WAR PORN SWAP SCHEME

http://stangoff.com/index.php?p=182

September 24

I was recently apprised by someone from Belgium of a bizarre and disturbing internet porn-swap. A porn site that is registered in Florida has offered US troops in Iraq free access to sexual pornography (ostensibly pictures of "real wives and girlfriends" a la Hustler's "Beaver Shots") in exchange for the more necrophilic brand of pornography -- grotesque pictures of war dead, often collected as photographic "trophies" by troops in combat.

At last count, over 100 US troops were participating in this swap. Even more interesting is the fact that the Belgians who discovered this have repreatedly tried to get the US media to pick this story up, but to no avail.

In one example, a solider sent in a picture of an Iraqi woman who had suffered a traumatic amputation of her leg. The photograph, taken in a hospital, exposed the woman's genitals. The soldier who sent in the pciture added the comment, "nice puss, bad foot," and asked the web moderator if this picture qualified him to receive the free pornography.

Story source is NYT, not WaPo. :-)

"...to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves. "

One wonders what further "amusements" these thoroughly degraded individuals will devise to humour themselves when they return home.

...to watch for in public opinion is whether there will be a resurgance of what I'd label the "Calley factor". A significant part of the American electorate when Calley was convicted essentially denied that he should be punished for his heinous crimes, largely I think because they came to believe that brutal illegal behaviour like that was almost a natural outgrowth of war and/or something ordered by those further up the chain of command. These allegations need to be investigated and the perpetrators punished to the full extent of the UCMJ.

One critical thing that I would note is this:

Guess that whole notion that if physically coercive means are practiced only by the "responsible adults" they can be firewalled from general practice doesn't hold up so well in the real world after all.

Boaters, who, thirty years after the fact, are still  in total denial about the behavior of some US troops in Vietnam--as in creating home necklaces of human ears as souvenirs, other acts described in the Winter Soldier hearings.

These pix, like those at Abu Ghraib, concern the same sort of behavior, occurring in an apparent absence of moral direction from higher-ups to the effect that "this ain't OK, boys."

It's Rummy's failure to denounce Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, and Bubble Boy's failure, and No Genevas-Gonzalez' failure, and everyone else's failure that allows these disgusting sadistic actions to go on unpunished.

These actions put our troops at risk--not pictures of flag-draped coffins.

The US army has dropped an inquiry into whether soldiers posted photographs of dead Iraqis on a website in exchange for access to pornography.

A preliminary investigation had failed to determine if US soldiers had posted the gruesome pictures and whether these showed actual war dead, officials said.

Colonel Joseph Curtin said the investigation could be reopened if new evidence was presented.

A US Muslim civil rights group condemned the inquiry as insufficient.

BBC UK

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U.S. judge orders release of Abu Ghraib photos

By LARRY NEUMEISTER

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Associated Press

New York -- Saying the United States "does not surrender to blackmail," a judge ruled Thursday that pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison must be released over government claims that they could damage the U.S. image.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered the release of certain pictures in a 50-page decision that said terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved they "do not need pretexts for their barbarism."

The ACLU has sought the release of 87 photographs and four videotapes taken at the prison as part of an October, 2003, lawsuit demanding information on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody and the transfer of prisoners to countries known to use torture. The ACLU contends that prisoner abuse is systemic.

The judge said: "Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command. Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed."

Globe and Mail

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There is a new picture at the BBC.

I appreciate your words.

It makes useful for me.

Thanks

123469

I mean the story. Not the pictorial content.

Army Investigating Complaints About Web Postings of Iraqi Corpses

.

The Associated Press

Published: Sep 27, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Army is investigating complaints that soldiers posted photographs of Iraqi corpses on an Internet site in exchange for access to pornographic images on the site, officials said Tuesday.

An Islamic civil rights group said it wrote to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld objecting to the practice, which it said may violate international laws of war, and urging the Pentagon to bring it to an end.

"This disgusting trade in human misery is an insult to all those who have served in our nation's military," Arsalan Iftikhar, legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in his letter to Rumsfeld.

bit more

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB6D6PQ4EE.html

Thanks

Your Words give me many help.

I hope it's permanent.

It's up again.

Strange, I've seen a few blogs posting references to this story in the last few days, but no-one has really picked it up in the mainstream media.

Maybe it's just me being oversensitive, but I find the whole thing very disturbing, almost as much as the Abu Ghraib pictures.

To quote S-P "Where's the outrage?!"

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

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 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 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."

