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"This is a way for Americans to see and honor the sacrifice of our fallen when it occurs. "So many Americans want to have Memorial Day once a year, when they go to the beach and cook hot dogs in the backyard," Soltz said. Jon Soltz, the chairman of, an anti-Iraq war group that says it has 15,000 military families as members, said he was pleased with the decision. "What is the need to show these caskets," Ellsworth added, "other than to try to inflame controversy?" I believe that the administration basically caved to the special interest groups, the antiwar groups, that are going to politicize our fallen." "There was nothing wrong with the way things were. "I'm very disappointed," said John Ellsworth, the president of Military Families United, whose son, Lance Corporal Justin Ellsworth, was killed in Iraq in 2004 at age 20. Reaction to the change from both sides was swift. The policy is similar to one in place for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery.
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Under the new policy, photographs will not be permitted of a coffin if a family says no. Gates said he came to the conclusion that "we should not presume to make the decision for the families we should actually let them make it." "There was a division in the building."īut, he added, a "very compelling" memorandum from the army in favor of changing the policy was persuasive, particularly because the army accounts for most of the war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates, who said at the news conference that he was "never comfortable" with the ban, tried to have it overturned a year ago.īut he said he encountered resistance in the Pentagon, and so he "demurred."īut once President Barack Obama said this month that he was reviewing the ban, Gates again sounded out senior officials at the Pentagon. But others, including some of the families as well as opponents of the Iraq war, said it sanitized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was intended to control public anger over the conflicts. The military said the ban protected the privacy and dignity of families of the dead.