BREAKING - Wikileaks: Iraq War Logs (Military Gave Secret Order Not to Investigate Torture)

[Hissyspit]

Source: Wikileaks/Al Jazeera/Guardian/New York Times/Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Breaking News: WikLeaks Secret Iraq Files Reveal U.S. Turning Blind Eye to Iraq Torture

WikiLeaks Iraq files reveal torture
Al Jazeera's access to leaked documents reveals secret US military order not to investigate Iraqi torture.

Last Modified: 22 Oct 2010 20:20 GMT

It is the biggest leak of military secrets in history. Al Jazeera has details of nearly 400,000 classified US documents. They are the secret Iraq files, leaked to whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

For the past ten weeks Al Jazeera's had complete access to those files. As part of our forthcoming coverage, we reveal how the US military gave a secret order not to investigate torture by Iraqi authorities discovered by American troops.

VIDEO AT LINK

Read more: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/10/20101022202210771944.html

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PREPARE FOR 'NOTHING NEW IN IRAQ WAR LOGS' SPIN & PUSHBACK - IT'S BULLSHIT - THERE'S PLENTY NEW - H'spit

Anyone who says there is nothing new in these reports is BULLSHITTING you.

WikiLeaks Twitter:

Al Jazeera have broken our embargo by 30 minutes. We release everyone from their Iraq War Log embargoes.

Darn those Muslims!

NEW YORK TIMES:

http://www.nytimes.com/?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1287781258-5iOy3NfUcR9doUmzkbgV+Q

The War Logs

A trove of secret field reprots from Iraq, obtained by the group WikiLeaks sheds new light on such issues as civilian deaths, detainee abuse and the involvement of Iran

From the Field Reports: Civilian Casualties, Abuse of Detainees, Iran's Involveme:

Reports Detail Iran Aid to Iraq Militias

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: October 22, 2010

On Dec. 22, 2006, American military officials in Baghdad issued a secret warning: The Shiite militia commander who had orchestrated the kidnapping of officials from Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education was now hatching plans to take American soldiers hostage.

What made the warning especially worrying were intelligence reports saying that the Iraqi militant, Azhar al-Dulaimi, had been trained by the Middle East’s masters of the dark arts of paramilitary operations: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally.

MORE

Civilians Paid War's Heaviest Toll

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: October 22, 2010

The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.

The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.

But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.

The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.

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Detainees Suffered in Iraqi Hands

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: October 22, 2010

The public image of detainees in Iraq was defined by the photographs, now infamous, of American abuse at Abu Ghraib, like the hooded prisoner and the snarling attack dog. While the documents disclosed by WikiLeaks offer few glimpses of what was happening inside American detention facilities, they do contain indelible details of abuse carried out by Iraq’s army and police.

The six years of reports include references to the deaths of at least six prisoners in Iraqi custody, most of them in recent years. Beatings, burnings and lashings surfaced in hundreds of reports, giving the impression that such treatment was not an exception. In one case, Americans suspected Iraqi Army officers of cutting off a detainee’s fingers and burning him with acid. Two other cases produced accounts of the executions of bound detainees.

And while some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans, most noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored, with the equivalent of an institutional shrug: soldiers told their officers and asked the Iraqis to investigate.

A Pentagon spokesman said American policy on detainee abuse “is and has always been consistent with law and customary international practice.” Current rules, he said, require forces to immediately report abuse; if it was perpetrated by Iraqis, then Iraqi authorities are responsible for investigating.

MOREGUARDIAN's Coverage: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9370124

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture
• Massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse
• 15,000 unknown civilian deaths in war

Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh
guardian.co.uk
Friday 22 October 2010 21.26 BST

A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

MORE

BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM:

http://www.iraqwarlogs.com