Secret logs detail 2004-’09 Iraqi casualties

— A cache of secret U.S. field reports from the Iraq war provides grim new details about the toll of that conflict, indicating that more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed during a sixyear stretch and that American forces often failed to intervene as the U.S.-backed government brutalized detainees, according to news organizations given access to the documents by the WikiLeaks website.

The nearly 400,000 records are described as offering a view of the war’s peak years, documenting thousands of civilian deaths, including hundreds killed at checkpoints manned by U.S. soldiers, and the burgeoning role that American contractors came to play in the conflict.

The documents, including some dated as recently as 2009, report the deaths of at least six detainees in Iraqi custody because of abuse, and cite hundreds of other cases in which prisoners were subjected to electric shock, sodomized, burned, whipped or beaten by Iraqi authorities, according to an account in The Guardian, a British newspaper that was among several news organizations given advance access to the logs.

The others included The New York Times, the Qatarbased Al-Jazeera satellite television network, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, the French newspaper Le Monde and the Channel 4 news program in Britain.

WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy group that uses servers in several countries, published the records on its website WikiLeaks.org on Friday evening.

There appear to be no major revelations in the latest logs. Much like those WikiLeaks released earlier this year on the war in Afghanistan, the Iraq documents are mainly low-level field reports that reflect a soldier’s-eye view of the conflict but do not contain the most sensitive secrets held by U.S. forces or intelligence agencies.

The Pentagon condemned the release but did not question the authenticity of the files.

“We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret informationwith the world, including our enemies,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

The 391,832 files included in the release cover a period from the beginning of 2004 to the end of 2009, and are more than quadruple the number of records that WikiLeaks published on the war in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks has not disclosed the source of the materials. But suspicion has centered on Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, an Army intelligence analyst whom the military arrested this year, charging him with the downloading and transfer of classified material.

Although narrow in nature, the records provide new insights into the toll of the conflict. According to Al-Jazeera, the documents show that the U.S. military kept a tally of Iraqi casualties, even while insisting that such statistics were not maintained.

The files indicate that 285,000 casualties were recorded, including at least 109,032 violent deaths, although reports suggested some double-counting. Of those, 66,081 were civilians, 23,984 were “enemy,” 15,196 were members of the Iraqi security forces, and 3,771 were U.S. and allied servicemen.

The logs document thekilling of as many as 681 civilians at checkpoints - “escalation of force incidents” in the military parlance - in which troops fearing suicide bombers opened fire on often-confused drivers who did not know how to act when approaching soldiers, especially at night.

The files also record the bloody toll of soldiers and civilians killed by insurgents’ increasingly sophisticated use of roadside bombs: 31,780 deaths.

The logs accuse Iran of providing extensive, lethal support to Shiite militias in Iraq as part of an effort to weaken the standing of Sunnis in government and engage in a proxy campaign against the United States. The Times cited documents indicatingthat Iran’s Quds Force collaborated with Iraqi extremists to encourage the assassination of Iraqi officials.

But some of news reports treated the claims with skepticism. The Guardian noted thatsources for some of the reports on Iran were described as “untested or of low reliability.”

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by a former computer hacker, Julian Assange. In contrast to the release of the Afghan documents, WikiLeaks redacted names and locations in what members said was a step to ensure there was no chance of exposing Iraqi civilians to reprisal.

Information for this article was contributed by Ernesto Londono, Ellen Nakashima, Greg Jaffe and Julie Tate of The Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 10/23/2010

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