If YouTube proved the natural home of anyone who happened to find himself in simultaneous possession of a camera phone, some Mentos, and a can of Diet Coke, then the not-yet-two-year-old LiveLeak.com is digging a foxhole for itself. It’s become a meeting place for those who blow stuff up and those who like to watch it explode.
Troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most valued content providers on LiveLeak. The site’s unsqueamish emphasis on raw video – it does have some rules, not that you would notice – makes it a destination spot for short war films that are awesome or disgusting, depending on your viewpoint.
See The Videos From Liveleak.com
Tonight on HBO, David Simon’s followup to “The Wire,” “Generation Kill,” marks a big step forward for Hollywood: the seven-part miniseries about a Marine recon battalion depicts civilian casualties and FUBAR’d missions, but it also glories in the spirit of the grunt. It’s the first Hollywood examination of the Iraq war that doesn’t seem like it was produced by the propaganda ministry of Jihad, Inc. Instead of fragging the troops, it makes an effort to show what it’s like to be a trained killing machine going after bad guys.
The best stuff on LiveLeak.com – and there is much to light up the G.I. Joe lobe of the male brain – is like the raw ingredients of “Generation Kill.” Click on the channels marked “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” and you’re embedded. There are firefights, airstrikes, mortar attacks and a night-vision-goggle-eyed view of the lurking insurgency.
The enemy is active on LiveLeak also: terrorists are posting video of their IED and sniper attacks (many of which look fake or are recorded with such poor quality that it’s not clear what’s happening.) A video called, with little taste and less accuracy, “Holocaust of the Americans,” appears to show the Talibaddies firing a recoil-less rifle at . . . nothing in particular, though some infidel shrubbery and desert rocks may well have paid a heavy price.
The military isn’t doing much to interfere with troops posting their videos on the Web. That battle is over, and the Web won it. But that doesn’t mean the military loses.
The more truth gets out, the better for America, and by taking no political stance, LiveLeak is doing a much better job presenting the facts than, say, the latest foamy-mouthed drivel about corporate masters of war from the formerly popular actor John Cusack. (Combined box office for his two latest war movies: $500,000.)
Commanders in the field are given wide discretion for making sure their units don’t compromise operational security, but so far that hasn’t been much of an issue. A bigger potential problem is that a posted video could show troops at their worst. What if a footage pops up showing somebody intentionally killing an unarmed civilian? Consider the uproar when a Marine was seen hurling a puppy in a clip that resulted in disciplinary action. We haven’t yet seen the full legal or diplomatic impacts of a LiveLeaked war.
LiveLeak made its bones with the grisly images of Saddam Hussein’s execution in 2006, then in 2007 posted video of Jessica Lynch’s rescue, but the clips don’t generate much profit. The site’s only ads are of the “Meet Local Girls” type and are sold for low rates on a click-through basis, rather than the more lucrative display ads.
The visceral content is what makes the site, and it’s exactly what will keep major advertisers away, but LiveLeak cofounder Hayden Hewitt says he isn’t interested in turning down the heat level.
The war scenes are “just something that’s always been a major component of the site,” says Hewitt, 35, who operates out of Manchester, England. “People upload, people want to see it, people want to discuss it. It’s the predominant thing on people’s minds at the moment.”
Hewitt has a censorship net, but it doesn’t catch much. (His moderators are unpaid volunteers.) “We won’t shy away from graphic footage as long as there’s a reason for having it,” he says. But: “We won’t show extreme glorification of violence – footage of mangled bodies set to Slayer and people laughing about it.”
Actually, the site this week was hosting a clip of gunship attacks set to the metal song by Dope called “Die Mothe – – – – er Die.” The video wasn’t gruesome, though, since the enemy was well off in the distance and disappearing tidily under puffs of white smoke. One of the troops is overheard saying, “This was great. I need a cigarette. This was like sex.” And a few more shocked grad students get some fuel for their eroticization-of-violence papers.
Hewitt is underplaying the vitriol on the site. He says, “If you spell black with an n and two g’s you’re going to be warned,” but I found the n-word on the site in a comment last week. Even if Hewitt used better filtering software, epithets can be misspelled as many ways as Viagra.
“We do want to encourage people’s ability to view what it is they might want to view without necessarily having the editorial hand-holding that they may get from the mainstream media,” Hewitt says. “There are some things we do have to draw a line at, for legal reasons and certain other reasons. But it would be very hard for us to say we do have journalistic integrity when we do have a video of guy with fireworks stuffed up his backside.”
LiveLeak is defiantly disorganized, proud of throwing everything out there and letting you wallow in it. Even if you know the title of a video, it may not be the first thing to come up in a search.
“We do have feature channels but we’re not really keen on top ten lists,” Hewitt says. “We like people to dive in and swim around the site rather than hand them everything on a plate.”
It’s too often Dumpster diving, though. The titles of the videos are misleading. Some of the Jihadists try to attract Western eyeballs to their videos by giving them misleading titles. A shaky grasp of English spelling and grammar seems to unite both sides, and coalition forces also give their videos sexed-up titles. “Suicide insurgent taken out by US soldiers in Abu Graib [sic], Iraq” simply shows troops looking at the remains of a shot-up BMW that looks like it could have been there since Saddam’s reign.
Hewitt, who when asked to cite his favorite clips on LiveLeak, offers, “A guy doing armpit farting music from Afghanistan,” thinks the terrorists have done a superior job of putting out their message. “They’re putting their point of view across, regardless of how they twist things,” he says. “I mean how often, to be honest, do we get video of the coalition doing good things? They are building schools. I know good news doesn’t sell as well as bad news but there’s still ways of disseminating that.”
Well, okay. The clip “Water Facility,” for instance, shows a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Afghanistan that is so nondangerous the French are actually involved. (It has logged 824 views, most of them presumably in the 16th Arrondissement.)
Not that a clip has to be boring to be good news for our side. The terrorist propaganda films about roadside IEDs and the like are so revolting that they are hardly likely to endear the West to their side. Hewitt points out that terror groups have backed away from posting gruesome beheading videos because they turned people against their cause.
Hewitt describes war as “this horrific offensive thing” and thinks it’s a public service to get the whole mess out there so people can make more informed decisions. He’s right, in a way: though LiveLeak’s images will horrify liberals shocked at how deadly our weapons are, the primary message fired-up young men are likely to take from them is that fighting for your country is a lot cooler than the mainstream media make it out to be.