23-10-2010, 04:02 AM
From http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/ :
Beaten, Shocked, Eyes Gouged: Iraq Abuse, WikiLeaked
![[Image: 091809-Bucca-full.jpg]](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/10/091809-Bucca-full.jpg)
Torture was a signature feature of the state terror that Saddam Hussein inflicted on Iraq. The voluminous Iraq-war documents released by WikiLeaks today show that getting rid of Saddam didn’t eradicate the brutal tendencies of the revamped Iraqi security forces. Detainees were roughed up with pipes, knives, cables, electricity — even a cat in the face. Some suspects were so scared, they confessed to being terrorists, just so they could be shipped to the Americans.
WikiLeaks proved at least one thing through its release of nearly 400,000 U.S. military reports from the Iraq war: the brutalization of detainees continued years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, perpetrated largely by Iraqi police and soldiers whom the U.S. trained. In at least one case, Iraqi police even brawled with private security guards. While early press coverage of the WikiLeaked documents has zeroed in on the abuse, it’s barely scratched the surface.
Searching the WikiLeaks Iraq trove for incidents of reported detainee abuse results in literally thousands of accounts of brutality. Some of them involve U.S. troops allegedly inflicting harm upon detainees in their custody. A detainee held by coalition forces in southern Iraq said in February 2006 that a U.S. task force beat him to the point where he lost one of his eyes. “Capture photo depicts a bandage over his right eye, and injury to his right forearm,” a report reads.
Continue Reading “Beaten, Shocked, Eyes Gouged: Iraq Abuse, WikiLeaked” »
Tags: Detainees, Iraq, Iraq's Insanity, Torture, WikiLeaks
[/url][url=http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/chemical-weapons-iranian-agents-and-massive-death-tolls-exposed-in-wikileaks-iraq-docs/]Chemical Weapons, Iranian Agents and Massive Death Tolls Exposed in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs
As the insurgency raged in Iraq, U.S. troops struggling to fight a shadowy enemy killed civilians, witnessed their Iraqi partners abuse detainees and labored to reduce Iran’s influence over the fighting.
None of these phenomena are unfamiliar to observers of the Iraq war. But this afternoon, the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks released a trove of nearly 392,000 U.S. military reports from Iraq that bring a new depth and detail to the horrors of one of America’s most controversial wars ever. We’re still digging through the just-released documents, but here’s a quick overview of what they contain.
(Our sister blog Threat Level looks at how Friday’s document dump could affect Bradley Manning, who’s already charged in other WikiLeaks releases.)
It Was Iran’s War, Too
No one would accuse WikiLeaks of being pro-war. Not when the transparency group titled its single most famous leak “Collateral Murder.” Not when its founder, Julian Assange, said that its trove of reports from the Afghan conflict suggested evidence for thousands of American “war crimes.”
So it’s more than a little ironic that, with its newest document dump from the Iraq campaign, WikiLeaks may have just bolstered one of the Bush administration’s most controversial claims about the Iraq war: that Iran supplied many of the Iraq insurgency’s deadliest weapons and worked hand-in-glove with some of its most lethal militias.
The documents indicate that Iran was a major combatant in the Iraq war, as its elite Quds Force trained Iraqi Shiite insurgents and imported deadly weapons like the shape-charged Explosively Formed Projectile bombs into Iraq for use against civilians, Sunni militants and U.S. troops.
One report from 2006 claims “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons from Iran were smuggled into Iraq. Others indicate that Iran flooded Iraq with guns and rockets, including the Misagh-1 surface-to-air missile, .50 caliber rifles, rockets and much more.
As the New York Times observes, Iranian agents plotted to kidnap U.S. troops from out of their Humvees — something that occurred in Karbala in 2007, leaving five U.S. troops dead. (It’s still not totally clear if the Iranians were responsible.)
