Ho Hum, More WikiLeaks “Chickenfeed”
Lamest WikiLeak So Far …Is Israel Behind It?
by Gordon Duff / October 25th, 2010
The new WikiLeaks claim the US under-reported by 15,000, the deaths of Iraqi “civilians.” With the numbers listed by the military as little as 10% or less of the actual deaths, bumping up the numbers must be a joke. More leaks about torture and killings, Iraqi torture and the US “looking away?” More idiocy. With the US sending “suspects” around the world on rendition flights, sent to secret prisons and obvious to anyone with a brain, to shallow graves, this WikiLeak is simply another sideshow, more “chickenfeed.”
Things have already come apart in Iraq. Why leak this now? Regular news stories are actually going much further than these “leaks.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the agenda here, an agenda with absolutely nothing to do with enlightening the world.
What does it prove, any of it? For sure, we see one thing. Everything leaked is carefully screened to have nothing of real value. With Mossad running around Mosul, operating out of Erbil, supplying and advising the terrorist PKK, not a word is mentioned. Instead, poor Iranians are swimming the Euphrates with explosives strapped to their chests.
Get real.
Thousands of tons of explosives were “mislaid” in Iraq. The US failed to secure Saddam’s weapons depots which were looted. These stockpiles were vast. The idea that anyone would need to bring weapons into Iraq is insane, simply another Israeli ploy to pre-stage an attack on Iran. Any fool can see this in seconds.
In fact, there are more assault rifles in Iraq than people.
While trying to blame Iran, is WikiLeaks reporting the hundreds of thousands of weapons bought by the US that simply disappeared in Iraq? It is easier to buy an assault rifle or RPG in Iraq than to get potato chips. This need to blame Iran, the idea that “secret agents” are smuggling ordnance into Iraq, a country loaded with explosives, is insane. Who would believe it? The idiotic controlled press?
What will we see if we watch the stories coming out? Where will the press be told to manipulate the public to look?
The Lies Begin…
Bloomberg and The Guardian start the ball rolling. Imagine Iraq, a country with the third largest military force in the world, needing “trainers” from Iran. Iraq with its elite Republican Guard and one million man army has more people with military training that Britain, a fact The Guardian seems oblivious to. One minute, Iraq is building nuclear weapons and threatening the region with SCUD missiles, the next it is having to turn to “Iranian experts” to build pipe bombs. Has any nation ever suffered such a case of collective amnesia in the area of weapons technology before?
As the days pass, we can expect more and more fanciful accounts of Iranian spies, trainers, kidnappers and terrorists, each story more sensational and fictitious than the last.
There is a more insidious aspect to WikiLeaks. Through representing itself as “anti-war” and “public spirited,” it can carry forward a globalist agenda, promoting war, promoting conflict, coincidentally directly tied to Israel’s “hit list.” Thus, WikiLeaks is potentially very effective in derailing genuine dialog and meaningful dissent.
Attorney General Gonzales Told US Torture was Good for US
Americans proved long ago that they were immune to guilt about torture and killing. In fact, polls show that the more religious an American, the more willing they are to accept brutality, and few countries are as “religious’ as America. No other country in recent times has killed as many people as America, even overshadowing the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Bosnia or the “situation” in Israel.
As with the earlier “leak,” WikiLeaks has the ability to go through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, carefully eliminating any black market dealings, drug running or, as with Iraq, the massive corruption and theft of oil.
There are dozens of subjects that seem to be carefully screened from any WikiLeak. Even the Department of Defense, not so secretly, thanks WikiLeaks for holding back really embarrassing information. “Held back” information is, of course, blackmail.
Who is WikiLeaks?
Is WikiLeaks Israel?
Only Israel has the penetration of the Department of Defense that would allow this kind of spying. Not only can they do it, they also have so many spies in the American chain of command, they could easily prevent it. Who has the facilities to gather and filter this much data? Who would want to?
With the biggest story in Iraq the falsified intelligence on “weapons of mass destruction,” why didn’t WikiLeaks get us documents on this? We know that the military had orders to try to falsify documents showing that they found fully operating nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities. These would have made good reading along with the thousands of pages of reports about how these stories would be fabricated. Even the “controlled press” wouldn’t touch them although they are still out there.
The lies.
Exposing this real Iraq scandal would do some good, except for one thing — friends of Israel inside the Pentagon were the creators of this program. Is this why WikiLeaks dodges the real issues? Is it because the trail for much of what happened in Iraq heads directly to Tel Aviv?
Who even cares about Iraq this many years later?
Look at the watered down reports about American support of Al Qaeda. The US is blamed for accidentally helping Al Qaeda by organizing the Sons of Iraq. In truth, the US actually reorganized the Baathists, something far worse than the imaginary construct “Al Qaeda.” Not a word is said about this.
One of the biggest scams of the Iraq “experience” was the looting of oil resources. Most easily verified is the theft of oil from the Kirkuk fields through the Kirkuk/Ceyhan pipeline, which goes to the Mediterranean through Turkey. Ships that load oil are shown on locator sights run by insurance companies and even the US Coast Guard. Their tonnage is available, how many ships, how long. When doing the math, how much oil is loaded compared to how much is paid for, billions and billions of dollars of oil is missing.
When Americans were paying $4 a gallon for gas, how many knew the oil that made the gasoline was “free” to the oil companies? Who split the take on this? Who was paid? How much was stolen through Basra? Were the British involved?
Then we have Fallujah. We are told America “carpet bombed” civilians and “ethnically cleansed” the area, as we are now informed, for no reason. The version the Army told is being debunked along with the phony stories of the “embedded” press. Nothing on this hit WikiLeaks either.
We are also noting
high levels of radiation there and a health crisis that can only be described as shocking. Where is wikiLeaks on this REAL story?
There is little doubt that WikiLeaks is a “sideshow’ run by an intelligence agency with dozens of agents inside the Department of Defense. Only Israel has this capability, having penetrated Defense to such a degree they run it as their own. What is the agenda of WikiLeaks? Is it revealing the truth? If so, why is the truth censored and watered down to such a degree as to be “non-news” as the earlier leak had been. In fact, most stories about leaks are simply speculation and most “leaks” are little than “chickenfeed.”
The last leak was an attack on Pakistan. WikiLeaks tried to make a case for Pakistan running the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, the Taliban are Pashtun and don’t care much for Pakistan. They are “blood enemies.” Because of this, Israel and India have found them useful allies against Pakistan, the only Islamic nuclear power. Aid of all kinds gets to the Taliban from the Mossad and RAW, something WikiLeaks worked hard to keep secret.
Real leaks by former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, proved that documents exist showing that rendition flights were used to ferry terrorists around, move drugs and tons of cash. With bales of cash leaving Afghanistan every day, why is it that not one page, not one word of any of this, things we know are in American files, hit WikiLeaks?
Why does WikiLeaks spend more time hiding things than revealing them? When the story dies down, are the Julian Assange rape allegations going to be dragged out again to give the story more play? Last time they “double dipped” on that one, first charges, then no charges, then charges. It was like a badly written “soap opera.”
What about this new “leak?”
This one may be aimed at Iran.
Anyone surprised or shocked to find that Iraqi security forces killed or tortured people is living on their own private planet. These were Saddam’s killers and torturers first. Then they became ours. What do killers and torturers do?
There was one reason for the invasion of Iraq with all the lies, all the killing, all the corruption. Israel wanted Iraq destroyed. Will WikiLeaks ever get to something real?
Related article: “
Why Wikileaks Must Be Protected?“
Gordon Duff is the senior editor of Veterans Today.
Read other articles by Gordon, or
visit Gordon's website.
