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October 25, 2010
The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks has released up to 400,000 US intelligence reports on the Iraq War from the start of 2004 until the end of 2009 leaked from the Pentagon's secret archives on the Iraq war. The disclosure is the biggest leak in US history, far more than the 91,000 Afghanistan war logs WikiLeaks released this summer, and it includes evidence of 15,000 more civilian deaths than initially reported. Adding those deaths to 107,000 others that had been recorded by the group Iraq Body Count, WikiLeaks has estimated the civilian toll since 2003 at more than 120,000.
Iraq appears to have been a bloodbath on every corner. Most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis and these were caused by systematic sectarian cleansing.
The latest leak--the Iraq war logs ---shows that the US-led military knew that Iraqi police, soldiers and national guards, that they were training and equipping, were torturing detainees and in some cases beating them to death. The documents describe scenes of torture by Iraqi forces of Iraqi detainees, involving acid, drills, hosepipes, lit cigarettes, and rape.
WikiLeaks, has redefined whistle-blowing by gathering secrets in bulk, storing them beyond the reach of governments and others determined to retrieve them, then releasing them instantly, and globally. The response from the Obama administration is an aggressive pursuit of whistle-blowers and it is trying to close down WikiLeaks. As Daniel Ellsberg observed, “Secrecy is essential to empire.”
Civilian deaths is what was ignored by those in favour of the war-- officials in the US, UK and Australia consistently downplayed the numbers of civilians they killed – or denied killing any at all. Glenn Greenward at Salon points out that there is now:
a major, coordinated effort underway to smear WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, and to malign his mental health -- all as a means of distracting attention away from these highly disturbing revelations and to impede the ability of WikiLeaks to further expose government secrets and wrongdoing with its leaks. But now, the smear campaign is led not by Executive Branch officials, but by members of the establishment media.
The strategy in the "establishment media" ---the media that serves the Government's interests, sidies with government and military officials, and attacks government critics--- is that Julian Assange must have his character smeared and his psychiatric health maligned. The whistle-blower is a psychologically ill, America-hating subversive and paranoid narcissist.
Update
The Republican media--- eg., the war cheerleaders on Fox News--just want Julian Assange taken out because he is conducting an act of political warfare against the United States.
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Lots of interesting developments in the USA following the release of the documents. Many, as you suggest Gary, are attempts to distract attention from the content by attacking the leakers. Others are quite funny, like the argument that because a few corroded, useless old mustard gas shells were eventually found buried somewhere, and someone had a chemical factory in their house, it proves there really were WMDs in Iraq all along. Bush was right!
However I sense that the Americans are in the process of doing what Australians did several years ago: wipe Iraq from their collective consciousness. The UN has reported that '[a] UNHCR poll of Iraqis who have returned to Baghdad from neighbouring countries found that physical insecurity, economic hardship and a lack of basic public services has led the majority to regret their decision to return to Iraq.' And that's just the handful who were motivated enough to return.
Iraq and Afghanistan remain the countries of origin of almost half the world's refugees but that doesn't appear to register with the people who keep trying to justify the invasions and occupations. They continue to pretend that we are liberators, bringing freedom and democracy to the oppressed masses of Islamofasciststan.