Oct 25 2010
Wikileaks Release 400,000 Documents Detailing Iraq War Deaths, Torture
In the largest leak of classified materials in the history of the US, the whistle blower website Wikileaks.org released 400,000 documents on Saturday, relating to the Iraq war. Eclipsing the summer expose of nearly 80,000 war logs from the Afghan war, this weekend’s release also consists of US Army field reports, and is believed to originate from the same source as the Afghan logs. In a press conference on Saturday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange explained the reason for releasing the documents: “The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends. We hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially concluded.”
Before being released to the public the documents were shared with a number of media organizations including the New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian in London, Der Spiegel in Germany, and Le Monde in France. Through their analysis, the Iraq war logs reveal that the US “failed to investigate hundreds of reports of torture, abuse, rape, and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers” (The Guardian), and that more than 15,000 Iraqi civilian deaths previously unaccounted for, were discovered. Even though the US has always maintained that no official count of Iraqi deaths are kept, a simple count through the logs reveals a total of 66,081 deaths, which are greater than the online group Iraq Body Count’s numbers. British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Human Rights Watch, and others have called for an investigation into reports of illegal detention and torture documented in the war logs. Meanwhile, the US mainstream press has largely ignored the story, as evidenced by a near complete silence on the major Sunday talk shows.
GUEST: Ray McGovern, Retired Army Intelligence Officer, served for 27 years as a CIA analyst. He is currently on the Steering group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Browse through the documents at www.wikileaks.org.
One Response to “Wikileaks Release 400,000 Documents Detailing Iraq War Deaths, Torture”
“Even though the US has always maintained that no official count of Iraqi deaths are kept, a simple count through the logs reveals a total of 66,081 deaths, which are greater than the online group Iraq Body Count’s numbers.”
This is incorrect: the logs contain 27,000 *fewer* civilian deaths than the Iraq Body Count (IBC) database records over the same period. However, by carefully analysing the logs we were able to determine that they nonetheless contain some 15,000 deaths that were unreported anywhere else – deaths which, as we work through the logs one by one, will eventually be added to the IBC database. This is a major addition to knowledge about the war’s casualties which would not have been possible without WikiLeaks.
(For anyone interested, our analysis of the logs is explained in greater detail on the Iraq Body Count website.)