Embedded Photojournalist Accuses US Military of Censorship After Being Barred for Publishing Photo..

[Leo 9]

Embedded Photojournalist Accuses US Military of Censorship After Being Barred for Publishing Photo of Dead Marine

An American photojournalist who was embedded with the Marines in Fallujah has been barred from the Marine Corps because of graphic photographs showing Marines killed in a suicide bombing last month. A few hours after he posted some photos of the bombing on his blog, a high-ranking public affairs official ordered him to remove it. When he refused, he was told his “embed” had been terminated and he would be flown out of Iraq.

snip

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/14/embedded_photojournalist_accuses_us_military_of

[islandmkl]

1. if they won't let you see the flag-draped caskets...

you know they don't want you to see any 'horrors of war' pics...

heard the ex-Marine photojournalist on DemocracyNow this AM...
he observed all the rules, 'out-waited' the waiting period, rejected all attempts to 'erase' the photocards, was given 3 different 'reasons' for his expulsion, etc....

this war is easy on 99% of americans, and one of the reasons is because they don't see any of it beyond stock or propaganda-value footage...

we are not even sheep...

on edit: he was a Marine, who became a photojournalist after his service...

[spanone]

2. this is how dictatorships work

[Generic Other]

3. Real journalists would take the shots and be sent home

EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ONE OF THEM.

You would think their egos wouldn't let them walk away from human tragedy when they could earn a Pulitzer or a Peabody for showing it. "Embed" means shoved up someone's ass. Pravda USA. Why a lifelong news reader like me no longer buys the paper.

[EFerrari]

4. He did and he posted them after waiting days for all the families

to be notified. He was horribly harrassed, too, by the Marines chain of command.

And, he's getting letters of support from Mariens all over the world. This is one of the good guys.

[Generic Other]

6. I didn't mean him...I meant his colleagues...

They should all be following his lead...Germans also were protected from witnessing the full extent of their government's actions. It is intolerable for ours to treat us this way.

[EFerrari]

7. Sure. I wonder how many of these people do fight the censors

and we just never hear about them.

[ColbertWatcher]

5. I don't get it...

...did the Pentagon not understand he was/is a photographer?

Do they not know what photographers do?

[EFerrari]

8. That's what I was thinking this morning -- why bother at all?

DoD seems to be in disarray.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

9. And Amy Goodman also interviewed another journalist who was barred

James Lee, who served in Iraq himself, went back there to cover the war for his university newspaper. He tried to take photos of the Iraqi army fighting in Basra. He said entire groups of Iraqi soldiers refused to fight and laid down their guns en masse. He too was de-embedded.

http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/news/010825.html