licentious radio

Wednesday, January 8, 2003
[7:22:14 PM]

The Unseen Gulf War by Peter Turnley [digitaljournalist.org]. Pictures of dead and captured Iraqis, as well as refugees.

"I arrived at the "mile of death" the morning the day the war stopped. It was very early in the morning and few other journalists were present. When I arrived at the scene of this incredible carnage, strewn all over on this mile stretch were cars and trucks with wheels still turning, radios still playing, and there were bodies scattered along the road. Many people have asked the question "how many people died" during the war with Iraq and the question has never been well answered. That first morning, I saw and photographed a U.S. Military 'graves detail' bury in large graves many bodies.

"I don't recall seeing many television images of the human consequences of this scene, or for that matter many photographs published. A day later, I came across another scene on an obscure road further north and to the east where, in the middle of the desert, I found a convoy of lorries transporting Iraqi soldiers back to Baghdad, where clearly massive fire power had been dropped and everyone in sight had been carbonized."

And *that* my friends, was a war crime according to the Geneva Convention: Iraq surrendered, it's soldiers were leaving the battleground. Cheney and Powell ordered our "let's roll" bomber pilot heros to massacre the Iraqis on their way home. Our bomber pilot heros were up to the challenge. And our grave digger heros quickly buried the evidence.

Powell stopped the massacre. But it isn't like the "have you stopped beating your wife" joke, because Powell was in charge of the massacre while it was going on. He and his fellow war criminals were never brought to justice, and covered up their crimes with sand over the bodies, and flags over the media.

My goodness. He has pictures of Iraqi soldiers being forced by Americans to carry dead Iraqis to graves. I didn't remember that using prisoners of war as forced labor was allowed under the Geneva Convention.

[3:08:26 PM]
Underlining links was a *seriously* primitive choice for html. Underlining reduces readability, even if it adds emphasis. So your eye is attracted to the spot, but the text is difficult to read.

CSS provides more options. Try: border-bottom: 1px; text-decoration: none. That also lets you get away from coloring the link text. You might want to add emphasis to a link by coloring it, but a lot of times there's no need. You can leave the text color alone, and just color the bottom border.

If you add pretty good line-height to make your text more readable, then you can afford a little padding, so there's some whitespace between the bottom of descenders ("gpqy") and the border. If you choose a border color that is lighter than the text, you probably have less need of extra padding.

If you're worried that the border by itself doesn't add enough emphasis, try making it two pixels.

I've been playing with this for a couple of days. Today I ran across this site, with a pleasant gray background, and a darker gray border for links.

[2:51:07 PM]
One of the worst CSS tricks: set body text-align: center, and then a width for the content div. Anyone whose browser window isn't as wide as your div won't be able to see the whole page, won't even be able to scroll to read the part hidden *to the left* of the viewable area. (In Mozilla, at least.)

Don't *do* this!