Iraq War
Logs: Secret Files Show How US Ignored Torture
• Massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse
• 15,000 unknown civilian deaths in war
By Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh
October 22, 2010 "The
Guardian" - -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 menin 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.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26671.htm