They are released from the United States today.
Includes...
* According to the Iraq Body Count project, the logs show there have been around 15,000 more civilian deaths than was previously admitted by the US government. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, out of 109,000 deaths in total. However, due to omissions, the figure cannot be relied upon as a complete record of Iraqi deaths. In contrast, a widely quoted report by The Lancet says that there were 650,000 "excess deaths" caused by the war.
* According to The Guardian, the logs "detail torture [by Iraqi police], summary executions and war crimes", US military officials "ignored torture" and "the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations". Sometimes US troops classified civilian deaths as enemy casualties. For example, the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike by US helicopter gunships which accidently killed two Reuters journalists along with several armed men suspected to be insurgents. They, including the journalists, were all listed as "enemy killed in action".
* According to Wired Magazine, abuse of prisoners by Iraqi troops under US training was more widespread than formerly known. Even after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident came to light in 2004, abuse of prisoners or detainees by Iraqi security forces was common and rarely acted upon; in one recorded case, US troops wrote "no investigation is necessary" in response to prisoners' claims of abuse.
* According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, one report shows that "the US military cleared an Apache helicopter gunship to open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender".
* According to Wired Magazine, "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."
* According to the Boston Globe, US military documents show Iraqi operatives being trained by Hezbollah in precision military style kidnappings. Reports also include incidents of US surveillance aircraft lost deep in Iranian territory.
* According to Al-Jazeera, the documents show that US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill. At least a half-dozen incidents involved Iraqi men transporting their pregnant wives or family members to hospitals. Many of the detainee abuse reports suggest that the US knowingly violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
* According to New York Times, the reports contain evidence of many abuses, including civilian deaths, committed by contractors. The New York Times point out some specific reports, such as one which says "after the IED strike a witness reports the Blackwater employees fired indiscriminately at the scene." In another event on May 14, 2005, an American unit "obseverd a Blackwater PSD shoot up a civ vehicle" killing a father and wounding his wife and daughter.
Topic: Iraq War documents leak (Read 3494 times)
