“They are not letting us cover the reality of war,” he added. “I think this has got little to do with the families or the soldiers and everything to do with politics.”

Lt. Col. Josslyn L. Aberle, chief of media operations for the Multi-National Corps in Iraq, said that the regulations are a matter of common sense and decency, not message management.

“The last thing that we want to do is to contribute to the grief and anguish of the family members,” she said by phone from Iraq. “We don’t want the last image that the family has of their soldier to be a photo of him dying on a battlefield. You have to ask how much value is added.”

There are some people stateside who would agree. In February, a story and accompanying video by The New York Times reporter Damien Cave — and a photo taken by Robert Nickelsberg — that depicted the grievous wounding and eventual death of a soldier on Haifa Street, drew both praise and condemnation on Web logs and in the military about what constitutes appropriate imagery for the breakfast table. What some readers see as a gratuitous display of carnage, others view as important homage to the boots on the ground.

Until last year, no permission was required to publish photographs of the wounded, but families had to be notified of the soldier’s injury first. Now, not only is permission required, but any image of casualties that shows a recognizable name or unit is off-limits. And memorials for the fallen in Iraq can no longer be shown, even when the unit in question invites coverage.

Kimberly Dozier, a CBS correspondent who was seriously wounded by an I.E.D. — CBS will run a special about her experiences tomorrow night — has been on both sides of the camera. When she was transferred from Iraq to a hospital in Germany, images of her crumpled body were broadcast all over the world.

“I think some regulations are a good idea,” she said. “Does a soldier lose his rights to privacy because he is in a combat zone and wounded? I don’t think so.”