Trading for porn
Capturing those Hallmark moments when you kill a fellow human being in cold blood is one thing, but it’s by no means limited to the insurgents. One of the more grotesque stories to emerge from the Coalition side during the Iraq war was the controversy over American soldiers trading images and video footage of dead Iraqis for access to a porn website. The website, owned by Chris Wilson of Lakeland, Florida, could not accept online payment from soldiers in high risk areas such as Afghanistan and Iraq due to security issues, yet soldiers wanted access to the smut.
Supply and demand being what they are, a deal was set up. Wilson said that he would allow access to his site for free to anybody that could prove that they were serving in a combat zone by sending in a picture. This humanitarian initiative to provide hardcore pornography to the brave troops overseas soon ended up as a freak show, with soldiers, in clear violation of the Geneva Convention, sending in graphic pictures of the dead. Visitors to the site even began to play ‘guess the body part’ with the more gruesome pictures.
Wilson claimed in an interview with CNN that some 30,000 of his site's members were US soldiers serving overseas, a sobering statistic which, if true, would implicate a not insignificant percentage of those currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite causing no small amount of controversy it was judged that no felony was committed.
Soldiers need 'light relief'.The classical touch
Using the IT revolution as a means to glorify a systematic killer or to acquire digital scalps to swap for porn is one thing, but there can be no denying that there is a side to the whole worm's eye view of combat that is not there merely to spread fear or titillate. In much the same way as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon sought to bring the horror of war back to the people at home, the same is now possible in the internet age.
Sites like Fallujah.us contain huge amounts of video of actual combat taking place and while it perhaps doesn’t have the artistic merit of a meticulously crafted poem, there’s something eerie about seeing combat as is. No editorial discretion, no soundtrack, no cuts away from the grisly bits. They show the reality of what so much of our video games, TV shows and movies are about and it’s uniformly understated yet uncomfortable viewing.
Some could argue that seeing war in the raw like this removes the mystique and the glamour from it that film makers and recruiters love to embellish it with, others might say that you’d have to be pretty wrongheaded to willingly observe the worst of human nature in that fashion. All I know is over the course of writing this article I saw a lot of things I wish I hadn’t.
In stark contrast to all the misery and bloodletting, it would be remiss not to mention this happy little offering. It just goes to show that no matter how bad the situation, you can always rely on somebody to cook up a spoof music video and send it to all their friends. Ironically, while the Amarillo spoof constituted one of the greatest accidental PR moves by the British army during the Iraq war, it was also the biggest online threat that the Ministry of Defence has ever faced - with so many people trying to download the video that their servers crashed.
Capturing those Hallmark moments when you kill a fellow human being in cold blood is one thing, but it’s by no means limited to the insurgents. One of the more grotesque stories to emerge from the Coalition side during the Iraq war was the controversy over American soldiers trading images and video footage of dead Iraqis for access to a porn website. The website, owned by Chris Wilson of Lakeland, Florida, could not accept online payment from soldiers in high risk areas such as Afghanistan and Iraq due to security issues, yet soldiers wanted access to the smut.
Supply and demand being what they are, a deal was set up. Wilson said that he would allow access to his site for free to anybody that could prove that they were serving in a combat zone by sending in a picture. This humanitarian initiative to provide hardcore pornography to the brave troops overseas soon ended up as a freak show, with soldiers, in clear violation of the Geneva Convention, sending in graphic pictures of the dead. Visitors to the site even began to play ‘guess the body part’ with the more gruesome pictures.
Wilson claimed in an interview with CNN that some 30,000 of his site's members were US soldiers serving overseas, a sobering statistic which, if true, would implicate a not insignificant percentage of those currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite causing no small amount of controversy it was judged that no felony was committed.
Soldiers need 'light relief'.
Using the IT revolution as a means to glorify a systematic killer or to acquire digital scalps to swap for porn is one thing, but there can be no denying that there is a side to the whole worm's eye view of combat that is not there merely to spread fear or titillate. In much the same way as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon sought to bring the horror of war back to the people at home, the same is now possible in the internet age.
Sites like Fallujah.us contain huge amounts of video of actual combat taking place and while it perhaps doesn’t have the artistic merit of a meticulously crafted poem, there’s something eerie about seeing combat as is. No editorial discretion, no soundtrack, no cuts away from the grisly bits. They show the reality of what so much of our video games, TV shows and movies are about and it’s uniformly understated yet uncomfortable viewing.
Some could argue that seeing war in the raw like this removes the mystique and the glamour from it that film makers and recruiters love to embellish it with, others might say that you’d have to be pretty wrongheaded to willingly observe the worst of human nature in that fashion. All I know is over the course of writing this article I saw a lot of things I wish I hadn’t.
In stark contrast to all the misery and bloodletting, it would be remiss not to mention this happy little offering. It just goes to show that no matter how bad the situation, you can always rely on somebody to cook up a spoof music video and send it to all their friends. Ironically, while the Amarillo spoof constituted one of the greatest accidental PR moves by the British army during the Iraq war, it was also the biggest online threat that the Ministry of Defence has ever faced - with so many people trying to download the video that their servers crashed.
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