Continue Reading “Chemical Weapons, Iranian Agents and Massive Death Tolls Exposed in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs” »
Tags: Iraq, Iraq War Logs, Iraq's Insanity, WikiLeaks
Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs [Bumped]
![[Image: Iraq-107.jpg]](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/10/Iraq-107.jpg)
The Afghanistan war logs were just the beginning. Coming as early as next week, WikiLeaks plans to disclose a new trove of military documents, this time covering some of the toughest years of the Iraq war. Up to 400,000 reports from 2004 to 2009 could be revealed this time — five times the size of the Afghan document dump.
It’s a perilous time in Iraq. Politicians are stitching together a new government. U.S. troops are supposed to leave by next December.
Pentagon leaders were furious over the Afghanistan documents, but the American public largely greeted them with yawns. Iraqis might not be so sanguine.
It’s hard to imagine Iraq will fall back into widespread chaos over the disclosures. But they can’t be good for the United States, as it tries to create a new postwar relationship with Iraq, or for the 50,000 U.S. troops and diplomats still over there.
Will 400,000 Secret Iraq War Documents Restore WikiLeaks’ Sheen?
After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in U.S. history.
Measured by size, the database will dwarf the 92,000-entry Afghan war log WikiLeaks partially published last July. “It will be huge,” says a source familiar with WikiLeaks’ operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Former WikiLeaks staffers say the document dump was at one time scheduled for Monday, October 18, though the publication date may well have been moved since then. Some large media outlets were provided an embargoed copy of the database in August.
In Washington, the Pentagon is bracing for the impact. The Defense Department believes the leak is a compilation of the “Significant Activities,” or SIGACTS, reports from the Iraq War, and officials have assembled a 120-person taskforce that’s been scouring the database to prepare for the leak, according to spokesman Col. Dave Lapan.
“They’ve been doing that analysis for some time and have been providing information to Central Command and to our allies, so that they could prepare for a possible impact of the release [and] could take appropriate steps,” says Lapan. “There are … things that could be contained in the documents that could be harmful to operations, to sources and methods.”
Continue reading on Threat Level …
We don’t know what’s in the documents. But here’s what we’ll be looking to find in the trove — and some unanswered questions that the documents might address.
The Rise of Roadside Bombs
Iraq is more a war. It was a proving ground for today’s signature weapon: the improvised explosive device. Insurgents raided Iraq’s military weapons silos to jury-rig devices set off by a simple cellphone.
Later, they bent bomb casings into cones to form the deadlier Explosively Formed Projectile, essentially a bomb that shoots a jet of molten metal into and through an armored vehicle.
Conflicting reports credited the “superbombs” to Iran, or not. Look to the WikiLeaked documents for supporting evidence either way.
Early on, the military found that its jammers — devices emitting frequencies to block those believed to detonate bombs — didn’t work. Worse, rumor was the jammers actually set the bombs off themselves.
We could be about to learn a lot more about how U.S. forces endured the first new bomb threat of the 21st century.
Abu Ghraib and Missing Jails
The Abu Ghraib detainee-abuse scandal was one of the worst strategic debacles in recent U.S. history. Aides to Gen. David Petraeus candidly said it inspired foreign fighters to join the Iraq insurgency.
Only one prison scandal came to light after Abu Ghraib: torture at the Special Ops facility known as “Camp Nama.” But journalists lost visibility into how the United States ran its detention complex in Iraq. Only in 2007, when Petraeus put Maj. Gen. Doug Stone in charge of rehabbing captured insurgents, did any sunlight return.
What happened for three years in the U.S. jails where tens of thousands of Iraqis were held?
Lost U.S. Guns
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2007 that the military had simply lost nearly 200,000 AK-47s and pistols it intended for Iraqi soldiers and police. Its documentation was a mess in 2004 and ‘05, when Petraeus ran the training mission. Many of those guns are believed to have made their way to the black market and to insurgents.
The leaks may shed some light on how thousands of guns fell off the back of a truck.
