From The Baltimore Sun -

The Sinclair Broadcast Group will yank Nightline from its seven ABC stations tonight because of a plan to devote the show to reading the names of the hundreds of American service members killed in Iraq, which Sinclair says is intended to damage support for U.S. actions there.

… The decision to drop Nightline was made at Sinclair’s corporate headquarters in Hunt Valley, not by its news editors, Hyman said. A statement posted on the company’s Web site yesterday said: “The action appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq.”

… Company directors and executives have been frequent donors to Republican causes.

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Sighs of relief were heard this afternoon in the targeted cities of Asheville, N.C., Charleston, W.Va., Columbus, Ohio, Pensacola, Fla., Springfield, Mass., St. Louis, and Winston-Salem, N.C. Thanks to the vigilance of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the planned attack by the al Koppel network was defused.

The rest of us are on our own, though. Without a massive outcry and swift action, this attack on the US effort in Iraq will commence tonight on ABC right after your local news. Families are being advised to stock up on bottled water and stay away from television sets until further notice.

After all, there is a risk that anyone who does not take these precautions might learn the names of American soldiers who have been killed while serving their country. Not just a few names - all of them. Unfortunately, we have to rely on alert citizens to prevent this - until we extend the Patriot Act, the al Koppel network can operate with relative impunity.

It’s not as if our fighting men and women aren’t aware of the risks - they now know that should they die in the line of duty, they instantly become a tool of the enemy. This might seem like a zombie movie paradigm, but it’s a sad fact - it’s a “Dawn of the Dead” scenario for sure, wherein we have to steel ourselves and utterly eliminate all traces of those who’ve passed on. Yes, it’s hard not to see them as our friends and neighbors, but don’t be fooled. We have to be strong. They are helpless pawns of the enemy now.

I’ve even heard some rumors of left-leaning soldiers who’ve been trying to get themselves killed in an attempt to undermine the war effort. I don’t know if that’s true, but do we really want to take the chance? To me, it’s plausible enough to take the proper precautions and send an unequivocal message to the troops: If you’re dead, you’re dead to us.

As the Sinclair group points out, this isn’t the first time that al Koppel and his sleeper cells (or “affiliate stations,” as they now call them) have tried to undermine the United States. In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, “Nightline” frequently featured guests making wild claims about Iraq not possessing weapons of mass destruction and equally wild predictions about the war potentially being “difficult” and “long” and “poorly planned.” There were also cooler heads on the show that offered the more appropriate views, but the damage was done.

But this… this is too much.

No, if we allow our citizenry to see the coffins, read about the funerals, or even hear the names of the fallen, the resulting damage could be devastating. Putting names and faces on those Americans who’ve died for us is a calculated move by the liberal media to make us think that those Americans who’ve died for us have names and faces. Less sophisticated viewers might also be tempted to think that this implies that the fallen have “families” and “loved ones,” and I think we all know where that kind of thinking leads.

Some people are saying that the effect of the reading of the names is up to the viewer, that it’s quite conceivable that people who believe in the war will shed a proud tear or two and spend some silent moments honoring the men and women who have given their lives for a just cause. But we can’t count on that response, can we? No, far from it. To preserve our free society, our casualties must exist only as numbers until further notice.

At the moment, that number is 740. A little disturbing, maybe, but imagine how much worse you’d feel if you had to hear their names or see their faces.