If you have to post snuff, at least do it after the fold.

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

I am leaving the diary for the time being, with the added warning, but may decide to hide altogether if site readers request it.

Could you explain your purpose in publishing these pictures here? A link to the site might have done the trick, as well. Why publish them? Why bring this to us? This is an honest question and I hope you can provide a simple answer.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Some (or all?) of these pictures were published by Metro (a London newspaper freely distributed to commuters weekday mornings) this past week, with the corpses digitally obscured. Even the altered photos generated mixed reactions from the readers, some accusing Metro of being no better than NowThatsFuckedUp.com

I first heard of this from Stan Goff's (highly recommended) blog on September 1, i.e., exactly one month ago. It got diaried on Daily Kos September 23.

Not only is this old news, it is also scarcely necessary to shock European publics with this since these are not European troops not did the said publics support the occupation let alone the invasion, and it is absolutely unnecessary to actually post the pictures.

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

I don't think it is right to post photos of dead bodies or body parts. Feels disrespectful to me (of the dead). A link would have sufficed, if someone wants to go there. My vote and request is to remove this diary.

Half the population is under the age of 18. Tanzania's future is NOW...join the 50% campaign!

Mixed feelings.  I would not have wanted to go near NTFU, so a link would not have been helpful.  I was curious as to how bad these pics from the US troops really were.  Now I know.  

They are ghastly, but objectively (since the people in them are already dead, and most appear to have died very suddenly and catastrophically, not from lingering torture) not much more awful than any butcher's counter.  This is what modern war is about -- the sudden and violent dismemberment of living bodies, mostly civilian.  Turning living people into heaps of offal.  If we imagine anything else we are deluded.  It may not be such a bad idea to be vividly reminded of this from time to time.  This is the end result when powerful men decide to start wars.

Pics of living people being humiliated, tortured, pissing themselves with fear etc (as taken at Abu Ghraib) would be more distressing to me.  These pics -- but even more the accompanying comments, which make me shudder with horror -- show mostly the brutality and hatefulness of those who submitted them to NTFU.  This is upsetting, but I think needs to be understood.  The world needs to understand this face of America.  Not the Third World, which has always known and understood this face of America, but the rest of the world...  and particularly the naive liberal contingent within American culture, which cannot come to grips with the real nature of its far-right opposition.

Perhaps it would have been sufficient to post a text description of the photo followed by the caption given to it at NTFU, since it is imho the captions which truly need to be understood.  Any photojourno or medic might have taken these pics -- what puts them in hateful, unbearable context is the amateur captioning.

Any further analysis from me will probably be posted over at Stan's place.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

Oh no.

I read about it on dailykos, but didn't look at the photos. Now I did. I shouldn't have looked at them. I won't forget. Because of my son. He had a couple of traumatic experiences while being in Iraq in 2003 from the first day of war for five and a half months.

During a stop of his track of convoys he was ordered to jump out of his vehicle with the order to shoot at anything that would shoot at them. While jumping out the convey to get himself and his rifle in position, he stepped into the dead body of an Iraqi child, which was laying at the roadside, where his vehicle came to a stop.

He told me two years later about it for the first time after he had left the US Air Force. The only thing he said that some organs were "hanging out of her body".

I know he has sought psychiatric help for post traumatic stress symptoms (recurring images of most probably this incidence) one year later in Korea. He mentioned it in three sentences during a shorter visit this year. Not one word too many. What should he have said. You have to see it to understand it.

I was helpless when he told me. Now I am completely and utterly upset and furious. The thought of making these photos and exchanging them for porn by soldiers is beyond my capabilitey to take it and beyond my imagination to understand it. The question is also in how far the access to porn over the internet has pulled civility down into the abyss of bestiality of human behavior. The pure thought about how messed up the minds of some of these soldiers must be and how messed up "web porn entrepreneurs" are, makes me insane.

Actually I remember that I got my first shock about the attitude of US troops when I saw the first images of US Air Force bombers, where soldiers in Afghanistan hugged and padded their bombs they were about to drop and nick-named them after the persons they were supposed to kill. I couldn't believe that their "hate of the enemy" would be of such an intimate and personal compassion. It is scary what propaganda can do to men. I watched the build-up to the war and the war itself on TV and I know what it does to yourself to have a child in the war-zone. I was thinking a lot of my father in WWII and his traumatic experiences. He was even lucky because he didn't see the worst.

To be honest, I can't believe til today what has happened in the US. The propaganda and media bias was so horrible and so 24/7, a constant shower of one patriotic, heroic, self-congratulatory, self-righteous padding on their own back for their fight for freedom and democracy in the world against the evildoers after the other. I remember being in speechless shock watching my environment not "seeing it" (the propaganda value of the news).

It would have been better I hadn't looked at those images. I know they won't change anything. What they do is messing up the reputation of other decent guys in the US Armed Forces. I think I hate Rumsfeld with a passion, next to Rumsfeld I hate Cheney and then the whole remaining gang of this oligarchy as well. They brought this country down and stained it for good.