Biggest Military Leak in History: WikiLeaks Releases 390,000 Iraq War Documents

WikiLeaks has once again captured international headlines with the release of 391,832 secret Iraq War documents that reveal new information about detainee treatment, civilian deaths, and the involvement of Iran in backing Iraqi militias.
The Iraq War Logs, provided to at least a dozen media organizations including The Guardian, The New York Times, Del Spiegel, Al Jazeera, CNN and the BBC, offer an on-the-ground perspective into six years of the Iraq conflict. Some of the documents posted by Wikileaks, The NYT and others provide unprecedented detail into how the war conducted.
Here’s a summary of the conclusions many media organizations have made about the documents:

• The number of Iraqi civilians deaths is greater than the numbers publicly reported by the United States. Most of those deaths came at the hands of other Iraqis.
• Iran was involved in the training, supplying and support of Iraqi Shiite militias. They may have even engaged with U.S. troops directly.
• Detainees were treating with shocking amounts of violence. The abuse was so feared that U.S. troops sometimes threatened prisoners with a transfer to Iraqi police units, where they would have most certainly been treated worse.

While several media organizations have had time to analyze the documents, there’s definitely a lot more to be learned from today’s leak. The Iraq War Logs leak is the largest leak of military secrets in history, supplanting the record WikiLeaks set with the Afghan War Diary leak.
Last week, we reported on the impending Iraq War Logs leak. The Pentagon, which has been preparing for today’s document release, responded to the Iraq War Logs release earlier today.

“We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies,” Department of Defense Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said in the Pentagon’s response. “We know terrorist organizations have been mining the leaked Afghan documents for information to use against us, and this Iraq leak is more than four times as large. By disclosing such sensitive information, WikiLeaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us. The only responsible course of action for WikiLeaks at this point is to return the stolen material and expunge it from their Web sites as soon as possible.”

WikiLeaks is looking to get back to what it does best: leaking secret documents. Since the Afghan War Reports, WikiLeaks has seen its website go down and its funding blocked. Recent actions by founder Julian Assange, who has been embroiled in scandal, have led to internal strife at the organization.http://mashable.com/2010/10/22/biggest-military-leak-in-history-wikileaks-releases-390000-iraq-war-documents/

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