Truth and other casualties of war

The US military’s censorship of a photographer in Iraq raises stark questions about how graphic we want war reporting to be

• 
• • Robert Fox
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Friday July 25 2008

A fellowship of death: the artillery memorial in London

The row over the American photojournalist Zoriah Miller should put the media’s narcissistic warbling about the right to know about Max Mosley’s kinky affair in the shade. I doubt if it will, however.

Miller, a freelance photographer, was embedded with a US marine unit at Fallujah two years ago. On July 26 2006, he was due to go with the marines to a town council meeting at Garma. He decided instead to accompany a marine troop on a routine patrol. As they were out on the streets they heard an explosion. A suicide bomber had struck the council meeting.

Arriving on the scene, Miller was left to photograph the devastation. More than 20 people had been dismembered by the blast and a number were severely injured.

“As I ran I saw human pieces … a skullcap with hair, bone shards,” he told a blog news wire in San Francisco. “Of the marines I jogged in with, someone started to vomit. Others were standing around, not knowing what to do. It was completely surreal.”

Some of the bodies he photographed wore the shredded uniforms of the marines. He edited the pictures back at the camp, checking that none of the other marines objected, and later put them on his own website, including the images of the American corpses.

For this, his embed was terminated. He was told by letter that he had violated paragraphs 14 (h) and 14 (o) of his signed agreement with the American authorities. By these he had agreed, apparently, not to divulge “any tactics, techniques, and procedures witnessed during operations”, and not to provide “information on the effectiveness of enemy techniques”.

The US marine commander in Iraq, Major General John Kelly has insisted that Miller is banned from access to all US military units in Iraq.

The case has brought into sharp focus the whole business of accrediting war correspondents and embedding journalists with operational units. His transgression – for no one could be daft enough to call this a crime – was that he showed images of dead Americans killed in the service of their country. Though more than 4,000 American service personnel have been killed in Iraq, there have been surprisingly few photos of the dead, and the flag-draped coffins have often been kept away from the public gaze in hangars on air bases.

Despite the pervasive nature of images of war and the ease with which they can be transmitted, our authorities are squeamish about showing that war kills. Dead foreigners are one thing, but showing the images of dead British, American or French allied soldiers are off limits on the grounds that they are an unwarranted intrusion on grief for the relatives, dismay the community at home, and encourage the enemy.

Continued . . .