The End Of Secrecy_ The Rise And Fall Of WikiLeaks Part 5

CHAPTER 9.

The Afghanistan war logs

Cybers.p.a.ce 25 July 2010

"We are saddened by the innocent lives that were lost as a result of militants' cowardice"

US ARMY M MAJOR C CHRIS B BELCHER, AFGHANISTAN.

One night in Afghanistan, five heavy rockets, fired from a new type of weapon, came shrieking out of the darkness on to a religious school, a madra.s.sa, completely reducing it to rubble. When the a.s.sault helicopters landed and US special forces came tumbling out, they discovered they had killed seven children. Their real target, a top al-Qaida fighter, escaped. This event, one of many during the benighted Afghan war, took place on 17 June 2007, and was described in the following way by the US army's special operations command news service: Airstrike in Paktika BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan.

Afghan and Coalition forces conducted an operation in Paktika Province's Zarghun Shah District late Sunday, which resulted in several militants and seven civilians killed and two militants detained. Credible intelligence named the compound, which contained a mosque and a madra.s.sa, as a suspected safehouse for al-Qaida fighters.Coalition forces confirmed the presence of nefarious activity occurring at the site before getting approval to conduct an airstrike on the location. Following the strike, residents of the compound confirmed that al-Qaida fighters had been present all day.Early reporting [suggests] seven children at the madra.s.sa died as a result of the strike. "This is another example of al-Qaida using the protective status of a mosque, as well as innocent civilians, to s.h.i.+eld themselves," said Army Maj Chris Belcher, a Combined Joint Task Force-82 spokesman. "We are saddened by the innocent lives that were lost as a result of militants' cowardice."

The real story only emerged from the text of a leaked military log obtained by WikiLeaks three years later, and published worldwide by the Guardian Guardian and its partners the and its partners the New York Times New York Times and and Der Spiegel Der Spiegel. The field report was among the 92,000 allegedly turned over to WikiLeaks founder Julian a.s.sange by US soldier Bradley Manning.

The log disclosed that there had actually been no "airstrike" (whose reconnaissance cameras might indeed have been less inaccurate). Instead, what had happened was a trial of a powerful, if potentially indiscriminate, new missile system a GPS-guided rocket volley that could be fired from the back of a truck up to 40 miles away, known as HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket system). The a.s.sault was not launched by ordinary "Afghan and Coalition forces" but by a shadowy troop of US killers known as Task Force 373, whose targets were written on a special list. And the rocket attack was not prompted by general "nefarious activity", but by the hope that a top listed target, Commander Al Libi, was on the premises.

The leaked war log gave the following account (abbreviations have been expanded): Date 2007-06-17 21:00:00 2007-06-17 21:00:00 Type Friendly Action Friendly Action t.i.tle 172100Z[ulu time] T[ask] F[orce] 373 OBJ[ective] Lane 172100Z[ulu time] T[ask] F[orce] 373 OBJ[ective] LaneSummary NOTE: The following information (TF-373 and HIMARS) is Cla.s.sified Secret / NOFORN. The knowledge that TF-373 conducted a HIMARS strike must be kept protected. All other information below is cla.s.sified Secret / REL[ease] ISAF. [International Security a.s.sistance Force]Mission S[pecial] O[perations] T[ask] F[orce] conducts kinetic strike followed with H[elicopter] A[ssault] Force raid to kill/ capture ABU LAYTH AL LIBI on N[amed] A[rea of] I[nterest] 2.Target Abu Layth Al Libi is a senior al-Qaida military commander, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) leader. He is based in Mir Ali, Pakistan and runs training camps throughout North Waziristan. Collection over the past week indicates a concentration of Arabs I[n] V[icinity] O[f] objective area.Result 6 x E[nemy] K[illed] I[n] A[ction]; 7 x N[on] C[ombatant] KIA 7 x detaineesSummary H[elicopter] A[ssault] F[orce] departed for Orgun-E [base] to conduct link-up and posture to the objective immediately after pre-a.s.sault fires. On order, 5 rockets were launched and destroyed structures on the objective (NAI 2). The HAF quickly inserted the a.s.sault force into the H[elicopter] L[anding] Zone. I[intelligence] S[urveillance] R[econnaissance] reported multiple U[n]I[dentified] M[ale]s leaving the objective area. The a.s.sault force quickly conducted dismounted movement to the target area and established containment on the south side of the objective. During the initial a.s.sault, dedicated air a.s.sets engaged multiple M[ilitary] A[ge] M[ale]s squirting off the objective area. G[round] F[orce] C[ommander] a.s.sessed 3 x EKIA squirters north and 3 x EKIA squirters south of the compound were neutralised from air a.s.set fires. The a.s.sault force quickly manoeuvred with a SQ[ua]D[ron] element on the remaining squirters. The squirter element detained 12 x MAMs and returned to the objective area. GFC pa.s.sed initial a.s.sessment of 7 x NC KIA (children). During initial questioning, it was a.s.sessed that the children were not allowed out of the building, due to UIMs presence within the compound. The a.s.sault force was able to uncover 1 x NC child from the rubble. The MED[ical] T[ea]M immediately cleared debris from the mouth and performed CPR to revive the child for 20 minutes. Due to time restrictions, TF C[omman]D[e]R launched Q[uick] R[eaction] F[orce] element to action a follow-on target (NAI 5). They quickly contained the objective and initiated the a.s.sault. The objective was secured and the a.s.sault force initially detained 6 x MAMs. The GFC recommended that 7 MAMs be detained for additional questioning. The TF CDR a.s.sessed that the a.s.sault force will continue SSE. The local governor was notified of the current situation and requests for a.s.sistance were made to cordon the A[rea of] O[perations] with support from A[fghan] N[ational] Police and local coalition forces in search of H[igh] V[alue] I[ndividual]. A P[rovincial] R[econstruction] T[eam] is enroute to AO.1) Target was an A[l] Q[aida] Senior Leader 2) Patterns of life were conducted on 18 June from 0800z 1815z (strike time) with no indications of women or children on the objective 3) The mosque was not targeted nor was it struck initial reports state there is no damage to the mosque 4) An elder who was at the mosque stated that the children were held against their will and were intentionally kept inside UPDATE: 18 0850Z June 07 Governor Khapalwak has had no success yet in reaching President Karzai (due to the President's busy schedule today) but expects to reach him within the hour (P[resident] o[f] A[fghanistan] reached later in the afternoon ~ 1400Z) The governor conducted a Shura [consultation] this morning, in attendance were locals from both the Yahya Yosof & Khail Districts He pressed the Talking Points given to him and added a few of his own that followed in line with our current story The atmospherics of the local populous [sic] is that they are in shock, but understand it was caused ultimately by the presence of hoodlums The people think it is good that bad men were killed The people regret the loss of life among the children The governor echoed the tragedy of children being killed, but stressed this could've been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area The governor promised another Shura in a few days and that the families would be compensated for their loss The governor was asked what the mood of the people was and he stated that "the operation was a good thing, and the people believe what we have told them"

