In the version of the Web site that was up last week, the first image on the site showed a malnourished Iraqi baby, wide-eyed and screaming in pain, under the sarcastic headline, "another grateful Iraqi civilian."
Many of the photographs are far more graphic than are usually carried in newspapers, showing headless bodies, bloodied troops, wounded women, and bandaged babies missing limbs. One added recently shows a U.S. soldier with part of his face blown away by a bomb.
The blog also amounts to a critique of the U.S. news media. Another section of the site, under the headline, "Also not in today's news," shows a photograph of a Marine propped against a concrete wall, grimacing as he is treated for a shrapnel wound in his upper right leg.
The blogger, who in an e-mail responding to a query identified himself as "Hugh Upton," but when questioned said that was a pseudonym, explained on his Web site that one of its purposes is to show the ugliness of what he believes is really going on in Iraq. "The world sees these images and we do not," he states. "That scares the hell out of me, as it should you."
He insists that he is sympathetic to U.S. troops. "I am angry with our citizens, not our military," he writes. "If this war is unjust they are among the victims of it."
In an interview, the blogger said he started the site after the presidential election, working on it in his spare time, because he believes "there is an emotional truth to the war, and it's not being shown" in the U.S. media. Since starting it, he said, the site has had more than 800,000 hits. He also has received more than 2,000 e-mail messages, about 10 percent of them hate mail, he said.
He declined to disclose his real name or many personal details. He said he is a 26-year-old writer in New York who works for an Internet company. He originally is from the District, he said.
After being interviewed, he added more information to his Web site, insisting: "This is not an antiwar site. You can visit this site and appreciate what it's doing and still support the war. . . . We need the whole story." He added that those wanting to see "the other side" of the story should "Go to Fox News, CNN, USA Today, WSJ, the Washington Post, or any of the other outlets that has these pictures and doesn't show them."
Retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who has advised the Pentagon on how to better fight in Iraq, said he thinks the military PowerPoint presentation does "a good job of trying to get the real story out."
But several other military experts said they found the blog more compelling.
"As far as the blog site, this is information operations at its finest," said one Marine officer who has served in Iraq. "IO is about influence, and this piece tries to influence people by depicting the human cost of war."
An Army soldier who fought in the Sunni Triangle last year and maintains a blog himself agreed. "The winner has to be the blog," he said. "There's something all too visceral about seeing the pictures of the dead and wounded, on both sides, which overwhelms static displays of weaponry" in the military presentation.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraqi affairs who has a blog called "Informed Comment" (www.juancole.com), came to a similar but broader conclusion: "What the two presentations show us is that the U.S. military is full of brave and skilled warriors who can defeat their foes, but is still no good at counterinsurgency operations, and is wretched at winning hearts and minds." -- Michael Pugliese