Iraq War documents leak – Wikipedia

The Iraq War documents leak is the disclosure to WikiLeaks of 391,832[1]United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 and published on the Internet on 22 October 2010.[2][3][4] The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths.[3][4][5][6][7] The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians.[8] It is the biggest leak in the military history of the United States,[2][9] surpassing the Afghan War documents leak of 25 July 2010.[10]

The logs contain numerous reports of previously unknown or unconfirmed events that took place during the war.

After criticism over the Afghan War documents leak, more material, including certain names and details, were redacted from these documents by WikiLeaks.[24]

Other

Wikileaks made the documents available under embargo to a number of media organisations: Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Iraq Body Count project.[50] Upon the lifting of the embargo, the media coverage by these groups was followed by further coverage by other media organisations. The Guardian said that "the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers were accused by web publications and some bloggers of downplaying the extent to which the documents revealed US complicity in torture and provided evidence that politicians in Washington "lied" about the failures of the US military mission".[36]The Guardian had reported that "fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks",[51] and Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com commented that "media outlets around the world prominently highlighted this revelation, but not The New York Times",[52] calling their coverage of the document leak "subservient" to the Pentagon, and criticising them for what he called a "gossipy, People Magazine-style 'profile' of Assange".[53]

While the U.S. tally of Iraqi & US-led Coalition deaths in the war logs is 109,000, a widely quoted[54] 2006 study published in The Lancet used a cross-sectional cluster sample to estimate about 650,000 deaths were due to the Iraq war increasing mortality.[55] Another study by the World Health Organization called the Iraq Family Health Survey estimated 151,000 deaths due to violence (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) from March 2003 through June 2006.[56] The Iraq Body Count reviewed the war logs data in three reports in October 2010 and concluded that the total recorded death toll, civilian and combatant, would be more than 150,000.[11]

An article on the leaked documents in Science magazine commented on these sources, as follows:

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Iraq War documents leak - Wikipedia