US News

New WikiLeaks documents suggest US forces turned a blind eye to Iraqi torture, say media

U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi authorities, according to thousands of secret military documents leaked to the media via the WikiLeaks website Friday.

Details of the 391,832 files were first released via a select number of world news outlets including the British-based Guardian newspaper, the New York Times and the Al-Jazeera TV network.

WikiLeaks later posted the entire cache on its website as Pentagon officials scrambled to assess the damage to its operations in Iraq by what the website suggested was “the largest classified military leak in history.”

According to The Guardian, the files suggest American commanders failed to investigate allegations of systematic torture by Iraqi police and soldiers.

The leaked cache includes numerous reports of detainee abuse and medical evidence documenting how prisoners were shackled, blindfolded and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks, according to the British daily.

Six of these reports apparently end with the detainee dying because of the alleged torture, and yet the claims were never properly investigated, it reported.

The Guardian also revealed details of an alleged incident in which a U.S. Apache gunship shot dead a group of Iraqis on the advice of a military lawyer who advised its crew that insurgents could not surrender to an aircraft and were therefore “valid targets.”

Al-Jazeera reported that at least 109,000 people were killed in Iraq from the start of the U.S.-led invasion until the end of 2009, according to the documents — and that 63 percent of those killed were civilians, meaning that 31 innocent people lost their lives each day.

The New York Times, meanwhile, said the documents revealed that Iraq’s military had intervened aggressively in the country’s bloody ethnic conflicts, supplying Shiite insurgents with weapons, training and sanctuary.

Friday’s revelations came despite the Pentagon warned that releasing the latest batch of secret military documents could endanger U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians.

More than 100 U.S. military analysts have spent days locked in a race to limit the damage of the leak and to protect U.S. sources and soldiers against reprisals.

Speaking as the files were being released via the media, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that the U.S. Central Command was reaching out to the hundreds of Iraqis whose lives may be in danger after their names were exposed.

Morrell said the U.S. had a “moral responsibility” to help those named, including 300 Iraqis he said were now “especially in danger.”

“This was information that should have been protected better by us,” Morrell said. “This is sensitive stuff that could get people killed.”

Morell had insisted earlier Friday that the documents were “essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story.”

“That said, the period covered by these reports has been well-chronicled in news stories, books and films and the release of these field reports does not bring new understanding to Iraq’s past,” Morrell added.

Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, added her condemnation of the leak “in the most clear terms.”

The whistleblower site previously infuriated the Pentagon in July by releasing 77,000 classified U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks has never revealed the source of its documents but the latest archive is believed to come from the same dissident U.S. army intelligence analyst, The Guardian said.