Is That Legal?

Sadly, Eric, the answer will be "no". Nur al-Cubicle broke this story on the blogosphere (as far as I know) one month ago. It was apparently very big news in the French and Italian dailies. None of the blogosphere heavies linked to it.

I even personally sent the above link to Juan Cole, and received no reply. If it gets any play as a result of this post, you have my thanks.

Disgusting.

I wonder if Andrew Sullivan has heard of this yet.

Maybe that's the kind of memorial Michelle's looking for.

This is very, very bad.

Horrible.

Scary to think of all the nightmarish things that are happening in some soldiers' minds that will play themselves out when they get home.

What is happening over there is worse than I can imagine. I knew in my heart that the invasion was a terrible mistake; I just never thought it would be this bad.

We should leave. Now.

I wish we could make this right, but we cannot.

General Wm. Tecumsah Sherman, on war:

Now that war comes to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance.

Americans cannot be occupiers

Americans cannont be refugees

Americans cannot be war criminals

Repeat

I wonder if Andrew Sullivan has heard of this yet.

Yes he has

That entire site(inluding site policies) should be downloaded and saved and then sent to every news outlet in the country. It is simply not enough that only a fraction of a percentage of internet users be aware of this.

It’s pretty common for soldiers to document a lot of what they see. They joke about it too. Dark, graveyard humor that most civilians outside cops and coroners would “get”. I didn’t take many pictures of what I saw when I served, but I damn sure joked about it. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. Maybe there’s a beast within, and when you start stripping off our taboos, the beast comes out and we really are callous underneath. I don’t know.

The web exploitation is certainly untoward and I agree that part is over the top.

Good luck on getting a court to literally enforce the Geneva Conventions tho. It seems to me this is something you should write the Pentagon about, and draw their attention to. No, really. I bet they’d go apes*** about this. They aren’t dumb, they know the kind of damage this kind of undisciplined shitheadery can do to the US efforts in the GWOT, and they’d likely respond very quickly to it.

If you care about it, that’s what you’d do. If you don’t, and want to get folks here and in the combat zone riled up at our troops (the bulk of whom probably don’t engage in this behavior) then spreading the news about these f***ups to every corner of the internet is probably what you should do.

This site has been around for a while.

But while your busy tsk-tsking and tut-tutting. I'll just roll my eyes at your naivete. If you want to see low stuff, check out Stile Project or some other porn/gross-out site.

I'll also wonder why you didn't notice that there are a lot of pictures of sunsets, and why you didn't consider if seeing the brutality of war might not actually make people think seriously about what the fuck we're doing over there. I saw one photo of a building smeared 3 stories high with the blood of a "suicider" (what ever happened to that term). I saw photos of truck drivers executed by god knows who. It doesn't make me want to cut and run, it makes me want to know what the fucking plan was, and why we're doing it. It makes me wonder if driving Iraq to civil war is worth putting our kids into the meat grinder.

For the record, I was against the war, though I did support us going to Iraq on the condition they weren't lying to us about WMDs (they were). So don't bother making me out as a freeper troll or any stupid shit.

I seriously doubt that the knuckle-draggers who rely on this website for their daily dose of amateur porn are going to be reflecting critically and patiently upon the underlying brutality of war. Decontextualized, the photos cannot speak to the bogosity of US policy in Iraq -- it's nothing more than jingoistic necrophilia.

the problem with the site isn't just the pictures, which are tasteless. it's the quid pro quo gore-for-porn aspect that's disgusting.

Well, I too remember hearing about it, and iirc linked to the story, at the time Ryan refers to.

And no, it doesn't surprise me, not because I already knew about Tiger Force, but because Tiger Force didn't surprise me, not because I had learned already in 1998 that US soldiers brought home souveniers carved from Japanese soldiers' bones, but because my sperm donor was such a man, who chose a second term in Vietnam, when my mother would not get an abortion as he wished, where he could go back to cutting off enemy body parts and having pictures taken of himself posing on heaps of the slain, like an Assyrian king or Egyptian pharaoh, the pictures and...objects, she found when she moved in with him.

--gotta civilize the little yellow bastards, yup.

