Democracy in Action: US troops upload photos of dead Iraqis for porn
Posted by Stanley at 18:39, 03 Oct 2005Hi all,
Just as one is wondering if it can get any worse....
US troops upload photos of dead Iraqis for porn
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
29 September 2005
The US military said yesterday it was opening an investigation into reports that soldiers based in Iraq were posting gruesome photographs of dead Iraqis, including explicit shots of severed body parts and internal organs, on a Florida-based website in exchange for access to the site's pay-only archive of pornography.
The photographs have outraged Arab and Muslim advocacy groups in the US and prompted human rights organisations to question whether they are not also a violation of the Geneva Conventions. They also constitute another potential public relations disaster for the United States as it continues to state publicly that it has the best interests of ordinary Iraqis at heart.
Some of the graphic website images are accompanied by openly racist comments from the soldiers who posted them. "What every Iraqi should look like," is the commentary next to a picture of a corpse whose brains and entrails are spilling out. In another image, six men wearing US Marine uniforms are smiling for the camera as they point to a burned body at their feet. The caption: "Cooked Iraqi."
Elsewhere, site visitors are invited to guess which body part is being depicted. The website owner, Chris Wilson, has been quite open about what he is doing. He said his site, which normally features photographs of the wives and girlfriends of his customers in pornographic poses, has proved very popular with the military. About a year ago, in response to complaints that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were having trouble getting their credit cards processed and gaining access to the site, he agreed to offer free subscriptions in return for the graphic images. Those images, unlike the porn, are openly accessible to anyone.
Mr Wilson's site is registered in the Netherlands, putting it outside the purview of the US legal system. He has pointed out that he is not a member of the military and so is not subject to their rules.
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Comments
13 May 2004
1 year 2 days
Jeez - where do you start with this one?
It beggars belief....
yer ol' pal,
Xibalba
(This post was brought to you by "Realm of the Dead")
1 May 2004
1 year 20 weeks
Hi Xibalba,
Cum on now what is it that you have a problem with here, that silly GI 's exchange pics of ultra violence for nudes ? Dont they know there's plenty of free porn out there ?
Seriously after the yugo war there was a lot of nasty pics going around too, often even more awful because victims (women mostly) were used to produce extreme filthy hardcore aswell as snuff movies.
Defacto this website performs an apparently free service to the public by making the abject horror of war visible- something the big media fail to do time and again. Were it not for the commercial interest a nobel peace price nomination could be considered.
" do unto others as you would have them do unto you "
24 June 2004
5 years 49 weeks
The sound of civilisation going down the toilet.
shadows
1 May 2004
6 hours 17 min
Army ends probe on porn site photos of Iraq corpses
Wed Sep 28, 2005 4:03 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army after a brief inquiry has failed to determine whether U.S. soldiers provided grisly photos of people killed in the Iraq war to a porn Web site in exchange for free access to it, officials said on Wednesday.
The numerous graphic pictures posted on the Web site showed men, with their faces visible and wearing what looked like U.S. military uniforms, standing over a charred corpse, mutilated dead bodies and severed body parts.
The porn Web site states the photos were provided by troops in Iraq as well as Afghanistan in order to get free access to its sexual images. Many of the photos, still posted on the site, are accompanied by captions making light of the corpses; for example one photo of a charred body was dubbed "Cooked Iraqi."
The Army Criminal Investigation Command in Iraq conducted the preliminary inquiry within the past week but closed it after concluding no felony crime had been committed and failing to determine whether U.S. soldiers were responsible for the photos and whether they showed actual war dead, Army officials said. [Emphasis added.]
Col. Joe Curtin, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said there currently was no formal investigation into the matter.
"We're not blowing this off," Curtin said. "If the Army thinks it's in its interest to investigate something, we will. There are multiple challenges here. One is the anonymity of the sources, dates, times, locations, units, anything that is reasonably identifiable that we can work off of."
This controversy over the photographs involving U.S. military personnel comes a year and a half after other pictures taken by U.S. soldiers became public in April 2004 showing them abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail, a scandal that prompted international condemnation of the United States.
'CURSORY INVESTIGATION'
The Washington-based Muslim civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations, which had called for an investigation into the allegations of photos of corpses swapped for pornography, called the probe insufficient.
"It's entirely inappropriate for the military to do such a cursory investigation of something that is really casting a very negative light on our nation's military and can only serve to further damage America's image and interests throughout the Islamic world," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the group.
Hooper said the military must determine who was involved and whether the conduct violated U.S. military law and international laws governing conduct during wartime, including the Geneva Conventions.
Curtin said the Army was not ruling out the possibility of opening a formal criminal investigation. "Any time new information becomes available that's credible, yes, they potentially could reopen the case," he said.
The Web site separates the corpse pictures from its sexual images. According to an article in the Online Journalism Review of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California, the site's owner, Chris Wilson, lives in Lakeland, Florida, but hosts the site out of Amsterdam. The article quotes Wilson as saying the site's images of nude female U.S. soldiers in Iraq and photos of war dead provide a "raw" account of war.
Officials said that while the Army's preliminary inquiry had determined no felony act had taken place, soldiers potentially could be punished for conduct unbecoming a soldier, which generally brings administrative sanctions.
Without confirming the authenticity of the photos or who took them, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "This does not represent the values of the United States military, and doesn't represent the vast majority of the actions and behavior of our men and women in uniform. It is a despicable practice. It's unacceptable. And the department is going to address it."
Curtin said the military was examining policies, procedures and legal implications of how soldiers transmit photos from the battlefield, and could consider limiting troops' use of their own personal computers or cameras in a combat zone.
"The military must be very careful in not violating an individual's First Amendment rights," Curtin said, referring to the constitutional right of free expression.
"Soldiers encounter the horrors of war, and they are able to record it," Curtin said. "You mix it with the porn site, now you muddy the waters."
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker on Wednesday sent a message about "Internet Safety" to U.S. soldiers, but focused on restrictions on images that could compromise operational security on the battlefield. Curtin said the message was unrelated to the corpse photos.
4 June 2005
4 years 12 weeks
"The Army Criminal Investigation Command in Iraq conducted the preliminary inquiry within the past week but closed it after concluding no felony crime had been committed and failing to determine whether U.S. soldiers were responsible for the photos and whether they showed actual war dead, Army officials said. [Emphasis added.]"
Hi Kat,
Thanks for the update.
This is hardly surprising is it? Military law and investigations have historically been less than impartial to say the least. Hardly likely to prosecute anyone when so many are coming home in body bags. Not good for the propaganda train.
For the military brass this would be viewed as good harmless fun for the boys - basic media fodder. And true enough, this is nothing new in war. Their remit is basically to give the media an impression that they are investigating and to leave it at that.
The ACIC is a joke.
Stan
1 May 2004
6 hours 17 min
According to google, the article Stanley quoted appeared in both The Independent and the Belfast Telegraph.
Kat