THIS MODERN WORLD

There was a lot of chatter on the right wing blogs in the days following Katrina, about how the Louisiana National Guard wasn’t actually stretched too thin at all and how the troops and equipment in Iraq wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be questionable at best:

In interviews, Guard commanders and state and local officials in Louisiana said the Guard performed well under the circumstances. But they say it was crippled in the early days by a severe shortage of troops that they blame in part on the deployment to Iraq of 3,200 Louisiana guardsmen. While the Pentagon disputes that Iraq was a factor, those on the ground say the war has clearly strained a force intended to be the nation’s bulwark against natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

Reinforcements from other states’ National Guard units, slowed by the logistics and red tape involved in summoning troops from civilian jobs and moving them thousands of miles, did not arrive in large numbers until the fourth day after the hurricane passed. The coordinating task was so daunting that Louisiana officials turned to the Pentagon to help organize the appeal for help.

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The senior commander of National Guard troops at the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, said the Iraq deployment did not slow the hurricane response. He said that Louisiana Guard troops were “in the water and on the streets throughout the affected areas rescuing people within four hours of Katrina’s passing,” and that out-of-state troops arrived as soon as they could be mustered.

But state Guard commanders disagreed. “We would have used them if we’d had them,” said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, a spokesman for the Louisiana Guard. “We’ve always known in the event of a catastrophic storm in New Orleans that we’d use our resources up pretty fast.”

There is little disagreement that Guard equipment sent to Iraq, particularly hundreds of high-water trucks, fuel trucks and satellite phones, could have helped speed the response. The chairmen of the Senate National Guard caucus, Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in a Sept. 13 letter to Mr. Bush that the Guard nationally had only 34 percent of its equipment available for use in the United States.

…it makes perfect sense that such a disproportionate percentage of the top bloggers on the right/conservatarian axis are trained as lawyers — i.e., trained to make the facts fit the argument, rather than the inverse, and when the facts fail to cooperate, to raise doubt where none should plausibly exist.

Watching right wing bloggers (including the “I’m-not-really-a-right-winger-I-only-play-one-on-the-internet” crowd) attempting to impugn the motives of anti-war protesters, undercount their numbers and discredit them generally is a bit like watching some pathetic reunion show of has-been child actors trying to reclaim a shred of their lost glory, if only for a moment. Sometimes you really just have to admit that the time for those catchphrases everyone once seemed to find so endearing has long since passed.

If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for letting him post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.

At Wilson’s Web site, you can see an Arab man’s face sliced off and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man’s head, his face crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver’s seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.

The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by the soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The soldier who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, “What every Iraqi should look like.” The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption “bad day for this dude.” One soldier posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection “DIE HAJI DIE.” The soldiers take pride, even joy, in displaying the dead.

This could become a public-relations catastrophe. The Bush administration claims such sympathy for American war dead that officials have banned the media from photographing flag-draped coffins being carried off cargo planes. Government officials and American media officials have repeatedly denounced the al-Jazeera network for airing grisly footage of Iraqi war casualties and American prisoners of war. The legal fight over whether to release the remaining photographs of atrocities at Abu Ghraib has dragged on for months, with no less a figure than Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers arguing that the release of such images will inflame the Muslim world and drive untold numbers to join al-Qaeda. But none of these can compare to the prospect of American troops casually bartering pictures of suffering and death for porn.

Story. The Nation has more. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of this sort of thing — I posted a link to a very similar story last January.

There’s the image of Our Troops, every last one of whom are Noble and Good. And there’s the reality of our troops, many of whom are kids who didn’t know much about life outside of Bumfuck, Wherever, before they were suddenly thrown into a world in which the normal rules of moral conduct are not remotely applicable. Americans would prefer to think about the former, but every now and again, we get our faces rubbed in the latter.

Billmon has further thoughts.

Minneapolis City Pages has posted more of them here.

The 101st Fighting Keyboarders newest battle: pounding pork. (Not to worry — the link is work safe. As long as you work somewhere where they don’t care if you’re screwing around reading cartoons instead of working.)

Incidentally, apologies for light posting. Blame it on a confluence of life, deadlines, business…and a need to occasionally get away from the damn computer.