a combination of reducing the size of non-defense government, tort reform, eliminating all social services and unions and reducing the corporate and top 1% tax rate to 0% would take care of everything…

Fresh from Limbaugh’s ass too!

Duh. We know have we will pay for wars. Tax the Poor by borrowing money.

The Tax on the Poor is the interest on the Government Debt paid to the rich, who lent the Government Money.

No, wait, I just realized: this is yet another effort by the Obama Administration to save American taxpayers money!

Think about it: instead of attempting to reduce our casualties by reducing our presence in Afghanistan, which would be an expensive military effort (in the sense that it would cost the Democrats a lot of defense-contractor campaign donations), he’s simply reducing the number of photographs being taken *of* troop casualties in Afghanistan… which hardly costs anything at all!

Now that’s change we can believe in… or *else*!

Hmmm . . .

There must be a way to link to specific photos at the LOC site, but right now I’m not seeing it.

Here’s the main link to their Civil War Photos page. If you play around in their links, you’ll find plenty to choose from.

You know! I paid some real good taxes for this damn war. And I don’t even get to see what I paid for. Well that’s not fair. At least they could show me some decent pics!

(said in the most sarcastic, acidic, cynical fucking tone you can imagine)

Surely we the people..and our press have the right to photograph, share and see what is happening in our name, to our troops, with our treasure.

FYI, Brady posed the dead for effect in his Civil War pics.

Yes, and as the link under “not always been rare” says, Brady was more of an editor and collector of these photos, though many are attributed to him as the photographer.

But posed or not, they are definitely dead.

So the Pentagon puts American troops in Afghanistan and is looking to up the number of American troops in Afghanistan.

Now the same people want to keep the real world results of killing and death from being seen in images across the United States.

So — they want the conflict to grow with requests for more American troops for Afghanistan and yet want to conceal the very real world mayhem and death visited on these same troops everyday?

So much for American Awesome Military Command and the awesome duplicity/hypocrisy it sets in place with this kind of sought concealment of what armed,deadly conflict produces and then seeks to increase the number of Americans in Afghanistan. What little people these are.

What? That’s gruesome.

Hiding truth from Americans is a losing proposition for the Government.

“The U.S. military in eastern Afghanistan recently changed its media embed rules to ban pictures of troops killed in the war.”

Fuck the Brass asses and their attempts to manipulate fact and truth Like NAZIS? These assholes need some ass kicking!!!!!

Thanks for this post, Peterr.

So few of us in the U.S. calculate the true cost of our continued foreign aggression. Beyond the KIA and the wounded, which we will pay for in hard dollars for several generations, there is the degredation of the national soul. The diversion of funds from things like science and engineering education and research, you know the shit that made us the global ‘big swingin dick’ in the first place.

How soon, and how easily we forget.

Sorry, didn’t check the links.

So let the photographers not embed. There’s no law against unembedded photographers from taking pictures of the dead, is there?

Just another example of O refusing to confront reality, or in his language, looking forward not backward.

However, as anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together knows, if you don’t pay attention to the lessons of history, … And if you don’t punish them as done wrong, wrong actions will multiply. For the Chicago School of Behavioral Economics, they show surprisingly little knowledge of how behavior is formed.

But then, I confronted them at NN08 on just that point, and discovered that they are indeed as ignorant of their field as they seem.

He did it for emotional & artisitc effect. It worked.

This (http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/three-dead-americans-lie-on-the-beach-at-buna/) is pretty much where the issue of publishing pictures of GIs killed in action stood until our modern age of only fighting wars against countries that can’t or won’t fight back. These days, we not only don’t show dead GIs, we don’t even like to let the press show us their coffins.

It’s interesting, when you think about it, that the Life photo comes from WW2, which was the war George Bush was telling us his little vanity effort in Iraq was “just like”. I guess it wasn’t “just like” WW2 quite enough to suit him and his handlers as far as the historical documentation goes.

My bigger beef is, where are the photos of the Iraqi victims: dead, injured, refugee, walled in jail by blast walls, etc.? You can find such photos if you search, but as Iraqis are basically not real people, the consequences of the U.S. war on them is rarely portrayed in U.S. press.

I’m not a pacifist

Peterr, I’d like to know, why not?

Well put.

Or this… helping to change the tide in Viet Nam….

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/09/19/obituaries/eddie_vietnam.jpg

And note the censors of WWII cleared Robert Capa’s photos of D-Day. The dead littering the beach. Enough truth and visual impact Spielberg used those few images as the genesis for Saving Private Ryan.

Every time I get close to that, I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’m not saying that I would have made the same choices he did in how to oppose the Nazis, but he was a very thoughtful theologian who came to the conclusion that there *are* occasions for violent resistance. To me, a pacifist is someone who would say he was wrong in that, and I’m not willing to do that.