-SNIP-

Army Investigates Photos of Iraqi War Dead on Web

By THOM SHANKER

September 28, 2005 - By THOM SHANKER (NYT) - Technology - News

...Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said that if soldiers had posted the images, their actions could violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which defines conduct unbecoming an officer or enlisted soldier.

Another Pentagon official who reviewed the Web site said it raised questions, as well, of whether the acts could be viewed as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which set standards for treatment of remains of those killed in a combat zone....

On the Web site, the photographs are set aside from the pornographic images that are its standard content. Those who provided the pictures often included crude captions. But there is also some discussion about the war, its purpose and conduct....

In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib and reports of other abuses by American troops, Pentagon and military officials acknowledged that such behavior could severely damage the American war effort in Iraq...

I hope everyone realizes that if this becomes a serious investigation, it raises all the free speech issues of "The People vs. Larry Flynt," it would very much be a return to that, i.e., "I know pornography when I see it." And whether 'communities' have the right to regulate how certain speech happens. The part I put in bold above, if true, just throws an extra problematic wrench into the works.

This raises the old questions about what kind of pornography is permissible, where you draw the line, should you prosecute snuff films or the murder itself, should you prosecute child pornography that does not use child models, or the child abuse itself.

It would also raise questions about whether people in the military have free speech off duty. A military prosecutor would have to step gingerly to avoid that, do something like get into the abuse of the subjects of the photos like they do when prosecuting child pornography; the article above suggests that that is where they are going by trying to find out who is in the photos and to target them, but it also suggests that they are going to go after those that posted the photos for "conduct unbecoming." Otherwise they would have to get into "I know pornography when I see it," and return to The People v. Larry Flynt. It's real easy to let the majority (which includes me) say "this is disgusting" and I don't want creeps like this in my military. But many thought Hustler magazine was creepy.

"I know it when I see it" issues also happen to be that which Gonzales is trying to target here:

Recruits Sought for Porn Squad

By Barton Gellman

Washington Post

September 20

....Applicants for the porn squad should therefore have a stomach for the kind of material that tends to be most offensive to local juries. Community standards -- along with a prurient purpose and absence of artistic merit -- define criminal obscenity under current Supreme Court doctrine.

"Based on a review of past successful cases in a variety of jurisdictions," the memo said, the best odds of conviction come with pornography that "includes bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior."....

Myself, I wish we would screen our volunteer military 'hires' for this whole type of attitude towards "the other." But when you end up with depleted ranks because of wars, you also end up with the bottom-of-the-barrel results. Also it's important to remember that everyone that joins The National Guard for an extra part-time job is naturally not going to be a shining example of truth, justice and the American way; see, for example: Lyddie Englund. That side of the problem is actually an argument against the draft. There was plenty of this kind of shit going on during Vietnam--if you cull your military from the general population, you will end up with some of the creeps and criminals that naturally occur in the general population. I tend to prefer a professional all-volunteer military precisely for that reason, despite the many other dangers it presents.

As for the U.S.'s tendency towards free speech absolutism vs. the approach of other countries where there are attempts to outlaw hate speech and related, I say: beware that which you push underground. If people are not publishing photos, how would you know any related abuse is happening? How do you catch child abusers without trying to entrap them on the internet? How do you protect from former child abusers without publishing their names and locations?

Many, many sticky wicket questions here. Chances are, though, that the people involved will be so shamed that they will not do a Larry Flynt when they are sought out for punishment. That's the way it usually works out.

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051008/NEWS/510080427/1004

October 10

LAKELAND -- Polk County sheriff's deputies Friday night arrested the creator of a Web site that stirred international controversy with its alleged swap of free access to pornography for pictures from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, including dead and mutilated Iraqi and Afghan war dead.

Chris Wilson ran the Web site, the name of which contains an unprintable word, from his apartment at the Glen Cove Apartment Complex on Edgewood Drive.

In September, when news reports of the site began to surface, Wilson insisted that because the site actually is hosted in Amsterdam, he was not violating any laws in Polk County.

"Nice try," Brad Copley, a prosecutor with the State Attorney's Office, who specializes in obscenity and sex crime cases, said Friday night. "He's in charge of the Web site. He lives here. He's operating from his house. It doesn't matter where his server is."

Wilson, a former Eagle Lake police officer, was arrested on charges of obscenity, but not for the pictures of the war dead.

However, according to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, "We have notified the Army's criminal investigation division. We will forward to them any investigative documents they deem appropriate if they open an investigation."

The Army opened an investigation into the site in September, but then quickly dropped it. Investigators said they did not have sufficient evidence to prove that American military personnel had sent in the gruesome pictures.

