WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Thursday that he is lifting a 1991 ban on news coverage of the return of the remains of service members to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, although he will leave the decision about media coverage up to the family of the dead.
The controversial ban on photography and other media coverage of the solemn return of flag-draped coffins — upheld by Republican and Democratic administrations — has generated lawsuits as well as conflicting emotions on the part of military families.
Gates said he is asking a group of advisers to come up with a plan on how to implement the new policy.
President George H.W. Bush’s administration imposed the ban on media coverage of the arrival of troops’ remains at Dover Air Force Base during the Persian Gulf War in February 1991. It came about after a controversy arose when Bush held a news conference at the same moment the first U.S. casualties were returning to Dover the day after the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. Three television networks carried the events live on split screen. Bush appeared at one point to joke while on the opposite screen the solemn ceremony unfolded at the Delaware base.
Pictures of casualties have long played into the politics of a war. The Vietnam War, dubbed the “living-room war” for its extensive television coverage, included footage of coffins rolling off planes at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii as if off a conveyor belt. Indeed, starting in the 1990s, politicians and generals used the term “the Dover test” to describe the public’s tolerance for troop casualties.
Republican and Democratic administrations have upheld the Dover ban, but both have also made notable exceptions, which some observers view as politically expedient. For example, under President Bill Clinton in October 2000, the Pentagon distributed photographs of coffins arriving at Dover bearing the remains of military personnel killed in the bombing of the USS Cole.
Exceptions were also made under President George W. Bush. In September 2001, the Air Force published a photo of the transfer at Dover of the remains of a victim of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.
Soon after the war in Afghanistan started in October 2001, however, the Pentagon restated the ban on coverage at Dover. In March 2003, the month that the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it expanded the policy prohibiting media coverage of the coffins of troops to other ports of arrival as well.
