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.
Awesome. Good thing we decided not to look backwards on this and investigate so that Republicans wouldn't go after Democrats in witch hunts should they ever return to power, huh.
No wonder the Middle East hates us. We've extracted a 9-year price in blood from the Muslim world orders of magnitude higher than what we paid in one day on 9/11 in the name of "freedom". That's justice right there.
Do read the whole thing. It's disgusting, disturbing, bloody awful and done in our name.
And it continues.
War is ugly. This, unnecessarily so. But it's a good thing that it's out there, so we don't forget what is being done. You're right when you say it is done in our name. We will be held responsible for this, even if it is only a small group that goes over the line. Ironic, huh?
ReplyDeleteThis goes on every day. Dear God.
And yet, the muslim-loving America-hating jihad site Wikileaks is the threat to US security...
ReplyDeleteThis is what I mean by when I say we make our own worst enemies. We do. We fucking do. And yet it is unamerican to state that simple fact. It's unamerican to state that if you
But hey, who cares what they think? They're only brown people, amirite?
This nation won't learn otherwise until it happens to us.