From this Toronto Star story.
askeptic: and the fact that I have lost a good friend in this one
Sorry about your loss askeptic, that’s a damn shame. 
Right, and along the same lines;
How did anyone even know that photos were taken?
Couldn`t the owner of the photos just handed over a picture of the cieling of the hangar?
There has got to be something else to this. The photographer could have easily deleted the photos when the request was made or could have easily denied such photos were even taken. Or like you said, just not have taken them.
If the administration didn`t want them out they could have lied about thier existence.
What does this say about the integrity of the administration to hand over such photos when a cover up could have easily taken place?
Kimstu:Thank you. And yes, it is a DAMN shame. He was a good man, he had no hatred for either Muslims or Iraqi’s. He voluntarily joined the military to protect his nation. Little did he know that yet again we would send troops to kill and die for the benefit of politicians and big busin…I’ll shut up now before I start screaming about the insanity and hypocrisy of it all…
But it’s okay to show returning servicemen being greeted by cheerful and happy family members, yes? Pimping those soldiers isn’t a problem, since they’re still breathing and have all of their limbs attached?
Yeah, well, given all the buck-shuffling he does these days, one wonders if anything in Washington was done by him.
Photos of bodies yes. Photos of flag draped coffins no.
It was ‘The Memory Hole’ (link) that filed the FOIA request for the photos. It was originally turned down, then approved on appeal. Last I checked, the site was down, probably cooked his server, since he was the only one hosting the photos yesterday.
The Memory Hole is one of the best sites on the web – full of stuff that people tried to hide or destroy. I support it, and go there daily to see the updates.
As far as the OP, I got chills looking at the photos. My views on the current administration and their war are already set in stone, but the photos really brought home what I already knew. A picture is worth a lot of words…
Because like most government agencies, they have a nearly pathological need to document everything. Think for a moment about Hitler’s Germany and the documentation they kept on the horrors perpetrated there. Difficult to understand why they would document their crimes. It seems to be the nature of bureaucracies.
The administration wasn’t being transparent, somebody screwed up.
From the Seattle Times:
"Air Force officials yesterday acknowledged they cannot control what Kick [the webmaster of memoryhole.org] now does with the images. But they say they have put a hold on further release of the Dover photos until word from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
“They’re not happy with the release of the photos,” Col. Jon Anderson, chief of public affairs at Dover Air Force Base, told the Associated Press. OSD (The Office of the Secretary of Defense) says that the release is not consistent with their policy."
The photos at The Memory Hole, which were picked up by Reuters and a whole bunch of other news outlets, turned out to be not U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, but file photos of the remains of the Columbia Astronauts.
Oops.
Nice try Sam
I hope the mods will forgive me for quoting Sam’s entire link but
Check of the photos from the OP link, even my limited eyesight allows me count at least 20 flag-draped coffins in the . One can reasonably assume the 7 Columbia astronaut’s remains required only 7 coffins. Oops, indeed.
5 time champ, what you’re calling a casket isn’t really a casket. It’s a human remains transfer case. It’s a reusable case, made of aluminum, designed to be filled with ice and transport bodies in high altitude aircraft.
The reason more than seven were needed for the shuttle crew is that the bodies of the crew members weren’t intact after the crash. This necessitated, um, packing them in a different way, so that the integrity of the remains could be maintained.
Gruesome, I know, but easily understood.
Thanks for the info MM. Gruesome indeed.
However, it really proves nothing, since the 20 casket photo was taken in Kuwait.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/04/22/coffin.photo.ap/index.html
I know the bodies of the Columbia shuttle astronauts were scattered, but I think we can more than reasonably assume that the remains were not scattered as far as Kuwait.
But if the photo of flag-draped aluminum tubes are from the Columbia disaster, not KIA from Iraq, I guess Ms. Silicio gets her job back.
FWIW Where’s the barf smilie, this whole episode is sickening.
So now that we know that these types of pictures aren’t allowed, I think it becomes the duty of the foreign press and foreign photographers to try to continue to take these pictures and then pass them on so they get published here, if not in major newspapers, then at least on the web. That would deal a death blow to this policy.
I just don’t buy the rationalization that the reasoning for the restriction on such pictures is that the sensibilities and interests of the deceased families are being protected. And even were that so, wouldn’t taking and publishing these pictures come under the free speech protection of the Constitution, since these pictures have nothing to do with national security?
Bush moved by casket photos
Actually, the first 72 photos (of 361) have been identified as shuttle astronaut photos by NASA officials – the rest are returning Iraq war dead, as stated by the Air Force.
Just wild ass guesses but :
-Because they could be of historical value?
-Because the power that be could want them to be released in the future, so they’d better have them handy?
This whole NASA thing baffles me. It seems to me, first of all, that the recipient of the photos was in a poor position to distinguish between shuttle dead and combat dead. So why did the Army release those pictures when what had been requested under the FOIA was just war dead? Are they that incompetent? Or were they trying to get egg on the face of the recipient by intentionally including the wrong pictures?