What happens when the war on porn meets the war in Iraq?

Chris Wilson, a webmaster in Florida, was arrested last week and charged with 300 counts of indecency for posting pictures of amateur porn on his Web site. The million dollar question is, why did local law enforcement crack down on him specifically, when the content of his site wasn't any worse than thousands of others like it?

The charges against Wilson come on the heels of media coverage and a subsequent Pentagon investigation of his site. The controversy centers on the site's policy of giving free access to soldiers who post pictures from Iraq and Afghanistan that aren't being published by major news outlets.

The pictures run the gamut of the wartime experience. Some depict cheerful grunts sitting on tanks, clowning and having beers together, or posing with their guns. Others are more racy, portraying sexual pranks and antics, female soldiers in various degrees of undress and soldiers having sex.

But the most controversial ones are brutally graphic snapshots of wartime violence, some far more grotesque than anything shown in the media: land mine victims, car bomb casualties and bullet-ridden corpses of insurgents. One picture, titled "Name this body part," depicts flesh that is mangled beyond recognition.

These images produce immediate, visceral responses. That's why they are so threatening to the authorities. They destroy the moment of rational detachment that arises when we ask, "Is this war (and implicitly, war in general) justified?"

That moment becomes fixed when we tune into our commander-in-chief as he calls for us to "stay the course," "defend freedom" and "spread democracy." Rationality, even if flawed, trumps our innate humanity. Even those who don't buy into this rhetoric still succumb to it in some sense; they're left pondering practical things like misspent tax dollars or the "number" of casualties.

But show someone a high resolution, close-up picture of a broken corpse, where no limb is where you expect it to be. Does it matter if there are two bodies or one? If they are insurgents or soldiers? If it is war or murder? We feel an identical response no matter what the context.

Suddenly, the connection between rhetoric and reality re-emerges. "Staying the course" takes on a tangible image, and it is not flattering.

Reason loses its force of persuasion in the sudden manifestation of an instinctual response. These pictures help us realize that violence, no matter how it is rationalized, is fundamentally senseless.

Of course, this realization is an inconvenience to those who perpetrate and perpetuate violence.

The controversy over the flag-draped coffins was the first indication of the Pentagon's schizophrenic crisis, waging a war with no casualties. And yet this paradox is crucial to their success and reflects a contradiction in society at large: We covet the result but refuse the cost.

In the name of operational security, army and state officials have systematically attempted to shut down our access to the realities of this war.

"Remind all personnel that the enemy will exploit sensitive photos... as propaganda and terrorist training tools," read an internally-circulated military document posted on Wilson's site.

But barring these photos from public discourse represents a form of propaganda-by-omission, perpetrated by our leaders onto us.

What Wilson is doing is both excessive and necessary. As our society grows more desensitized to violence, the images that can jolt us out of our complacent and superficial posturing must become correspondingly more severe.

Don't support our troops­­; support our pornographers instead.

Tran is an anthropology junior.

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