There is less clipped military jargon than usual in this war log entry. The report is untypically loquacious, and in relatively plain English, because the slaughter of the seven children turned into quite a scandal, and because President Karzai was making ever louder protests about the civilian death toll from US operations in Afghanistan. But otherwise the report is representative of the kind of doc.u.ments that surfaced when the Afghan war logs were first published on 25 July 2010. On that day, Der Spiegel Der Spiegel made the activities of the killer squad Task Force 373 its cover story, headlining it "America's secret war". In the made the activities of the killer squad Task Force 373 its cover story, headlining it "America's secret war". In the Guardian Guardian, Nick Davies unearthed much detail about TF 373's 2,000-strong target-list for "kill or capture". The hit-list appeared as yet another cryptic acronym in the war logs, JPel the "joint priority effects list".

Davies wrote: "The United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights, Professor Philip Alston, went to Afghanistan in May 2008 to investigate rumours of extrajudicial killings. He warned that international forces were neither transparent nor accountable and that Afghans who attempted to find out who had killed their loved ones 'often come away empty-handed, frustrated and bitter'. Now, for the first time, the leaked war logs reveal details of deadly missions by TF 373 and other units hunting down JPel targets that were previously hidden behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves."

The Guardian Guardian/WikiLeaks publication smoked out profound divisions about these tactics among the occupying coalition. "The war logs confirm the impression that this is a military campaign without a clear strategic direction, under generals struggling to cope with the political, economic and social realities of Afghanistan," says Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, until June 2010 the UK government's special representative to Afghanistan and from 2007 to 2009 its amba.s.sador to Kabul. "The truth is that the military campaign in Afghanistan is not under proper political supervision or control ... Nato's Joint Priority Effects List [the so-called kill or capture list] is not subject to genuine political oversight. It is driven by the military. The situation has deteriorated further since the war logs came out. General Petraeus has stepped up the campaign of slaughtering Taliban commanders, without a clear strategy for harvesting that politically, and in defiance of his own field manual's a.s.sertion that countering insurgency is 80% politics."

A hitherto veiled face of the Afghan war was thus revealed in the story of TF 373 and the hit-lists. Another veil was lifted to reveal the relentless toll taken on perfectly innocent civilians by the jittery troops riding in convoys. The foreign troops not just Americans, but also British, Germans and Poles were understandably terrified of roadside bombs, or of suicide bombers driving up to them in cars or on motorbikes. In theory there are strict regulations about the graded series of warning steps that soldiers have to take in Afghanistan before firing to kill. These are the procedures governing EOF "Escalation of Force". In reality, as log entries repeatedly implied, some soldiers tended to shoot first and ask questions later.

