Ascribing omniscience to the military is foolish. It’s not that they were extraordinarily incompetent, either. The shuttle pictures were likely included on the disk because the clerk who made the disk made a mistake. It’s not the first time that someone, sifting through what must be mounds of data, mis-labeled or mis-apprehended what they were looking at or cataloging.
It’s a simple error, inflated because of the intense focus on the issue.
Yeah, his heart bleeds. Too bad he has never been able to free up some time in his busy campaign schedule to attend EVEN ONE funeral of one of our 704 dead Iraq soldiers. Wouldn’t want to intrude on his workout schedule or power nap, now would he? Here’s a story on this from last Oct 30, 2003: Bush Ignores Soldiers’ Burials and another one from April 20, 2004: President Bush, Honor Fallen Soldiers and Attend a Funeral or Memorial
This has been hashed out extensively on this board in the past. The opinions run a bunch of different ways, naturally.
I remember, when I was younger, a county commissioner attending the viewing of a family member of mine. He made sure to sign the guest book, too. This caused a lot of bad feeling in the family, as he wasn’t well known to us. The consensus feeling was that he was looking for votes.
Funerals are for family and close friends only, where I come from.
Surely, if George Bush were to attend a funeral for a servicemember he didn’t know, he would be attacked for that too, for using the death of a servicemember for political gain. If I were him, I wouldn’t do it in a million years.
OP:
Photos of US military coffins now surfacing. What will be the effect?
I can only speak for myself, but I found the images of the returning coffins to be deeply moving, but also very sanitised.
Seeing the coffins in the aircraft, arranged with military precision, each one draped with the flag, and the military escort standing at semi attention, cannot help but impress one of a sacrifice well made in a just war.
However, seeing that this is anything but a just war, perhaps they shouldn’t have bothered with coffins. Perhaps they should have just tipped the remains of the soldiers onto the tarmac.
Maybe then I and others would question whether this charnal house sacrifice was “well made”.