Elsewhere, Lieutenant-Commander Joe Carpenter told aljazeera.net the following:

"These are disgusting images and it is disgraceful that they are on the web. We do not know if they are genuine or who posted them," Carpenter said.

Time for a bit of critical thinking, since the Pentagon appears to be handing us a set of very weak reasons for not following up. First, it’s widely recognized that the Abu Ghraib photos had a significant negative impact in the Mideast and horrified Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide. Geneva conventions and felonies aside, these photos destroyed any moral high ground the US may have had prior to the scandal. One would expect that the Pentagon and USG would institute policies to prevent future public relations disasters, such as restricting the use of digital cameras in combat zones, analyzing server logs from base internet cafes, contracted satellite internet providers and Iraq’s main (possibly only) commercial ISP, Uruklink, as well as keeping a record of army personnel internet usage (either through logins or on paper). One would further expect that if more ghoulish digital images somehow got out of Iraq, the Pentagon would have an electronic paper trail A MILE WIDE because of how much control they have over internet traffic in the country.

But let’s pretend that the Pentagon didn’t institute any of these policies post-Abu Ghraib and instead allowed soldiers to continue snapping photos of dismembered corpses and nude women with their legs blown off at the knee. Let’s further assume that they could not subpoena the ISP in Belgium (or the Netherlands or wherever the fuck the site is hosted). It is still possible to collect IP addresses from websites where users can modify pages on the server (e.g. a message board). Even a halfwit webmaster or CIA Agent knows that you can track users on a message board by posting an entry and including an image file that is stored on a server under your control. This image file can be an invisible 1x1 GIF or a “sig file” that users often append to their messages as an identifier. Once you’ve posted an entry with an image from your server, every single person that loads that page will download that image and leave their IP address in your server’s log. Admittedly, it’s hard to make distinctions between posters and lurkers without doing a bit of added work, but the Pentagon wouldn’t need to do any of it because they could easily lock down base internet cafes and start searching PCs for usernames and site records in their browser caches. It doesn’t matter if the server-side is completely inaccessible, the Pentagon has nearly full control over client-side usage records, from the soldier who signs in at the internet café for his once-a-week email check, to the local browser cache, to the ISP server logs, to the invisible surveillance of that website’s server.

And this is assuming that the soldiers grinning next to the charred remains of an Iraqi man could not be identified immediately by their photos and uniform markings cross-referenced against IED event records and troop deployment in the area. We already know that the CIA studies every frame of every bin Laden tape to determine where a given video is shot, yet the Pentagon can’t use its own information to assess whether or not these photos are taken in Iraqi cities?

Even if submitting photos to this site could not be classified as a felony, wouldn’t it make a bit of sense from a communications perspective to at least make a show of investigating the incident and identifying the perpetrators? There’s got to be a Lynndie England out there somewhere that the Pentagon can pin this on.

[This issue was discussed previously on August 21 and September 28]