"Among the 361 Dover casket photos are a minority of images showing coffins of the Columbia astronauts. I didn't realize this at the time that I posted them, mainly because when the Air Force asked for clarification during the process, I specifically told them that I wasn't requesting photos of the Columbia astronauts, only military personnel killed overseas."

"(Not that I have anything against astronauts. One of the tricks for writing successful Freedom of Information Act requests is to make your request as narrow as possible. I was afraid that including the astronauts in the request would give the Air Force another excuse not to release the photos. As in: "Well, since you want the astronaut photos, we're going to have to clear that with more federal agencies.....") I've since been told by a reporter that NASA released the astronaut casket photos at the time and has never objected to their use. Quite a marked difference from the battlefield dead, who are swept under the rug by the Pentagon."

Editor's note: The Washington Post has printed a photo on page A10 of Deputy Administrator Fred Gregory on the tarmac at Dover AFB with the caption "About 350 photos of coffins at Dover Air Force Base were released under the Freedom of Information Act". No one in the photo is identified - nor is the date of the photo or the event noted.

Editor's note: Reuters is also distributing a photo of the Columbia crew remains without identifying it as such -instead captioning it as "Coffins of U.S. military personnel are offloaded by Air Force honor guards at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware in this undated photo." Update: Reuters has since withdrawn the incorrectly captioned photo and issued a correction

Editor's note: AP has a screen grab of the first page of photos - all of which are of Columbia crew remains. AP titles the image as "A page from the Memory Hole.org's homepage shows photographs of American war dead arriving at Dover Air Force, the nation's largest military mortuary, Thursday, April 22, 2004." Update: AP has an article up which they posted at 4:50 pm EDT today and then revised at 8:30 pm which now mentions their own error.

Editor's note: As of 5:00 pm EDT yesterday CNN Headline news was flashing several pictures of NASA Deputy Administrator Fred Gregory standing on the tarmac receiving the bodies of the Columbia crew at Dover Air Force Base in February 2003 and claiming that the photos are of caskets containing war dead arriving home from Iraq in 2004. NASA and CNN are aware of this and I expect that the photos in question won't be running again.Update: The Columbia photo was shown once again today on Wolf Blitzer's show at noon EDT on CNN.

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