Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Who Will Control the Images of War?
Army Investigates Photos of Iraqi War Dead on Web - New York Times
The availability of digital cameras, laptops and highspeed connections during wartime has transformed the images of war flowing around the war. The ability of the Defense Department to control the flood of imagery coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan has diminished considerably. The crowd of professional journalists is the least of the Pentagon's problems. The photos that created the Abu Grhaib scandal were taken by American soldiers who had absolutely no conception of the effect that their photos would have on the image of America around the world. The effect of those photos did more damage to American credibility than any other event in this conflict.
American soldiers are still snapping photos and taking videos for their own amusement and to show their friends and families what they are experiencing. Free web hosting, blogging and photo hosting sites allow service men and women to post galleries of images at no cost. Most of these images are innocuous touristy shots of the places they are posted and their buddies horsing around or riding in armored vehicles out on operations. Some are funny, some dramatic, but some are filled with the horror and tragedy of war. One topic that is well documented are the IED explosions that threaten their lives. There are a lot of gory photos of burnt corpses and dismembered bodies and destroyed vehicles.
These gory images are a form of war porn that is fascinating to many soldiers and civilians alike. The recent discovery of an "amateur" porn site that caters to military personnel and includes a section of gory war images contributed by soldiers as a form of payment for admission to the porn site has made the news. This is proving to be a source of embarrassment for the Defense Department.
Soldiers are using the highspeed communications networks created by the military to communicate with their own friends and family. Any attempt to crack down or surveil soliders using these networks to ease the boredom and communicate with their families will result in a serious blow to morale. On the other hand, free expression for the troops will surely lead to more scandals that will seriously damage the prestige of the armed forces and the war effort itself. The unfortunate connection between pornography and war gore will confirm a lot of anti-American suspicions about the morality of the war in Iraq. The military will have to curtail the posting of images by soldiers in order to regain control of the image of war, but will that be possible given the enormous amount of personal media carried by modern soldiers?
See also the Online Journalism Review Article on the same subject;
and the Washington Post's Army Investigating Web Postings of Grisly War Photos which quote the site adminstrator of the offending web site as saying:
"It's an uncensored view of the war, from their perspective," said Chris Wilson, 27, of Florida, who began accepting the photographs from soldiers overseas as payment for access to pornography on his Web site. "It's a place where the soldiers can express themselves without being filtered by the Bush administration," he added.Lumping together pornography and free speech for soldiers is going to be a hard sell in this political climate. Let's see what the world press makes of this scandal. It has everything the sensational media could hope for: sex and blood and war.
NFL Cheerleaders in Kuwait
Here are the rules for posting as published on Chris Wilson's site:
Post subject: The Rules For This Section If you are a U.S. Soldier stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other combat area and would like free SUPPORTER access for the site, you can post real pictures you or your buddies have taken while you have been deployed.
This section is for the gory ones so that people who do not wish to see that kind of stuff can just not go in here. I also do not want already published pictures that were taken by news people. This is supposed to be an area where we can see pictures posted by the solders themselves.
Just post your pics like you normally would and when I see them I will approve you for free access to the wife and g/f area. There have only been a few people cheat from this but I do now know what kind of pics to expect from the guys over there. So please do not waste my time if you are not a military person by just posting iraq pics you found on CNN or something.
Keep up the good work over there guys, we love seeing your pics.
