The pornography of war

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

"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 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.' "
-- Chris Thompson, East Bay Express. Full article here.

Now, I don't believe that this sort of behavior represents the majority gestalt of our military. But it certainly represents the same coinage of the culture that allowed Abu Ghraib and other such atrocities to flourish.