corrente

Dan Milbak of WaPo writes:

Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.

To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.

Lovely...

For a long time, people have treated deaths as the proxy for the intensity of the war, not the number of wounded, and this is howIraq has been covered.

However, our troops now have new body armor; great stuff, but only covers the torso. The good news is that deaths are lower than they would have been in past wars; the bad news is that wounds are a lot worse, since a round that once would have killed and taken of an arm now just takes off the arm; and the better marksmen don't aim for the torso any more. This is the reason for the photos and stories about amputations, which the regime has not yet figured out how or whether to suppress.

And we put our troops into this based on lies.

UPDATE: Alert reader MJS suggests:

Can we have an Internet Day of Mourning for the deaths and injuries visited upon our soldiers and upon the people of Iraq? Complete with "illegal" images?

Good idea!