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Porn site offers soldiers free access in exchange for photos of dead Iraqis
The Internet has proven to be a vast resource of information and knowledge, but it only takes one hyperlink to get from the profound to the profane. When reading an Egyptian blog a few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a bulletin board site called NowThatsFuckedUp.com (NTFU), which started out as a place for people to trade amateur pornography of wives and girlfriends.According to the site's owner, Chris Wilson, who lives in Lakeland, Fla., but hosts the site out of Amsterdam, the site was launched in August 2004 and soon became popular with soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. When female soldiers started to appear in the nude on the site, the Pentagon blocked access to the site from military computers in the field, according to the New York Post. But the story gets more twisted. Wilson said that soldiers were having trouble using their credit cards in Iraq to access the paid pornographic content on the site, so he offered them free access if they could show that they were actually soldiers. As proof, some sent in G-rated photos of traffic signs in Baghdad or of a day in the life of a soldier abroad. Others sent in what appear to be Iraqi civilians and insurgents who were killed by suicide bombs or soldiers' fire. Now there's an entire forum on the site titled "Pictures from Iraq and Afghanistan - Gory," where these bloody photos show body parts, exploded heads and guts falling out of people. Along with the photos is a running commentary of people celebrating the kills, cracking jokes and arguing over what kind of weaponry was used to kill them. But the moderators will also step in when the talk gets too heated, and sometimes a more serious discussion about the Iraq war and its aims will break out. Wilson told me in a phone interview that he is "not very" political and considers NTFU as a community site. "People say, 'This is a porn site so why are you talking politics?' " Wilson said. "But it's actually a porn community, and any time you have a community with shared interests there's going to be other interests. Just because somebody looks at porn doesn't mean that they have a below-60 IQ and don't know anything. I have doctors and lawyers and police officers and teachers, and it doesn't surprise me that there are educated people who want to discuss things. It's interesting, and I love reading it." Wilson has no qualms about running the gory photos of war in open forums that don't require registration or payment. "I enjoy seeing the photos from the soldiers themselves," Wilson said. "I see pictures taken by CNN and the mainstream media, and they all put their own slant on what they report and what they show. To me, this is from the soldier's slant. This is directly from them. They can take the digital cameras and take a picture and send it to me, and that's the most raw you can get it. I like to see it from their point of view, and I think it's newsworthy." Wilson says it's a judgment call on whether the photos he gets are really from soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. After months of sifting through photos, Wilson has an idea of the quality of the digital cameras soldiers use and what the terrain is like in those areas of the world. I couldn't verify whether these gory photos were taken recently in Iraq by soldiers. But the U.S. military is currently looking into the site and trying to authenticate the photos -- and take appropriate action if soldiers are involved. "We do have people who are specifically looking at that website, and I will talk to my colleagues and my bosses here and get back to you," said Staff Sgt. Don Dees, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command (CentCom) in Baghdad... Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-09-21 |
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