I have been disgusted that a president who asserts we are fighting for the safety and security of the nation and of the world against a terrorist threat has dishonored our fallen servicemen and women by not allowed them to be publicly acknowledged when they return home.

Gag orders on reporting on the return of the dead?

Gee that's a real honor isn't it?

Take the support the troops magnetic stickers off your bumpers please and go to the airport or go to Arlington (somewhere every American should go) or better yet support charities for the families of the fallen and visit a veterans hospital or volunteer to help service people and their families.

Then when you see the reality of war...tell President Bush he has dishonored the service of these people and their sacrifice by not allowing us to see the dead come home to their final rest.
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National Post Editorial Board: Highway of Heroes
Posted: January 02, 2009, 5:46 PM by NP Editor
Editorial, Canadian politic

On Friday, Allison Hanes wrote a piece in this newspaper observing that Canada is refreshingly sane in how it has handled the repatriation of human remains from the NATO war in Afghanistan. After a brief period of controversy — a controversy that seems painfully ridiculous in retrospect — we ended up rejecting the gag orders and media taboos that obfuscate the return of dead soldiers to the soil of the United States. Canadians are given the opportunity to witness, and they have responded, on the stretch of the 401 known as the “Highway of Heroes,” by improvising a popular tradition of visible tribute to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the country’s service.

The contrast with the situation in the U.K. is striking and curious. Ms. Hanes revives the memory of a scathing and sobering Mail on Sunday feature from April, in which dignified images of a Canadian-style funeral cortege, accompanied by official vehicles and receiving salutes from fire and police officers, were juxtaposed with pictures of official British hearses struggling with metropolitan traffic. Canada is supposed to be the more decentralized of the two states, yet in Britain, the civilian police crankily refuse to provide roadblocks or to honour their fellow “first responders.” While there is broad antiwar sentiment in Canada, it does not seem to manifest itself, as it does in the U.K., in the form of stroppy complaints that soldiers killed in combat did not really “die for us” or that official displays of respect for the dead would impose needless costs and inconvenience.

Part of the difference surely lies in the psychological distinction between living on the old imperial periphery and being at its centre. Canadians do not have the same lingering bad conscience about sending troops abroad to fight for humanitarian values that comes with being an Englishman — or, perhaps, with having entered the more hotly contested war in Iraq. British and American soldiers have remained relatively much busier with combat responsibilities than ours since the Korean War, perhaps inducing a form of great-power fatigue in the public. And in the United States, images of coffins returning from the front became a highly contested political symbol during the Vietnam War; that genie cannot now be easily restored to its bottle.

And, of course, there is no sense denying that our participation in Afghanistan, while unquestionably a matter of “punching above our weight,” has remained small enough in scale for the soldiers to come home in groups of two or three, and thus to remain recognizably individuals. A Canadian who reads the newspaper every day has remained capable of reading short profiles of every Canadian soldier who has died violently in Afghanistan. This, too, makes a difference in the way we react. Stalin spoke a dark but convincing truth when he talked of the “tragedy” versus the “statistic.”

The British Empire has dwindled, nominally, to a few far-flung islands; the American empire, ever more difficult to deny given the presence of American garrisons in more than 140 countries, seems at or near its peak. If history is any guide, there are many cycles of expansion and retreat left in the ongoing story of the English-speaking peoples’ global supremacy. Our own place in the narrative is unclear and much-debated. But it is certainly a sign of health that we still think of our soldiers (and sailors and airmen) as representatives of ourselves — that we do not think of “them” and “us” when the military is talked of.

That is, above all, why we have a Highway of Heroes. A country has taken one more step on the way to decadence and ultimate desuetude when the bond between the army and the people is weakened.

it'll be okay, by the time Obama gets done we won't have a military anyway so just hang in there, things will be better soon!

Dead ? We have still have Americans being killed in Iraq? How can that be? Are the Iraqi people throwing those flowers too hard? Did someone prick thier finger on a rose & get a bad infection?