eIraq in the Press
Leslie Walker, Washington Post, May 9, 2004
Photos of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated by U.S. soldiers popped up all over the Web last week as the Internet once again proved to be the place millions of people turned to get the scoop on a big story.
While American newspapers tended to show restraint in how many and which prisoner photos they printed, lots of Web sites posted as many images as they could find in greater graphic detail. The Web also was where many folks went to read the full transcript of the U.S. Army's official report on conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
Among the sites publishing numerous photos of naked Iraqi prisoners in humiliating poses was the Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org) and GlobalSecurity.org (www.globalsecurity.org), a global think tank. GlobalSecurity also posted the full text of the Army report, along with satellite imagery of the Baghdad prison and other documents of the Iraq prison scandal.
Web logs ("blogs" for short) also posted exhaustive commentary about the naked prisoner photos that were first publicized on CBS's "60 Minutes II" two weeks ago, as well as about other disturbing photos that hit the Web last week. Blogger Christopher Allbritton (www.back-to-iraq.com) was among the online pundits who suggested a set of pictures purportedly showing men in U.S. Army uniforms raping an Iraqi woman had been faked.
Those images nonetheless were widely written about at many Iraq-focused and Arabic Web sites such as IslamOnline (www.islamonline.net). The English-language Web site of Al Jazeera TV (english.aljazeera.net) published some of the more subdued coverage. Prominent on its home page Friday, for example, were a photo gallery showing Muslims protesting outside the prison and a survey of site visitors in which 62 percent of the 72,840 respondents said they suspected abuse of Iraqi prisoners was routine. Among the many activist sites covering the escalating prisoner scandal were ElectronicIraq (electroniciraq.net) and AlterNet.org (www.alternet.org).
Microsoft Corp. announced last week it has been quietly testing a paid e-mail service that lets certain commercial marketers bypass anti-spam filters for the company's Hotmail and MSN services if they pay bond fees upfront. This "Bonded Sender" program, offered by e-mail services provider IronPort Systems, requires participating companies to post bonds and undergo an investigation to verify that their commercial messages aren't spam and are welcomed by recipients. The messages are then allowed to bypass Hotmail and MSN's filters. Microsoft said it tested the program for five months before publicly signing off on it last week.
www.bondedsender.com/
Among the zanier sites to hit the Web lately: Pac-Manhattan, devoted to a real-life version of the classic Pac-Man video game that was to be played out this weekend on the streets of Manhattan by New York University students. The idea was for people clad in ghost-like outfits to be directed around Greenwich Village via "generals" (issuing orders via cell phone) in an attempt to catch one player attired as the game's yellow, dot-munching hero.
The results were to be posted on the Web site this weekend.
Recent articles on Electronic Iraq:
Page last updated: May 9, 2004 - 8:50:00 AM
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