U.S. soldiers engaged in gore-for-porn swap

September 24, 2005

An amateur pornographic website, NowThatsFuckedup.com, is giving free access to its content to American soldiers currently who post pictures of corpses from Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers can also send in pictures of themselves, their buddies, or their living quarters. The post on the website states "the kinda pictures you would be sending home to your family and friends". Chris Wilson of Florida, the website administrator, says he started offering free memberships to soldiers in exchange for photographs from overseas after finding that many soldiers wanted to join the site, but could not due to issues with recognizing foreign addresses associated with credit cards held by overseas enlisted men.

"They wanted to join the site, the amateur wife and girlfriend site," Wilson said. "But they couldn't, because the addresses associated with their credit cards were Quackistan or something, they were in such a high-risk country, that the credit card companies wouldn't approve the purchase."

The soldiers caption the images themselves, such as one image of a woman's whose leg had been amputated, with the caption "Nice puss -– bad foot." in reference to her vagina also visible in the photo.

Response to the trading has been met with a certain level of ambivalence from military higher-ups; "There are policies in place that, on the one hand, safeguard sensitive and classified information, and on the other hand protects the First Amendment rights of servicemembers," said Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Conway. "In plain English, if you're on the job working for the Department of Defense, you shouldn't be freelancing. You should be doing your duty." However, Army Chief of Staff Peter Shoomaker warned that soldiers compromise "operational security" when they post photographs from Iraq on the internet in a memorandum issued in August.