The field reports almost never contained any direct admissions of misbehaviour: these entries are written by comrades, and designed to be viewed by more senior officers. But the Americans were a little less inhibited when giving accounts of the conduct of their allies than they were when writing up their own behaviour. As a result, David Leigh and his colleague Rob Evans were able to tease out cl.u.s.ters of what looked like excessive use of force against civilians on the part of certain British units. They identified a detachment of the Coldstream Guards which had recently taken up position at Camp Soutar in Kabul. The Coldstream Guards' unofficial blog described their mood at the time: "The overriding threat is that of suicide bombers, of which there have been a number in the recent past."

Four times in as many weeks, this unit appears to have shot civilians in the town in order to protect its own members. The worst was on 21 October 2007, when the US soldiers reported a case of "blue-on-white" friendly fire in downtown Kabul, noting that some unknown troops had shot up a civilian vehicle containing three private security company interpreters and a driver. The troops had been in "a military-type vehicle that was brown with a gunner on top ... There were no US forces located in the vicinity of the event that may have been involved. More to follow!" They updated a short while later, saying "INVESTIGATION IS CONTROLLED BY THE BRITISH. WE NOT ABLE TO GET THE COMPLETE STORY. THIS EVENT BELONGS TO THE BRITISH ISAF FORCES."

It took another three months' stalling, after the WikiLeaks logs went public, before the Ministry of Defence in London admitted these Kabul shootings had indeed taken place. They confirmed the British patrol had shot dead one civilian and wounded two others in a silver minibus. It was claimed the minibus failed to stop when the soldiers signalled for it to do so.

A few days after the minibus shooting, on 6 November, the British reported around midday that they had wounded another civilian in Kabul in broad daylight with what was at first claimed to be a "warning shot". At the end of the afternoon, the Americans heard the man had died, and there might be trouble: "There could be some demonstration, the civilian was a son of an Afghan aviation general, his wedding was planned for this evening with numerous people." They later updated: "It was not the wedding of the dead person. The wedding for this evening was planned for his brother but now it is cancelled. The family will get the dead body tomorrow morning." Again the British army eventually confirmed this WikiLeaks disclosure after a long delay: the official British version is that the general's son had "accelerated" his Toyota towards a patrol, leaving the soldiers only time for a shouted warning before firing at the car. The car then skidded to a halt and a man fell out, they say.

These events, and hundreds like them, together const.i.tute the hidden history of the war in Afghanistan, in which innocent people were repeatedly killed by foreign soldiers. The remarkable level of detail provided by the war logs made it accessible for the first time.

However, while the European media focused on the sufferings of civilians, the New York Times New York Times tended to take a more strategic approach to the Afghan war. One of their major interests was to study the large and often surprising quant.i.ty of evidence in the war logs that US efforts to suppress the Taliban were being hampered by Pakistan. There were repeated detailed entries telling of clashes or intelligence reports in which Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, appeared to be the villain, covertly backing the Taliban for reasons of its own. tended to take a more strategic approach to the Afghan war. One of their major interests was to study the large and often surprising quant.i.ty of evidence in the war logs that US efforts to suppress the Taliban were being hampered by Pakistan. There were repeated detailed entries telling of clashes or intelligence reports in which Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, appeared to be the villain, covertly backing the Taliban for reasons of its own.

The Obama administration had a relatively sophisticated response to this information, which it was aware the papers had discovered. It used the situation to project a message. As the logs were published at 10pm GMT on Sunday evening, a White House spokesman emailed newspapers' Was.h.i.+ngton correspondents a note not intended for publication under the subject line: "Thoughts on WikiLeaks". They even attached some handy quotes from senior officials highlighting concerns about the ISI and safe havens in Afghanistan. "This is now out in the open," a senior administration official told the New York Times New York Times. "It's reality now. In some ways, it makes it easier for us to tell the Pakistanis that they have to help us." A spokesman stated in public: "The safe havens for violent extremist groups within Pakistan continue to pose an intolerable threat to the United States, to Afghanistan, and to the Pakistani people."

The British prime minister, David Cameron, on a two-day trip to India, chimed in, in what seemed a synchronised way. Speaking to a business audience in Bangalore two days after the war logs were released, he signalled the same hard line. "We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country [Pakistan] is allowed to look both ways and is able to promote the export of terror, whether to India or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world," he said. "That is why this relations.h.i.+p is important. But it should be a relations.h.i.+p based on a very clear message: that it is not right to have any relations.h.i.+p with groups that are promoting terror. Democratic states that want to be part of the developed world cannot do that. The message to Pakistan from the US and from the UK is very clear on that point."

