Ministry of Defence criticises Wikileaks Iraq release

The release of nearly 400,000 classified Iraq war documents by whistleblowing website Wikileaks could endanger UK service personnel, the Ministry of Defence has said.

The leaked material suggests US commanders ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities.

The documents also suggest "hundreds" of civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003.

The MoD condemned "any un-authorised release of classified material".

In a statement, it said such releases "can put the lives of UK service personnel and those of our allies at risk and make the job of armed forces in all theatres of operation more difficult and more dangerous".

It also said it had set up a dedicated team to investigate all alleged cases of abuse by UK service personnel in Iraq.

The files released by Wikileaks show the US kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it.

The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians.

The US government has criticised the leak, which is the largest in American military history.

The Guardian newspaper, which had been given advance access to the files, said two reports, dated 23 June 2008, recorded cases of alleged abuse by unidentified British troops against Iraqi detainees.

Another log, dated 2 September 2008, recorded that a civilian interrogator working with the Americans reported that British soldiers had dragged him through his house and repeatedly dunked his head into a bowl of water and threatened him with a pistol.

But the log also recorded that an absence of injuries and inconsistencies in his story cast doubt on his allegation.

At a news conference in London, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that those snapshots of everyday events offered a glimpse at the "human scale" of the conflict.

The deaths of one or two individuals made up the "overwhelming number" of people killed in Iraq, Mr Assange said.

'Relentless tragedies'

The new documents and new deaths contained within them showed the range and frequency of the "small, relentless tragedies of this war" added John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count, which worked with Wikileaks.

Phil Shiner, a lawyer who said he was acting on the behalf of the families of many Iraqi civilians who were killed or tortured by UK forces, said it would be "wrong" to assume the leaking of US documents had "nothing to do with the UK".

The lawyer, who said he was dealing with 142 outstanding cases of alleged mistreatment, argued that some Iraqis were "killed by indiscriminate attacks on civilians or the unjustified use of lethal force", adding that "others have been killed in custody by UK forces and no-one knows how many Iraqis lost their lives while held in British detention facilities".

Arguing that there is a growing body of evidence about the killing, ill treatment and torture of Iraqis whilst in UK custody, the lawyer said there appeared to be "many cases" in which Iraqis died in UK custody and were then certified as dying from natural causes.

"None of these deaths have been investigated, many of these Iraqis were hooded and abused and my law firm does not accept the Ministry of Defence's explanation that each and every one of these deaths has a innocent explanation," he said.

Mr Shiner also accused the MoD of covering up details of maltreatment and called for "a judicial inquiry to fully investigate UK responsibility for civilian deaths in Iraq".

Lives at risk?

The MoD said: "There is no place for mistreatment of detainees and we investigate any allegation made against our troops.

"The protection of civilians is always at the core of what UK forces do in any operational theatre and any civilian casualty is, of course, a matter of deep regret and we take any incidents extremely seriously."

And it said the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) had been set up to establish the truth or otherwise of any allegations.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she condemned Wikileaks' disclosure and suggested the leaking of US documents put lives at risk.

However, Wikileaks said it was confident that the documents - which it has amended to remove names and other identifying details - contain "no information that could be harmful to any individual".

Related Links:

Five bombshells from WikiLeaks' Iraq war documents

WikiLeaks defends its release of classified documents on Iraq War

Secret military documents leaked: Julian Assange: the hacker who created WikiLeaks

Pentagon Wows -- Pentagon pans new WikiLeaks release, but expects few surprises

Five bombshells from WikiLeaks' Iraq war documents

In the largest document leak in US history, WikiLeaks has released more than 400,000 secret US documents about the Iraq war. As with the second-largest leak in US history – the 92,000 Afghan war documents released in July – much of the substance of the leaks has been reported already, but details are new.

WikiLeaks will hold a press conference Saturday morning in Europe. Click through the following slides to learn what the documents reveal.

5. Details of torture and abuse

The WikiLeaks documents reveal numerous cases of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqi police and soldiers, according to the Qatar-based news agency Al Jazeera, which was given early access to the cache. "It was one of the stated aims of the war to end the torture chambers. But the secret files reveal a very different story. In graphic detail they record extensive abuse at Iraqi police stations, Army bases, and prisons."

US troops reported the abuse to their superiors on more than 100 occasions, according to the documents, but the military – at the highest levels – ordered troops not to intervene.

The Monitor has detailed the alleged torture and abuses that have continued in Iraqi prisons since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

"What I consider humane treatment of prisoners, is not what [Iraqi prison guards] would consider humane treatment," Lt. Col. Shaun Reed, commander of a Baquba-based US infantry unit, whose work with Iraqi security forces has exposed him to Iraqi prison conditions, told the Monitor in 2009. He said it's hard to change prison workers accustomed to brutality. "If you ask Iraqis what they think – it's completely different."

Indeed, a December 2008 report by the New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) went as far as to assert a "disturbing continuity" with Saddam Hussein-era detention.

Related documents: WikiLeaks defends its release of classified documents on Iraq War

WikiLeaks defends its release of classified documents on Iraq War

WikiLeaks released nearly 400,000 classified reports detailing more than 100,000 deaths in the Iraq War, some 60 percent of which were of civilians. WikiLeaks also intends to release thousands more documents on the war in Afghanistan.

The most recent WikiLeaks disclosure covers the Iraq War for the period from the beginning of 2004 through 2009.

Based on “SIGACT,” or “Significant Activity” reports by US military personnel, the 391,832 individual reports (the largest such release of classified documents in US history) “detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout,” according to WikiLeaks.

The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq. These include 66,081 “civilians,” 23,984 “enemy” insurgents, 15,196 “host nation” (Iraqi government forces), and 3,771 “friendly” (coalition) forces. Some 60 percent of the total is civilian deaths.

“For comparison, the 'Afghan War Diaries', previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people,” states WikiLeaks on its web site. “Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivalent population size.”

Pentagon officials and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have condemned the release of such information.

“Our fear here is that the release of this classified information will give our enemies the opportunity to mine that database, to look for how we respond to certain situations,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told CNN. “If they can see patterns of behavior, our tactics, our techniques and our procedures, the capabilities of our equipment, response times, how we cultivate sources, this is all information which should never be in the public domain.”

“We know in the aftermath of the Afghan document leak, the Taliban and others spoke publicly, encouraging their members to mine that database,” Mr. Morrell said. “Our intelligence confirmed that fact. Now you will have virtually half a million classified secret documents in the public domain which our enemies clearly intend to use against us and that could threaten the lives of American forces not just in Iraq or Afghanistan but around the world.”

In July, WikiLeaks released 70,000 documents related to the Afghanistan war. A junior US Army intelligence analyst, Private First Class Bradley Manning, was arrested in May and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of classified information. He is being held in the US Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia.

Since then, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Afghanistan leak did not reveal any sensitive intelligence sources or methods.

That’s essentially the point made by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange regarding the latest report on Iraq.

“While there may have been legitimate reasons to keep many of these reports secret at the time they were made, that time has passed,” he said in an interview with Sky News. “The attempt to keep them secret is an attempt to keep the public record sanitized and keep the American administration from being criticized.”

"In our release of our 400,000 documents about the Iraq war, the intimate detail of that war from the US perspective, we hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially concluded," Mr. Assange said at a press conference in London Saturday.

As reported by the British newspaper the Guardian (one of several news outlets that received an advanced look at the WikiLeaks information), 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.