Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Be careful what you find on the net

There is a reason why i sometimes don't post on an issue right away. First is because I don't allways have time. Second, I may have already commented on something similar so I don't see the point. I'm not THAT vain. Thirdly, there is a lot of mis-information out there and sometimes I'm waiting to see if I can get verification on a particular piece of information before posting on it. So it comes as little surprise to me to find out that the photo's of a purported gang rape of an Iraqi woman were in fact fake. over at the Bush Wars blog there is a post with a good breakdown of why those images are fake:

quote:
a) First, and most resoundingly, the soldiers are wearing dark green jungle camouflage gear, which--understandably, if you think about it--was not issued in Iraq.


b) The faces are camo-painted, too. Have you seen any other Abu Ghraib torture image in which a soldier tries to conceal his/her face? Isn't the lesson of the prison photos we've seen so far that anything went--that there was no sense of shame or circumspection about anything they were doing?


c) A forensic point: Look at the body posture of the woman in the first photo. She's standing under her own power. I have read a few accounts of rape over the years, in police files and in books, and I've heard of very few in which the woman did not strain physically--reflexively--to recoil from her attacker. This woman stands almost languidly. It's porn, and coarse, standard-issue porn at that.


d) A compositional point: Look at the third shot, of the "rapist"'s penis entering the "victim"'s mouth. In the rough and tumble of a real, forced sexual encounter that involved 2-3 guys crowded around a victim, this would be a very difficult photo to take. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely. On the other hand, this very shot is an obligatory part of any porn production, still or video.    

I agree wholeheartedly with the analysis here. As much as I am against the war, I will not stoop to the use of fake porn to suport my case. Indeed there may have in fact been rapes of some sort done in Iraq, I don't know of a war that did not have some type of rape involved but These picturesaren't them.

What is worse is that we have the beheading of a "civiilian" by a group claiming to be a part of Al-Qaida. This group indicated that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners as seen on the media and the web was at least partially responsible for their decision to brutally behead this man. And let's be clear, regeardless of the bloodyness and inhumanity of this act, it is a direct result of the Illegal war in Iraq. Unfortunately Al-Qaida did not do their cause any good by broadcasting the beheading as most Americans, who still think themselves immune from the repercussions of the government, will believe that the right response is to get back at the "barbarians." Very poor PR on AQ's part.

Links:
http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/sperry/2004/05/10#a729