The Digital Age
A few weeks ago I was at a show and I noticed that this guy in the middle of the mosh pit had his cell phone open so that his friend on the other end of the line could hear the band. He was getting tossed about like a rag doll, but still managed to have his arm up and his cell phone on.
It cracked me up, but it also made me aware of how we really have entered the digital age. Since the start of the war and occupation of Iraq, soldiers have been sending home photos. Unlike past wars, the average soldier, not just professional journalists, can document the war.
Lately, reports have been circulating that soldiers have been trading pics of the dead in exchange for access to a porn website:
Click here for the article
"The allegations surfaced last week, when the Bay Area weekly East Bay Express published a story about graphic photographs that appeared on one section of the Web site. The photographs, which show the bodies of several people killed in shootings, explosions or fires, include crude captions, some of which mock the dead.
Pentagon and Army officials issued strong statements Wednesday condemning the taking and posting of such photographs but said there was little evidence to authenticate them and few ways to pursue a criminal investigation. While some of the photos appear to show U.S. soldiers in uniform near mutilated bodies, it is unclear where or when the pictures were taken.
The Web site's creator, Chris Wilson, said Wednesday that about 30,000 members of the military were registered on his site, several thousand of whom have sent him photographs or comments from their official military Web addresses. Many photographs depict life in Iraq, while only a few are extremely graphic, he said.
"It's an uncensored view of the war, from their perspective," said Wilson, 27, of Florida, who began accepting the photographs from soldiers overseas as payment for access to pornography on his site. "It's a place where the soldiers can express themselves without being filtered by the Bush administration."
-Jean Chen
posted by flika @ 10:24 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Dayum, that's hecka crazy (pardon my Bayarea-ese). I guess I can't fault the soldiers who allegedly traded their pictures--if they're the type of folks who take pictures of war atrocities, they're probably liable to do anything. However, the porn site really should have known better.
This article does makes me wonder about where soldiers get their porn. An acquantice of mine was serving in Iraq a little while ago, and though we planned to send him some "Jugs"-type magazines, we were advised that this was frowned upon. Oh, well. Hope he liked those car magazines.
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