Outside the Wire - Free Speech on the Cheap

Outside the Wire - Free Speech on the Cheap


Written by JD Johannes
Tuesday, 03 November 2009
This line from a Washington Post story jumped out at me:

"The arrival of war dead at Dover has long pitted free speech advocates against the government, which had been accused of using the ban to hide the horror of war from the public--especially as casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan began to climb."

The article is by Christian Davenport.

I'm at a little outpost in northern Iraq, fresh back from a patrol where we met with a local Sheik. The previous day I had rode with US Soldiers to a logistics base on a resupply run and while there picked up a few back issues of Stars and Stripes where I read the story.

In the story, a previous graph has a quote from University of Delaware Journalism Professor Ralph Begleiter one of the above mentioned free speech advocates. Begeleiter said, "Taking pictures of the returning casualties to Dover is a measure of the human cost of war. Do you want the government ultimately to have control over what we see or not see? Or do you want independent observers, an independent press or media, relaying those images?"

Mr. Begleiter if you really want to understand the human cost of war, don't stand on a fucking tarmac, get embedded and see the human cost of war up close and personal where the price is actually paid.

But many of the free speech advocates have no desire to put themselves at risk to tell the stories of the women and men who have willingly put themselves in harms way.

They want to do it on the cheap, standing on concrete in the US at a scheduled time rather than face the capricious hazards of war standing on the sands of Iraq or rocks of Afghanistan.

Many of those free speech advocates are interested only in the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines as props. As the story illustrates, very few of the arrivals at Dover are covered by the media.

When a reporter is embedded with US forces they at least have to share some of the risks and possibly themselves become another account in the human cost of war.

I have been ready to pay that price for the last five years and nearly had to pay it a few times. How many of the so-called speech advocates have been willing to pay that price?