Iraq war logs: media reaction around the world

How the media around the globe have been covering the WikiLeaks revelations, and which parts they are focusing on

An Iraqi man reads newspaper with news on the Wikileaks documents in Baghdad.
An Iraqi man reads newspaper with news on the Wikileaks documents in Baghdad. Photograph: Mohammed Jalil/EPA

Iraq

Iraq's media continues to probe two key themes from the WikiLeaks disclosures. Newspapers and television networks have focused heavily on the claim that prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, directed a counter-terrorism unit answerable only to him, which targeted predominantly Sunni areas. They have also examined disclosures that the numbers of civilian deaths throughout the eight-year war are 15,000 higher than previously stated.

The Iraqi News Network was typical of the tone: "The WikiLeaks documents revealed very important secrets," it said. "But the most painful among them are not those that focus on the occupier, but those that reveal what the Iraqi forces, Iraqi government and politicians did against their citizens. Those leaders who returned to remove Iraq from oppression toppled the dictator but then carried out acts that were worse than Saddam himself.

"If these documents make the US apologise to Iraqis, they should compel Mr Maliki to leave the political arena altogether and apologise to everyone."

The revelations have led to an uncomfortable week for Maliki, who has been battling to cobble together a coalition government that would allow him to lead the country for a second term. Members of Maliki's coalition have taken to the airwaves in an attempt to defuse fears that the leaked documents would make it harder for him to win cross-sectarian support.

The government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh has been prominent, on largely government-friendly channels, in defending the would-be leader's position. So too have other loyalists, including key henchmen Haider al-Abadi and Abbas al-Biyati, who have tried to convince viewers that the assertions have been overstated.

Dabbagh has not been so keen to speak to western networks this week, telling at least one network that he would not agree to appear on air if the WikiLeaks revelations were up for discussion. Other Maliki backers have suggested the leaks were part of an orchestrated conspiracy designed to cripple his chances of being returned as leader. His office on Monday released a statement to that effect, but did not suggest who may have been behind any plot.

The sharp rise in the stated numbers of deaths throughout the war – 105,000, including 66,000 civilians – has also created ripples. The number is around 30,000 higher than an official US government tally released last month, which was collated between January 2004 and August 2008. The numbers killed during the tumultuous years since the invasion have been a point of contention between the US and Iraqi governments and NGOs. So too have claims that the US had been complicit in acts of torture carried out by arms of the Iraqi security forces.

These revelations, which featured prominently in the Wikileaks documents, have not played as strongly as anticipated in the Iraqi press.

Iraq's human rights minister has threatened to sue any organisation found culpable of torture. Maliki has ordered an investigation into the claims.

United States

The main American newspapers latched on to three core elements of the WikiLeaks Iraq documents: the abuse of detainees in Iraqi custody, Iran's involvement in the war and the role of private US contractors in the widespread killings of civilians.

But the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers were accused by web publications and some bloggers of downplaying the extent to which the documents revealed US complicity in torture and provided evidence that politicians in Washington "lied" about the failures of the US military mission.

Under the headline "Detainees Suffered Most In Iraqi Custody, U.S. Logs Say", the NYT detailed the revelations of torture and other abuses by the Iraqi security forces, sometimes with the connivance of the US military and other officials.

But the paper gave greater emphasis than foreign newspapers to what the documents revealed about the role of private military contractors in Iraq, still a sensitive issue in the US, where the trial of several Blackwater employees over the killings of civilians appears to be collapsing. The NYT said the war logs showed that the wide use of military contractors added to the chaos of the war.

"The documents sketch, in vivid detail, a critical change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents," the paper said.

"The archive, which describes many episodes never made public in such detail, shows the multitude of shortcomings with this new system: how a failure to co-ordinate among contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy."

Much of the US press also focused on the claim that the WikiLeaks papers supported the former president George Bush's claim that the war in Iraq was severely complicated by Iran's covert role.

The Washington Times said the leaked documents showed "Iran was orchestrating one side of the Iraqi insurgency".

"Field reports made public by the website WikiLeaks ... show that US military intelligence agencies had many strands of evidence revealing that Iran provided paramilitary training to Shiite Muslim insurgents at the height of the civil war in Iraq," it said. But the same paper, a strong supporter of the Bush administration, played down the extensive disclosures of human rights abuses and killings by Iraqi security forces.

