Iraq War documents leak

The Iraq War documents leak is the disclosure to WikiLeaks of 391,832 United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 and published on the Internet on 2010. The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths. The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians. It is the biggest leak in the military history of the United States, surpassing the Afghan War documents leak of 25 July 2010.

The logs led to news reports of previously unknown or unconfirmed events that took place during the war.

Civilian casualties

The Iraq Body Count project estimated 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government based on an extrapolation of a sample of the deaths found in about 800 logs. Although American and British officials had denied any official record of civilian deaths, the logs released by WikiLeaks showed 66,081 civilian deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities for the period from 1 January 2004 to 31 December 2009. As of 2 January 2013, the IBC has added a total of 3,334 of these previously unrecorded civilian deaths to its database from their ongoing analysis of the war logs.
Some civilian deaths were classified as enemy casualties, such as the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike by US helicopter gunships which killed two Reuters journalists along with several men thought to be armed and suspected to be insurgents. They, including the journalists, were listed as "enemy killed in action".
According to Al Jazeera English, some of the leaked documents describe how almost 700 civilians were killed by US troops for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill. At least a half-dozen incidents involved Iraqi men transporting pregnant family members to hospitals.
The New York Times said the reports contain evidence of many abuses, including civilian deaths committed by contractors. The New York Times points 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 14 May 2005, an American unit "observed a Blackwater PSD shoot up a civ vehicle" killing a father and wounding his wife and daughter.

Iraqi - Western coalition human rights abuses

The logs corroborate previous allegations that the US military handed over many prisoners to the Iraqi Wolf Brigade which was accused of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills, and executing suspects. According to The Guardian, the logs also show that "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers." The coalition, had "a formal policy of ignoring such allegations", unless the allegations involved coalition forces.
Wired Magazine reported that abuse of prisoners or detainees by Iraqi security forces continued even after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident came to light in 2004. In one recorded case, US troops confiscated a "hand cranked generator with wire clamps" from a Baghdad police station, after a detainee claimed to have been brutalised there.
One report analysed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism seemed to show a US military Apache helicopter gunship open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender.
According to Dagbladet Information, Danish soldiers "passed on responsibility for a much higher number of prisoners to Iraqi police than had previously been made public. The practice continued even though the coalition witnessed, and was repeatedly warned of widespread torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the hands of the Iraqi police."

Foreign training and support for insurgents

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 penetrator bombs into Iraq for use against civilians, Sunni militants and U.S. troops."
It was reported in the Boston Globe that the documents show Iraqi operatives being trained by Hezbollah in precision military-style kidnappings. Reports also included incidents of US surveillance aircraft lost deep in Iranian territory.

Miscellaneous

According to The Australian, a document from December 2006 described a plan by a Shia militia commander to kidnap US soldiers in Baghdad in late 2006 or early 2007. The Australian also reported that "detainee testimony" and "a captured militant's diary" are cited among the documents, in order to demonstrate "how Iran provided Iraqi militias with weapons such as rockets and lethal roadside bombs."
According to The New York Times, the trove of documents released by WikiLeaks in October 2010 "portrays the long history of tensions between Kurds and Arabs in the north of Iraq and reveals the fears of some American units about what might happen after American troops leave the country by the end of 2011."
An analysis published by The Jerusalem Post argued the leaked documents indicates a double standard in the international community views of human rights towards Israel's military policy.
An editorial in The Washington Post said that the leak "mainly demonstrates that the truth about Iraq 'already has been told', while it 'has at least temporarily complicated negotiations to form a new government'". The editor also charged that "claims such as those published by the British journal The Lancet that American forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands are the real 'attack on truth.'"
After criticism over the Afghan War documents leak, WikiLeaks redacted more information from the Iraq War documents. Julian Assange explained that this was to stop people distracting from the message contained in the material.

Responses

Media coverage

WikiLeaks made the documents available under embargo to a number of media organisations: Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Iraq Body Count project. In October 2010, it was reported that WikiLeaks was planning to release up to 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq War. Julian Assange initially denied the reports, stating: "WikiLeaks does not speak about upcoming releases dates, indeed, with very rare exceptions we do not communicate any specific information about upcoming releases, since that simply provides fodder for abusive organizations to get their spin machines ready." The Guardian reported on 21 October 2010 that it had received almost 400,000 Iraq war documents from WikiLeaks. On 22 October 2010, Al Jazeera was the first to release analyses of the leak, dubbed The War Logs. WikiLeaks posted a tweet that "Al Jazeera have broken our embargo by 30 minutes. We release everyone from their Iraq War Logs embargoes." This prompted other news organisations to release their articles based on the source material.
Upon the lifting of the embargo, the media coverage by these groups was followed by further coverage by other media organisations. The Guardian said that "the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers were accused by web publications and some bloggers of downplaying the extent to which the documents revealed US complicity in torture and provided evidence that politicians in Washington "lied" about the failures of the US military mission". Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com commented that "media outlets around the world prominently highlighted this revelation, but not The New York Times", calling their coverage of the document leak "subservient" to the Pentagon. UK papers including The Independent and The Daily Telegraph called the War Logs an indictment of the war that "must be investigated not ignored for the sake of political expediency".
Slate wrote the "bigger finding" was that "most Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by other Iraqis" and that "while some American guards behaved horrendously toward Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, Iraqi police and soldiers have behaved much worse". Other writers said the War Logs highlighted the danger of Iran in Iraq and "may well derail the formation of a government by implicating caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in running death squads". Max Boot wrote that the documents "don't tell us much that we didn't already know in broad outline".

International organisations

The UN's chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, states that "if the files released through WikiLeaks pointed to clear violations of the United Nations Convention Against Torture the Obama administration had an obligation to investigate them." The convention, according to Nowak, forbids the US from turning over detainees to the Iraqi government, if doing so meant they might be subjected to torture. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay said that "the US and Iraq should investigate claims of abuse contained in files published on the WikiLeaks website". In addition, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak called "for a wider inquiry to include alleged US abuses."
Hamit Dardagan, co-founder of the Iraq Body Count project, said that the publication of the Iraq War logs had revealed specific details about 15,000 previously unreported violent deaths of Iraqi civilians. Dardagan said that, for some of the deaths, WikiLeaks provided "hitherto undisclosed identifying details including their names — no small matter when so many Iraqi families were still desperately searching for their missing loved ones".