 following wikileaks Wikileaks releases Iraq War Diaries
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. This average does not include the slain working in the Iraqi security services or those claimed by US soldiers to be 'insurgents'. When these are added in, almost 50 Iraqis died on average in every single day reported by the logs. Many of these deaths are violent deaths, often featuring grim details that have never been told before; murdered and tortured bodies discovered all over Baghdad. There are reports of civilians being indiscriminately killed at checkpoints, such as speeding to get a pregnant woman to hospital; of Iraqi detainees being tortured by Coalition Forces; and of US soldiers blowing up entire civilian buildings because of one suspected insurgent on the roof. In amongst all this horror there are just ten lone reports mentioning primary political reasons the public was given for the war weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And many of these purely state that no weapons of mass destruction were found. There are over 300 recorded reports of colation forces committing torture and abuse of detainees across 284 reports and over 1,000 cases of Iraqi security forces committing similar crimes. There are numerous cases of what appear to be clear war crimes by US forces, such as the deliberate killing of persons trying to surrender. Prior to the release of the Iraq War Logs, WikiLeaks undertook the arduous task of redacting any piece of information contained that might lead to the identification of any innocent Iraqi. We have performed this process by beginning with redacting everything and then deciding what is safe to put back in. We therefore apologise if you find that there is far too much redacted in these logs at the current stage. We hope to raise the capital necessary to continue this process and enable more of the data to be un-redacted. The Pentagon refused to assist this process, stating that it was not interested in 'harm minimization', only complete destruction of the record. WikiLeaks has brought together a number of collaborators to go through this vast wealth of previously classified material: Analysis by the independent NGO, Iraq Body Count (IBC) suggests the Logs contain 15,000 civilian deaths that have not been previously discovered outside the Pentagon. Most of the newly revealed deaths in the Logs occurred in previously unreported violent incidents involving the deaths of one or two people. They include targeted assassinations, drive-by-shootings, torture, executions, and checkpoint killings. Public Interest Lawyers are presently acting in four judicial review cases which arise from details discovered in the Iraq War Logs. Two of these are ongoing and two are being developed to the pre-action letter stage. The cases will be detailed at a release press conference in London on Saturday 23rd October. warlogs.wikileaks.orgWikiLeaks have also structured collaborations with a number of other media organisations to ensure that as much of the information contained within these logs is brought into the public domain from the moment of the War Logs release. Please donate to WikiLeaks to defend this information and our activities. For further information on the content from our media collaborators: Iraq Body Count - www.iraqbodycount.org Public Interest Lawyers - www.publicinterestlawyers.co.uk Bureau of Investigative Journalism - www.iraqwarlogs.com The Guardian - www.guardian.co.uk Der Spiegel - www.spiegel.de The New York Times - www.nytimes.com Analysis of the Iraq War Logs
more from this section  • following wikileaks: Sacrificing Stratfor: How the FBI waited three weeks to close the stable door (Sunday, March 25th, 2012) • following wikileaks: Sabu the Inciter: Marveling at the FBI's Hacker Frankenstein Monster (Sunday, March 11th, 2012) • following wikileaks: Wikileaks releases "The Global Intelligence Files" (Monday, February 27th, 2012) • following wikileaks: Parody: Google Translation of the Sept 2nd Guardian Editorial: "Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: no case, no need" (Guardian English to Plain English) (Monday, September 5th, 2011) • following wikileaks: Guardian Investigative Editor David Leigh publishes top secret Cablegate password revealing names of U.S. collaborators and informants... in his book (Wednesday, August 31st, 2011) • following wikileaks: Leaked Los Angeles police documents: Radical Islamic Tattoos (Friday, June 24th, 2011) • following wikileaks: Scary Daily Telegraph report that Al-Qaida's military leader threatened nuke attack if Osama captured or killed is unsupported by Wikileaks source documents (Sunday, May 1st, 2011) • following wikileaks: The Wikileaks Story... Visually. (Friday, April 8th, 2011) • following wikileaks: Glenn Greenwald presentation for Lannan Foundation (Tuesday, March 8th, 2011) • following wikileaks: "Quantico Community Relations" Facebook Page shuts down Bradley Manning protests (Sunday, March 6th, 2011) |
...the nigelparry.net recommended web hosting | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[ top of page | following wikileaks | home ] Content & design ©1995-2010 Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net.  |