'In a reversal of an 18-year-old military policy that critics said was hiding the ultimate cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the news media will now be allowed to photograph the coffins of America’s war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States, but only if the families of the dead agree.The decision, which Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Thursday, lifts a 1991 blanket ban on such photographs put in place under President George Bush.
The original 1991 ban had its genesis in an embarrassment for the first President Bush.
In 1989, the television networks showed split-screen images of Mr. Bush sparring and joking with reporters on one side and a military honor guard unloading coffins from a military action that he had ordered in Panama on the other'
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27coffins.html?th&emc=th
It's about time. I think this will be the final straw for civilian acceptance of the mideast wars. Nothing is more powerful than these sorts of pictures.
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