A friend of mine sent me a link to one of those feel-good sites that warms your heart.

Photos That Will Never Make the News.

I counter with these. They don’t make you feel so good.

Under Mars 1
Under Mars 2
Under Mars 3
Under Mars 4

It’s not so much the photos that bother me. While they are disturbing, we’re pretty naively deceiving ourselves if we think people aren’t dying in gruesome ways every day over there. What really disturbs me are the captions. Tuckova is right. “Does this death make me look fat?’ Disgusting.

Update (2/21/2005 11:57 am): I finally tracked down some information about the website they’re posted on. The Australian first reported that the website is “being used by American soldiers to post grisly pictures of Iraqi war dead,” but that’s apparently not true. Glider says:

At present UnderMars is pushing out 26mb/s of data and climbing fast. To put that into context, that's approaching three hundred gig a day or nine terabytes a month of transfer. Expensive! I've cut the resolution and quality of the images slightly so they're about a third the size, which I hope will halve my bandwidth. If anyone has 100+ mb/s of bandwidth they are able to donate for this (about $5k a month), please contact me. I will keep the site online as long as possible but if the bandwidth continues to climb I will not be able to afford to.

It's rather disturbing reading what people have to say about me and the site. It's interesting that I've rarely gotten flack about posting pictures like this if they're accompanied by an over-the-top paranoid antiwar rant (nor does antiwar.com, which posts such images centrally on a daily basis), but if I post them sans-politics, to show them as is without politicizing, suddenly I'm a bad guy... People need to see these scenes as they are seen at the time, not as tools of one set of pundits or another.

One of the biggest problems with war is that it's hidden behind a thick political and media filter where each "side" twists it to broadcast their own message. However, war is not fought by the media or the politicians or even the corporate CEOs that profit from it — war is fought by the commoner, and it is the commoner that suffers through war. It is the common man's story that must be told if the uninitiated populace is ever to see war for what it is.

You can read more at his site, here.

Oh, and as for the captions,

I have presented the captions as they were given to me and have not censored or edited them. I do not know what motivated their titling, nor have I asked, nor do I intend to. My goal is only to record them. These are extreme experiences and I make no claim to understand the feelings involved.

the photos themselves are bad, but not unreal. the captions are horrific. i wonder why it stops, though, if the link isn't dead.