This article was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2010 at 6:59am and is filed under
Opinion.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/10/ho-hum...%E2%80%9D/
Deaths Revealed by Wikileaks Are the "Tip of the Iceberg"
by Nicolas Davies
![[Image: 21615.jpg]](http://www.globalresearch.ca/coverStoryPictures2/21615.jpg)
Global Research, October 25, 2010
warisacrime.org
The documents on the U.S. War in Iraq published by Wikileaks contained data on 15,000 Iraqis killed in incidents that were previously unreported in the Western media or by the Iraqi Health Ministry, and therefore not counted in compilations of reported Iraqi war deaths by Iraqbodycount.org. The Western media are dutifully adding these 15,000 deaths to their so-called "estimates" of the total numbers of Iraqis killed in the war. This is deceptive. What the unreported deaths really demonstrate is that the passive methodology of these body counts is a woefully inadequate way to try and estimate the number of deaths in a war zone. These 15,000 deaths are only the tip of an iceberg of hundreds of thousands of unreported Iraqi deaths that have already been detected by more serious and scientific epidemiological studies, but the U.S. and British governments have successfully suppressed these studies by confusing the media and the public about their methods and accuracy.
There is nothing unusual about such large numbers of deaths being unreported in a war-zone. It bears out the experience of epidemiologists working in war-zones around the world that "passive reporting" of war deaths generally only captures between 5% and 20% of the total number of actual deaths. This is partly a result of the changed nature of modern war. About 86% of the people killed in the First World War were uniformed combatants, whose identities were meticulously recorded. 90% of the people killed in recent wars have been civilians, making counting and identifying them much more difficult.
I discussed the various efforts to count the dead in Iraq in my book, "Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq". What follows is a fairly lengthy excerpt from the book, and I urge you to read it if you really want to come to grips with the scale of the mass slaughter that our country has inflicted on the people of Iraq:
"The interim Iraqi government’s Health Ministry started collecting civilian mortality figures from hospitals in 2004, and in June that year, it started separating the figures for people killed by resistance forces from those killed by U.S. and other occupation forces. Knight Ridder correspondent Nancy Youssef was given the figures for the period between June 10th and September 10th 2004 and covered them in an article on September 25th 2004 that the Miami Herald titled “U.S. attacks, not insurgents, blamed for most Iraqi deaths.”[135]
During this three month period, the Health Ministry counted 1,295 Iraqis killed by the occupation forces and 516 killed in what the ministry called terrorist operations, but it agreed with hospital officials who told Youssef that these figures only captured part of the death toll. The Centcom press office refused to provide her with an alternative estimate, although it admitted that the U.S. command did have one, and the International Committee of the Red Cross told her it didn't have sufficient staff in Iraq to compile such information.
Youssef questioned whether some of the Iraqis counted as killed by the occupation forces might have been resistance fighters, but Dr. Shihab Jassim of the Health Ministry's operations section told her the Ministry was convinced that nearly all were civilians, because a family member wouldn't report it to the occupation-controlled Health Ministry if his or her relative died fighting for the Mahdi Army or other resistance forces. This view was corroborated by Dr. Yasin Mustaf, the assistant manager of al-Kimdi Hospital in Baghdad: “People who participate in the conflict don't come to the hospital. Their families are afraid they will be punished. Usually, the innocent people come to the hospital. That is what the numbers show.”
Dr. Walid Hamed, another Health Ministry official told Youssef, “Everyone is afraid of the Americans, not the fighters. And they should be.” Another doctor she spoke to had lost his own 3-year old nephew in a check-point shooting, and a doctor at the Baghdad morgue told her about a family of eight who were all killed by a helicopter gun-ship after they went up to sleep on their roof to escape the summer heat. Overall, officials attributed the high numbers of civilians killed by occupation forces primarily to air strikes rather than to shootings by ground forces.
Also in September 2004, an international team of epidemiologists, led by Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Drs. Lafta and Khudhairi of Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, conducted the first of two more scientific studies of mortality in Iraq. This one covered the first eighteen months of the war. Roberts had worked with a joint team from the Center for Disease Control and Doctors Without Borders in Rwanda in 1994, and had conducted similar studies in war zones around the world. Mortality estimates he produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2000 were widely cited by American and British leaders, and the U.N. Security Council drafted a resolution demanding the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the DRC following that report.
In Iraq, the epidemiologists found that, “Violent deaths were widespread ... and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children ... Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.” Their report was published in the Lancet, the British medical journal, in November 2004.[136]
There was nothing surprising in their conclusions in light of the already existing evidence that “coalition” air strikes had killed thousands of civilians, both during and after the invasion. However, their report was quickly dismissed by the American and British governments. The American media, following their tradition of deference to U.S. officials, took their cue from the government and more or less ignored the study. Following the publication of the epidemiological team's second study in 2006, which garnered a bit more media attention, President Bush said only, “I don't consider it a credible report.”
The cynicism of these official dismissals was eventually exposed by yet another set of leaked British documents. On March 26th 2007, the BBC published a memo from Sir Roy Anderson, the chief scientific adviser to Britain's Ministry of Defence, in which he described the epidemiologists' methods as “close to best practice” and their study design as “robust.” These documents included memos sent back and forth between worried British officials saying things like, “Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies.” Another official replied, “We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate,” but added, in the same e-mail, “the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”[137]
The methodology that the British officials were referring to was a “cluster sample survey,” the same type of study that Les Roberts had conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2000. Prime Minister Blair had publicly cited that study's figures to the 2001 Labour Party Conference to justify British policy in Africa, but he dismissed the study in Iraq, telling reporters in December 2004, “Figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is.” This was interesting in light of Youssef's report. Blair dismissed the overall numbers in the Lancet report, but avoided the even more sensitive question of who killed all these people, on which the Health Ministry and the epidemiologists were in total agreement.
The Western media widely cited the Iraqi Health Ministry and Iraqbodycount. org as sources for civilian mortality figures, but these both used a passive methodology to count deaths, essentially adding up deaths that had already been reported either in hospital records or in Western media accounts. Epidemiologists working in other war zones over the past twenty years have typically found that such passive methods only capture between 5% and 20% of actual deaths. That is why they have developed the cluster sample survey method to obtain a more accurate picture of the deadly impact of conflicts on civilians, and thus to facilitate more appropriate responses by governments, U.N. agencies, and NGOs.
The cluster sample survey method used in war zones was adapted from epidemiological practice in other types of public health crises, surveying a representative sample of a population by clusters to estimate the full extent of a health problem that affects the whole population. As Les Roberts pointed out, “In 1993, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control randomly called 613 households in Milwaukee and concluded that 403,000 people had developed Cryptosporidium in the largest outbreak ever recorded in the developed world, no one said that 613 households was not a big enough sample. It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces.”[138]
In Iraq in September 2004, the epidemiological teams surveyed 988 households in 33 clusters in different parts of the country, attempting to balance the risk to the survey teams with the size needed for a meaningful sample. Michael O'Toole, the director of the Center for International Health in Australia, said, “That's a classical sample size. I just don't see any evidence of significant exaggeration ... If anything, the deaths may have been higher because what they are unable to do is survey families where everyone has died.”
Beyond the phony controversy in the media regarding the methodology of these epidemiological studies, there was one significant question regarding the numbers in the 2004 study. This was the decision to exclude the data from a cluster in Fallujah due to the much higher number of deaths that were reported there (even though the survey was completed before the final assault on the city in November 2004). Roberts wrote, in a letter to the Independent, “Please understand how extremely conservative we were: we did a survey estimating that 285,000 people have died due to the first 18 months of invasion and occupation and we reported it as at least 100,000”
The dilemma they faced was this: in the 33 clusters surveyed, 18 reported no violent deaths (including one in Sadr City), 14 other clusters reported a total of 21 violent deaths and the Fallujah cluster alone reported 52 violent deaths. This last number is conservative for the reason Michael O'Toole highlighted. As the report stated, “23 households of 52 visited were either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbors interviewed described widespread death in most of the abandoned homes but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the survey.”
