'War porn often shows the death of Iraqi and Afghan people. But do we want to see it? Getty 
 
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 cholars have identified America's latest internet addiction — "war porn." That's what soldiers and academics call combat-footage videos of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan showing graphic violence and death. Such clips were once an underground phenomenon, but academics say the leaked photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison fueled public appetite. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are turning to the web for the occasional war-porn fix. Is it wrong to watch these videos, or do they serve a purpose? (Watch an example of '"war porn") 
 
 We have a duty to watch these videos: Apparently, many people enjoy watching these images of carnage, "unfathomable humiliation, and abuse" as "pornography," says David Swanson at AlterNet. But those of us who don't — most of us, let's hope — should watch anyway, to understand "the true story of what this war is about and what all wars are about." 
 
 "Iraq's war porn" 
 
 
 
 Come off it — this isn't about education: Americans who pore over these videos on iPhones or home computers "don't generally do it for the information; they do it because it's entertainment," says Wired for War author P.W. Singer, quoted in Newsweek. "That's the porn part of it. The soldiers use the word because they know there's something wrong with it." 
 
 War porn is "snuff": War porn truly went mainstream in April when the WikiLeaks video depicting U.S. helicopter troops killing Iraqis went viral, says Susannah Breslin in True/Slant. That footage provoked plenty of "outrage," but commentators' "haughty indignation" only veiled the real problem: Our apparent "collective interest in watching what amounts to a snuff film." 
 
 "An appetite for snuff" 
 
 This problem is bigger than a few websites: No one loves this kind of footage, says the military blog Mudville Gazette, more than the mainstream "news" business, which gets a ratings boost whenever they employ it, too. That has to stop: War porn not only "inspires others to go out and create more war porn," it serves as propaganda for the people we're fighting. 
 
 "War porn (Part 2)" 
 
 
 
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 SEE MORE OF THE WEEK'S COVERAGE: 
 
 • Taliban captures: A turning point? 
 
 • Banning the Taliban from 8th grade 
 
 • A Gitmo in Afghanistan? 

 The video isn't quite clear. Three Iraqis stand in a field, unaware that a U.S. Apache helicopter is eyeing them from afar. Two of the men are handling what looks like a weapon, but there's no time to check. The Apache pilot gets an order: hit them. The 30mm bullets go clack-clack-clack. "Got [one]," says the pilot. "Good, hit the other one," says a voice on the radio. Clack-clack-clack. No. 2 goes down. The third man tries to hide behind a truck as bullets slam into the vehicle. After a few seconds a figure crawls into the open. "He's wounded," says the pilot. "Hit him [again]," says the voice. Clack-clack-clack. When the dust settles, the third man is dead. 
 
 Some 7,000 miles away, Nate J. sat in front of his computer, mesmerized by these images. It was 2006, and Nate, who owns a decal company, got his first taste of what soldiers and scholars call war porn. Although he's never been a soldier, Nate loves all things military. But this was better than anything he'd seen on the Military Channel. "I was just like 'Wow,' " he recalls. " 'I have to find more.' " 
 
 That was easy enough. Although the recently released footage of U.S. Apache helicopters gunning down two Reuters journalists appalled many, similar war videos are plentiful on Web sites like GotWarPorn.com and YouTube. Nate, who asked NEWSWEEK not to use his last name because he's received death threats, has uploaded more than 800 to his own channel on LiveLeak.com and other sites. 
 
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 When the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts broke out, the military officially released some of the raw combat footage now on the Internet to build a stronger bond between the home front and the battlefield. Soldiers also took their own videos or pulled them from cameras on military systems like Predator drones. But almost as soon as these images became available, civilians and soldiers alike started splicing the clips together, often adding soundtracks and spreading them across the Web. Today there are thousands of war-porn videos, and they've been viewed millions of times. Like sexual porn, they come in degrees of violence, ranging from soft-core montages of rocket-propelled grenades blowing up buildings to snuff-film-like shots of an insurgent taking a bullet to the head. And even as the U.S. begins its march toward the end of two long conflicts, these compilations continue to attract viewers. With a videogame sensibility, they fetishize—and warp—the most brutal parts of these high-tech wars. 
 
 Historically, combat images have been captured and disseminated by a handful of professionals, such as the photographers Mathew Brady during the Civil War and Robert Capa during World War II. Now the immediacy of the Internet, coupled with the spread of cheap video technology, allows anyone to document war as they see it. "There's a new order," says James Der Derian, a professor at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. "Unlike the photograph, the moving image creates a feeling that it more accurately depicts what it is representing, whether it does or not." 
 
 Academics date the origins of war porn to the scandalous images from Abu Ghraib Prison, in which Iraqi prisoners were stacked on top of each other to form naked pyramids, forced to simulate sexual acts, or otherwise abused. The snapshot of Pvt. Lynndie England holding a naked prisoner by a leash became an iconic representation of the war. The acts were born of an aimless power and a pornographic sensibility, argued the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard, who defined this form of "war porn" in a 2004 essay in the French newspaper Libération. 
 
 After Abu Ghraib the floodgates burst, with U.S. soldiers even trading war porn for real porn. Chris Wilson was running a user-generated porn site when he started getting requests for sexual material from soldiers in both war zones. But when paying via credit card proved problematic, Wilson let them swap war footage for access to the site's sexual content. The first images he received were fairly tame. But as the Iraq War took a turn for the worse in late 2004, the photos and footage got bloodier and included shots of headless corpses and body parts like intestines, brains, and what appeared to be limbs. By 2005, Wilson had an estimated 30,000 U.S. military personnel as members. "It was a view of war that had never been seen," he says.
– Combat footage from Iraq and Afghanistan has generated a new form of online porn, Newsweek reports, with tens of thousands of spliced-together clips—soundtracks added—drawing millions of views on YouTube, and enthusiasts creating sites with names like GotWarPorn.com. "Like sexual porn," writes Jessica Ramirez, "they come in degrees of violence, ranging from soft-core montages of rocket-propelled grenades blowing up buildings to snuff-film-like shots of an insurgent taking a bullet to the head." It all started with Abu Ghraib, when images with obvious "pornographic sensibility" went viral on the web. Soldiers began swapping war footage for sexual porn, the founder of a user-generated porn site reports, with the content getting more and more extreme—filled with headless corpses and body parts. The Week rounds up opinion on whether public access to graphic footage serves a purpose—to make war more real—or inspires violence. One military blog notes that it works well as propaganda for our enemies.