These soldiers reflect the ethics of their political and military leaders.
Bush lied to get support to invade Iraq and what is based on a lie has
little chance of metamorphosing into good while having all the danger of
getting even more corrupt and vile.

---

War Pornography

US soldiers trade grisly photos of dead and mutilated Iraqis for access to
amateur porn. The press is strangely silent.

By Chris Thompson

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 could become a public-relations 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
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 *****" and "***** 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 special site to
view 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 did after returning home. "I had just
finished watching the beheading of one of our contractors that was taken
hostage over in Iraq," he wrote in an 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 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 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 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."

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 days since the
European press uncovered the gore-for-porn story, not a single US print
newspaper other than the Express has touched it.

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
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 here. Click on the small
photos to view the larger photos with captions.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-09-21/news/news_print.html

--
They Knew...

Despite the whitewash, we now know that the Bush administration was warned
before the war that its Iraq claims were weak

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/they_knew_0802/