It was a surprising turn of events, confirming what most investigative journalists know instinctively, that full disclosure of hitherto secret information can stimulate all kinds of unexpected outcomes. The Guardian Guardian summed up in an editorial the purpose of its co-operation with WikiLeaks: summed up in an editorial the purpose of its co-operation with WikiLeaks: The fog of war is unusually dense in Afghanistan. When it lifts, as it does today ... a very different landscape is revealed from the one with which we have become familiar. These war logs written in the heat of engagement show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up and sanitised "public" war, as glimpsed through official communiques as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting ... The Guardian Guardian has spent weeks sifting through this ocean of data, which has gradually yielded the hidden texture and human horror stories inflicted day to day during an often clumsily prosecuted war. It is important to treat the material for what it is: a contemporaneous catalogue of conflict. Some of the more lurid intelligence reports are of doubtful provenance: some aspects of the coalition's recording of civilian deaths appear unreliable. The war logs cla.s.sified as secret are encyclopedic but incomplete. We have removed any material which threatens the safety of troops, local informants and collaborators. has spent weeks sifting through this ocean of data, which has gradually yielded the hidden texture and human horror stories inflicted day to day during an often clumsily prosecuted war. It is important to treat the material for what it is: a contemporaneous catalogue of conflict. Some of the more lurid intelligence reports are of doubtful provenance: some aspects of the coalition's recording of civilian deaths appear unreliable. The war logs cla.s.sified as secret are encyclopedic but incomplete. We have removed any material which threatens the safety of troops, local informants and collaborators.With these caveats, the collective picture that emerges is a very disturbing one. We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported; of hundreds of border clashes between Afghan and Pakistani troops, two armies which are supposed to be allies; of the existence of a special forces unit whose tasks include killing Taliban and al-Qaida leaders; of the slaughter of civilians caught by the Taliban's improvised explosive devices; and of a catalogue of incidents where coalition troops have fired on and killed each other or fellow Afghans under arms ...In these doc.u.ments, Iran's and Pakistan's intelligence agencies run riot. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence is linked to some of the war's most notorious commanders. The ISI is alleged to have sent 1,000 motorbikes to the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani for suicide attacks in Khost and Logar provinces, and to have been implicated in a sensational range of plots, from attempting to a.s.sa.s.sinate President Hamid Karzai to poisoning the beer supply of western troops. These reports are unverifiable and could be part of a barrage of false information provided by Afghan intelligence. But yesterday's White House response to the claims that elements of the Pakistan army had been so specifically linked to the militants made it plain that the status quo is unacceptable. It said that safe havens for militants within Pakistan continued to pose "an intolerable threat" to US forces. However you cut it, this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain is about to hand over gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national government in Kabul. Quite the contrary. After nine years of warfare, the chaos threatens to overwhelm. A war fought ostensibly for the hearts and minds of Afghans cannot be won like this.

What the paper did not dare advertise, for security reasons, was that the world would shortly be presented with a far bigger trove of leaked doc.u.ments, detailing similar truths about the bloodbath in Iraq.

CHAPTER 10.

The Iraq war logs

Cybers.p.a.ce 22 October 2010

"You know we don't do body counts"

GENERAL T TOMMY F FRANKS.

The Iraq war logs were all about numbers. Both the US administration and the British prime minister refused to admit how many ordinary Iraqis had been killed since the mixed blessing of their being "liberated" by US and UK troops. General Tommy Franks had notoriously been quoted in 2002 saying, "We don't do body counts" a year before he led the US military invasion of Iraq. He may have really meant that he was not going to fall into the over-optimistic trap of the Vietnam war in the 1960s, when US generals had claimed to have slaughtered virtually the entire military manpower of North Vietnam several times over, before admitting eventual defeat.

But because the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 turned into an unplanned bloodbath, "We don't do body counts" became the unspoken mantra of Bush and Blair as well. Authorities meticulously recorded that 4,748 US and allied troops lost their lives up to Christmas Day 2010. But western governments claimed for years that no other official casualty statistics existed.

The publication of the huge leaked database of Iraqi field reports in October 2010 gave the lie to that. The logs disclosed a detailed incident-by-incident record of at least 66,081 violent deaths of civilians in Iraq since the invasion. This figure, dismaying in itself, was nevertheless only a statistical starting-point. It is far too low. The database begins a year late in 2004, omitting the high casualties of the direct 2003 invasion period itself, and ends on 31 December 2009. Furthermore, the US figures are plainly unreliable in respect of the most sensitive issue civilian deaths directly caused by their own military activities.

For example, the town of Falluja was the site of two major urban battles in 2004, which reduced the place to near-rubble. Yet no civilian deaths whatever are recorded by the army loggers, apparently on the grounds that they had previously ordered all the inhabitants to leave. Monitors from the unofficial Iraq Body Count group, on the other hand, managed to identify more than 1,200 civilians who died during the Falluja fighting.

