The Iraq War Logs Ten Years Later
Ten years ago, Wikileaks released the Iraq War Logs — approximately 400,000 secret US Army field reports. The reports detail torture, executions, war crimes, and how the US and other coalition forces ignored, encouraged, and used these tactics in their military operations.
Wikileaks provided these war logs to news media outlets like Der Speigel, The Guardian, and the BBC before posting them on the Wikileaks website. The Guardian, Der Spiegel, BBC, etc. reported on the Iraq War logs, as did hundreds of news media outlets.
This October marks the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War Logs. Aside from some outliers, virtually nothing is written about them, a stunningly obvious correlation to the silence surrounding any international reporting on the US extradition trial of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.
The contents of these documents verify what many had thought during the invasion and occupation and throughout the war. That US-led forces committed war crimes, and tens of thousands of civilian deaths were unaccounted for and dismissed.
The original Guardian story “Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture” released Friday, Oct 22, 2010, notes in its subhead, “massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse,” and “15,000 unknown civilian death in war.” Hundreds of reports showed systematic torture, abuse, rape, and murder and went uninvestigated by US authorities. After US and UK officials claimed “no official record of civilian casualties exists,” the leaked logs exposed records of 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of 109,000 fatalities note the Guardian. Iraq Body Count, who monitors civilian casualties, identified 15,000 previously unknown deaths resulting from the leaked army logs.
Perhaps the most famous incident is titled “collateral Murder.” A video of an Apache gunship murdering 19 civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, and wounding two children. That same gunship, Crazyhorse 1–8, slaughtered two men attempting to surrender a year earlier in 2007. An army lawyer told the helicopter crew, “they can not surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets.”
The “Collateral Murder” video captured three war crimes committed by the US gunship and army troops on the ground in that incident alone. The initial killing and wounding of civilians, the second follow up killing and wounding a civilian rescue attempt. The third is the defiling of dead bodies by an army jeep. At the time, a US press release described the incident as a “Firefight in New Baghdad. US, Iraqi forces kill 9 insurgents, detain 13.”
“Look at those dead bastards,” pilot one says.
“Nice,” the other says.
The “Collateral Murder” release was the single most damaging leak for the US during the Iraq war. The video also exposed the US military actively lying and covering up the incident. They called civilians “insurgents” to obfuscate the deaths. When Reuters news questioned the US military, they lied about the event. Those who committed the acts would face little repercussions.
The crimes of “collateral Murder” are not merely those of individuals within the Apache gunship. They are one example of systematic and structural evidence of how the US operates globally and how it shields the public from its wars’ brutality and barbarism.
Another Iraq war Log revelation was “frago” (fragmentary order) 242: an order to officers that the higher-ups would not be investigated, and any “Iraqi on Iraq abuse” and torture committed would be ignored.
One log detailed an example of torture. Suspected army officers cut off a man’s fingers and burned him with acid.
Yet, another log tells a story about Iraqi army soldiers in Talafar, pushing a detainee onto the ground in the street, punching him, then shooting him, executing him.
At the time, Assange noted intimate details of the war should correct attacks on the truth, before, during, and after the war. The US asserted that the official aims of that war were to improve democracy and human conditions, which worsened Iraq’s conditions. Even today, peace is still elusive. Death squads, murders, and torture are widespread.
The Iraq war logs, like the Afghanistan war logs before it, are parallel to the Pentagon Papers of the 1970s, obtained and leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The Pentagon Papers exposed the US military’s war crimes in Vietnam. Bombings, assassinations, village “pacification,” and the murder of countless Vietnamese civilian deaths.
Ellsberg says that the US is attempting to prosecute Assange for exposing war crimes. The US tried to do the same to Ellsberg after the Pentagon Papers leak. The Obama administration considered the possibility of attempting to prosecute Assange. But realizing the implication to the news media, effectively criminalizing it, they refused.
With little to no justice for the crimes committed in Iraq, Chelsea Manning would spend time in jail for releasing classified materials to Wikileaks. She was sentenced to 35 years and would serve six years. Exiting President Obama would commute her sentence.
Like Ellsberg before her, Chelsea Manning made an act of consciousness by leaking classified material to Wikileaks to expose the US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She would serve additional time in jail as she was subpoenaed by a US grand jury to testify against Wikileaks and Julian Assange. She refused and was found in contempt of court and jailed. Speaking to the unfair use of grand juries that force people to testify: “we’ve seen this power abused countless times to target political speech,” she said. “I have nothing to contribute to this case, and I resent being forced to endanger myself by participating in this predatory practice.” It is not wrong to describe her imprisoning as cruel and vindictive.
Ten years later, Assange is in the maximum-security UK Belmarsh prison, in isolation 23 ½ out of 24 hours a day. He is there awaiting extradition by the US government for violating the Espionage Act for his journalism.
Wikileaks published those documents, like the New York Times, the Washington Post and others in the 1970s. Today, many of these same news media outlets accepted awards, congratulations and praise for worthy and necessary reporting on the Iraq and Afghanistan war. Yet, they are silent as Assange is about to be persecuted by the US government for exposing their war crimes. The silence is deafening as the anniversary of these war logs goes virtually unnoticed in the mainstream media.
