Saturday, October 23, 2010

Nearly 400,000 classified Iraq war documents leaked

Iraq - Ubaity - DetaineesThe documents on WikiLeak describing human rights abuses in Iraq may implicate British as well as US forces, a human rights lawyer has said. Photograph: Jehad Nga/Corbis

The UN has called on Barack Obama to order a full investigation of US forces' involvement in human rights abuses in Iraq after a massive leak of military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes. ...

Assange highlighted how the reports documented 109,000 deaths – including 66,000 civilians, of which 15,000 were previously undocumented. "That tremendous scale should not make us blind to the small human scale in this material. It is the deaths of one and two people per event that killed the overwhelming number of people in Iraq."

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

via GuardianUK

... The documents also suggest "hundreds" of civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003.  .... The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians.The US government has criticised the leak, which is the largest in American military history. ...

via BBC News

WikiLeaks full public release on its website of 400,000 classified military documents from Iraq war operations is shameful, the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said tonight. ... More than 150,000 forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already in considerable danger, he said. “That danger is now exponentially multiplied as a result of this leak because it gives our enemies the wherewithal to look for vulnerabilities in how we operate and to exploit those opportunities and potentially kill our forces. That is just shameful.” ...

“We have not always been perfect but we have been far better than anyone else has in the history of warfare,” he added, “and we continue to do everything in our power to prevent innocent civilians from being killed in the war zones.”


A U.S. Department of Defense task force has been combing through the Iraq data base to assess the damage that the WikiLeaks publication of the activity reports could pose to the U.S. military, Iraqi allies and on-going operations.


“Potentially what one could mine from a huge data base like this are vulnerabilities in terms of how we operate, our tactics, our techniques, our procedures, the capabilities of our equipment, how we respond in combat situations, response times - indeed how we cultivate sources,” Morrell said. “All of that, [given the] thinking and adaptive enemy we’ve been facing in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be used against us.”...


via Haaretz


Iraqi forces systematically beat and tortured prisoners .... Some of the files also detail serious and sexual assaults on women, on young people – including a boy of 16 who was hung from the ceiling and beaten – the old and vulnerable, including a disabled man whose damaged leg was deliberately attacked.

The 391,831 documents date from the start of 2004 to January 1, 2010, providing a ground-level view of the war written mostly by low-ranking officers in the field.

via Telegraph

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an August 16 letter to the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the leak had not revealed any "sensitive intelligence sources or methods."

via Reuters

At 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history. The 391,832 reports ('The Iraq War Logs'), document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a 'SIGACT' or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.

The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 'civilians'; 23,984 'enemy' (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 'host nation' (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 'friendly' (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period. For comparison, the 'Afghan War Diaries', previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size.







via Wikileaks

Every death mapped (guardianUK):
DATA: download details of every death in Iraq (Google Fusion tables)
DATA: download our analysis spreadsheet















































































Year
Coalition forces

Iraqi forces

Civilians

Enemy

TOTAL DEATHS

TOTAL WOUNDED, all categories
20047471,0312,7815,99510,55418,567
20058562,2565,7463,59412,45224,850
20068214,37025,1784,65735,02641,164
20079194,71823,3336,79335,76355,804
20082821,9486,3622,63511,22723,632
20091468732,6813104,01012,365
TOTAL3,77115,19666,08123,984109,032176,382

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