Spinning in their graves

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/14/1068674378831.html

As the body count mounts in Iraq, George Bush's minders are putting the maximum distance between him and the dead. Paul McGeough reports.

The fighting in Iraq is real. But there is a traditional aspect of war that Americans now see only in the movies - it is the solemn homecoming for the dead.

There was a time when the United States paused as the TV cameras panned over rows of coffins flown home from battle, when it was impossible not to share the sorrow of the families there to receive them, and when there was a genuine sense of shared pain when the president or very senior members of his team attended memorial services.

But George Bush has fenced off himself and his team from the cemetery, and there is a ban on cameramen entering the central military morgue at Dover, in Delaware, where hundreds who have died in Iraq are received. It is also difficult for the photographers to get past security at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, where thousands of the wounded have been treated.

So the American dead and the injured from Iraq pass through a politically imposed void, until their coffin - or stretcher or wheelchair in the case of the wounded - arrives in the back blocks of Idaho or Texas, by which time they have long ceased to be a prime-time or national story. Usually only family and friends witness the handing over of the triangulated Stars and Stripes to grieving spouses or parents.

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1. Torn

The return of bodies from Iraq should be private for family members only--or should it? Shouldn't the public be aware first hand of the price we, as a country, are paying?

[Generic Other]

2. I heard on NPR today that Italians were in mourning over their dead

who were being honored at their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier while the country was watching the funerals on tv with great pomp and ceremony.

In the meantime, our soldiers are coming home in the dead of at night. Without honor or shame.