The Line Between Politics and Entertainment is History
Now I'll Talk About the Porn of War
by Neva Chonin, SF Chronicle

Last week I wrote about the war on porn; now I'll talk about the porn of war.

On Tuesday, a military court found Lynndie England guilty of humiliating prisoners, in a grandstanding trial that branded her and her co-defendants as isolated deviants in a squeaky-clean war. Well, that contention is becoming increasingly hard to swallow. Conversely, England's contention that her acts were covertly sanctioned is sounding likelier every day, especially after visiting an amateur porn site called NowThatsF -- Up.com. You'll have to fill in the omitted letters, dear reader; I'm not allowed to print them because they're ... what? Obscene? No, what's obscene is what's on the site. And what's on the site? Reality, dude. Reality's on that site, and it's not pretty.

For a year now, American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been posting photographs of corpses -- insurgent corpses, civilian corpses, unidentifiable piles of guts in various stages of mutilation -- on the site in return for free access to its porn cache. And these pictures have in turn drawn thousands of civilian gawkers who find the sight of laughing soldiers posing with dead bodies at least as titillating as candid shots of women in flagrante delicto. Explicit sex, graphic violence. For some guys, they're twin stimuli.

Full story here.