Journalist corroborates evidence: war log, war lies

Excerpting and editing by Carolyn Bennett

Crimes, lies, leaks, recollections from Iraq USA will not go away.

Former Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo, former West Africa bureau chief for The Associated Press, graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Ellen Knickmeyer in a Monday article in The Daily Beast.

“In the dark morning hours of February 22, 2006, a group of unknown attackers detonated bombs in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra, bringing down the golden dome of a revered Shia Muslim shrine.

“A few hours later, I drove through Baghdad and watched the country descend into civil war. Then the Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post, I drove with Iraqi and American colleagues to Sadr City, the sprawling slum on the outskirts of the city. We watched hundreds of black-clad religious militiamen, waving their AK 47s in the air and calling for revenge, in what would be the start to a campaign of sectarian killing and torture.

“During visits to Baghdad’s morgue over the next two days, I saw Sunni families thronging to find the bodies of loved ones killed by the militias. The morgue’s computer registrar told the grim-faced families and me that we would have to be patient; since the Samarra bombing, the morgue had received more than 1,000 bodies and it was way behind on processing corpses.…

“Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference at the Pentagon to say that U.S. press reports of killings—such as mine that estimated 1,300 dead in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, based on what I had seen at the morgue, interviews with Sunni survivors, U.N. and Iraq health officials—were calculated ‘exaggerated reporting.’

“Iraqi security forces, he said, ‘were taking the lead in controlling the situation,’ everything, he assured his listeners, was ‘calming.’

“American journalists in Baghdad were under attack not just from Iraqi insurgents but — at least verbally — from our own country’s civilian and military commanders as well.

“Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.

“The American troops, who were risking their lives on the ground, witnessed and documented it themselves.

“The WikiLeaks documents show that the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, and U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld must have known that all along, owing to the accounts from their forces.

“Despite statements of top U.S. commanders at the time, it wasn’t the journalists in Baghdad who were lying.”

Source

“WikiLeaks Exposes Rumsfeld's Lies,” Ellen Knickmeyer in The Daily Beast, October 25, 2010, http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/20101025/ts_dailybeast/10609_wikileaksshowsrumsfeldandcaseyliedabouttheiraqwar

Also today on Democracy Now a conversation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, October 26, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/
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