Hamill Mixes It Up With Kristol Over Images of War Dead

William Kristol (l) and Pete Hamill argue over war images

The setting: A panel discussion this week at Michael's restaurant in New York. The issue: Whether Americans should see graphic images from the Iraq War. The combatants: Conservative New York Times columnist William Kristol and author/journalist Pete Hamill.

Hamill argued that there is "no sense of what reality is on the ground by editing out corpses," while an increasingly agitated Kristol called that "nonsense" and said Americans are smart enough to know what goes on in war without seeing "brains in the road." (See the video of their exchange here.)

Hamill is right. When U.S. soldiers are fighting and dying overseas, Americans back home should see that reality, and not a sanitized version of war in which there is no blood, no corpses. (Full disclosure: Hamill was my boss during part of my time at the NY Daily News.)

But it's not surprising that Kristol, one of the most stalwart backers of the Iraq War, would support censoring such images. The Bush White House even banned publication of flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base several years ago.

The panel discussion, by the way, was part of an effort to promote the new "IFC Media Project" series, reviewed last week in this blog.

For more on how Iraq War images have been censored, read Gary Kamiya's column in Salon from several years ago. A gallery of war images accompanies the column.

Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images