Leaving aside this last factor, there were three possible interpretations of the results from Fallujah. The first, and indeed the one the epidemiologists adopted, was that the team had randomly stumbled on a cluster of homes where the death toll was so high as to be totally unrepresentative and therefore not relevant to the survey. The second possibility was that this pattern among the 33 clusters, with most of the casualties falling in one cluster and many clusters reporting zero deaths, was an accurate representation of the distribution of civilian casualties in Iraq under “precision” aerial bombardment. The third possibility, which effectively incorporated the other two, was that the Fallujah cluster was atypical, but not sufficiently abnormal to warrant total exclusion from the study, so that the real number of excess deaths fell somewhere between 100,000 and 285,000.
In each case, however, these figures were only the mid-point of a statistical range, leaving considerable uncertainty over the actual number of deaths. The epidemiologists found, with 95% certainty, that the excess number of deaths as a result of the war, excluding the 3% of the country represented by the cluster in Fallujah, was somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000. In itself, this was hardly a solid or satisfactory conclusion. However, it was very unlikely that the actual number of dead was close to either of those extremes, and there was a 90% likelihood that it was more than 44,000.
The Fallujah cluster, statistically representing the most devastated 3% of the country, reported 52 of the 73 total violent deaths in the survey. Even if this was not a perfect representation of the distribution of violent deaths, these parts of the country by definition suffered considerably worse than other areas, and yet the published estimate of about 100,000 violent deaths effectively counted zero violent deaths in these areas. The survey team that visited Fallujah reported that “vast areas of the city had been devastated to an equal or worse degree than the area they had randomly chosen to survey,” so that the area chosen did in fact appear to be representative of many severely bombed areas. One could therefore arrive at the estimate of “about 100,000 excess deaths or more” by looking at the survey data in a number of different ways, which made the authors very confident in their interpretation. There were other conservative biases built into the study, such as ignoring empty and bombed-out houses, as Michael O'Toole pointed out, but no serious criticisms were made that would account for a significant over-estimate of deaths resulting from these methods. The main criticism made by politicians and journalists was that these studies produced higher estimates than passive reporting, but that is exactly what one would expect.
One larger survey that did produce lower civilian mortality figures was the Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS). This survey was conducted by the Coalition Provisional Authority's Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation in April and May 2004 and it was published in May 2005 by the U.N. Development Program. The “UNDP” imprimatur and the large sample size gave credence to its reassuringly low figure of about 24,000 “war deaths.”[139]
However, its estimate of war-deaths was derived from a single question posed to families in the course of a 90-minute interview on living conditions conducted by officials of the occupation government. By contrast, the mortality studies published in the Lancet were designed with the sole purpose of obtaining accurate mortality figures, and included extensive precautions to guarantee the anonymity of the respondents and to reassure them of the independence of the survey teams.
Jon Pederson, the Norwegian designer of the ILCS, said himself that its mortality figures were certainly too low. Survey teams that returned to the same houses and enquired only about child deaths found almost twice as many as in the main survey. This suggested precisely the reluctance to report violent deaths that Roberts and his colleagues sought to overcome by stressing their impartiality. And in April or May 2004, a question regarding “war-deaths” could still be interpreted to refer only to the invasion itself, as opposed to the long guerilla war that followed it. This interpretation is supported by the fact that more than half the deaths reported in the ILCS were in the southern region of Iraq, which bore the brunt of the invasion but was later more peaceful than other regions.
In January 2005, the health ministry provided the BBC with a summary of its hospital survey for the previous six months which painted a similar picture to the one given to Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder in September. It counted 2,041 civilians killed by U.S. forces and their allies, and 1,233 killed by so-called insurgents. After the BBC broadcast these figures all over the world, it received a call from the Health Minister of the occupation government claiming that his ministry's report had been misrepresented and that the number of deaths attributed to the occupation forces was not accurate. The BBC issued a retraction, and the Health Ministry stopped providing breakdowns of its figures that attributed any responsibility for civilian deaths to the occupation forces.[140]
Another actual nationwide count of civilian deaths was published by a group called Iraqiyun on July 12th 2005. Iraqiyun was an Iraqi humanitarian group headed by Dr. Hatim Al-Alwani and affiliated with the political party of Interim President Ghazi Al-Yawer. It counted 128,000 actual violent deaths, of whom 55 percent were women and children under the age of 12. The report specified that it included only confirmed deaths reported to relatives, omitting significant numbers of people who had simply disappeared without trace amid the violence and chaos. It was highly unlikely that an effort like this to actually count every one of the dead could result in anything but a significant undercount, for the reasons already discussed.[141]
Then, between May and July 2006, Roberts, Burnham and Lafta led a second epidemiological study in Iraq to update their estimate of at least 100,000 deaths between March 2003 and September 2004. They increased their sample size to 1,849 households, comprising 12,801 individuals, in 47 clusters. They were now surveying the results of 40 months of war. These factors enabled them to narrow the statistical range of their results. This time they were able to say, with 95% certainty, that between 426,000 and 794,000 Iraqis had died violent deaths as a consequence of the war. Their best estimate was that there had been about 655,000 excess deaths, of which about 600,000 were violent deaths. The finding of the earlier survey that at least 100,000 Iraqis had been killed by October 2004 was validated, with a new estimate of 112,000 excess deaths for that period. This also validated the conservative assumption that the Fallujah sample was unusual but not irrelevant. [142]
They also found some changes in the pattern of violent deaths. Gunfire was now the most common cause of death overall, and “the proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces had diminished in 2006, although the actual numbers have increased every year.” Their overall conclusion, however, was that, “The number of people dying in Iraq has continued to escalate.”
This overall trend was extremely disturbing, with each period accounting for more violent deaths than the one before and a proliferation in types of violence over time. Air strikes now accounted for only 13% of total violent deaths, but were still responsible for the deaths of about half of all the children killed in Iraq, underlining the inherently indiscriminate nature of powerful air-launched weapons. There had been huge increases in violent deaths among males between the ages of 15 and 44, now accounting for 59% of all violent deaths, but the epidemiologists decided not to try to differentiate between combatant and non-combatant deaths. With much of the population now involved in armed resistance to the occupation, they felt that asking questions about this could put the survey teams at greater risk, and that responses would not be reliable in any case.
Households attributed 31% of violent deaths to coalition forces, which would result in an estimate of at least 180,000 people killed directly by American and other foreign occupation forces. However, the report noted that, “Deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party; consequently, the number of deaths and the proportion of violent deaths attributable to coalition forces could be conservative estimates.” Also, Iraqi forces recruited and trained by U.S. forces and under overall U.S. command played an increasing role in the war, in particular in the reign of terror launched in Baghdad in May 2005. These forces were responsible for the summary executions of thousands of young men and teenage boys, but those deaths were not attributed to “coalition” forces in this survey.
Two more studies of mortality in Iraq were published in January 2008. The first was the Iraq Family Health Survey, which was conducted by the same group (COSIT) that conducted the CPA's Iraq Living Conditions Survey in 2004. This study focused exclusively on the death toll, with some cooperation from the World Health Organization and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It surveyed deaths only up to June 2006, to provide a comparison with the second survey by Roberts, Burnham, and Lafta. Although it also found evidence of a huge increase in the death rate since the invasion, the IFHS produced a much lower estimate of about 150,000 violent deaths.[143]
Unfortunately, there are several reasons to doubt the accuracy of this lower figure. Like the ILCS in 2004, this survey was conducted by employees of a government that was taking part in the violence it was attempting to quantify. This predictably leads to underreporting. Secondly, its estimate of the pre-invasion death rate for 2002 is about one third of the official death rate recorded by the World Health Organization. Thirdly, it found no increase in the violent death rate from year to year between 2003 and 2006. Every other data set available, from mortality studies to the Pentagon's statistics on violence in Iraq, showed increases in violence each year. Fourth, it found that only one in six post-invasion deaths was due to violence, compared with a majority of deaths due to violence in the other epidemiological studies, and in independent surveys of graveyards.
