WikiLeaks Unveils War Crimes Committed In Iraq

Whistleblower leak site WikiLeaks, who was in the center of a huge scandal during the summer over the release of classified documents related to the activity of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, leaked now some 400,000 files of American campaign in Iraq, showing that the troops used torture against the civilian Iraqis.

According to the site, thousand of Iraqi civilians were killed at the American checkpoints since the beginning of the invasion in 2003.

The site publishes governmental records of these deaths, which the U.S. government had denied all these years. According to these records, 109,000 inhabitants were killed, 66,081 of them being civilians.

The site claims that by the publication of these Iraqi campaign documents, which the editors called as “extremely important,” 15,000 civilian deaths that were previously unreported will now be exposed.

Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of the site, said for British televisions that the truth itself was a “casualty of war” in Iraq.

Assange said they hoped to correct by this publication, some of the attack on the truth before the war, during the war and after the war.

WikiLeaks worked in uncovering this truth about Iraq with an organization called Iraqi Body Count, which help them document the deaths of 15,000 civilians who had never been previously recorded.

They say the people of the United States do not have a correct picture of what these years of war meant for the Iraqi people: targeted assassinations, drive-by shootings, checkpoint kills are tragedies of war that this log is revealing in detail.

Some of these deaths may be linked to the British Forces thus being subject to investigation in the UK.

The documents record field realities reported and recorded in writing by U.S. low-ranked officers in the field, and date from the beginning of 2004 to January 1, 2010.

According to The Guardian, who had early access to these documents, those dry reports, written in military jargon, speak of torture, murder, executions and war crimes.

They also show how the U.S. authorities failed to investigate reports of abuse, and murder, and rape and execution carried out by the Iraqi police and soldiers.

There are reports of prisoners being abused, handcuffed, blindfolded, hung by wrists or ankles, six of them ending in the death of the detainee.

The Pentagon dismissed the information on the files uploaded on WikiLeaks, and prior to the release it said they had over 100 analysts researching the data, which was dismissed by Julian Assange who said such thing was logistically impossible.

Pentagon also claimed that the publication of these files would endanger the lives of 300 Iraqis, and that U.S. central command would contact those whose live may be put at risk by these leaks.

The U.S. government does not show to be impressed to much about these documents. State Secretary Hillary Clinton said she had “a strong opinion” that the classified information that places the lives of American citizens in peril should be condemned.

According to another editor of the site, Kristin Hrafnsson, the documents have been carefully redacted so that the information may not harm anybody, alluding to the allegation of Pentagon that it would put at risk the lives of people who worked or are still working with the American troops.

In the summer the publication of documents referring to the war in Afghanistan drew severe criticism from the Afghan President Karzai, who said that the site carelessly published addresses and names of informants, liaisons and strategies of the U.S. military, thus placing in danger both American soldiers and their Afghan collaborators.

U.N. chief investigator on torture Manfred Nowak says that if the files on the WikiLeaks point out to serious violation of the U.N. convention on torture, it is the obligation of the Obama administration to launch an investigation into them.

Nowak said that under the convention on human rights it is the obligation of states to prosecute all forms of torture, direct or indirect, and investigate any allegation of abuse.

He reminded that Obama came to power with a moral agenda that stated the U.S. didn’t wanted to be perpetrators of human rights, and argued that a failure to investigate the claims in the WikiLeaks files would be a failure of the Obama government to recognize the responsibility of the U.S. under international law.

Some of the documents refer to the fact that the United States handed over detainees to the Iraqi or other authorities, and that these people were subsequently subjected to torture.

Nowak reminded that the U.S. had the obligation to make sure, before extraditing a prisoner, that the person in question is not at the risk of being submitted to torture in the country that was going to take custody of him.

At the same time, the U.N. envoy said that, since neither the United States nor Iraq ratified the treaty by which officials can be brought to justice in international courts, the possibility to sanction them is very weak.

In the end it is the obligation of the American courts to establish whether their citizens have committed aggressions and crimes against humanity, and to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the domestic law.

Still, he warned President Obama that acknowledging that these crimes were committed before he came to power was not enough; they must be investigated and the truth revealed.