The iconic pics of Iraq are the torture pics. Unfortunately they were greeted with a collective yawn.

No — they were greeted with outrage, followed by a desperate effort to paint them as the work of a few bad apples. That effort, sad to say, has worked in many quarters.

After the first batch were released, the rest have been held back to avoid that outrage bursting forth again.

Torture, the frozen scandal. Too bad there’s not enough heat to thaw it.

Yawn or not they will be iconic. I still see them in my mind’s eye. The images are indelible.

And someone had the nerve to call Yoo on it, though I can’t right now find the pic.

This is probably not the forum to go over the ins and outs of beliefs that we bundle up and label pacifism. I’d like to, however, some other time and thread.

Marshall B. Rosenberg speaks of “the protective use of force.” Force is not necessarily violence. And “protective” to me requires someone other than one’s own self-preservation.

Can you suggest something of Bonhoeffer’s writings that I can read to better understand the kind of violent resistance you refer to?

Force is not necessarily violence

Plz explain. The opposite seems pretty obvious to me, i.e., force is violence by definition.

Gandhi was able to generate tremendous forces for change. Non-violently.

The guy who did the Civil War documentary also did one on WWII. In it, they said that during the first part of the war only the dead were shown if they weren’t Americans. But after one of the bloody battles in the Pacific, the government reversed itself and began showing dead Americans.

What the Pentagon is doing here has nothing to do with caring for the dead and dying. It is just that they don’t want the real costs of the war to be known and seen by the public, because–surprise!–the war will become even more unpopular than it already is.

FWIW, you can link to an image by right clicking on it and getting it’s address from it’s properties.
http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cwpb/04300/04324r.jpg

Several come to mind. The anthology A Testament to Freedom would probably be a good place to start, and give you a flavor for him and his theology by showing different kinds of his writing (sermons, lectures, etc.)

Two other good ones would be The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison.

Good luck!

Yes, but I had wanted to link to the page that held not only the image but also the documentation so that folks knew what they were looking at.

Reaction to the photograph of Joshua Bernard. Good commentary on that photo by Fred Reed, an ex-marine curmudgeon war reporter and occasional blogger.

From photos in the NYTimes: Abu Ghraib, Extraordinary Rendition, Casualties, Refugees, Private Contractors, Orphans, Detainees, Siege of Sadr City, The war comes home……………………

Peace vigil paintings at:
http://web.mac.com/ctb3

No. I could not paint the beheaded bodies. That was more than I could bear.

Unembedded photographers might have security issues – how can they safely get to locations where US troops were killed? Those locations may not be accessible even to people that can call in an airstrike or artillery mission, let alone civilians.

The aftermath of Tarawa.

No images on Windoze.

Instead of allowing cameras, perhaps the DoD should hand out a copy of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun to every reporter and say that’s all they need to know about war casualties. Or a copy of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or Churchill’s, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, about Victoria’s war in India’s Northwest Frontier, near Afghanistan:

Along with the close-up look at the Army and its Malakand campaign and fighting, with bravery and adventure, Churchill shares a feeling for the people and the countryside. The young lieutenant also is brash enough to stretch beyond the frontier war to discuss Imperial policy, preferring the “Forward Policy” (basically, reach out to secure the frontier regions) to the “butcher and bolt policy” (basically, punish attacks and inroads, but without commitment to stabilizing the frontier).

A copy of Churchill’s The River War might do as well. It’s about Britain’s imperial “reconquest” of the Sudan from Fuzzy Wuzzies and the Arab tribal leader known as the Mahdi. Even the 1970’s miniseries, Once an Eagle, was more forthcoming than Mr. Bush’s and now Mr. Obama’s military.

That open, transparent and forthcoming government you promised, Mr. Obama? Your people are still waiting for it. Obama the rhetorician might take a cue on compassion from Churchill the rhetorician’s first parliamentary speech in London, given at a time when Britain was mired in its Vietnam War in South Africa: “If I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field.”

A representative government that prohibits coverage of how it goes to war and the human consequences of its doing so, is no longer representative of anything but itself, not its people. Except, of course, if and so long as its people tolerate such willful blindness.

That sentiment was shared by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the best known war poet, who knew the face of war and who said this in his best known poem, Dulce et Decorum Est – ironically, how sweet and meet it is to die for one’s country – about a fellow soldier dying from a gas attack:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I think Johnny Got His Gun is as powerful an anti-war novel as there is. All Quiet… gives us a broad picture of the horrors of trench warfare. Johnny… is one man’s struggle in its aftermath.

This link to Civil War dead at Gettysberg (1-3 July 1863; 51,000 killed) should work:

http://www.archives.gov/research/civil-war/photos/images/civil-war-099.jpg

See the work of the Turnley twins (Peter and David) neither of which embeded. They got around. For that matter…. there are the Turnleys, James Nachtwey and Christopher Morris. They’ve covered a world of war for decades and, for the most part, making their own way.

forgot the credit line:

Photographed by Timothy H. O’Sullivan.