The NYT also came in for criticism from some respected bloggers who accused it of underplaying the significance of revelations about the failures of the American military.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon accused the paper of glossing over the fact that the US was actively complicit in the torture and abuse of detainees in part by handing them over to known Iraqi torture squads.

"Media outlets around the world prominently highlighted this revelation, but not The New York Times," he wrote. Instead, Greenwald said, the New York Times framed the revelations as suggesting that the Americans were not so bad in their treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib because they fared worse in Iraqi hands.

Greenwald contrasted the paper's take with that of Politico, which began an article on the WikiLeaks documents by saying: "Newly released Iraq war documents paint a devastating portrait of apparent US indifference to a pattern of murder and torture by the Iraqi army, raising new questions about the Obama administration's plans to transfer the nation's security operations to Iraqi units."

Other publications were equally forthright. The Washington Post's former Baghdad reporter during the war, Ellen Knickmeyer, wrote in the Daily Beast that the documents demonstrated the extent of the "lies" of US leaders.

"Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded," she wrote, specifically naming the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Denmark

Iraqi interpreters working for coalition forces during the war were systematically tortured and killed by insurgents, according to a Danish investigation of the leaked Pentagon files. The newspaper Dagbladet Information reported that at least 60 Iraqi interpreters were executed between January 2004, when the first of the secret reports date from, and the summer of 2007, when Danish forces left the country.

Up until shortly before the Danish pullout from Iraq, interpreters were not allowed to stay overnight in the Danish camp if they were not on duty. "We were living targets when we were not working," one of the translators told Information. "The insurgents considered us traitors and believed we carried information they could use. They were constantly on the hunt for us."

The newspaper is one of a small number of media organisations, including the Guardian, which were given access to almost 400,000 secret US army reports released by the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The Iraqi translators' security became a high-profile political issue in Denmark in 2007, when the ministry of defence initially refused to allow them asylum. The government reversed its decision following intense media pressure after the killings of two translators employed by Danish forces came to light.

The study of the Iraq war files has revealed how Danish troops were involved in handing over detainees to Iraqi authorities, despite warnings of torture in police stations. The investigation by Information also showed that Danish forces increasingly used British troops to handle the arrests of Iraqis, after a report surfaced in the summer of 2004 of prisoners being mistreated in Danish custody.

A legal adviser to the Danish defence command told the paper that there was a clear strategy to let British troops handle the capture of prisoners. "It was common practice to assemble the operations so that there were British troops, who would carry out any potential capture," said Jes Rynkeby Knudsen.

A lawyer from the Danish Institute of Human Rights, Peter Vedel Kessing, said: "If the Danes are in charge of an operation but simply arrange for other nationals to apprehend the prisoners in order to dodge further responsibility, then this would seem to amount to circumvention of the Geneva convention."

Italy

Italian journalists scouring through the Iraq war logs have found two reports that appear to contradict soldiers' accounts of Italy's military mission in southern Iraq.

Italian soldiers who fired upon a vehicle in Nassiryah in August 2004 reported at the time that they were responding to insurgents firing at them from the vehicle, Corriere della Sera reported. But an American account of the engagement, released by WikiLeaks, reports that the vehicle was fired on because it did not stop at an Italian checkpoint.

The vehicle, which witnesses said was an ambulance carrying a pregnant women, her mother, sister and husband, blew up when hit, killing the passengers.

Corriere della Sera also reported that newly revealed documents contradicted official reports of the accidental death of an Italian soldier, Salvatore Marracino, in 2005. At the time, the Italian government stated that Marracino accidently shot himself while trying to free the jammed firing mechanism in his rifle during a training exercise in Iraq. The documents state he was hit accidentally by a colleague.

Backing the official Italian version, Marco De Paolis, a military magistrate, said that simulations, photographs and witnesses had convinced him Marracino had fired the fatal shot. But La Repubblica wrote that doubts were cast on the official version of events at the time. Marracino was unlikely to have pointed his rifle at himself while fixing it and the entry wound was at the wrong angle.

The Italian defence minister, Ignazio La Russa, said he would order a new study of the events but said he believed the reports amounted to "very little that is new but lots of noise".


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