In light of the review announced today, Susan Kelleher, a reporter for the Seattle Times, contacted Ms. Silicio, now living in Everett, Washington, to get her reaction. Ms. Kelleher writes:
The news came as a salve for Tami Silicio, an Everett woman who was working as a military contractor when she took the first published photo of fallen U.S. soldiers’ coffins in 2004.
Silicio’s photo, published in The Seattle Times, fueled a political firestorm over whether the U.S. was manipulating public opinion or protecting family privacy by blacking out images of the Iraqi War dead.
It was a debate Silicio said she neither welcomed nor intended when she initially shared the photo with family and friends.
“It was a passionate picture that they turned political,” she said on Tuesday. “They should be honored coming home. They should be addressed. What parent doesn’t want their child honored when they come home?”
Allowing coffins to be photographed more widely, she said, would put the focus back on the soldiers.
In 2004, the Seattle Times published the first photograph of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq being shipped back to the United States. Tami Silicio, the woman who took that photograph, was a military contractor working at the airport in Kuwait where the coffins were loaded onto planes to be flown back to the U.S. Ms. Silicio had taken the photograph with no thought of publishing it, even though she later said she was unaware that there was any ban on taking photographs of the coffins.