A fifth factor that surely contributed to the IFHS's low mortality figure was that it was unable to survey mortality in the most dangerous 11% of the country. It attempted to compensate for this based on the regional distribution of violent deaths in Iraqbodycount.org (IBC), a record of deaths compiled from international media reports. However, because the unsurveyed areas were also the most dangerous for Western reporters, IBC inevitably undercounted deaths in these same areas. And yet IFHS used this distorted distribution pattern based on passive reporting to estimate deaths in the deadliest parts of the country.
The other survey published in January 2008 was a survey conducted in August and September 2007 by Opinion Research Business, a British polling firm, in conjunction with Iraq's Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies. They surveyed 2,414 households and asked them if they had lost a member or members of the household to violence since the invasion. They were unable to survey three provinces (Anbar, Karbala and Irbil), and most of the 8% of households who refused to answer were in Baghdad, where death-rates were among the highest. These factors contributed a conservative bias to their estimate. In spite of this, ORB found that about 20% of households surveyed had lost at least one member, and estimated that 1.03 million people had died in the war. Without compensating for the conservative biases mentioned above, their data and sample size gave them 95% certainty for a number of deaths between 946,000 and 1.12 million. [144]
After the publication of the second epidemiological study in the Lancet, the scale of violent death it revealed was gradually acknowledged among educated circles in the West, including in the United States. The ORB survey provided independent confirmation of the scale of the violence. It also suggested that deaths had continued to increase for at least another year after the publication of the second study in the Lancet and that the death toll probably now exceeded a million violent deaths.
The work of all these researchers showed that the United States and other modern governments could not unleash this kind of violence on another country without eventually facing the consequences of public awareness of the nature and magnitude of its effects. And, although U.S. officials may never publicly acknowledge it, the publication of these studies probably served to restrain some of their most violent impulses in the conduct of the war."
135. Nancy Youssef, "U.S. attacks, not insurgents, blamed for most Iraqi deaths,” Miami Herald, September 25 2004.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0925- 02.htm
136. Les Roberts et al., "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey,” The Lancet, Vol 364, November 20 2004.
137. Owen Bennett-Jones, "Iraq deaths survey was robust,” BBC World Service, March 26 2007.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm
138. Nicolas J. S. Davies, "Burying the Lancet report,” Z Magazine, February 2006.
139. http://www.iq.undp.org/ilcs.htm
140. "BBC obtains Iraq casualty figures,” BBC News, January 28 2005. Original report at
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7906.htm
141. "Iraqi civilian casualties,” United Press International, July 12 2005.
http://www.upi.com/Security_Terrorism/Analysis/2005/07/12/iraqi_civilian_casualties/ 2280/
142. Gilbert Burnham et al., "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a crosssectional cluster sample survey,” The Lancet, October 11 2006.
143. Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group, "Violence-related mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006,” New England Journal of Medicine, Vol 358: 484-493, January 31 2008.
144. http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq" (Nimble Books, 2010).
http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Our-Hands-Am...343&sr=1-1
released close to 400,000 classified US documents on the Iraq war, the largest intelligence leak in US history and the largest internal account of any war on public record. The disclosure provides a trove of new evidence on the violence, torture and suffering that’s befallen Iraq since the 2003 US invasion. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange unveiled the new documents on Saturday.
JULIAN ASSANGE: In our release of these 400,000 documents about the Iraq war, the intimate detail of that war from the US 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, worsened the situation in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Despite US claims to the contrary, the war logs show the Pentagon kept tallies of civilian deaths in Iraq. The group Iraq Body Count says the files contain evidence of an additional 15,000 previously unknown Iraqi civilian casualties. The number is likely far higher as the war logs omit many instances where US forces killed Iraqi civilians, including the US assault on Fallujah in 2004.
The war logs also show the US imposed a formal policy to ignore human rights abuses committed by the Iraqi military. Under an order known as "Frago 242" issued in June 2004, coalition troops were barred from investigating any violations committed by Iraqi troops against other Iraqis. Hundreds of cases of killings, torture and rape at the hands of the Iraqi troops were ignored.
New evidence of other possible US war crimes has also emerged. According to the war logs, a US Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis in February of 2007, even though they were trying to surrender. The helicopter unit was the same that killed kill twelve people and wounded two children in a July 2007 attack captured on video and leaked by WikiLeaks earlier this year. This is the moment the US forces first opened fire in that attack.
US SOLDIER 1: Have individuals with weapons.
US SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.
US SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.
US SOLDIER 3: Let me know when you’ve got them.
US SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.
US SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!
US SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.
US SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!
US SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: That July 12th, 2007 attack was the one that killed the two Reuters employees: the videographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh, the father of four. The logs also show US gunships killed even more civilians just four days later. On July 16th, 2007, fourteen civilians were reported dead in a US attack in eastern Baghdad.
The documents also reveal that the private military firm Blackwater has killed more Iraqi civilians than previously known. There are reports of fourteen separate shooting incidents involving Blackwater forces, resulting in the deaths of ten civilians and the wounding of seven others. That doesn’t include the Nisoor Square massacre that killed seventeen civilians. A third of the shootings occurred while Blackwater forces were guarding US diplomats.
Of over 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints between 2004 and 2009, an estimated 681 were civilians. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, fifty families were fired on and thirty children were killed.
The disclosure marks the biggest leak in US history, far more than the 91,000 Afghanistan war logs WikiLeaks released this summer. Seventy-six thousand of them they have released so far. WikiLeaks says it still plans to release the other 15,000 withheld Afghan war documents. An Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been in prison since May, when he was arrested on charges of leaking the classified material.
The Obama administration has lashed out at WikiLeaks for the latest disclosures. Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell said WikiLeaks is endangering US troops.
GEOFF MORRELL: The bottom line is, our forces are still very much in danger here as a result of this exposure, given the fact that our tactics, techniques and procedures are exposed in these documents, and our enemies are undoubtedly going to try to use them against us, and making their jobs even more difficult and dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined now for the rest of the hour by three guests. From Washington, DC, Pratap Chatterjee, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about contractors employed in the global war on terror, has written two books on the subject: Iraq, Inc. and Halliburton’s Army. He’s written about the war logs for The Guardian of London.
Here in New York, we’re joined by Nir Rosen, an independent journalist who has covered the Iraq war since 2003. He’s a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and author of the new book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World.
And joining us from London is David Leigh. He’s the investigations editor at The Guardian newspaper of London. The Guardian was one of the media outlets given advanced copies of the Iraq war logs and has published an extensive series on its website.
David Leigh, let’s begin with you. Why don’t you give us an overview of what this trove of almost 400,000 documents represents and says about Iraq?
DAVID LEIGH: It represents the raw material of history. And that’s an immensely valuable thing to have, because, as we all know, over the last six or seven years of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, this has been accompanied in the usual way by propaganda, by spin, by the sanitized version. This is the unvarnished version. And, of course, what the unvarnished version does is confirm what many of us feared and what many journalists have attempted to report over the years, that Iraq became a bloodbath, a real bloodbath of unnecessary killings, of civilian slaughter, of torture, and of people being beaten to death.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you divide the documents into different categories, as _The Guardian did, the different categories of killings, of torture, of who was involved with these? And who—begin with who wrote them. Explain what these war logs are.
DAVID LEIGH: 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.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, that’s an astounding part of the story.