As he was led from his apartment in handcuffs Friday night, Wilson, asked to comment, said only "I love my lawyer."

That lawyer, Lawrence Walters of Orlando, is a veteran First Amendment litigator, who has battled the Polk Sheriff's Office and Copley before in an obscenity case.

He said Wilson had sought him out prior to the arrest. And deputies said they found evidence that Wilson was researching speech and obscenity cases similar to his.

All that suggests Wilson may have expected trouble from local law enforcement.

As Walters said, "I'm not surprised (by the arrest), but disappointed. This is clearly retaliation for disseminating graphic news accounts and footage from Iraq and Afghanistan. There are hundreds of thousands of adult Web sites, including in Central Florida and Polk County, and my client is singled out. It smacks of selective enforcement."

He added, "I would hope that one wouldn't face the wrath of the legal system just merely because some police officers wanted to be on television."

Walters said that the law protects Wilson's site as legitimate speech and that his client has done nothing wrong.

Wilson's Web site advertises itself as primarily being dedicated to amateur pornography.

Wilson claims that soldiers serving overseas were trying to get access to his Web site, but were not able to use their credit cards from Iraq and Afghanistan.

He made an offer on the Web site that if they posted pictures proving they were military serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, he would give them free access to the paid sections of the Web site.

For about six or seven months, people claiming to be members of the military have been sending in pictures of life overseas, ranging from picturesque scenery to hideous pictures of people burned black and unrecognizable, or with body parts mangled or blown apart.

According to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, the area that includes pornographic pictures was equally distasteful.

"Normal people don't have the ability to imagine how perverse and horrific these images were," he said. "It certainly is content that shocks the community."

According to Copley, many of the pictures of women clearly were taken without their knowledge or consent.

"There's revenge photos all over the Web site. Boyfriends posting pictures of ex-girlfriends, pictures taken from hidden cameras," he said.

Deputies arrived shortly before 5 p.m. with a warrant to search the apartment, Judd said.

They seized three computers, a laptop computer, recording equipment, a digital camera and tripod, several women's costumes, including a nun costume and a frilly costume with an apron, and other materials, according to Deputy Sandy Scherer.

Depending on what sheriff's deputies find on the computers, more charges could be pending, Judd said.

"It's important to recognize that this is only the beginning of the investigation, not the end."

Judd said his office began to investigate the site after it became aware of it through news reports.

"In my 33 years of law enforcement, this was one of the more horrific examples of obscene materials that the Sheriff's Office has ever encountered," Judd said.

After reviewing and downloading pictures from the Web site, the State Attorney's Office presented the pictures to County Judge Angela Cowden, Judd said.

Copley then filed 301 criminal charges against Wilson.

He was arrested on charges of 100 counts of distribution or transmission of obscene materials, 100 counts of offering to distribute or transmit obscene materials, 100 counts of possession of obscene materials. All of those are misdemeanors.

He faces one felony count of wholesale promotion of obscene materials.

The misdemeanors carry a potential penalty of up to one year in jail each, and the felony carries a potential penalty of up to five years in state prison.

Walters criticized the number of misdemeanors filed, saying the Web site itself should have constituted one count only.

"It smacks of charge stacking," he said.

Wilson was booked into the Polk County Jail on $151,000 bail.

So far, what coverage we have, indicates that there is very much something going on with intent of some of the 'iconography' on that site that is very similar to that which was intended by hanging the burnt bodies of the American contractors on the bridge in Falluja.

The desecration of bodies is a humiliation message. This is also why rape is so common during war; it's a humiliation message.

...active service when they distributed the photos, they should be toast. The only situation that I am aware of when someone isn't subject to the UCMJ is when they are not on active duty (e.g., they are drilling with their NG unit during weekends, etc.). When they are called to service in Iraq, they are clearly on active duty and there is no "free speech" defence that I think is going to save them from a "conduct unbecoming" charge.

I would go even further than just distribution, however, and argue that even the act of taking the damned photos is "conduct unbecoming," regardless of whether they swapped them for free porn or not. There are rules governing how the enemy (dead or alive) is treated and these guys broke them - just because there's a long and rich tradition of folks taking stupid ass photos of enemy and civilian dead doesn't make the practice acceptable from a military justice standpoint. The point of military justice is to maintain good order and discipline, and these guys have both undermined that and put their fellow soldiers at increased risk; they deserve to be punished to the full extent of the UCMJ. If they can be more severely punished for distribution, great - if all they can be got for is taking the shots, then that'll have to do.

ahem, this story has an internet/cyberspace hook which takes you into covering big, big issues.