The row over the American photojournalist Zoriah Miller should put the media's narcissistic warbling about the right to know about Max Mosley's kinky affair in the shade. I doubt if it will, however.

Miller, a freelance photographer, was embedded with a US marine unit at Fallujah two years ago. On July 26 2006, he was due to go with the marines to a town council meeting at Garma. He decided instead to accompany a marine troop on a routine patrol. As they were out on the streets they heard an explosion. A suicide bomber had struck the council meeting.

Arriving on the scene, Miller was left to photograph the devastation. More than 20 people had been dismembered by the blast and a number were severely injured.

"As I ran I saw human pieces ... a skullcap with hair, bone shards," he told a blog news wire in San Francisco. "Of the marines I jogged in with, someone started to vomit. Others were standing around, not knowing what to do. It was completely surreal."

Some of the bodies he photographed wore the shredded uniforms of the marines. He edited the pictures back at the camp, checking that none of the other marines objected, and later put them on his own website, including the images of the American corpses.

For this, his embed was terminated. He was told by letter that he had violated paragraphs 14 (h) and 14 (o) of his signed agreement with the American authorities. By these he had agreed, apparently, not to divulge "any tactics, techniques, and procedures witnessed during operations", and not to provide "information on the effectiveness of enemy techniques". The US marine commander in Iraq, Major General John Kelly has insisted that Miller is banned from access to all US military units in Iraq. The case has brought into sharp focus the whole business of accrediting war correspondents and embedding journalists with operational units. His transgression – for no one could be daft enough to call this a crime – was that he showed images of dead Americans killed in the service of their country. Though more than 4,000 American service personnel have been killed in Iraq, there have been surprisingly few photos of the dead, and the flag-draped coffins have often been kept away from the public gaze in hangars on air bases. Despite the pervasive nature of images of war and the ease with which they can be transmitted, our authorities are squeamish about showing that war kills. Dead foreigners are one thing, but showing the images of dead British, American or French allied soldiers are off limits on the grounds that they are an unwarranted intrusion on grief for the relatives, dismay the community at home, and encourage the enemy. The broadcast by Arabic satellite television of pictures of two dead Royal Engineers seized outside Az Zubayr during the initial British incursion in Iraq outraged the British command. Similarly the display of the bodies of two US Rangers killed in the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu in 1993 caused similar ire among the American command. The display of the gory images of war is yet another part of war, as all sides recognise. Like Miller, Stefan Zaklin, formerly of the European Press photo agency, was dis-embedded when he published a photograph of a dead US Army captain lying in a pool of blood in Fallujah in 2004. Last year, Lt Gen Ray Odierno, now the senior American commander in Iraq, introduced a new rule which said pictures could only be taken of the wounded with their written consent. That must be the ultimate Catch-22 of the world of embed regulations. Many wounded are incapable of signing anything, or even thinking about it.

British forces increasingly use their own 'combat media teams', which provide suitably approved footage and interview material for mainstream media organisations like the BBC, ITN and Sky. Tactically, for military training and operational purposes, this is understandable. But the adoption of such material without question raises some interesting questions about sources in modern journalism. The problem of the graphic portrayal of death in war, and above all war in Iraq, is brilliantly illustrated in the Scottish National Theatre's Black Watch, just ending its London run. It shows – in graphic and gory detail – the death of three members of the regiment during the forward deployment to Fallujah two and half years ago in a suicide bombing. Each of the three is well known by name, and easily identifiable, Generals Kelly and Odierno might care to note. The show has played to huge acclaim. Hundreds have been turned away, among them several serving generals. The soldiers, including those from the regiment itself, love the play because it shows them for real.

Of the numerous memorials commemorating the dead of the first and second world wars, the Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, sculpted by Charles Sergeant Jagger and unveiled in 1925, stands out. (During the war the graphic portrayal of the dead by official artists and writers was discouraged.) On the plinth of Jagger's memorial lies the bronze figure of a dead gunner shrouded by his gas cape and helmet. The bold depiction of a dead Tommy caused outrage even then. But the meticulous detail of the piece – down to the unravelling puttees, the broken bootlace knotted up – is the masterstroke. It is a fitting testament to the dead of that war – as Miller's pictures are of his war in Iraq.