In other cases, the US army killed civilians, but wrongly recorded them in the database as enemy combatants. It was as enemy combatants, for example, that the two hapless Reuters employees shot in Baghdad in 2007 by an Apache helicopter guns.h.i.+p the episode captured on a gun-camera video, and subsequently discovered and leaked to WikiLeaks were registered.

As so often, further journalistic investigation was needed to improve these raw and statistically dirty figures. Iraq Body Count, an NGO offshoot of the Oxford Research Group and co-founded by a psychology professor, John Sloboda, had dedicated itself for years to counting up otherwise unregarded corpses. They were able to cross-check with the leaked military data. The group says: "The release and publication by WikiLeaks of the 'Iraq War Logs' provided IBC with the first large-scale database we could compare and cross-reference with our own. For most of its incidents this military database is as detailed as IBC's, and quite often more so. Its release in such a highly detailed form enabled us to carry out some preliminary research into the number of casualties that the logs might contain, that have not been reported elsewhere. IBC was consequently able to provide an initial, but fairly robust, estimate that, once fully a.n.a.lysed, the logs would reveal another 15,000 civilian deaths (including 3,000 ordinary police) beyond the previously known death toll."

The numbers contained in the war logs proved not only to generate that extra 15,000 casualties, but also to be broadly comparable with the IBC's own unofficial figures. At the end of 2010, IBC concluded that the full total of doc.u.mented civilian deaths from violence in Iraq since 2003 now ranged between 99,383 and 108,501. The increased confidence that the public can have in these numbers can be presumed to be directly due to the whistleblowing of Manning and a.s.sange, along with the dedication of IBC researchers, and the hard work of journalists from three news organisations. Future historians may be able to a.s.sess whether that work might make future American and British military adventures any less reckless and b.l.o.o.d.y.

Another aspect of the war logs statistics which is likely to be exceptionably reliable because the US army had no reason to play down the figures is the appalling total of civilians, local troops and coalition forces whose deaths were caused either by insurgent landmines or by internecine fighting. No fewer than 31,780 deaths were attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. Sectarian killings (recorded as "murders") claimed another 34,814 victims. Overall, the war logs detailed 109,032 deaths.

This total of dead broke down into the 66,081 civilians detailed above, plus 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces, and 23,984 people cla.s.sed as "enemy". At 31 December 2009, when the leaked database stops, the total was arrived at by the addition of 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers. Every one of those westerners who died had a name, a family and probably often a photograph published in their local newspaper along with grieving tributes. But these files showed they represented less than 3.5% of the real death toll in Iraq.

Such appalling bloodshed was justified by the US, the UK and their occupying partners on the grounds that they had at any rate rescued Iraqis from the brutal police state run by Saddam Hussein. It was therefore doubly disturbing when an a.n.a.lysis of the data by the Guardian Guardian's Nick Davies revealed that Iraq was still a torture chamber. The legacy being left behind by western troops was of an Iraqi army and police force which would continue to arrest, mistreat and murder its own citizens, almost as if Saddam had never been overthrown.

It was Bradley Manning's revulsion at the behaviour of the Iraqi police, and US military collusion with it, which had led him, according to statements in his chat logs, to think in 2009 about becoming a whistleblower in the first place. After being rebuffed in an effort to exculpate a group of improperly detained Iraqis, "everything started slipping ... I saw things differently ... I was actively involved in something that I was completely against."

Davies reported in the Guardian Guardian on 23 October: on 23 October: 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 ... 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.As recently as December 2009 the Americans were pa.s.sed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: "The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound ... The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pus.h.i.+ng him to the ground, punching him and shooting him." The report named at least one perpetrator and was pa.s.sed to coalition forces.In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring torture allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pa.s.s reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries.

Even when torture like this was not being alleged, vignette after vignette emerged from the Iraq logs of killings which must have been deeply degrading and damaging to their military perpetrators.

On 22 February 2007, for example, an Apache helicopter guns.h.i.+p crew from the same unit that killed the Reuters employees, call sign Crazyhorse 18 radioed back to base for advice about their aerial man-hunt. They were chasing down a pair of insurgents who had been lobbing mortar sh.e.l.ls at a US base, and then attempted to make off in a van. Crazyhorse 18 shot up the van. The two men jumped out and tried to escape in a dumper truck. Crazyhorse 18 shot that up, too. "They came out wanting to surrender," the helicopter crew signalled back to base, asking for advice. What were they to do? It is a sign of US respect for legal forms that the base lawyer was immediately on hand, ready to be consulted. The controller signalled back: "Lawyer states they cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets." So the helicopter crew killed the men, as they were attempting to surrender.

Those two dead men were enemy combatants. The same could probably not be said of a car which drove too close to a supply convoy outside Baghdad. The marines in the rear Humvee claimed afterwards that they had made hand signals and fired warning shots to the engine-block "to warn the vehicle to slow down and not approach the convoy". When it had closed to within 20 yards of the Humvee, the marines started putting shots into its windscreen.

