WASHINGTON, Aug 3: As the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Saturday, some American media experts see uncomfortable echoes between the suppression of images of death and destruction then and coverage of Iraq today. As author Greg Mitchell lays out in an article in Editor & Publisher this week, in the weeks following the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US authorities seized and suppressed film shot in the bombed cities by military crews and Japanese newsreel teams to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent of devastation wrought by the new weapons.

Tens of thousands died in each attack. The US military footage shot in color was classified as secret. It remained hidden until the early 1980s and has never been fully aired. The Japanese film shot in black and white was declassified and returned to Japan in the late 1960s.

Some of the images captured in the days after the bombings will finally be shown on a US cable television channel as part of a documentary on Saturday.

“Although there are clearly huge differences with Iraq, there are also some similarities,” said Mitchell, co-author of ‘Hiroshima in America’ and editor of Editor & Publisher.

“The chief similarity is that Americans are still being kept at a distance from images of death, whether of their own soldiers or Iraqi civilians,” he said.—Reuters