“In our release of these 400,000 documents about the Iraq war, the intimate detail of that war from the U.S. perspective, we hope to correct some of that attack on the truth.
“We have seen that there are approximately 15,000 never previously documented or known cases of civilians who have been killed by violence in Iraq. Iraq, as we can see, was a bloodbath on every corner of their country. The stated aims for going into that war, of improving the human rights situation, improving the rule of law, did not eventuate; and in terms of raw numbers of people arbitrarily killed, [the U.S. war] worsened the situation in Iraq.” — Online whistleblower WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange“These war logs are day-by-day and, in many cases, hour-by-hour field reports from information radioed in by small units out in the field. They really chart incidents, every single incident. And sometimes you’ll see like twenty or thirty or fifty in a single day. They have all been collated into an electronic archive, I think probably for the first time. This is probably the first—this and Afghanistan have been the first American military adventures in which this kind of archive has been collated and made available to other people in the US military, which is, of course, how it’s come to be leaked.
What it contains of significance is three different types of material, in the sense that we didn’t really know these things before. First of all, that at least 15,000 more civilians have been identifiably killed and are recorded in these logs. There are many other civilians who’ve been killed who aren’t recorded there, of course. But that increases the figures. And bodies, independent bodies like the Iraq Body Count, the London-based private group, have pinned down those 15,000 extra by wading through all these documents.
The second thing it documents is really brutal events in which the laws of war, as we commonly understood them, seem to have been overtaken by technology, air power and asymmetric warfare. The classic case in here was of a helicopter, the Apache helicopter, which later went on to shoot and kill Reuters employees. It describes how men on the ground were trying to surrender. It radioed back to base for advice, and extraordinarily, the base lawyer said, ‘You cannot surrender to an aircraft. Go ahead and kill them.’ So it went ahead and killed them.
“… The helicopter crew don’t seem to have been trigger-happy at all. They were pretty concerned. They radioed back to base: ‘These men are trying to surrender. What do we do?’ … They’re told more than once, ‘They can’t surrender. You should go ahead and kill them.’ …
“What we see is orders coming from a high level.
“… That plays into the third new aspect in these documents: they detail literally hundreds of times—I think there is more 900 incidents of what they class as detainee abuse of people being tortured.
“They are largely tortured by Iraqi security forces but with the United States forces standing by or, in some cases, turning detainees over to people they know are going to torture them. Those orders seem to come from a high level. You are not looking at individual rogue sadists in the U.S. military. You are looking at orders.” — Investigations editor at The Guardian newspaper, David Leigh, spoke today with Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now program. The Guardian was one of the media outlets given advanced copies of the ‘Iraq war logs.’ On Guardian’s website is a news feature on the documents.
Source and notes
Online whistleblower WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange whose website “released close to 400,000 classified U.S. documents on the Iraq war, the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history and the largest internal account of any war on public record, a disclosure providing a trove of new evidence on the violence, torture and suffering that’s befallen Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion.” Democracy Now, October 25, 2010,
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/25/wikileaks_iraq_war_logs_expose_us
IRAQ: The War Logs, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq-war-logs
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