The spare uppercase prose of the leaked field report takes up the story.

THE VEHICLE SWERVED OFF THE ROAD INTO A Ca.n.a.l 1.5KM NORTH OF SAQLAWIYAH (38S LB 768 976) AND SANK. (1) ADULT MALE EXITED THE VEHICLE AND WAS RECOVERED FROM THE Ca.n.a.l; ALL OTHER Pa.s.sENGERS SANK WITH THE VEHICLE. THE ADULT MALE WAS TREATED BY THE CORPSMAN ON THE SCENE AND WAS TRANSPORTED TO THE SAQLAWIYAH JCC AND SUBSEQUENTLY TRANSPORTED TO THE JORDANIAN HOSPITAL. SAQLAWIYAH I[RAQI] P[OLICE] S[ERVICE] RESPONDED TO THE SCENE AND RECOVERED (2) ADULT FEMALES, (3) CHILDREN AGES 5 TO 8, AND (1) INFANT FROM THE VEHICLE. ALL (6) HAD DROWNED. THE SAQLAWIYAH IPS ARE TAKING ALL RECOVERED BODIES TO RAMADI.

These were not the hi-tech military heroics so frequently put out by the US army's press releases, but acts of cruelty more worthy perhaps of a place in a modern version of Goya's dark etchings from early 19th-century Spain, "The Disasters of War".

a.s.sange had launched the publication of the Iraq logs in the grandiose ballroom of the Park Plaza hotel on the Thames, with Iraq Body Count, Phil s.h.i.+ner of Public Interest Lawyers, and a TV doc.u.mentary team all in attendance. Shortly before 10am, the teams lined up in the corridor behind a.s.sange, who was wearing a sharp suit and tie, and led them out into a blizzard of flashbulbs and camera lights. He was mobbed. It was as if the Australian were a rock star with his entourage. About 300 journalists had turned out to watch his performance, five times more than at the launch of the Afghan logs. When the packed room was called to order, a.s.sange intoned: "This disclosure is about the truth."

He had now delivered two of his controversial leaked "packages" to the newspapers, with striking results. But the question in the Guardian Guardian and and New York Times New York Times journalists' minds, as they watched the adulation, was would a.s.sange be prepared to honour his undertaking, and hand over "package three" for publication? That might prove even more sensational. journalists' minds, as they watched the adulation, was would a.s.sange be prepared to honour his undertaking, and hand over "package three" for publication? That might prove even more sensational.

CHAPTER 11.

The cables

Near Lochnagar, Scotland August 2010

"ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#"

a.s.sANGE'S 58- 58-CHARACTER Pa.s.sWORD.

David Leigh had listened patiently to a.s.sange, who had instructed him that he must never allow his memory stick to be connected to any computer that was exposed to the internet, for fear of electronic eavesdropping by US intelligence. But there was currently no danger of that at all. Leigh's rented cottage way up in the Scottish Highlands was unable even to receive a TV signal, never mind a broadband connection. The Guardian Guardian's investigations editor had originally planned to spend his annual summer vacation with his wife, hill-walking in the Grampians. But the summits of Dreish, Mayar, Lochnagar and Cat Law went unclimbed. He sat transfixed at his desk instead, while the sun rose and set daily on the heather-covered hills outside. On the tiny silver Hewlett Packard thumb-drive plugged into his MacBook were the full texts of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables. To search through them was maddening, tiring and utterly compelling.

It had been a struggle to prise these doc.u.ments out of a.s.sange back in London. There were repeated pilgrimages to the mews house belonging to Vaughan Smith's Frontline Club near Paddington station before a.s.sange reluctantly turned them over. "We have to able to work on them, Julian," Leigh had argued. "None of the partners have any real idea what's there, except their contents are supposed to give Hillary Clinton a heart attack!" a.s.sange was keeping the three news organisations dangling, despite his original agreement to deliver all the material for publication. He willingly pa.s.sed on the less important war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, but talked of how he would use his power to withhold the cables in order to "discipline" the mainstream media.

The atmosphere had become even more problematic since Nick Davies personally broke off relations in the summer, after a.s.sange breached the original compact, as Davies saw it, by going behind his back to the Guardian Guardian's TV rivals at Channel 4, taking with him all the knowledge acquired by privileged visits to the Guardian Guardian's research room. Davies at the time said he felt betrayed: a.s.sange simply insisted there had never been a deal.

