Should photos of soldiers' coffins be on the news?

WHEN THE flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in action come home, should the press be allowed to take pictures?

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It isn't an easy question.

The controversy over publishing the images of returning war dead has simmered throughout the war in Iraq. The Bush administration, enforcing a policy that dates back to the Gulf War, bars the media from filming or photographing caskets bearing soldiers' remains. That policy was breached last week when the Seattle Times published a snapshot of military coffins being loaded onto a transport plane in Kuwait. The picture had been taken by Tami Silicio, a cargo handler for defense contractor Maytag Aircraft, which fired Silicio (and her husband, a co-worker) after the picture appeared in print.

Meanwhile, 361 photographs of caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware showed up on The Memory Hole, a website created to combat government secrecy. The pictures had unexpectedly been released by the Air Force in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed last year. The Pentagon subsequently said that the photos should not have been provided, but it was too late. Images of the coffins led the evening news on Thursday, and appeared in countless newspapers the next morning.

The administration says its ban on media coverage is motivated solely by respect for the fallen soldiers' families. It argues that the mourners' right to privacy at a time of such anguish trumps any public or media interest in pictures of the coffins. That is hardly an unreasonable position, and it is endorsed by the National Military Family Association, which said last week that it supports the ban because ``sensitivity to the grief of surviving families should be paramount.''

But President Bush's critics suspect that behind the talk of sensitivity lurks an ulterior motive: a desire to suppress a vivid reminder of the war's growing toll in lives. Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware told CNN it was shameful for dead soldiers to be ``snuck back into the country under the cover of night so no one can see that their casket has arrived.'' Former Senator Max Cleland, a maimed Vietnam veteran who has been campaigning heavily for John Kerry, said that Americans ``must see the costs of war. They must see what it is producing. To hide it is unconscionable.''

Well, yes and no. Only a naif would believe that the intensely political Bush White House hasn't weighed the political pros and cons of the issue. Obviously it has. Just as obviously, so have the president's - and the war's - opponents. Some of whom, it is perhaps worth mentioning, are not politicians but journalists. ``The only reason somebody would come out against the use of these pictures,'' Steve Capus, executive producer of NBC's Nightly News, told The New York Times, ``is that they are worried about the political fallout.'' Those don't sound like the words of a man whose only interest in the matter is journalistic.   Continued...