Photos from hell

A reader forwards this article from The Australian:

THE US Defence Department has been asked to investigate a website being used by American soldiers to post grisly pictures of Iraqi war dead.

The site, which has been operating for more than a year, describes itself as “an online archive of soldiers’ photos”.

Dozens of pictures of decapitated and limbless bodies are featured on the site with tasteless captions, purportedly sent in by soldiers.

Captions include “plastic surgery needed”, “road kill” and “I said dead”.

This comes via what appears to be an italian links-roundup site called uruknet.info, which provides the URL of the photo site in question. I’m unfamiliar with the former, but the latter appears to be legit. There are currently 64 pages of galleries, most of which contain inoffensive pictures of mundane daily life — Iraqi street scenes, soldiers goofing around, things like that. But there are a few pages of extraordinarily disturbing images. I’m not sure the summary above really prepares you for it. I’m going to link to the main page; the photos mentioned above seem to start around page 50. But seriously, I’m warning you, this stuff will haunt your nightmares for weeks. If you have a weak stomach, don’t follow the link.

(Here).

…this was mentioned in a Daily Kos diary a few days ago. A commenter there found further, rather enigmatic, information about the site in question. (Same entry on his blog here.)