DAVID LEIGH: The third aspect—
AMY GOODMAN: That part of the story, David, is an astounding part of the story, that these men held up their hands to a plane overhead, to a helicopter. And in all these cases, the soldiers in the planes, they call back to the base.
They are not rogue. They are getting permission, and a [U]lawyer says, "You cannot surrender to a helicopter," so they could go ahead and kill them.[/U]
DAVID LEIGH:
[COLOR="Purple"]That’s exactly the point. 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?" And they’re told more than once, "They can’t surrender. You should go ahead and kill them." So what we see is orders coming from a high level.
[/COLOR]
And that plays into the third new aspect in these documents, which is that they detail literally hundreds of times—I think there’s more 900 incidents of what they class as detainee abuse of people being tortured. And they’re 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. And those orders seem to come from a high level. Again, you’re not looking at individual rogue sadists in the US military; you’re looking at orders.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. David Leigh, investigations editor at The Guardian. The Guardian is one of the media outlets that had the advanced copies of the documents, got to see the documents, in addition Der Spiegel in Germany, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, Le Monde in France. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.
[WE CERTAINLY HAVE THE HIGH MORALGROUND - KILLING SURRENDERING NON-COMBATANTS!] 
mokin: It is as if the Nuremberg Trials never took place....and the Nuremberg Principles never emplaced. Our savagery and decline in morality seem to parallel are increase in technology and the growth of the National Security State. Just following orders.....
Assange Honored by Intelligence Veterans
Submitted by Ray McGovern on Sun, 2010-10-24 20:15
Julian Assange Honored at London Press Conference
By Ray McGovern
You are not likely to learn this from “mainstream media,’ but WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange have received the 2010 Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award for their resourcefulness in making available secret U.S. military documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars.
If the WikiLeaks documents get the attention they deserve, and if lessons can be learned from the courageous work of former CIA analyst Sam Adams—and from Daniel Ellsberg’s timely leak of Adams’ work in early 1968—even the amateurs in the White House may be able to recognize the folly of widening the war from Afghanistan to adjacent countries. That leak played a key role in dissuading President Lyndon Johnson from approving Gen. William Westmoreland’s request to send 206,000 more troops—not only into the Big Muddy, but also into countries neighboring Vietnam (further detail below in the description of SAAII).
This year’s award was presented Saturday, with the customary “corner-brightener candlestick,” by SAAII awardee, and former UK ambassador, Craig Murray, after Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg discussed WikiLeaks’ release of almost 400,000 classified battlefield reports from Iraq. The award reads as follows:
It seems altogether fitting and proper that this year’s award be presented in London, where Edmund Burke coined the expression “Fourth Estate.” Comparing the function of the press to that of the three Houses then in Parliament, Burke said:
“… but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far then they all.”
The year was 1787 — the year the U.S. Constitution was adopted. The First Amendment, approved four years later, aimed at ensuring that the press would be free of government interference. That was then.
With the Fourth Estate now on life support, there is a high premium on the fledgling Fifth Estate, which uses the ether and is not susceptible of government or corporation control. Small wonder that governments with lots to hide feel very threatened.
It has been said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” WikiLeaks is helping make that possible by publishing documents that do not lie.
Last spring, when we chose WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for this award, Julian said he would accept only “on behalf of our sources, without which WikiLeaks’ contributions are of no significance.”
We do not know if Pvt. Bradley Manning gave WikiLeaks the gun-barrel video of July 12, 2007 called “Collateral Murder.” Whoever did provide that graphic footage, showing the brutality of the celebrated “surge” in Iraq, was certainly far more a patriot than the “mainstream” journalist embedded in that same Army unit. He suppressed what happened in Baghdad that day, dismissed it as simply “one bad day in a surge that was filled with such days,” and then had the temerity to lavish praise on the unit in a book he called The Good Soldiers.
Julian is right to emphasize that the world is deeply indebted to patriotic truth-tellers like the sources who provided the gun-barrel footage and the many documents on Afghanistan and Iraq to WikiLeaks. We hope to have a chance to honor them in person in the future.
Today we honor WikiLeaks, and one of its leaders, Julian Assange, for their ingenuity in creating a new highway by which important documentary evidence can make its way, quickly and confidentially, through the ether and into our in-boxes. Long live the Fifth Estate!
Presented this 23rd day of October 2010 in London, England by admirers of the example set by former CIA analyst, Sam Adams.
What Is Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence?
SAAII is a movement of former CIA colleagues and other associates of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. Sam did precisely that, and in honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence profession exemplifying Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth — no matter the consequences.
It was Adams who discovered in 1967 that there were at least 500,000 Vietnamese Communists under arms — more than twice the number that our military in Saigon would admit to in the “war of attrition.” Gen. William Westmoreland had put an artificial limit on the number that Army intelligence was allowed to carry on its books. And Gen. Creighton Abrams specifically warned Washington that the press would have a field day if Adam’s numbers were released, and that this would weaken the war effort.
Westmoreland’s figures were shown to be bogus in January/February 1968, when Communist troops mounted a surprise countrywide offensive in numbers that proved that Adams’ analysis had been correct. But because Sam was reluctant to go “outside channels,” the CIA and Army were able to keep the American people in the dark.
After the Tet offensive, however, Daniel Ellsberg learned that Westmoreland had asked for 206,000 more troops to widen the war into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam — right up to the border with China, and perhaps beyond. In his first such act, Ellsberg leaked Sam Adams’ data to the then-independent New York Times on March 19, 1968. Dan’s timely truth telling, and that of the Times’ Neil Sheehan, won the day.
On March 25, President Johnson complained to a small gathering, “The leaks to the New York Times hurt us...We have no support for the war. This is caused by the 206,000 troop request [by Westmoreland] and the leaks…I would have given Westy the 206,000 men.” On March 31, Johnson introduced a bombing pause, opted for negotiations, and announced that he would not run for another term in November 1968.
Sam Adams continued to press for honesty and accountability but stayed “inside channels” — and failed. He was not able to see that the supervening value of ending unnecessary killing trumped the secrecy agreement he had signed as a condition of employment. Nagged by remorse, Adams died at 55 of a sudden heart attack. He could not shake the thought that, had he not let himself be diddled, the entire left wall of the Vietnam memorial would not exist. There would have been no new names to chisel into such a wall.
In the past, the annual Sam Adams Award has been given to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; former US Army Sgt. Sam Provance, who told the truth about Abu Ghraib; and Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence, who exposed his government’s eagerness to conspire with the Bush administration in advertising non-existent weapons of mass destruction in order to “justify” the invasion of Iraq — and went to prison for it; and Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who exposed the powers behind many of the crimes of the Bush administration — first and foremost what he called the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal;" in Washington, DC.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After serving as an Army infantry/intelligence officer during the early 60s, he entered the CIA and served for 27 years as a CIA analyst. A colleague of Sam Adams, Ray witnessed the gyrations Sam went through to get the truth out about Vietnam (sans the option WikiLeaks now offers)—in vain. Ray has acknowledged that, in 1967, he, too, blew a golden opportunity to “do a Dan Ellsberg” on Vietnam. (See:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/081510a.html )
The initial version of this article appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
Will post interview with Assange shortly, when transcript is done...but get this...he is really under growing attack now. Blocked from living in Sweden; the sex set-up; Wikileaks money handler told to and does close Wikileaks account and the other day Assange flys on a flight from Stockholm to another European capital and his luggage is the only lost forever....no midway stops....the pressure is on....threats from Australia and USA hinting of arrest and prosecution. At this point, anything could happen ....:fight:
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AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration is defending the US military’s record in the Iraq war after coming under worldwide condemnation following the release of leaked secret documents that paint a graphic picture of the US occupation. The whistleblower group WikiLeaks released close to 400,000 classified US war logs over the weekend, comprising the largest intelligence leak in US history. The disclosure provides a trove of new evidence on the violence, torture and suffering that’s befallen Iraq since the 2003 US invasion. Despite US claims to the contrary, the war logs show the Pentagon kept tallies of civilian deaths in Iraq.
