Oh, for the love of GOD, people!
GALESBURG, Ill. — An Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him. Terri Miller of Galesburg says she sent her son, Specialist Billy Miller, pictures of the little girl to help him get over his homesickness. The pictures show the child in a swimsuit playing a wading pool and sitting on a truck. In one, the girl is wearing a swim suit and part of her buttocks are exposed.
The Army says Miller will stay in Afghanistan until his court martial. His unit came home last August. Miller faces jail time, if convicted.
Terri Miller says the pictures are innocent. She says her son is close to the girl.
WQAD TV reports that the child is a relative whom the family says Billy treated as his own child when the girl was diagnosed with cancer as her father went through boot camp. Her father, the station reports, can't believe the charges, especially since they're on other family computers and on Facebook pages and no one else has been investigated.
Granted, we don't get all the facts in this story, I'm sure. And granted again, we need to protect children. I get all that, I really do. But at some point, we have to let a little sanity enter the child porn debate. Sometimes pictures of children are just pictures of children. But as it stands, this man could well lose his career over photographs that even the child's father thought were perfectly innocuous.
Frankly, assuming that the photographs are as described, this makes me wonder what exactly has been happening in our military that would lead them to jump to this conclusion based on that particular evidence. Or what else they've found that they're not talking about, because really, given what this article says, there's no there there.
Posted by iain at January 15, 2010 04:13 PM
