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Produced & Maintained by Idaho Mountain Express, Box 1013, Ketchum, ID 83340-1013 
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Copyright © 2003 Express Publishing Inc.
All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited. 


Friday — May 14, 2004

Our View

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.


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The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.





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