The documents also show the US imposed a formal policy to ignore human rights abuses committed by the Iraqi military under an order known as Frago 242 issued in June 2004, coalition troops were barred from investigating any violations committed by Iraqi troops against other Iraqis. Hundreds of cases of killings, torture and rape at the hands of the Iraqi troops were ignored. State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley rejected the accusations, saying the United States trained Iraqi security forces in human rights. Crowley said, quote, "Our troops were obligated to report abuses to appropriate authorities and to follow up, and they did so in Iraq. If there needs to be an accounting, first and foremost there needs to be an accounting by the Iraqi government itself." Meanwhile, General George Casey, who headed US forces in Iraq during 2004 to 2007, also denied that the United States turned a blind eye to prisoner abuse.
But the war logs have sparked worldwide concern and condemnation. In Britain, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the allegations were, quote, "extremely serious" and should be "properly examined." The Gulf Cooperation Council, which comprises six US-allied Arab countries, urged Washington to open a serious and transparent investigation into possible crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, the United Nations chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, has called on the Obama administration to order a full investigation of the role of US forces in human rights abuses in Iraq. And Human Rights Watch said the US may have broken international law if it knowingly transferred prisoners to potential places of abuse.
The nearly 400,000 documents were provided ahead of time to the New York Times, The Guardian newspaper in London, the French newspaper Le Monde, Al Jazeera, the German magazine Der Spiegel, on an embargoed basis. They’re now available online at wikileaks.org.
We go now to London, where we’re joined by the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.
Julian, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of these documents, how you got them, and why you decided to release them.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Hello, Amy.
Well, these documents cover the periods of 2004 to the beginning of 2010. It is the most accurate description of a war to have ever been released. Within them, we can see 285,000 casualties. That’s added up, report by report. That’s each casualty, where it happened, when it happened, and who was involved, according to internal US military reporting.
Now, looking at particular groups of casualties, we can see, for example, over 600 civilians killed at checkpoint killings, including thirty children, previously—mostly previously unreported, that three-quarters of those killed at checkpoint killings, according to the United States military itself, were civilians, and only one-quarter, according to the US military internal reporting, were insurgents.
We see 284 reports covering torture or other forms of prisoner abuse by coalition forces, covering 300 different people. We see over a thousand reports of torture and other prisoner abuse by the Iraqi state itself, many or most of those receiving no meaningful investigation. I heard in your introduction that the Pentagon claims that the Iraqi government is responsible for this, but in international law, it is the person or government or organization that has effective control that is responsible. And certainly, before the technical legal handover from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the Iraqi government, it is clear that the United States and other coalition forces were the effective, legally responsible group for those. We see in the United Kingdom, Phil Shiner and his group Public Interest Lawyers, Amnesty International, and in New York, Human Rights Watch, calling for investigation and, in some cases, lawsuits against coalition forces for wrongful death.
There’s other aspects, as well. We can see the involvement of Iran in Iraq with various forms of support given to Shia groups. We can see the corruption present in the Maliki government, including what appears to be a special forces—Iraqi special forces—squad personally responsible to Maliki and not tasked by the Iraqi army itself that has been going around and strong-arming and possibly assassinating opponents.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did you get these documents, and who wrote them?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The documents are what is referred to in military terminology as "significant action reports," so those are field reports by the US Army radioed back to base of everything those soldiers and commanders considered significant. So, that is the launch of an operation; the dropping of a bomb; the arrest or detainment of persons, of which there are approximately 174,000 cases documented in this material; significant key leadership engagements, so the meetings with some key leaders and the US Army. It is, if you like, what the US Army and the Pentagon use as its raw ingredients to come up with policy and understand how the war was progressing.
Clearly this material must have come from someone or some persons within the Pentagon or within the United States military. And it’s worth pointing out that there are clearly good people in the Pentagon who were not happy with the progress of the Iraq war. And those people have chosen to provide us with this material and, presumably, have chosen to provide us with other material that we have released over the years.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and come back to Julian Assange. He’s joining us from London, actually just across the River Thames from MI5 and MI6, where we were broadcasting from a few weeks ago, the British equivalents of the FBI and the CIA. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Julian Assange. He’s joining us from London, where he held a news conference on Saturday with his organization WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that has released close to 400,000 military documents, the largest leak in US history, about the Iraq war.
Now, Julian, I wanted to play for you some of the comments coming from the military, WikiLeaks being criticized for releasing these documents. This is what, well, the disgraced General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, who also ran special operations forces during the surge in Iraq, had to say about the Iraq war logs on the eve of their release.
GEN. STANLEY McCHRYSTAL: I think, first, the decision by anybody to leak classified information is something that—not only is it illegal, it’s also something that that individual is making judgments about the value of that information and the threat to comrades that almost nobody is qualified to make that judgment. So, if somebody leaks information that puts me or one of my soldiers at risk, I think that’s a level of irresponsibility that’s very upsetting. Then there’s the decision to release them widely. I also am not comfortable with that, either. I think that a level of responsibility towards our people needs to be balanced with any argument for a need or right to know. I can’t judge every single piece of information—I wouldn’t try to—but I would say that there has to be that balance, and there has to that level of maturity, because it’s likely that the leak of some of that information could cause death of our own people or some of our allies.
AMY GOODMAN: That was General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the US and NATO force in Afghanistan. His view was echoed by other soldiers farther down the chain of command. This is Private First Class David Service who’s stationed in northern Iraq.
PFC DAVID SERVICE: I don’t think anybody who’s managed to access classified information should share, as far as regarding the safety of the soldiers or the people it could be affecting. But when you get into—the Iraqis have been—you know, it’s a violent culture. We’ve been doing our best to help them with the problems that they’re having.
AMY GOODMAN: And back in Washington, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell also lashed out at WikiLeaks for releasing the war logs.
GEOFF MORRELL: The bottom line is, our forces are still very much in danger here as a result of this exposure, given the fact that our tactics, techniques and procedures are exposed in these documents, and our enemies are undoubtedly going to try to use them against us, and making their jobs even more difficult and dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell. Julian Assange, your response?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, this is the same old argument that the Pentagon has been trotting out every time there is media exposure of their abuses for the past fifty years. They tried it with the Afghan war logs. Last week, NATO told CNN from Kabul that there was not a single case of an Afghan that they could find who needed moving or protection. The Pentagon—Secretary of Defense Gates wrote to the US Senate Armed Services Committee privately on August the 16th saying that no intelligence sources, sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been revealed by this material, while saying publicly something completely different. Similarly, the Pentagon stated last week that it could find no incidents of an Afghan who had been adversely affected by this release or the injury to any US troops. The reality is that the only thing at risk here is the reputations and the jobs of those individuals who put troops in harm’s way in Iraq and who put Iraqi citizens in the middle of a civil war.
You know, late last week, the Pentagon was saying—pushing out the message that they had found 300 names in this material of people who needed protecting. But that, in fact, is misleading rhetoric. What they had found was 300 names in their internal material, which they say needed protecting. But the Department of Defense issued—confessed yesterday that in fact none of those 300 names were present in our material.
So, on the one hand, we see no credible evidence of harm being committed. We also see the Pentagon making a position that it’s not really involved in Iraq anymore. Well, we all know that there’s 50,000 US forces presently in Iraq and hundreds—over 100,000 US military contractors. So that argument can’t stand up on both accounts. But when we look to see what happened with the Afghan experience, we see no one harmed by this, apart from the reputation of an abusive organization, who is not credible, who’s been shown time and time again, not just by our work, but by others, to make statements that are simply not credible. And so, that is the lack of harm.