The other Guardian Guardian journalists tightened their lips and held their peace. There was still a long road to travel if all the leaks were ever to come out. But after the publication of the Afghan war logs, a.s.sange proposed to change the terms of the deal once again, before the planned launch of the much bigger tranche of Iraq logs. He wanted more television, in order to provide "emotional impact". He had by now made some new friends in London Ahmad Ibrahim, from the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera, and Gavin MacFadyen from City University in London. MacFadyen, a veteran of journalists tightened their lips and held their peace. There was still a long road to travel if all the leaks were ever to come out. But after the publication of the Afghan war logs, a.s.sange proposed to change the terms of the deal once again, before the planned launch of the much bigger tranche of Iraq logs. He wanted more television, in order to provide "emotional impact". He had by now made some new friends in London Ahmad Ibrahim, from the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera, and Gavin MacFadyen from City University in London. MacFadyen, a veteran of World in Action World in Action, one of Britain's most distinguished investigative TV series in the 1970s, had recently helped set up an independent production company based at the university. Called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, it was funded by the David and Elaine Potter Foundation. Elaine had been a reporter during the great days of London's Sunday Times Sunday Times, and her husband David had made millions from the development of the Psion computer. There was a distinct prospect that the wealthy Potter Foundation might become patrons of WikiLeaks: the Florentine Medicis, as it were, to a.s.sange's Michelangelo. Rapidly, the "Bureau" was drawn into a.s.sange's new plans.

He demanded that print publication of the Iraq war logs be postponed for at least another six weeks. This would enable the Bureau, under a.s.sange's guidance, to sell a TV doc.u.mentary to Channel 4's well-regarded Dispatches Dispatches series. The Bureau would also make and sell a second doc.u.mentary, of a more wide-ranging nature, to be aired on both Al Jazeera's Arabic and English-language channels, which could be guaranteed to cause uproar in the Middle East. Both doc.u.mentaries eventually got made, and a.s.sange sensibly hired a respected NGO, Iraq Body Count, to a.n.a.lyse the casualty figures for the TV productions. series. The Bureau would also make and sell a second doc.u.mentary, of a more wide-ranging nature, to be aired on both Al Jazeera's Arabic and English-language channels, which could be guaranteed to cause uproar in the Middle East. Both doc.u.mentaries eventually got made, and a.s.sange sensibly hired a respected NGO, Iraq Body Count, to a.n.a.lyse the casualty figures for the TV productions.

The fledgling Bureau, headed by former TV journalist Iain Overton, unsuccessfully attempted to make further lucrative sales to TV channels in the US. Overton then exasperated his unenthusiastic print partners by giving an on-the-record interview to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek Newsweek, betraying in advance the entire top-secret plan to publish the Iraq war logs.

"Exclusive: WikiLeaks Collaborating With Media Outlets on Release of Iraq Doc.u.ments", ran the headline above the article, which opened: "A London-based journalism nonprofit is working with the WikiLeaks website and TV and print media in several countries on programmes and stories based on what is described as a ma.s.sive cache of cla.s.sified US military field reports related to the Iraq war ... The material is the 'biggest leak of military intelligence' that has ever occurred, Overton says."

a.s.sange's side deal with the Qataris also angered the original partners. Al Jazeera English was to break the agreed embargo for simultaneous publication by almost an hour, leaving the other media organisations scrambling to catch up on their websites. Leigh found it hard to disagree with Eric Schmitt of the New York Times New York Times when he protested that a.s.sange seemed to be doing media deals with "riff-raff". The founder of WikiLeaks had been rocketed to the status of a huge celebrity, in large part thanks to the credibility bestowed on him by three of the world's major news organisations. But was he going out of control? when he protested that a.s.sange seemed to be doing media deals with "riff-raff". The founder of WikiLeaks had been rocketed to the status of a huge celebrity, in large part thanks to the credibility bestowed on him by three of the world's major news organisations. But was he going out of control?

Leigh tried his best not to fall out with this Australian impresario, who was p.r.o.ne to criticise what he called the "snaky Brits". Instead, Leigh used his ever-s.h.i.+fting demands as a negotiating lever. "You want us to postpone the Iraq logs' publication so you can get some TV," he said. "We could refuse, and simply go ahead with publication as planned. If you want us to do something for you, then you've got to do something for us as well." He asked a.s.sange to stop procrastinating, and hand over the biggest trove of all: the cables. a.s.sange said, "I could give you half of them, covering the first 50% of the period."

Leigh refused. All or nothing, he said. "What happens if you end up in an orange jump-suit en route to Guantanamo before you can release the full files?" In return he would give a.s.sange a promise to keep the cables secure, and not to publish them until the time came. a.s.sange had always been vague about timing: he generally indicated, however, that October would be a suitable date. He believed the US army's charges against the imprisoned soldier Bradley Manning would have crystallised by then, and publication could not make his fate any worse. He also said, echoing Leigh's gallows humour: "I'm going to need to be safe in Cuba first!"

