[Four Civilian Contractors Killed, Burned & Mutilated in Fallujah]

Story and Graphic Video posted by the Washington Post [March 31, 2004]
"Four civilian contractors were killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah Wednesday in an attack that left their vehicles in flames, and afterwards at least three of the burned bodies were mutilated, dragged through the streets and suspended from a bridge while a group of Iraqis danced in the streets."
[9 Killed in Separate Attacks in Iraq"]
[Video Report—RealPlayer]

[Deeply disturbing images of the event can be found at The Memory Hole.com. Photo: Karim Sahib-AFP]

Typically we see atrocity photos reproduced as small, fuzzy pictures in newsprint or on the computer screen. Below is a link to a large-scale image that has been used in debates about which images to publish. Does the vivid sense of "being there" produced by scale, detail and the like change the meaning of a picture?
[Altert: This is perhaps the most disturbing image on this site—a charred body of an American contractor hanging from a rope on a bridge while the crowd below celebrates.]

Comments

[MSgt W.]

One should also bear in mind that these "contractors," as the media likes to refer to them, were in all likelihood U.S. military veterans being paid through U.S. funds for doing jobs so dangerous that you couldn't order soldiers to do them. Most were ex-paratroopers or infantrymen who had laid their life on the line many times while in uniform, and took these dangerous jobs for two reasons: because they believed in their mission to help the Iraqi people, and were trying to earn enough money to go to college when they returned, or send their children back here to college.

The media's casual treatment of them as just nameless nobodies does a disservice to young American men who were heroes before they took these thankless jobs, and still are in my book.

When faced with atrocities like this, the only proper response is wholesale slaughter of the communities that perpetrate them, just as every army in every war has done.

Any lesser response and you might as well turn Europe and the U.S. over to these animals right now and learn which way to face Mecca.

[John Fuller]

Kill all the Arabs and then maybe there will be world peace.

[omri]

fuck all the arabs

[joe]

these people are fucking animals, nuke them

[not impressed]

you call this disturbing?

[DebbieM]

Makes Aby Ghraib look like a college fraternity initiation.

[Henni]

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