So then we look at the other side of the equation. What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes. We see serious consideration and calls for investigation by the top levels of the United Kingdom government. That is the correct response to the revelation of this type of material.
You know, it must be disturbing to Iraqis to see this sort of revelation, which reveals 15,000 civilian casualties that were never previously reported, 66,000 internally declared total, but 15,000 that are not present in any media report since 2003, to hear the Pentagon take such a cavalier attitude to the discovery, the public discovery, of six 9/11s, the equivalent death count of six 9/11s. And, you know, really, if the Pentagon is to be seen as a credible institution—every country needs a military to defend it, but if it’s to be seen as credible in that role, it needs to also be a responsive institution.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, you—
JULIAN ASSANGE: All these reports were made secret at the time that they were written. Without doubt, they—nearly all of them should not be secret now. Their time has elapsed. They’re not of tactical significance. And yet, they are still concealed. So, what is the purpose of concealing them?
AMY GOODMAN: What are the documents you’re talking about, are still concealed?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, essentially, all this material, all these 400,000 reports have been kept by the Pentagon. The only reason that the public are seeing them now is that some brave soldier or soldiers stepped forward to give us this material and get it out into the public domain, where it can shape public policy and do some good.
AMY GOODMAN: Not only Britain has responded saying they are calling for an investigation, but the latest news right now out of—out of Denmark, I believe, the—let’s see if I can find it here. The Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen promised all allegations according to which Danish soldiers may have knowingly handed over detainees in Iraq to mistreatment at the hands of local authorities are regarded as very serious. But the Prime Minister also rejected calls by the opposition to establish an independent commission to investigate the claims. Have you, Julian Assange, redacted any of these close to 400,000 documents? And how did you communicate with the Pentagon beforehand?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, so, we look at the claims made by the Pentagon last week, that they had saw 300 names in this material. That was their material. And they admitted early this week that in what we released, there are none of those 300 names. None whatsoever. So, we went through a harm minimization process, like we do with every release of our material. And we asked, back for the—back when dealing—at the time, in dealing with Afghanistan and after, for the Pentagon and the ISAF’s assistance in this. The Pentagon stated to us very clearly, including in a letter from its—from the DOD’s chief counsel, that they were not interested in harm minimization. They were not an organization that were interested in harm minimization, and they would not be assisting us. And they were only interested in, in fact, demanding, under the threat of compulsion, that we return and destroy all of this.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain Frago 242, the—and 039, and how US leadership might be implicated in torture?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Frago 242 is a classified order that we managed to discover after reviewing this material. It wasn’t included in the material itself, but we managed to explore it and get it from some of our sources, that shows that—an order that the US military not intervene in these cases of Iraqi police and Iraqi officials committing torture. We can also see cases where people have been deliberately handed over to some of the most abusive groups, most abusive police groups, in Iraq, in what looks to be an intentional sort of torture laundering, a sort of internal torture rendition in Iraq.
Now, there’s an extraordinary piece of footage, which we included in the Channel 4 documentary that was released yesterday on this subject, of the chief of staff, at a press conference with Donald Rumsfeld, responding to a question by a reporter along these lines of what action US forces must take if they see torture or other forms of abuse. And the chief of staff said, "Well, they must intervene where they can," and was corrected by Donald Rumsfeld, in saying, "No, no, they don’t. They don’t have to intervene." And in fact, it turns out that Rumsfeld was right, and presumably Rumsfeld knew the existence of this order 242 much better than the chief of staff, because he had been involved in the drafting of that order.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me play that interaction. We played it yesterday. But it’s very interesting. General Peter Pace, followed by Donald Rumsfeld. This is from November 2005.
GEN. PETER PACE: It is absolutely the responsibility of every US service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it. It’s to report it.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, and you’ll find, in the longer version of that clip, Pace says, "No, no, no, that they have an obligation to physically intervene." Not true. And not also subsequently re-corrected by Rumsfeld. But Rumsfeld was right. Frago 242 says explicitly that that is not to happen, that there is not to be a physical intervention. And arguably, the US, at that period, was the controlling organ in the situation. It had effective control on the ground, and so, under international law, it is the responsible party having effective control.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I want to read for you from the Washington Post editorial in today’s paper. They write, quote, "In Afghanistan, Wikileaks appears to have put the lives of courageous Afghans at risk, by identifying them as American sources. In Iraq, it has at least temporarily complicated negotiations to form a new government.
"We are all for the disclosure of important government information; but Mr. Assange’s reckless and politically motivated approach, while causing tangible harm, has shed relatively little light."
Now, that’s not a general speaking in the United States; that’s the Washington Post. I wanted you to respond to that, but also, interestingly, Ellen Knickmeyer, former Washington Post Baghdad chief during much of the war, writes in the Daily Beast, "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." Julian?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, well, those statements in the Washington Post of "tangible harm" are simply false. And that’s not me making that allegation. It’s not our people making that allegation. We just need to look at what the statements of the Department of Defense have been last week and this week, that there is no Afghan civilian or anyone else that they can determine who has been harmed by release of the Afghan material; the statement by NATO in Kabul last week, that there was not even anyone that they could see that needed protecting or moving as a result of the release of that material. The Australian government has just completed a review, Australian Defense Department completed a review of that material, the Afghan release, and published a press release this morning saying that they could find no harm to individuals as a result of that material. So, the Washington Post editorial is simply untrue. So, there’s a question as to why a newspaper like that feels that they need to make untrue statements. What are they catering for?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, the Washington Post editorial also takes a different stance on the reports of deaths of civilians in Iraq. It reads, quote, "The report confirms that the vast majority of Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by other Iraqis, not by coalition forces; claims such as those published by the British journal The Lancet that American forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands are the real 'attack on truth.'" Julian Assange?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States. And I would have to say the situation is worse in tabloid journalism—craven behavior by a number of mainstream media organizations. So, let’s dissect that statement. The Lancet study did not say, in fact, who had caused these excess deaths. That was an epidemiological study, where deaths could have been caused by many different types of violence, disease and so on. Those were, if you like, the missing people in the Iraqi population.
Similarly, our material, which is told from the US perspective, probably only covers about 50 percent of US military—of military operations. It doesn’t include British operations, doesn’t include CIA, doesn’t include special forces, doesn’t include top-secret operations. But nonetheless, it sometimes touches on those, when there is a combined operation. It lists internally declared 66,000 civilian casualties between 2004 and the end of 2009, with two missing months.
And yes, the majority of those are listed as those who have been killed by sectarian violence, but it is the Iraq war and the mismanagement of the Iraq war that caused that sectarian violence. So, you know, organizations such as Iraq Body Count, which has the sort of most detailed and rigorous individual counting, as opposed to statistical surveys of death, individual cases that are recorded, it also has the majority of deaths caused—civilian deaths caused by civilian violence. But it still counts those as civilians killed by violence as a result of the war, and correctly so.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, we’re going to break and then come back. We’re speaking to Julian Assange. He’s the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, which has just posted the largest release of documents, of military documents in history. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. After we speak with him, we’ll be talking about the outbreak of cholera in Haiti.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Julian Assange. He’s the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, which has released—well, posted at wikileaks.org close to 400,000 Iraq war logs—military documents written by soldiers, by military officials over the years—what exactly are the years? 2004 right until 2010, Julian?
JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s correct, excluding two months in 2004 that are missing for reasons we don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian, you have seen these thousands and thousands of documents. What most surprised you? Is there a story or stories, a category that has most disturbed you?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s the big picture of the war, that nearly all the deaths are in incidences that kill just one or two people. A little girl on the street, who would—in a yellow dress, who would frequently go to collect candy and so on from US troops, one day a tank goes past, and for an inexplicable reason, a shooter comes out of the US tank and blows her away. There are just so many of these incidences.
