September 23, 2005
If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com.
For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan
have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly
mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site
administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these
images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American
soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as
currency to buy pornography.
At Wilson's Web site, you can see an Arab man's face sliced off
and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man's head, his face
crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A
man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint
lies slumped in the driver's seat of a car, his head obliterated by
gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose
petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and
smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse
lying at their feet.
The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written
by the soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The
soldier who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own
brains and entrails wrote, "What every Iraqi should look like." The
photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a
gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption: "bad day for this dude."
One soldier posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and
titled his collection, "die haji die." The soldiers take pride, even
joy, in displaying the dead.
This is a moral catastrophe. The Bush administration claims such
sympathy for American war dead that officials have banned the media
from photographing flag-draped coffins being carried off cargo planes.
Government officials and American media officials have repeatedly
denounced the al-Jazeera network for airing grisly footage of Iraqi war
casualties and American prisoners of war. The legal fight over whether
to release the remaining photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib has
dragged on for months, with no less a figure than Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers arguing that the release of such images
will inflame the Muslim world and drive untold numbers to join
al-Qaeda. But none of these can compare to the prospect of American
troops casually bartering pictures of suffering and death for porn.
"Two years ago, if somebody had said our soldiers would do these things
to detainees and take pictures of it, I would have said that's a lie,"
sighed the recently retired General Michael Marchand – who as Assistant
Judge Advocate General for the Army was responsible for reforming
military training policy to make sure nothing like Abu Ghraib ever
happens again. "What soldiers do, I'm not sure I can guess anymore."
But for Chris Wilson, it's all in a day's work. "It's an unedited look
at the war from their point of view," he says of the soldiers who
contribute the images. "There's always going to be a slant from the
news media. ... And this is a photo that comes straight from their
camera to the site. To me, it's just a more real look at what's going
on."
Wilson, a 27-year-old Web entrepreneur living in Florida, created the
Web site a year ago, asked fans to contribute pictures of their wives
and girlfriends, and posted footage and photographs bearing titles such
as "wife working cock" and "ass fucking my wife on the stairs." The
site was a big hit with soldiers stationed overseas; about a third of
his customers, or more than fifty thousand people, work in the
military. Wilson says he started getting e-mail from soldiers thanking
him for keeping up their morale and "bringing a little piece of the
States to them." But other soldiers complained that they had problems
buying memberships to his service. "They wanted to join the site, the
amateur wife and girlfriend site," he says. "But they couldn't, because
the addresses associated with their credit cards were Quackistan or
something, they were in such a high-risk country, that the credit card
companies wouldn't approve the purchase."
That's when Wilson hit upon the idea of offering free
memberships to soldiers. All they had to do was send a picture of life
in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they'd get all the free porn they wanted.
All sorts of images began appearing over the transom, but he dedicated
a special site to view the most "gory" pictures. Asked what he feels
upon viewing a new crop, Wilson says: "Personally, I don't look at it
one way or another. It's newsworthy, and people can form their own
opinions."
Wilson's Web site has made the news before – but not for posting pictures of murdered human beings. Last October, the New York Post
reported that the Pentagon was investigating Wilson for posting naked
pictures of female soldiers in Iraq. After a few months, the Post
reported that the Pentagon had blocked soldiers in Iraq from accessing
the Web site, which had posted five more pictures of nude female
soldiers, some of whom had posed with machine guns and grenades. After
the Post's stories, Wilson says, he was bombarded with requests
for interviews from newspapers and radio stations. Even after he
started posting photographs of corpses late last year, media inquiries
focused exclusively on his nudie pics. It wasn't until reporters from
the European press contacted him last week that anyone took notice of
Wilson's snuff-for-porn arrangement with American troops.
"The soldiers thing, I think the Italians picked it up first," Wilson
says. "I've done interviews with the Italians, the French, Amsterdam.
... They were very critical, saying the US wouldn't pick it up, because
it's such a sore spot. ... It raises too many ethical questions. ... I
started to laugh, because it's true."
According to Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Conway, Pentagon
policy may be ambivalent when it comes to soldiers posting pictures of
mutilated war victims. "There are policies in place that, on the one
hand, safeguard sensitive and classified information, and on the other
hand protects the First Amendment rights of servicemembers," he says,
adding that field commanders may issue additional directives. "In plain
English, if you're on the job working for the Department of Defense,
you shouldn't be freelancing. You should be doing your duty."
If American soldiers are always considered representatives of their
government while in the field, international law clearly prohibits
publishing and ridiculing images of war dead. The First Protocol of the
Geneva Conventions states that "the remains of persons who have died
for reasons related to occupation or in detention resulting from
occupation or hostilities ... shall be respected, and the gravesites of
all such persons shall be respected, maintained, and marked." The first
Geneva Convention also requires that military personnel "shall further
ensure that the dead are honorably interred, if possible according to
the rites off the religion to which they belonged."
Nothing about this appalling trade could begin to be called
"honorable." This latest scandal doesn't just demean the bodies of the
dead – it demeans us all, in ways we won't begin to understand for
years. One of the pictures on Wilson's site depicts a woman whose right
leg has been torn off by a land mine, and a medical worker is holding
the mangled stump up to the camera. The woman's vagina is visible under
the hem of her skirt. The caption for this picture reads: "Nice puss –
bad foot."
We have decided to make available six of the photos originally posted
on NowThatsFuckedUp.com, along with the soldiers' original subject
headings. This decision to repost them was not made lightly, but we
concluded that the graphic nature of the photos, juxtaposed with their
flippant treatment by members of the US military, is newsworthy as a
statement on US military culture. WARNING: These are brutally graphic
war images that many readers will find disturbing. They should NOT be
viewed by children or the faint of heart. With that disclaimer, you
will find them here. Click on the small photos to view the larger photos with captions.
See also.:
Stan Goff, WAR PORN
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=15295
Dr. Trudy Bond, Honoring The Dead
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=15311
Tim Grieve, Which one is the pornographer?
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=16018
Mark Glaser, Porn site offers soldiers free access in exchange for photos of dead Iraqis
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050920glaser/
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