Will Barack Obama admit extent of Iran's role in Iraq, laid bare by WikiLeaks?

Telegraph ^

[mandaladon]

Much of the attention surrounding the WikiLeaks document dump will, predictably enough, focus on a single incident of two insurgents being killed after they tried to surrender to an Apache helicopter and, more disturbingly, the widespread abuse of detainees by Iraq forces, apparently with a blind eye being turned by the US military.

Some of the reporting of the documents is distinctly tendentious. Take for instance this from the Guardian. The headline states as fact that “Apache helicopters kill 14 civilians”. The source for this? A single Iraq informant, speaking to an interpreter for the US military. In addition, an Iraqi colonel said the number was 12.

Any journalist who has worked in Iraq (and I spent much of 2004 and 2005 there) knows that casualty figures from Iraqis were extremely unreliable and often based on rumour, exaggeration or personal/political agendas and prejudices. In the US report, the figures are rightly described as “unconfirmed”.

I’m not saying it’s not true that 14 were killed. Civilians die in wars, often in very large numbers, and they certainly did so in Iraq. There might well have been that number or more killed by US forces that. But we just don’t know and things that we can’t be sure about should not be reported as fact just because we might like them to be true.

Interesting to note also to that the Guardian has seen fit to name the interpreter in the incident report, which I won’t link to for that reason.

A couple of things to say about the detainee abuse. Clearly, a legacy of Saddam Hussein’s regime was a culture of astonishing brutality in Iraq. To expect that indigenous forces would somehow adhere to Western standards of due process is unrealistic.

[mandaladon]

The files show there were occasions recorded when morally courageous US troops did intervene and the blind-eye policy was eventually and rightly changed. The MSM won't say much about this though.

[Venturer]

If we had a real CIA the guy dumping these documents would be History.As would the traitor who delivered them to him.