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Pornographer supports our troops, gets more than he bargained for

A well camouflaged free-speech fight has been brewing in Polk County, FL, for the last few months. Like many an exercise in First Amendment rights, it involves a pornographer. But, this time around, righteous indignation at naked boobies is a means to an ends.
A well camouflaged free-speech fight has been brewing in Polk County, FL, for the last few months. Like many an exercise in First Amendment rights, it involves a pornographer. But, this time around, righteous indignation at naked boobies is a means to an ends.

You can probably guess the stage where this drama unfolds. A 20-something dude, Chris Wilson is his name, is running an amateur porn site, http://www.nowthatsfuckedup.com. I like to imagine that he still lives with his parents and manages the web site on an old computer in the bedroom where he grew up. The site is doing fine, in a misogynistic, patriarchal, sort of way. Guys send in pictures of their naked girlfriends and get rewarded with access to naked pictures of other naked girlfriends. Then they can all jerk off, and try not to get their keyboard all sticky. It’s all arranged to follow the letter of the law. Here are some of the ground rules from the “RULES” section of the site:

1) DO NOT post mean or darogatory [sic] statements about any picture or video of a female in this forum.
2) DO NOT post ANY copyrighted material. If you are unsure, don't post it.
3) DO NOT post any professional porn material
4) DO NOT post material that is watermarked with another website's URL.
5) DO NOT post any material that would be considered illegal in the United States.
6) DO NOT post personal information about someone for the purpose of encouraging harassment.
7) DO NOT repost any image or video found in the SUPPORTER forums on another website.
8) DO NOT post ANY material of people under 18. If you are unsure, don't post it.

And what if you like to look at naked pictures on the computer, but you don’t have any naked pictures of your own to trade? Well, we live in an advanced capitalist society. Money is exchanged for goods and services. PayPal down your 10 bucks and you’re in. And if you can’t pay? Chris isn’t a bad guy. He’s trying to make a living, sure, but when (at least, according to the limited media attention his story has received) soldiers in Iraq couldn’t get $10 billed to their credit cards from overseas, Chris came up with this deal, which he posted to the Open Forum on his site, back in October of 2004:

Post subject: Are You A US Soldier Serving In Iraq Or Afghanistan ?

As a Thank-You for the work you do and the sacrifices you make I would like to offer you guys who want it the ability to get free access as a SUPPORTER member.

Just post a picture of you guys hanging out, or saying hi, or of other cool stuff you see while your there. Something like the kinda pictures you would be sending home to your family and friends. Lets see some tanks, guns, the place your living in, some dead Taliban, just anything. I would like to get a glimpse of what you guys are seeing over there and I think everyone here would also.

In return for your submission I will give you SUPPORTER access in the forums. When I get a few pictures I will setup a special forum called something like "Pictures From The Field" or something like that and post them all there for people to see.

And you can bet that horny 18-24 year-old (and many other demographics) jumped at that chance. As one reply post reads:

Thanks, Chris. My gf would never let me take a pic of her, so this is a fantastic offer. I very much appreciate it. I just got back from overseas - here's some "hang out" pics. I blurred my face out for my personal safety - a lot of bad guys don't like my unit.

Thanks for even considering doing this for us.

There are lots of pictures of tanks, there are GIs standing with smiling “natives” in scenic locals, and there is generally material that makes a hell of a better advertisement than the shitty “Army Of One” material that recently led the Army to fire their ad agency.



But, as you might have guessed, some people thought Chris was serious when he asked for pictures of “some dead Taliban”. Maybe he was serious.



This is not the kind of pictures that make a good advertisement for the military. In fact, it probably turns people off to war all together. And there is quite a collection of such photos available on Chris’s web site. Feel free to scroll it off the screen now. Let’s get back to a good military advert.



Anyways, as the pictures piled up, there was always some concern that they were not from soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan at all. “Looks like Gulf War I” says a commenter about a trophy-style photo of smiling men standing over a charred corpse. “That was the only time we used those uniforms,” responds another commenter. And it is a good thing for the posters, perhaps, that their authenticity cannot be established beyond a reasonable doubt. According to Rolling Stone, “Likely fearing another Abu Ghraib, the Army launched an inquiry into whether the images constituted a felony. But the photos couldn't be verified, and Wilson fell outside military jurisdiction.”


Enter the Local Law Man


The military police might not have found anyone to arrest in their initial investigation, but the Polk County sheriff always gets their man. Umm, some man. Well, I don’t know how to say this in an engagingly literary style: The pigs dragged Chris off to jail at the beginning of last October. Not for portraying the true horrors of war, they say. He was arrested for showing dirty pictures on the web. But wait, I could have sworn that I’ve seen dirty pictures on the web before. Chris’s lawyer is onto this sneaky trick as well. He told the Polk County Ledger, “I'm not surprised [by the arrest], but disappointed. This is clearly retaliation for disseminating graphic news accounts and footage from Iraq and Afghanistan. There are hundreds of thousands of adult Web sites, including in Central Florida and Polk County, and my client is singled out. It smacks of selective enforcement.”


Chris’s arrest certainly is selective enforcement, but follow the rabbit hole a little deeper. It doesn’t take a 9-11 conspiracy theorist to suspect that the failed military investigators might have asked the Polk County Popo for a little helping hand. Especially when Sheriff Grady Judd says things to the Polk County Ledge like, “We have notified the Army's criminal investigation division. We will forward to them any investigative documents they deem appropriate if they open an investigation.”


Rolling Stone, not exactly known as a wing-nut conspiracy rag, reports that an anonymous source, claiming Pentagon access, says this is just what happened: “Once the deputy chief of staff got word, a call was made to the Florida prosecutor and the governor, who of course is related to the president. A day later, [Wilson was] arrested.”


And what happens to a poor pornographer who tries to support our troops in his own pornographic way? Well, after being charged with 300 misdemeanors and 1 felony, and getting his parents to post $30K for bail, he moves to Orlando, the closest big city, so those small town cops can’t hassle him. And what happens, but the judge revokes his bail and makes him spend Christmas in jail. The judge felt that Chris was in violation for not removing the offensive material from the website. Which is absurd, as an appeals court agreed just before New Years. So today Chris is out awaiting trial, nowthatsfuckedup.com is back to where it was before (currently not trading war photos for free memberships, but still receiving plenty), and the Defense Intelligence Agency has any emails that were on Chris’s hard drive which might let them know which horny soldiers they can discipline.


Our job is to spread the word about the contortions that the government is willing to perform to spy on Americans, to realize how something as distant from war as pornography can be an agent for change, and, of course, to try not to get our keyboards all sticky.


FOR MORE INFO:

http://www.freechris.org/

http://www.eff.org/

http://www.nowthatsfuckedup.com/

Marine Corps Times

Rolling Stone


 
 

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