NTFU porn story reaching MSM
The body part porn story is (at last) reaching the English-language portion of the MSM. Today's UK Guardian has a good short report on the NTFU website, written by Andrew Brown.
Yesterday, Brown and I briefly discussed the "trophy" nature of the images on the NTFU site-- both the sexual-porn ones that are its usual staple and the body-part-porn ones that are its most shocking special feature. He quotes me as saying: "It is like finding Mistah Kurtz, sitting in the middle of the black jungle, surrounded by heads on stakes."
The NYT also has a piece on the topic today. It's by Thom Shanker. It gives no hint of the role that people in the blogosphere-- Nur al-Cubicle, Christiane, I, others-- played in getting this story to an English-reading public, but makes it seem as though the idea for the story sprang fully-formed out of Thom Shanker's omniscient head.
Oh wait. Buried down deep here in the piece is a reference to Mark Glaser's September 20 piece on the topic in the Online Journalism Review.
Shanker doesn't, however, go as far as mentioning Glaser by name... Oh no. That would make it seem as though someone other than his own exalted self had been in the lead on this story.
(And nor, of course, does he mention Glaser's citing of my role in helping break the story.)
Shanker's "lede" in his "story" does not focus on the existence of the obscene, deeply troubling NTFU website. Instead, he leads with this:
- The Army has opened an investigation into whether American troops have sent gruesome photographs of Iraqi war dead to an Internet site where the soldiers were given free access to online pornography, Army officials said Tuesday...
It looks like, as usual, the lower-downs and grunts. (Think Lynndie England, but in this case most likely male.) Here's Shanker:
- Officials said the military's preliminary inquiry was being conducted by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. They said it had proved difficult to identify the military personnel who can be seen in some of the photographs wearing Army or Marine Corps uniforms but no clear name tags or unit markings.
The outrage here, folks, is that members of the US military committed outrages of mutilation, killing, and desecration of bodily remains against their fellow humans in the first place. Not so much, I would argue, the boy's-clubbish sharing of atrocity photos afterwards-- though that is also pretty bad, and might at the margins incentivize the commission of further atrocities.
Those atrocities against Iraqis and Afghans were committed, in large part, because of the Bush administration's wilfull and criminal disregard of its obligations under the laws of war. (See next post.)
Well, I'm truly delighted the story is getting out. A little due attribution to predecessors and a little less olympian assumption by the NYT's writers and editors of the claim to their own omniscience would of course be even better.
(You can check out some of my fairly ground-breaking August writings on the NTFU issue here.)
The BBC has it also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4289518.stm
The thing that shocked me most about the story was the assumption of the Board's owner that this kind of free speech was a mark of civilisation. That's why I quoted Helena as I did.
Sorry there was nocredit to the web site, but there weere horrendus problems filing, since I had quoted some of the text ads, and newspaper have filters to keep that sort of thing out of their email.
At first glance the Beeb story looks like a minimal rewrite of the NYT one... No attribution. What shysters some of these MSM-ers are, eh?
Think the fault is Shanker's, or copy desk's? The NYT seems pretty blog-unfriendly these days, outside the Tech section. It's like, "a blog? we're supposed to cite a blog as a credible source?"
One thing that this points out is that - contrary to American sentiment - soldiers are generally brutish dolts. If these guys weren't brutalizing and killing Iraqis they would be back home in Alabama busting beer bottles over the heads of 'fags' walking out of gay bars.
Soldiers abandon their god-given conscience, reason, and intellect and do what they are told. A soldiers 'honor' is simply unthinking obediance like a dog. A soldiers 'bravery' is like that of a pitbull trained to attack whatever is put in front of them, without thinking or understanding.
I wrote about another similar site back in February http://www.spectator.se/stambord/?p=575 that Raed in the Middle had reported on. Again, you might prefer not to look, for the same reasons i don't want to see the new ones - it too was grotesque http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com/2005/02/new-us-scandle-new-dahmer-buffet.html .
I was surprised at how upset I was when I heard this story at "Today In Iraq". I guess coming from a military family, I tend to see the military AS family, even if I'm a bitterly estranged son. Family is the cornerstone of our moral universe, and when it's this dysfunctional I don't know where to turn. I am easily seduced by the idea that there is something noble in the image of 1914, the officers leading their men into the machine guns, though as a student of history I know it was insane. If only that power could be used for good... but that's how we turn to the dark side. I can bear living in a future of armed political struggle, but not a snuff film. As I told many friends in e-mails, if Bertold Brecht possessed the body of J. G. Ballard they couldn't come up with a war story as sick as this one.
Thanks for mentioning me, Helena.
My ancestors who fought at Vicksburg, Petersburg, Anzio and the North Atlantic, men who delivered battle death as well as received it, would be ashamed at the indiscipline and brutality of today's US Armed Forces. I would like to know to what extent this kind of behavior is encouraged. Evidence from the Vietnam War says that it is, especially in the Special Forces.