There is a controversy going on in the blogsphere. The controversy has raised a moral question which needs to be answered.
The young American soldiers in Iraq are going through hell at the moment. No matter what the Bush administration says, Americans areat war in Iraq. And with war comes destruction of the body and mind. We are all well aware of the kind of destruction wrought by war on the mind. We have seen the soldiers come back and break into pieces (I will be linking to the specific articles soon).But now the blogsphere is slowly waking up to the destruction of the body.
There is a site called nowthatsf**kedup.com which is an amateur porn site. From what I gather the site let’s users view pictures of everyday people as long as you pay a certain fee. Another way to view the pictures is to trade. In other words, put on your pictures and you are allowed access to the other people’s pictures. A year ago soldiers from Iraq started to approach this site with the proposition that they would post pictures,completely uncensored, of the war in Iraq for access to porn pictures to the site.
The end result, the site manager agreed and let the soldiers post pictures. If you are curious you can go to the site and see the pictures yourself. BUT I MUST WARN YOU. Isaw only a few pictures and I almost threw up. There are pictures of ordinary Iraqis or actual terrorists with faces ripped off bodies; men in their cars with their heads on the ground, a terrorist’s arm nailed to the wall, a charred body, aftermath of the scene immediately after a suicide attack and the one that made me almost throw up: a picture of a body turned inside out belonging to a little boy or a girl caught in a suicide attack. The pictures were absolutely horrendous. I have never seen anything like this before in my entire life and the images, especially, the last one is likely to stay with me for a long, long time.
The worse part of the picture was not the bodies that were ripped apart, but the fact that in each and every picture there was an American soldier or a group of American soldiers with huge smiles on their faces giving a thumbs up. The glee on these faces next to horror was so surreal, so out of place that it throws the American moral superiority right out the window.
This story was brought to everyone’s attention by John and Joe of the americablog.com. They also have censored versions of the pictures in case you want to see sanitized versions of the horror. And now they are asking their readers a question.
I was discussing this with Joe in DC earlier today. Now that the Pentagon has decided to totally ignore this scandal, to sweep under the rug the fact that US troops are making the electronic version of ear necklaces from the dead, is it time for AMERICAblog to publish the worst of the photos on our site?I’m talking, there are photos of faces ripped off of bodies – leaving only the face behind, not the skull, the face just lying on the ground. Guys sitting in their cars, heads totally blown off.This is gruesome stuff folks. Probably the worst thing you can imagine. But I’m seriously wondering if the only way to prove how bad this is is by creating a scandal by publishing the very visible and very uncensored death photos on this very public blog.What do you all think? I could go either way
.
I think the pictures need to be brought to the public’s attention. It will show the other side of the glorification of the war that the Bush administration is actively promoting. But at the same time, the pictures need to be censored witha link to the uncensored version. The way that the pictures were censored on AMERICAblog.com showed the true gruesome nature of the whole situation in Iraq…..a “censored” shattered body and gleeful American soldier. War is not kind to the human soul andsoldiers go through hell. I have seen one of my close relative battle with his own demons after a stint in Sri Lanka with the Indian Peace Keeping Force. To be able to face such horror and come clean it just not possible. It’s even more damaging to the mind when your government is perpetuating a lie and asking you to die for it. That just not right.
What do you think?
Desi In Toronto 