25-10-2010, 06:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 26-10-2010, 09:57 AM by Peter Lemkin.)
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.....
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.....
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass