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.
As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: "The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him."
The report named at least one perpetrator and was passed to coalition forces. But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries. Some cases of alleged abuse by UK and US troops are also detailed in the logs.
In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".
A Pentagon spokesman told the New York Times this week that under its procedure, when reports of Iraqi abuse were received the US military "notifies the responsible government of Iraq agency or ministry for investigation and follow-up".
The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.
The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.
Iraq Body Count, the London-based group that monitors civilian casualties, says it has identified around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths from the data contained in the leaked war logs.
Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.
This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.
No fewer than 31,780 of these deaths are attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. The other major recorded tally is of 34,814 victims of sectarian killings, recorded as murders in the logs.
However, the US figures appear to be unreliable in respect of civilian deaths caused by their own military activities. For example, in Falluja, the site of two major urban battles in 2004, no civilian deaths are recorded. Yet Iraq Body Count monitors identified more than 1,200 civilians who died during the fighting.
Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers, plans to use material from the logs in court to try to force the UK to hold a public inquiry into the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians.
He also plans to sue the British government over its failure to stop the abuse and torture of detainees by Iraqi forces. The coalition's formal policy of not investigating such allegations is "simply not permissible", he says.
Shiner is already pursuing a series of legal actions for former detainees allegedly killed or tortured by British forces in Iraq.
WikiLeaks says it is posting online the entire set of 400,000 Iraq field reports – in defiance of the Pentagon.
The whistleblowing activists say they have deleted all names from the documents that might result in reprisals. They were accused by the US military of possibly having "blood on their hands" over the previous Afghan release by redacting too few names. But the military recently conceded that no harm had been identified.
Condemning this fresh leak, however, the Pentagon said: "This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment."
Comments in chronological order (Total 716 comments)
22 October 2010 9:32PM
Mr Bush, Mr Blair. Post your comment?
22 October 2010 9:32PM
everyone knows war is like this. That is why waging war is a criminal activity. Let us hope that justice is done to the politicians who started this war.
22 October 2010 9:33PM
Sickening and shameful, we owe these people (Iraq) such a huge debt for the immense fraud we forced upon them.... :-(
22 October 2010 9:34PM
However, the US figures appear to be unreliable
Bet your f**king buns they are.
22 October 2010 9:36PM
I admit I was one of those who supported the war in Iraq. Successive revelations have made me realise that I was naive. I had thought that the UK and USA were a civilising influence in world affairs, but now I'm not so sure..
22 October 2010 9:37PM
war is a bloody and terrible thing paid for by the tax payers, apparently for our own good. i, for one, am glad to get some insight into what exactly happens on our behalf.
22 October 2010 9:37PM
There was a whole catalogue of crimes crried out by the USA and UK governments but not one has had his coat felt, some are still plying their trade abd the rest of us are supposed to sit by and do nothing.
Time to follow the French way and get angry.
22 October 2010 9:37PM
See, now that's the 'freedom' the Yanks espouse
22 October 2010 9:38PM
A horrible truth that should never of happened. im not surprised by some of the facts the have been shown where i am saddened to find that those facts are true. if only i was found wrong about it.
Who will be penalised for the this evidence? no one. maybe a slap on the wrist and then they will carry on. These are facts from awhile back. i wonder what may be happening now.
22 October 2010 9:38PM
@Martin Brody
The silence from Tony Bliar will be deafening ... he's too busy raking in the money to bother about this sort of thing now.
And to think, I cheered when that slimeball was elected.
22 October 2010 9:38PM
I was in Basra working in a military hospital in March 2003.
None of this is a surprise to me.
22 October 2010 9:38PM
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22 October 2010 9:38PM
Wow
22 October 2010 9:38PM
I'm sorry but Wikileaks has lost all credibility for me.
22 October 2010 9:39PM
This war is terrible. We need to elect a President in America that promises to end it...
Oh, right.
22 October 2010 9:39PM
This is why millions protested. It was always going to turn out like this with the way the Americans Hawks were rushing in. Tony Blair, shame on you for joing them. You deserve to go to the Hague and answer to the civilised world for your actions.
Well done Wikileaks for exposing their true actions once again.
22 October 2010 9:40PM
Thank you and Wikileaks for covering this. I'm betting it'll hardly be mentioned in the U.S. press except to bemoan the threats to military security.
22 October 2010 9:40PM
@simonralli
what are you sorry about?
22 October 2010 9:40PM
Josia, surely you must have known that there were no WMD and if there were so what hasn't every country a right to defend themselves. Don't get caught out when the buggers attack Iran.
22 October 2010 9:41PM
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22 October 2010 9:41PM
An absolutely abhorrent display of hypocrisy there.
22 October 2010 9:41PM
So in short........
The people of Iraq would have been better off if Saddam Hussein was still in charge.
That's a measure of how low Bush and Blair have fallen in the public eye. They rank behind an evil old dictator.
Still, at least all the weapons of mass destruction are gone, right?
22 October 2010 9:41PM
Shame on us.
Not in my name,
22 October 2010 9:41PM
This is no surprise - it is what happens in war. Why even post it?
22 October 2010 9:42PM
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22 October 2010 9:43PM
This is sad, but not unsurprising. War never changes, after all.
22 October 2010 9:43PM
Bag the culprits, cuff them, and ship them to Gitmo with a selection of slaps? No?
22 October 2010 9:43PM
@SimonRalli
What the hell for? You think they're making this up?
22 October 2010 9:43PM
@simonralli
Why exactly?
22 October 2010 9:43PM
Maybe the internet will finally make these megalomanics think twice about going to war under false pretences. It's harder to get away with atrocities in the digital age.
Excellent work WikiLeaks.
22 October 2010 9:44PM
The question is what difference will it make to the behaviour of the US and the UK that diminishing the threat of international terrorism and promoting democracy in Iraq are revealed (once again) as a sham?
Will the fact that economic imperialism as the real reason for the war make any difference?
Will anyone be held truly accountable?
Don't hold your breath...
22 October 2010 9:44PM
Er, wait, I mean not surprising. Stupid lack of an edit button
22 October 2010 9:45PM
Is the Guardian trying to get the previous government indicted en-masse? The Guardian staunchly supported Labour until 2010. They should think about that.
The British people elected a government that went to war. They re-elected them. Who is to blame?
This war was conducted more humanely by the UK than any previous major war (much more so than WW2). Progress. If you don't like it, don't do it in the first place.
I have opposed every war Blair got us into - the Left didn't. They seemed to think there was such a thing as a just war. Hopefully they have learnt a lesson.
22 October 2010 9:46PM
well then, you and they should have thought about that before approving the torture and killing of innocents.
22 October 2010 9:47PM
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22 October 2010 9:47PM
Shame it wont make a difference.
22 October 2010 9:48PM
Those who believe that this information is of no consequence because it is merely what war is disappoint me more than the fact that the wars have occurred.
22 October 2010 9:48PM
For those who criticise wikileaks: Shame on you. War would never happen, least not in Democratic countries, except in the most dire of last resorts. Iraq was nowhere near that. If it was, then by rights we should be at war with most the planet, say, Indonesia for their 40 year cultural genocide in West Papua. Oh, hang on, they are using our weapons aren't they?
If people knew the true horror of war, they would never have advocated subjecting hundreds of thousands of innocent people to it's chaotic devastation. Wikileaks is helping to change that in an age where governments have learned from Vietnam... learned not to show people to true nature of it that is.
22 October 2010 9:49PM
Excellent work by WikiLeaks - doing what journalists should be doing, exposing the lies for what they are rather than feeding us pap or giving us government propaganda from 'embedded' positions. What's the betting we'll see this supplanted in the media by Lady Gaga, Russell Brand's wedding, etc within a few days?
22 October 2010 9:50PM
Make me even prouder that I was on the marches objecting to what we knew was going to happen. We didn't trust Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al then, and the leak of all the documents and videos this year justify our position.
They only ever wanted war, the only wanted to destroy a whole infrastructure and they had no exit strategy. Useful that it lined their own pockets with their military-based investments and directorships. And Blair went along with it. Disgraceful.
It's important these leaks are made because if it can stop/hinder another dreadful war being perpetrated by the Hawks of Capitol Hill, then it's all worth it.
22 October 2010 9:51PM
That's more than a bit unfair. The Guardian did more to the war more than any of the broadsheets, except perhaps The Independent. And who exactly are this generic 'left' you refer to? I'm on the left and opposed the war tooth and nail, as did nearly all of my colleagues and friends of similar political persuasion.
22 October 2010 9:51PM
should read "did more to oppose the war than"
22 October 2010 9:52PM
This is valued information.
Thank you.
And now we know it is true.
Failure to release this information got people killed. By our soldiers, following orders. All victims of their leaders, their officers all the way up the chain.
22 October 2010 9:52PM
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22 October 2010 9:52PM
All thanks to the military industries that persuaded Bush to go in there. A sad farce.
22 October 2010 9:53PM
there should be nurember style tribunal of all who was responsible for these deaths. the whole political and military establishments of us, uk, canada, australia and other participants of coalition of the willing to commit war crimes.
22 October 2010 9:53PM
And there I was thinking that Team America: World Police was no more than a satrical parody of the US Army.
22 October 2010 9:53PM
These released logs are even more controversial than the Pentagon Papers of 1971 which underlie the years of lies and war unleashed by first JFK then LBJ and his war hawks in 1963. I was a Vietnam war protestor in San Diego after I served over 5 yrs active duty in the army including 30 months in W. Germany in the early 60s. Had I not washed out of flight school in late '64 the odds are I would have served in Vietnam as a chopper pilot which suffered heavy casualties. Our protesting was not against the trigger pullers, but vs the military brass and the civilian chicken hawks, some of whom were never in the military. San Diego did not have the raging protests as in the East and elsewhere but SD State and UCSD had numerous events.... War is cruelty, it is Hell and it cannot be refined as Gen Wm Sherman stated at West Point in 1881. Our mission in AFPAK will end up in a disaster, I fear....Iraq? Our embassy is larger than the Vatican--we are there to stay, somehow.
22 October 2010 9:54PM
The christofacists will be baying for Julian Assange's assasination again.
I have much respect for Wikileaks and not just because the piss off the right kind of people.
22 October 2010 9:54PM
Only left wing/weak westerners care about torture. Its just business as usual for the majority of the world.
Get off your moral high horse you snotty, opinionated, western "Crusaders".
PC Thugs.