Continue Reading “Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs [Bumped]” »
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/#ixzz139BpNlxY
Beaten, Shocked, Eyes Gouged: Iraq Abuse, WikiLeaked
- By Spencer Ackerman
![[Image: envelope.gif]](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/wp-content/themes/wired/images/envelope.gif)
- October 22, 2010 |
- 9:34 pm |
- Categories: Iraq
Torture was a signature feature of the state terror that Saddam Hussein inflicted on Iraq. The voluminous Iraq-war documents released by WikiLeaks today show that getting rid of Saddam didn’t eradicate the brutal tendencies of the revamped Iraqi security forces. Detainees were roughed up with pipes, knives, cables, electricity — even a cat in the face. Some suspects were so scared, they confessed to being terrorists, just so they could be shipped to the Americans.
WikiLeaks proved at least one thing through its release of nearly 400,000 U.S. military reports from the Iraq war: the brutalization of detainees continued years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, perpetrated largely by Iraqi police and soldiers whom the U.S. trained. In at least one case, Iraqi police even brawled with private security guards. While early press coverage of the WikiLeaked documents has zeroed in on the abuse, it’s barely scratched the surface.
Searching the WikiLeaks Iraq trove for incidents of reported detainee abuse results in literally thousands of accounts of brutality. Some of them involve U.S. troops allegedly inflicting harm upon detainees in their custody. A detainee held by coalition forces in southern Iraq said in February 2006 that a U.S. task force beat him to the point where he lost one of his eyes. “Capture photo depicts a bandage over his right eye, and injury to his right forearm,” a report reads.
Continue Reading “Beaten, Shocked, Eyes Gouged: Iraq Abuse, WikiLeaked” »
Tags: Detainees, Iraq, Iraq's Insanity, Torture, WikiLeaks
[/url][url=http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/chemical-weapons-iranian-agents-and-massive-death-tolls-exposed-in-wikileaks-iraq-docs/]Chemical Weapons, Iranian Agents and Massive Death Tolls Exposed in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs
- By Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman
- October 22, 2010 |
- 7:12 pm |
- Categories: Iraq
As the insurgency raged in Iraq, U.S. troops struggling to fight a shadowy enemy killed civilians, witnessed their Iraqi partners abuse detainees and labored to reduce Iran’s influence over the fighting.
None of these phenomena are unfamiliar to observers of the Iraq war. But this afternoon, the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks released a trove of nearly 392,000 U.S. military reports from Iraq that bring a new depth and detail to the horrors of one of America’s most controversial wars ever. We’re still digging through the just-released documents, but here’s a quick overview of what they contain.
(Our sister blog Threat Level looks at how Friday’s document dump could affect Bradley Manning, who’s already charged in other WikiLeaks releases.)
It Was Iran’s War, Too
No one would accuse WikiLeaks of being pro-war. Not when the transparency group titled its single most famous leak “Collateral Murder.” Not when its founder, Julian Assange, said that its trove of reports from the Afghan conflict suggested evidence for thousands of American “war crimes.”
So it’s more than a little ironic that, with its newest document dump from the Iraq campaign, WikiLeaks may have just bolstered one of the Bush administration’s most controversial claims about the Iraq war: that Iran supplied many of the Iraq insurgency’s deadliest weapons and worked hand-in-glove with some of its most lethal militias.
The documents indicate that Iran was a major combatant in the Iraq war, as its elite Quds Force trained Iraqi Shiite insurgents and imported deadly weapons like the shape-charged Explosively Formed Projectile bombs into Iraq for use against civilians, Sunni militants and U.S. troops.
One report from 2006 claims “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons from Iran were smuggled into Iraq. Others indicate that Iran flooded Iraq with guns and rockets, including the Misagh-1 surface-to-air missile, .50 caliber rifles, rockets and much more.
As the New York Times observes, Iranian agents plotted to kidnap U.S. troops from out of their Humvees — something that occurred in Karbala in 2007, leaving five U.S. troops dead. (It’s still not totally clear if the Iranians were responsible.)
