Last night, I got a weird comment on the post about the woman who was fired for taking a picture of coffins in a cargo hold. The comment consisted of a link to a site called “thememoryhole.” I couldn’t figure out what it was about, because the site wouldn’t load (there was probably too much traffic on his site already. Anyway, it looked like a spam link, so I deleted it. Turns out The Memory Hole broke open a big story. Apparently, he or someone else posted links to a lot of blogs that had copies of the picture of coffins that got 2 people fired, and probably also sent links to all the news organizations that picked up on the story. So they followed up on the Memory Hole site, and suddenly the story shows up on the New York Times and other major news sites.
Update: The Pentagon is not happy with the Air Force, and is not happy that so many news organizations found the images and reprinted them. Pentagon lawyers are now reported to be looking into the matter, according to BBC News. The article includes the famous “War President” mosaic image, made up of images of Iraq war dead.
The Memory Hole had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware, the destination for most of the bodies. The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command’s decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.
The release of the photographs came one day after a contractor working for the Pentagon fired a woman who had taken photographs of coffins being loaded onto a transport plane in Kuwait. Her husband, a co-worker, was also fired after the pictures appeared in The Seattle Times on Sunday. The contractor, Maytag Aircraft, said the woman, Tami Silicio of Seattle, and her husband, David Landry, had “violated Department of Defense and company policies.”
So now there are more images out there – these were taken by the Air Force. No one knew they were documenting this until one person decided to ask for the images under the Freedom of Information Act. It pays to question authority – sometimes you get an unexpected answer.
“The Memory Hole” is a reference to Orwell’s 1984, where forbidden history was destroyed and rewritten.
