[News] U.S. Soldiers Swap Gore for Porn
Anti-Imperialist News
News at freedomarchives.org
Wed Sep 28 16:47:01 EDT 2005
From eastbayexpress.com
Originally published by East Bay Express 2005-09-28
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
U.S. Soldiers Swap Gore for Porn
In an echo of the Abu Ghraib fiasco, grisly images of dead, mutilated
Iraqis are traded for access to pornography, an apparent breach of Geneva
Conventions.
By Chris Thompson
If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site
<http://NowThatsFuckedUp.com/>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 permission to 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
soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The person 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 person posted three
photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection "DIE
HAJI DIE."
This could become a public-relations catastrophe. The Bush administration
claims such sympathy for American war dead that officials banned the media
from photographing flag-draped coffins being carried off cargo planes.
Government officials and American media pundits 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 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 with 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
recently retired General Michael Marchand, who as assistant judge advocate
general for the Army was responsible for reforming military training policy
in the wake of Abu Ghraib. "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 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
soldiers began e-mailing him, 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 was 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 free section of
the site to the most "gory" pictures. Asked what he feels upon viewing a
new batch, Wilson says: "Personally, I don't look at it one way or another.
It's newsworthy, and people can form their own opinions."
One soldier, who would not reveal his name or unit, defended his decision
to post pictures of the dead, which he says he did after returning from a
tour of duty. "I had just finished watching the beheading of one of our
contractors that was taken hostage over in Iraq," he said via e-mail. "I
figured since that was all over the Web, maybe these pictures would make
some potential suicide bomber think twice after seeing what happens AFTER
you pull the pin.
"What you interpret [as] maliciousness and bravado may be how [soldiers]
react to situations where they almost die or they just saw their buddy get
killed," he continued. "I will not defend the people who have posted
pictures of dead, innocent Iraqis, but in my opinion, the
insurgents/terrorists that try to kill us and end up getting killed in
return have absolutely no rights once they are dead.
"Obviously these postings do not help our public image at all," the soldier
concluded. "However, I believe the US has been far too concerned about our
public image as of late. ... We need to take a much harsher stand against
these Islamic fundamentalists and stop giving them the royal American
treatment. They need to be taught a lesson, a lesson hard enough that they
will think twice before waging a jihad against us."
Wilson's Web site has made the news before -- but not for posting pictures
of murdered people. Last October, the New York Post reported that the
Pentagon was investigating him for posting naked pictures of female
soldiers in Iraq. After a few months, the Post reported that the Pentagon
had blocked access to the site from US military facilities in Iraq. In the
wake of the Post's stories, Wilson says, he was bombarded with requests for
interviews from newspapers and radio stations. Even after he began 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 in early September 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."
When contacted for this story, a White House spokeswoman said, "If we have
a comment, we'll call you back." They never did. But 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 protect the
First Amendment rights of service members," 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 in the field are always considered representatives of
their government, 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 of the religion to
which they belonged."
No one can reasonably expect a war without war crimes. But thanks to modern
communications technology, photographic evidence of its brutality will
always be with us. Roughly two hundred soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan
document their experiences in online "milblogs," and digital cameras are
ubiquitous. No one can stop soldiers from posting pictures of eviscerated
corpses for all to see, and no one should ever again be able to feign
ignorance of war's human cost.
Or so you'd think. Yet in the weeks since the European press uncovered the
story and in the week since the site was first noticed by Eric Muller, law
professor and author of the blog <http://IsThatLegal.com/>IsThatLegal.com,
not a single US daily newspaper had covered it -- as of press time.
Representatives from Amnesty International and Human Rights First even
refused to comment, although both organizations ostensibly exist to condemn
just this kind of practice. Perhaps no one wants to give Chris Wilson more
publicity, or daily editors are too sensitive about being viewed as
unpatriotic. Or perhaps the story is just too ugly to contemplate.
Americans have thousands of media outlets to choose from. But they still
have to visit a porn site to see what this war has done to the bodies of
the dead and the souls of the living. 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 some of the photos originally posted on
<http://NowThatsFuckedUp.com>NowThatsFuckedUp.com, along with the soldiers'
original subject headings. This decision 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. 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.
That said, you may find them
<http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gallery/index.php?albumID=6&catID=78>here.
Click on the small photos to view the larger photos with captions.
The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org
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