Mother allows photos of California soldier's coffin to protest media ban [View All]

[CShine]

SACRAMENTO (AP) - The mother of a soldier killed in Iraq summoned news outlets to photograph her son's flag-draped casket arriving at Sacramento International Airport to protest a Pentagon policy banning media coverage of America's war dead. Nearly a dozen reporters, photographers and television crews watched as the coffin of Army Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, 34, was transferred to a hearse outside an airport cargo terminal shortly before midnight Sunday, officials said.

"I don't care what President Bush wants," his mother, Nadia McCaffrey, told the Los Angeles Times. Patrick "did not die for nothing ... The way he lived needs to be talked about. Patrick was not a fighter, he was a peacemaker."

Patrick McCaffrey was killed June 22 along with Lt. Andre Tyson, both members of the 579th Engineer Battalion, when the two were ambushed by insurgents near Balad, Iraq. The debate over whether Americans should see the coffins of McCaffrey and other troops flared last April after The Seattle Times published a front-page photograph of caskets in a cargo plane in Kuwait and a First Amendment activist posted on his Web site dozens of like images from Dover, Del., home to the nation's largest military mortuary. Sunday night's brief ceremony, however, did not violate the policy because it applies only to military facilities. The airport and the California National Guard worked Sunday to arrange the event.

The Pentagon's rules "are specifically for the airlift command, when the caskets are on the military plane," said Lt. Jonathan Shiroma, spokesman for the California National Guard. "This is a commercial jet, so it's a different jurisdiction, so to speak. We cannot stop the media from filming."

http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/9815043p-10737570c.html