WARNING: This story deals entirely with brutality, killing, and pornography all at once. Please exercise your own judgement, we're talking Abu Ghraib stuff here and worse.
I would call it "murder porn", but inevitably some right winger would whine about how it's technically not murder because the victims were killed in a war zone, etc, etc. Said right wing person would, of course, be technically correct.
Americablog comes up with a new story about a real-porn for-what amounts to snuff porn trading site.
What's goin' on?
Apparently some soliders over in Iraq are frequenting a particular website. At this website they post pictures of people--Iraqis--who they have killed or otherwise dismembered, maimed, or brutalized and in exchange people post pornography.
Think of it as a "death-for-porn" program.
No words i have can express the ridiculous madness of this sort of thing. I'm not even going to say it's all the evil troops' fault, although clearly some of them are deserving of that label if you ask me. Still: ethics, it is said, are often the first things to get tossed out the window in battle and war is inherently destructive of human life and dignity. So i will leave that sort of examination up to others.
Let me look, instead, at the Pentagon's response--which is, as Americablog puts it, a great big shrugging of shoulders. Then again, as Americablog reports, this story has hit DC so perhaps their tune will change shortly.
But the crux of this is, aside from the inhumanity of it all, that the systematic abuse of Iraqis has not stopped, that it remains a problem, that the upper levels (and this is the important part because they're the ones ostensibly responsible here) don't give a damn--if they don't care about sending troops into battle without any sort of body armor you think they're going to give a damn about posting some mangled Iraqis on the internet?--and all for what?
For oil? For profits for Halliburton? For empire? For what end? President Bush--the man responsible and the man who pushed this war hardest--either can't or won't say. The same answer given to Cindy Sheehan is given to the Iraqis--and, indeed, the soliders--here.
And damn us all for it. That's the problem of living in a Democracy (or, really, a Republic): one person fucks up, but everyone is ultimately responsible.
As a final aside: this is the problem with counting dead soldiers so obsessively. Although the grisly count is important, i fear it marginalizes and outright ignores the fact that there are more than just "us" and "terrorists" involved here and that "third" party suffers, too. But even terrorists don't deserve to be desecrated in death.
As an addition: Will Attorney General Alberto "Abu Ghraib" Gonzales be tackling this issue any time soon? After all, he has dedicated new agents to prosecuting pornographers--are they going to ignore obvious violations of the geneva convention (a rhetorical question, i know) or turn a blind eye to them?
(Update: Clarified title by adding "military" and Gonzales comments.)
(Another update: Billmon writes a lot more than i do. He's also more willing to blame than i am.)
(Update 3: IsThatLegal has more on the story. Steve Gillard agrees with my view (kind of) and not Billmon's.)