You know, I spoke before about checkpoint killings. In one incident, after a car was shot up and examined, according to these internal US military reports, the man killed was a doctor delivering a pregnant woman to the hospital.
We see a very interesting example of a town of 40,000 on the Syrian border, whose population went from 40,000 to 2,000 over a year or so. And that town and that circumstance has not been reported in any—not been reported at all, that we could find in the mainstream media or, in fact, in the alternative media. There was just no reporters there as that town collapsed and people fled across to Syria.
There—you know, I like to describe the big tragedy of war, the killings on every—on almost every street corner in Baghdad, as—it’s the car accidents of war and not the bus accidents of war, that actually—
AMY GOODMAN: It looks like we have just lost Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder. Satellite just cut off to Britain. We’ll see if we can get him back, but we’ll move on to our next segment. Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, editor-in-chief. We will also provide the transcript online at democracynow.org of this whole conversation. It will be in video and audio podcast, and you can link to it. And, of course, we’ll link to the documents.
----------------------------
AMY GOODMAN: We are going to turn back now to London, because we’ve just reconnected with Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Julian, we just have a few more minutes, and I wanted to ask you about the targeting of you. You said that the company responsible for collecting WikiLeaks’ donations terminated its account after the US and Australia placed the group on blacklists, the company called Moneybookers. What evidence do you have of this? Also, you’ve been denied Swedish residency. You sound very much like you are on the run, that you feel under siege.
JULIAN ASSANGE: [inaudible] under siege and that we have to go through some extraordinary security procedures at the moment and shore up—
AMY GOODMAN: Julian, can you start again? We just got your sound up. Julian, just start again, because we just got your sound up.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: The question about you being under siege.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, yeah. Oh, there’s no doubt that this organization is under siege. There was a direct demand made by the Pentagon that we destroy all previous publications, all upcoming publications—an incredible demand for prior restraint on a media organization by a military—and that we cease dealing with US military whistleblowers.
My Swedish residency application was denied for reasons that still remain secret.
One week after the release of the Afghan war diaries, our donation credit card processing company Moneybookers, the second biggest on the internet after Paypal, terminated our accounts, and we were forwarded an email by the security department explaining the situation to the account manager, which was that we were on a US watchlist and an Australian government blacklist and to see the current controversy in relation to Afghanistan. Fortunately, we have just now managed to get up an Icelandic-based credit card processing scheme, so donors can once again donate there.
The Australian attorney general stated that he would assist any country anywhere in the world to prosecute us over these disclosures and that, when asked the question, had he provided intelligence assistance, something that we have evidence of, said, "Well, yes, we help countries from time to time, but I won’t comment directly on that matter."
And we know the Icelandic government has been publicly pressured to not be a safe haven for our publishing activities or for me personally.
The Swedish government has been pressured at the intelligence agency level to its body SAPO. When I left Sweden on the 27th of September, my—to a flight to Berlin on SAS, one of the world’s most—if not the world’s most reputable airline—my luggage disappeared. That was the—I was the only case in that plane. It was a direct flight with the Schengen zone in Europe. And SAS—
AMY GOODMAN: Julian, we only have five seconds.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you planning to release the remainder of the Afghan war documents?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, we are working on that and a number of other—
Government harassing and intimidating Bradley Manning supporters
By
Glenn Greenwald
In July of this year, U.S. citizen Jacob Appelbaum, a researcher and spokesman for WikiLeaks, was
detained for several hours at the Newark airport after returning from a trip to Holland, and had his
laptop, cellphones and other electronic products seized -- all without a search warrant, without being charged with a crime, and without even being under investigation, at least to his knowledge. He was interrogated at length about WikiLekas, and was told by the detaining agents that he could expect to be subjected to the same treatment every time he left the country and attempted to return to the U.S. Days later,
two FBI agents approached him at a computer conference he was attending in New York and asked to speak with him again. To date, he has never been charged with any crime or even told he's under investigation for anything; this was clearly a thuggish attempt by federal officials to intimidate any American citizen involved with or supporting WikiLeaks.
That campaign of intimidation is now clearly spreading to supporters of Bradley Manning. Last Wednesday, November 3, David House, a 23-year-old researcher who works at MIT, was returning to the U.S. from a short vacation with his girlfriend in Mexico, and was subjected to similar and even worse treatment. House's crime: he did work in helping set up the
Bradley Manning Support Network, an organization created to raise money for Manning's legal defense fund, and he has now visited Manning three times in Quantico, Virginia, where the accused WikiLeaks leaker is currently being detained (all those visits are fully monitored by government agents). Like Appelbaum, House has never been accused of any crime, never been advised that he's under investigation, and was never told by any federal agents that he's suspected of any wrongdoing at all.
Last Wednesday, House arrived at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and his flight was met in the concourse by customs agents, who examined the passports of all deplaning passengers until they saw House's, at which point they stopped. He was then directed to Customs, where his and his girlfriend's bags were extensively searched. After the search was complete, two men identifying themselves as Homeland Security officials told House and his girlfriend they were being detained for questioning and would miss their connecting flight. House was told that he was required to relinquish all of his electronic products, and thus gave them his laptop, cellphone, digital camera and UBS flash drive. The document he received itemizing his seized property is
here. He was also told to give the agents all of his passwords and encryption keys, which he refused to do.
House was then taken to a detention room by two armed agents and on his way there, he passed by a room in which several individuals were plugging various instruments into his laptop and cellphone. The two agents, Marcial Santiago and Darin Louck, proceeded to question him for 90 minutes about why he was visiting Manning in prison, what work he did to support the Manning campaign, who else was involved in the Manning support group, and what his views were on WikiLeaks. He was told that he would not receive his laptop or camera back, and the agents kept it. To date, he has not received them back and very well may never. When he told them that he had roughly 20 hours of source code work in his laptop and would like to save it or email it to a saved site, they told him he could not do that. He subsequently learned from Agent Santiago that although Agent Louck identified himself as a Homeland Security agent, he is, in fact, with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
What's going on is here obvious. The Federal Government has the authority to conduct border searches of people entering the country that are far broader than for those inside the country, and such searches require no search warrant. The Government has that power in order to prevent security threats from entering the country, but here, they are clearly exploiting and abusing it in order to conduct investigative searches which would ordinarily require a search warrant but for which they have no basis to obtain one (in his effort to justify what he did in turning in Manning, Adrian Lamo --
the least credible person on the planet -- has been attempting to convince federal authorities that WikiLeaks is not merely a publisher of classified information, but an "epsionage" ring that affirmatively induces leaks, thus enabling its prosecution; to achieve that, he has
repeatedly claimed, without a shred of evidence, that MIT students actively assisted Manning in obtaining and leaking the information; in any event, House is not and never was an MIT student). American citizens who are charged with no crime and not under investigation should not have their
laptops permanently seized and searched by law enforcement officials
in the absence of reasonable suspcision that they did something wrong.
The real purpose of this conduct is to intimidate and deter anyone from being involved in any way with WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning. And it works. I had been invited to go and speak with Manning at Quantico, and still fully intend to do that -- I think Manning, if he did what he's accused of, is the most heroic political figure of the last decade at least -- but of course incidents like these, as intended, implant in your brain the fear that if you do go visit Manning -- or if you donate money to his legal defense fund, donate to WikiLeaks, or otherwise support them in any manner whatsoever -- then you, too, will be put on some list and have your property seized and searched with no search warrant when entering the country, and otherwise harassed and intimidated by the Executive Branch's police agencies. It's bad enough that the Obama administration has
escalated attacks on whistle-blowers through vastly increased prosecutions, but this level of intimidation is clearly targeting legitimate political activity. It now goes far beyond prosecuting whistle-blowers and is intended to harrass and deter those who are merely supportive of them.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_...index.html
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