Concern for families? Think
again
It wasn’t 50-year-old Tami
Silicio’s job to utter a very personal prayer over flag-draped caskets
she helped load into U.S. Air Force transports headed home from a Kuwait
airfield.
Nor was she to shoot photos of the
solemnity as soldiers provided a reverent farewell to comrades-in-arms.
But families of fallen GIs who saw
the amateur photos in newspapers and on television found comfort in the
final tender military care accorded their sons, fathers and brothers.
For this, her employer, Maytag
Aircraft, which provides ground-handling services in Kuwait for the
Defense Department, fired her for violating a Pentagon policy banning
photos of caskets leaving the war zone.
Pretty callous. But the Bush
administration is obsessed about secrecy.
"Concern for families" seeing
caskets is the official but transparently phony justification for the
photo ban.
In truth, it’s nothing more than
concealing real costs of Iraq.
Photos of caskets headed home
soured Americans on the Vietnam War. President Bush’s brain trust fears
the same backlash now.
When your government says you’re
not to hear, read or see something about your government for your own
good, keep this in mind:
In 2003, according to the
Information Security Oversight Office, the federal government made
14,228,020 "decisions" on documents classifying them with various levels
of secrecy—of which 13,993,968 were classified by President Bush’s
Executive branch, or about 98.4 percent of the decisions.
Because of secrecy, the public has
no way of knowing what is kept from them.
And it is not just national
security. One of Bush & Company’s earliest acts was an executive order
sealing presidential papers of living presidents, designed some believe
to benefit Bush the Elder’s secrets. The White House also wrote into the
Patriot Act a law prohibiting anyone from revealing that papers had been
seized by the Justice department for investigations—including owners of
seized papers.
And Vice President Cheney, whose
public-be-damned mindset is Washington legend, is fighting to conceal
names of corporate titans he invited behind closed doors to create a
sympathetic national energy policy.
Meanwhile, Tami Silicio is
jobless. But she has the satisfaction of having taken touching photos of
fallen American soldiers ready for their final trip home, while
unmasking the cynical politics of "concern for families" to hide the
truth about war.