(Matthew Brady didn’t actually take many battlefield photos, himself. Mostly he remained in Washington, D.C., supervising all his men in the field.)

Some here might appreciate the comments of James Nachtwey and why he has chosen to photograph the horror he has witnessed over the decades.

How does this work? A member of the audience said he felt a sort of frustrated powerlessness when he saw a Nachtwey picture. At least, came the reply, it made you feel like doing something. “Now it is up to you to decide what to do. Don’t turn away from your feelings.” At some point you will have a discussion with somebody. Keep the sentiment alive. Even the people who make the decisions see the same pictures and know that millions will be upset by them. As it happened, I had been perturbed by a photograph in Friday’s newspapers. It showed an unnamed, murdered woman being dragged away from the Chechen hostage-taking in Moscow as if she were no more than a bag of heavy laundry.

By now it must be obvious that if Nachtwey is merely a workman, he is an extraordinary one. He was asked what he felt when he was operating in the middle of death and destruction. Do you suppress your feelings and concentrate solely on the job in hand? I was astonished by his reply: “It’s all about emotions. The emotions are the source of the image. The emotions are why you went there in the first place. You can’t make a picture which moves somebody else unless you yourself have been moved.”

Nachtwey discussed two particular emotions. Do you feel anger, he was asked. “Anger might be the main fuel of my work. Outrage. Disbelief that this can possibly be allowed to be happening.” Do the intentions of the photographer matter? “The intentions are very, very important. It’s not meant to be neutral. It’s meant to move you in a certain way. I photograph a lot of inhuman occurrences. But I always want there to be a human element in the picture. At the core of it, I want there to be a sense of compassion. I truly hope you perceive that intention.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andreas-whittam-smith/photojournalism-can-become–a-form-of-art-615064.html

I agree. “Johnny Got His Gun” is so powerful, which is why it has so often been banned when countries are going to war…

You have to click on the photo numbers, then scroll down from the headings to see the complete paintings. Thanks for trying and keep up the good work for PEACE.

The import of Wilfred Owen’s work on visions of war from its sharp end, something chickenhawks like Lieberman know from nothing:

… it is the preface, by Wilfred Owen, to a volume of his poems which was to show, to England, and the intolerant world, the foolishness, unnaturalness, horror, inhumanity, and insupportability of war, and to expose, so that all could suffer and see, the heroic lies, the willingness of the old to sacrifice the young, indifference, grief, the soul of soldiers … he is a poet of all times, all places, and all wars. There is only one war: that of men against men.”

Dylan Thomas

Poetry with words or camera lenses exposes lies. That’s why it’s not wanted.

Violence is in the American DNA. It saddens me.

I lived a happy and contented childhood in Australia during the fifties where we worshipped and adored everything American. That included the movies showing us how the ‘Americans won the War’ by ridding us good people of those ‘bad guys’. Then came the sixties and Vietnam; with the truth manifesting itself with horrific photographs and television footage reproduced in the local Aussie media and in overseas magazines such as Look and Newsweek – of the Mai Lai massacre and the execution by revolver of a Viet Cong suspect seen around the world.

I avoided going to Vietnam, but some of my friends didn’t. Two lost their souls there; for nothing but Australia’s blind support for America and the ‘Domino Principle’. When will we ever learn/ we are still sending our people to Iraq and Afghanistan for basically the same sick reasons.

as i said to the magistrate at my court hearing for refusing to register, “All wars will cease when men refuse to fight”.

My views shifted radically, especially after the draft notice arrived after I refused to register, stating I do so as a conscientious objector.

A few years ago I saw an Iraqi’s photos of the Falujah massacre (the Generals claimed it never happened) on aljazeera.net. It was horrific. Posting photos of the Afghan/Iraq war dead would be a really good campaign, and foreign reporters would have those photos, and in fact they would probably provide them to help stop the war.

Remember Falluja. One of many war crimes committed under the command of U.S. generals and majors, among the most horrific. Forgotten to death (to borrow a line from a Paddy Chayefsky screenplay).

Yes, Brady (or whoever-Gardiner?) sometimes posed the dead in their photos for “effect”. Not always to show the carnage in a bad way, but sometimes to show their bravery. One of the most common was to put a rifle to replace the dead soldier’s because they were likely pilfered for either side!

That is sacriledge to us now many generations later but, I dare say, the Civil War generations had a much more inherent knowledge of the depridations than we do: brother against brother, military draft, disease, hundreds of thousands killed and maimed, etc. Hell, photos were the “icing on the cake” in a way.

Freedom of the press is subordinate to the freedom of the military. See Article V of the U.S. Constitution. (Cheney had the constitution amended, however those amendments are classified.)