Other blogs are just start to pick up on this. Ironically, it comes at the same time the blogs picked up a Washington Post story about how the Bush Administration wants to make the "War on Porn" a top priority. And by porn I mean adult porn involving conscenting adults, not child pornography.

Unfortunately I have to mostly agree with Al Maviva and others that soldiers, American or not, get immersed in an outlook that just can't be judged by p.c. or "civilized" standards. My dad used to show me pictures he'd taken of vietcong corpses he called "crispy critters." Call it a coping mechanism, or the breakdown of human empathy in the face of routine horror, it happens in every war regardless of the Geneva Convention.

Yes, in a sense it's sick, but no more so than war itself. Fighting a war tends to make people interested in seeing the enemy dead; it's their job.

What a puzzle. Why did this take a month to hit American blogs? Will this hit the MSM? I'm so paranoid, I suspect the story of this killing of the number 2 guy is designed to distract everyone from THIS story.

I just learned about it today and I plan to pay attention to it. There's a story in how this story got ignored.

This Iraq invasion is turning out to be worse and worse every day. This is a big story. I haven't felt this ashamed since Abu Garib.

Will humanity ever learn that war is, in itself, a crime?

Our taxes pay for the US army, then we go out and buy oil from terrorist countries.

As someone pointed out: We're funding both sides of the war on terror.

Thank you. It's in the MSM.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/28/web.photos/index.html

This new is really old.
The web has been talking about it for months.

A Spanish Blog on the 27th of April:
http://spaces.msn.com/members/akarquitectura/Blog/cns!1pznJCenGOXDFKhLmmQ3JZSw!239.entry

This is from the 5th of May: http://incaseyoumissedit.blogspot.com/2005/05/war-bush-doesnt-want-you-to-see.html

And this other one http://ohiblog.splinder.com/post/5548539 is the one who spread the new in Italy and then Europe last month.

American site (02 september 2005) http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=200509021045103

And the Pentagon has decided to move only after all that time. And what they say? That there is no violation at all.
You cannot be above the rules. If you forget them, and if you don't respect the others, hate against U.S.A. will rise more than ever.

Remember: the whole world is watching.

I n a couple of places, the Geneva Conventions forbid the ill-treatment of enemy dead and require respect for their remains. (Specifically, Articles 15 and 17 of the First Geneva Convention and Article 34 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts.)

Respect for remains means, among other things, preventing the remains from being

I pray to god that these unhuman soldiers will never have peace in their life and their commanders to.Abu garib prisoners are and will be the shame of all the american for ever

I was a moderator at that site (which has been shut down by local fascists for having pictures of naked LIVE people, not for having pics of bloody DEAD people). The deal wasn't "give us gory pics and we'll give you porn".

The deal was "send us pics that prove you're part of the coalition forces in Iraq or Afghanistan and we'll give you free access to the parts of the site that you are unable to buy access to because the credit card companies won't accept charges from a war zone". Some of the soldiers chose to send gory pics. Those pictures were segregated into a single disgusting forum, with a hard to miss warning about the nature of the content. The misleading invitation quoted at the beginning of this page was INSIDE the forum.

Until it began to be moaned about by bloggers, there were no more than a few dozen people who ever even saw the pics ... and a goodly number of them were the ones who sent the pics in the first place.

This was a really tiny corner of the site, and not remotely representative of the standards of 99% of the membership. If alarmists around the world hadn't made such a damn big stink, noone would have known about it and the forum would have simply faded away. No more than a half-dozen people got access via that route ... none of them after late 2004.

Far more damage was done by the attention given to this little aberration than would ever have been caused by the content itself.

How many of you hippies know anything about war? Go ahead and cry about soldiers posting pics of dead Iraqis for porn. How many of you have spent 1 year plus away from your wife? Nothing but your wang in your hand. More importantly...Those bastards are chopping up Americans but your liberal hearts bleed for the Iraqis?? Go figure!! If America is sooo wrong and you disagree with the direction our country has taken, then move your sorry asses over to Iraq and help the cause, instead of poking snide remarks at the men and women who protect your right to pout. Yeah, yeah it's war, people die, pictures get taken, soldiers need porn, DEAL WITH IT!!