This Democracy Now! story promotes an L.A. Times feature on the weekend documenting the extremely rare appearance in major newspapers of photos of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

Democracy Now! talked to LAT reporter James Rainey and Village Voice columnist Sydney Schanberg, who has also written on this matter and Aaron Glantz of Pacifica Radio.

The actual LAT story ran on May 21 and is headlined Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories. There's a Flash animation of the historical use of war photos and a chart, by paper, of a count of dead or wounded American photos and of dead and wounded Iraqis (you may get a registration request. Sorry).

Here's a link to Schanberg's May 17 column: Not a pretty picture

An excerpt from the rush transcript:

JAMES RAINEY: Well, what we did is we started in September of last year and went through the end of February of this year. We wanted a manageable period, because that's a lot of newspapers to look at. We also wanted to take in some of the major fighting, which was the assault on Fallujah last November, and then the run-up to the election, which I think everybody remembers was pretty bloody. So, we looked at the six newspapers and we looked at Time and Newsweek, and what we found is what you already stated, essentially, that the readers of those publications didn't see any U.S. dead. They saw very few pictures of U.S. wounded. There was one of the eight publications we looked at, The Seattle Times did run a picture of a U.S. serviceman who was killed. He was covered with a blanket. It was after the mess hall bombing last December near Mosul. So that was -- those were our findings in terms of U.S. casualties. Very few pictures.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, I think I can tell you that American reporters have always been careful not to show, certainly not to show the face, identifiable face of a fallen soldier who is dead, and still do that. And that's -- I think that's a useful guide, a taste guide in terms of whether you are going to over-shock people or not. But we always showed pictures of fallen soldiers in Vietnam, and we, as Jim Rainey points out, we see almost none of them in the Iraq war. This censorship has been going on for a long time. I mean, if we go back to the Gulf War, you remember, reporters had to be taken by babysitters, Pentagon babysitters, to stories, and the soldiers that they met on these stories had been pre-interviewed by the same babysitters, so that no truth might slip out during the interviews with the journalist. So -- and we acceded, the major news organizations acceded to those ground rules. And --

AMY GOODMAN: I want to point out that Pacifica, along with independent publications, sued the Pentagon over the press restrictions during the Gulf War. We couldn't get the major newspapers to join us.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: I was one of the plaintiffs.

AMY GOODMAN: You were with us. And we couldn't get one of the newspapers not only to join us, but to cover the lawsuit?

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: That's correct. Yes. I mean, that is -- well, they were -- and embarrassed as a result of all of that, they decided to try to negotiate for a different situation in the next American combat, and they did, and we had embedded reporters, which is a good thing because it gives you a piece that we should see, that is, the soldiers as they live during combat. And -- but it's, of course, not the full picture. And the only way you get the full picture is if you are on your own and you are functioning unilaterally and outside any particular ground rules, at your own risk.

AARON GLANTZ: I was in Iraq in April and May of 2004 when the United States military was bombarding Fallujah. This is very typical, actually, under the occupation that there will be some, you know -- I mean, smaller crime against U.S. people like this killing of these four Blackwater Security figures and their hanging on the old Fallujah bridge. And it will bring a tremendous response by the U.S. military and the killing of hundreds of people is what happened in Fallujah. I was in Baghdad at that time and, at first, I thought it was unsafe to go to Fallujah, so I would interview refugees fleeing the city. I interviewed a 12-year-old boy who talked about how a U.S. military sniper shot his 11-year-old best friend, as he stood in front of his school. I interviewed a man who talked about how his father was in his own house and that that house was bombed by the U.S. military. I spoke with so many people. I spoke with a man who had a bullet in his -- right below his collar bone because U.S. military snipers in Fallujah were aiming for the neck, and they had just barely missed as he went to go get food aid from a neighborhood mosque.

And I think at some level I thought that these stories that I were hearing were exaggerations, that the situation couldn't possibly – in fact, even sitting in Baghdad, I thought the situation in Fallujah could not possibly be as bad as these refugees were telling me, even as Al Jazeera was broadcasting from the hospital, showing us images of the women and children in the hospital. But when I went to Fallujah, after the bombing had stopped, I saw that the city had just been devastated. Whole streets had been destroyed. I saw shopping centers that had collapsed, mosques that had been bombed, and the story that sticks out the most for me, is of this woman, and I think this is the clip that we're going to hear, who was buried in the front lawn of a neighbor's house because as she was trying to flee the city in her car, the Americans bombed it.