Associated Press
By Matt Surman

Ron Griffin has dozens of pictures that tell his son's story: Kyle in U.S. Army camouflage during training, a proud teenager with a hint of a smirk on his face; standing under a pair of crossed swords with his buddies in Baghdad; or in a helicopter over the Euphrates River, heading to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

One picture he wouldn't want is from the day in 2003 when the body of his 20-year-old son came home in an American flag-draped steel box.

Air Force cargo planes carrying the war dead home land on the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware where a solemn ritual is performed: The anonymous coffins known as "transfer cases," each sealed in the Stars and Stripes and marked with a tag, are unloaded, ultimately to be delivered back to their loved ones for burial.

The media and photographers have been kept away since the 1991 Gulf War, but President Barack Obama now says he is considering lifting the controversial ban.

Some in the U.S. media have argued that the rule is a political attempt to downplay the cost of war _ which include at least 4,245 members of the U.S. military who have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003 _ especially in light of images from Vietnam that some credit with turning U.S. opinion against that war. Obama swept into office in part on campaign promises of greater transparency than the Bush administration.

Opponents of the ban argue Americans have a responsibility to pay their respects and consider the reality of being a nation at war when its military is all-volunteer and most people are insulated from the destruction.

"It's the biggest single aspect of the cost of war. For that aspect to be invisible, undebated, undiscussed by American people is just wrong," said Ralph Begleiter, a journalism professor at the University of Delaware who sued the Pentagon to force the release in 2005 of pictures taken by military photographers at Dover.

"I felt these images were the single most important way that the American people could see the cost of war," he said.

But, to Griffin, a self-described fighter with a strong Bronx accent to match his personality, changing the rule would just turn soldiers killed during war into anonymous numbers, and put unnecessary stress on families. The media should report on the soldiers and their personal memorials, not their coffins, he believes.

"Come to my house. We'll fill your photographic record," he said in a telephone interview. "You want pictures? I can show you tears, I can show you joy. I can show you any amount of pictures you want."

Controversy in America over photos of war dead goes back as far as the earliest battlefield photography, said David Perlmutter, a documentary photographer and journalism professor at the University of Kansas.

Photography pioneer Matthew Brady was believed to have arranged battlefield death scenes during America's bloody mid-19th century Civil War. During World War I much of the coverage of the war was censored, as it was in World War II before President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided the public needed to see how its soldiers were suffering to avoid complacency.

Vietnam brought the war home, however, in new ways, as television film footage caught the daily grind and blood of war. The coverage was blamed in part for the loss of public support.

Photographs of war dead are a source of such debate because Americans "are most concerned about what happens to our men and women in uniform above all other considerations," Perlmutter said.

The issue could come into play for Obama as he considers whether to lift the ban. Though deaths in Iraq are down, the new president plans to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, which could mean a steady number of soldier's bodies coming back through Dover in transfer cases.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week that he was reviewing the ban, and signaled that he was likely to recommend overturning the policy, saying that if "privacy concerns can be addressed, the more honor we can accord these fallen heroes, the better."

Journalists should be thoughtful if the ban is overturned and avoid excessive coverage, said Kelly McBride, an ethics expert at the Poynter Institute journalism think tank.

"The temptation is that because we can, we will," she said. Journalists, excited by the access, could jump at the new opportunity to take photos and release a flood of images that might exaggerate the number of deaths, she said.

"It would be possible to have more coffin photos than homecoming photos, when the reality is that there are more live bodies coming home than dead bodies," she said. "There is an obligation to tell the truth in as complete and full a picture as possible, and coffin photos are part of that."

According to an informal survey of its members by the group Families United, which says it represents 60,000 military families, a majority opposed changing the policy. John Ellsworth, the group's vice president whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004, argued that if Obama chooses to reverse the ban, he should have the military take photographs and release them to the families, who could then decide whether they want to share them with the media, or see them at all.

"I don't know what happened in Iraq, or at Dover," he said. "There are blank spots where I don't know what happened, but I don't know if I need to."

Ron Griffin knows a lot about what happened to his son, and his death on May 30, 2003, in an accident on the road from Mosul to Tikrit. Hundreds of people attended the funeral in New Jersey.

Kyle Griffin was a fighter who would take on his dad, who liked to fool around and joke and bend the rules _ until he enlisted in the military, where he was a model soldier and earned a Bronze Star medal for bravery. Kyle made the choice to go to Iraq and he is the only person who could judge whether it was worth it, Griffin said.

Those are the kinds of things, he worries, that no one could ever learn from a photo of a coffin.

"Does the American public really benefit to only see an anonymous transfer case, with no knowledge of the soldier, his history, or the family he left behind?" he asked.