Continue Reading “Chemical Weapons, Iranian Agents and Massive Death Tolls Exposed in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs” »
Tags: Iraq, Iraq War Logs, Iraq's Insanity, WikiLeaks
Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs [Bumped]
- By Spencer Ackerman
- October 22, 2010 |
- 4:00 pm |
- Categories: Iraq
The Afghanistan war logs were just the beginning. Coming as early as next week, WikiLeaks plans to disclose a new trove of military documents, this time covering some of the toughest years of the Iraq war. Up to 400,000 reports from 2004 to 2009 could be revealed this time — five times the size of the Afghan document dump.
It’s a perilous time in Iraq. Politicians are stitching together a new government. U.S. troops are supposed to leave by next December.
Pentagon leaders were furious over the Afghanistan documents, but the American public largely greeted them with yawns. Iraqis might not be so sanguine.
It’s hard to imagine Iraq will fall back into widespread chaos over the disclosures. But they can’t be good for the United States, as it tries to create a new postwar relationship with Iraq, or for the 50,000 U.S. troops and diplomats still over there.
Will 400,000 Secret Iraq War Documents Restore WikiLeaks’ Sheen?
After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in U.S. history.
Measured by size, the database will dwarf the 92,000-entry Afghan war log WikiLeaks partially published last July. “It will be huge,” says a source familiar with WikiLeaks’ operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Former WikiLeaks staffers say the document dump was at one time scheduled for Monday, October 18, though the publication date may well have been moved since then. Some large media outlets were provided an embargoed copy of the database in August.
In Washington, the Pentagon is bracing for the impact. The Defense Department believes the leak is a compilation of the “Significant Activities,” or SIGACTS, reports from the Iraq War, and officials have assembled a 120-person taskforce that’s been scouring the database to prepare for the leak, according to spokesman Col. Dave Lapan.
“They’ve been doing that analysis for some time and have been providing information to Central Command and to our allies, so that they could prepare for a possible impact of the release [and] could take appropriate steps,” says Lapan. “There are … things that could be contained in the documents that could be harmful to operations, to sources and methods.”
Continue reading on Threat Level …
We don’t know what’s in the documents. But here’s what we’ll be looking to find in the trove — and some unanswered questions that the documents might address.
The Rise of Roadside Bombs
Iraq is more a war. It was a proving ground for today’s signature weapon: the improvised explosive device. Insurgents raided Iraq’s military weapons silos to jury-rig devices set off by a simple cellphone.
Later, they bent bomb casings into cones to form the deadlier Explosively Formed Projectile, essentially a bomb that shoots a jet of molten metal into and through an armored vehicle.
Conflicting reports credited the “superbombs” to Iran, or not. Look to the WikiLeaked documents for supporting evidence either way.
Early on, the military found that its jammers — devices emitting frequencies to block those believed to detonate bombs — didn’t work. Worse, rumor was the jammers actually set the bombs off themselves.
We could be about to learn a lot more about how U.S. forces endured the first new bomb threat of the 21st century.
Abu Ghraib and Missing Jails
The Abu Ghraib detainee-abuse scandal was one of the worst strategic debacles in recent U.S. history. Aides to Gen. David Petraeus candidly said it inspired foreign fighters to join the Iraq insurgency.
Only one prison scandal came to light after Abu Ghraib: torture at the Special Ops facility known as “Camp Nama.” But journalists lost visibility into how the United States ran its detention complex in Iraq. Only in 2007, when Petraeus put Maj. Gen. Doug Stone in charge of rehabbing captured insurgents, did any sunlight return.
What happened for three years in the U.S. jails where tens of thousands of Iraqis were held?
Lost U.S. Guns
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2007 that the military had simply lost nearly 200,000 AK-47s and pistols it intended for Iraqi soldiers and police. Its documentation was a mess in 2004 and ‘05, when Petraeus ran the training mission. Many of those guns are believed to have made their way to the black market and to insurgents.
The leaks may shed some light on how thousands of guns fell off the back of a truck.
Continue Reading “Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs [Bumped]” »
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/#ixzz139BpNlxY
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"