The Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser reports on a web site that offers soldiers in Iraq access to pornography in exchange for grisly images from the war zone.

I wrote a post about this back on 21 August, but decided not to publish it because I couldn’t substantiate it.

At the time, La Repubblica had reported that an Italian blogger had discovered a web site inviting American troops in Iraq and Afganistan to send pictures of mutilated and bloated corpses in lieu of payment for access to hard-core pornography (translation).

The Italian reports did not name the site, and my e-mailed requests for more information were ignored, so I dropped it.

Oops.

Apparently blogger and journalist Helena Cobban of Just World News did a better job of following up the story. One of her readers translated the Italian post and another identified the site.

Although it’s not certain that the horrific images available on the site were really taken by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, the US military are now looking into the website, according to Glaser:

I couldn’t verify whether these gory photos were taken recently in Iraq by soldiers. But the U.S. military is currently looking into the site and trying to authenticate the photos — and take appropriate action if soldiers are involved. “We do have people who are specifically looking at that website, and I will talk to my colleagues and my bosses here and get back to you,” said Staff Sgt. Don Dees, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command (CentCom) in Baghdad.

Update: more information is now available.