Eventually, a.s.sange capitulated. Late at night, after a two-hour debate, he started the process on one of his little netbooks that would enable Leigh to download the entire tranche of cables. The Guardian Guardian journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a pa.s.sword. a.s.sange wrote down on a sc.r.a.p of paper: journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a pa.s.sword. a.s.sange wrote down on a sc.r.a.p of paper: ACollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#. "That's the pa.s.sword," he said. "But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word 'Diplomatic' before the word 'History'. Can you remember that?"

"I can remember that."

Leigh set off home, and successfully installed the PGP software. He typed in the lengthy pa.s.sword, and was gratified to be able to download a huge file from a.s.sange's temporary website. Then he realized it was zipped up compressed using a format called 7z which he had never heard of, and couldn't understand. He got back in his car and drove through the deserted London streets in the small hours, to a.s.sange's headquarters in Southwick Mews. a.s.sange smiled a little pityingly, and unzipped it for him.

Now, isolated up in the Highlands, with hares and buzzards for company, Leigh felt safe enough to work steadily through the dangerous contents of the memory stick. Obviously, there was no way he, or any other human, could read through a quarter of a million cables. Cut off from the Guardian Guardian's own network, he was unable to have the material turned into a searchable database. Nor could he call up such a monolithic file on his laptop and search through it in the normal simple-minded journalistic way, as a word processor doc.u.ment or something similar: it was just too big.

Harold Frayman, the Guardian Guardian's technical expert, was there to rescue him. Before Leigh left town, he sawed the material into 87 chunks, each just about small enough to call up and read separately. Then he explained how Leigh could use a simple program called TextWrangler to search for key words or phrases through all the separate files simultaneously, and present the results in a user-friendly form.

Leigh was in business. He quickly learned that although the cables often contained discursive free-text essays on local politics, their headers were always a.s.sembled in a rigid format. In fact, the state department posted on its own website an uncla.s.sified telecommunications handbook which instructed its cipher clerks exactly what to do and how to do it, every time.

So, to type in, for example, "FM AMEMBa.s.sY TUNIS" could be guaranteed to fetch up a list of each dispatch sent back to Was.h.i.+ngton from the American emba.s.sy in the capital of Tunisia. Similarly, the dispatches always signed off with the uppercase surname of the amba.s.sador in post at the time. So the legend TUTTLE would fetch every cable during the amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p of Robert Tuttle, George W Bush's London envoy.

There were limits to the dossier's contents. There was very little material prior to 2006 and the "Net-Centric Diplomacy" system had clearly been built up from some restricted pilot projects. So only a few emba.s.sies contributed material at first. Even the more up-to-date and voluminous dispatches were only a partial selection: many cables or sections that the state department could not bring themselves to share with other parts of the Was.h.i.+ngton military and bureaucratic forest were missing. Nevertheless, what the cables contained was an astonis.h.i.+ng mountain of words, cataloguing the recent diplomacy of the world's sole superpower in ways that no one in earlier decades could have even imagined.

Its sheer bulk was overwhelming. If the tiny memory stick containing the cables had been a set of printed texts, it would have made up a library containing more than 2,000 sizeable books. No human diplomats would have attempted to write so much down before the coming of the digital age: if written down, no human spy would have been able to purloin copies of that much paper without using a lorry, and no human mind would have been able subsequently to a.n.a.lyse it without spending half a lifetime at the task.

To be confronted with this set of data therefore represented a severe journalistic problem.

Leigh began his experiments by typing in the word "Megrahi". He thought the name of the Libyan intelligence officer imprisoned for his part in the notorious 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing might be unusual enough to throw up relevant results. The Megrahi case was an ongoing diplomatic altercation involving the Americans, the Libyans, the British, the Scottish and as it transpired even the Qataris. Against US wishes, Megrahi had been released from a UK prison in August 2009, supposedly on compa.s.sionate grounds because he was on the brink of death from prostate cancer. A year later, he was still alive, after receiving a hero's welcome back in Tripoli. That much was known to the outside world, and conspiracy theories abounded. Was there now a way of uncovering the insider truth?

The TextWrangler software took barely two minutes to throw up and itemise no fewer than 451 appearances of the word Megrahi in US dispatches. Taken together, the picture they painted was certainly different from the one officially fed to the British public at the time. The first cable up on the screen was from Richard LeBaron, the charge d'affaires in London, dated 24 October 2008. Marked "PRIORITY" for both the secretary of state in Was.h.i.+ngton and also the department of justice, the cable was cla.s.sified "CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN". It began, "Convicted Pam Am 103 bomber Abdelba.s.set al-Megrahi has inoperable, incurable cancer, but it is not clear how long he has to live."

A succession of cables then charted growing pressure described as "thuggish" heaped on the British by Libya. Viewed sidelong from a US perspective, the dilemma for their junior ally in London was clear, and even evoked some sympathy. The American public was going to be furious if the ailing Megrahi was let out too soon: many US citizens had died on the bombed plane, and Megrahi was the only Libyan who had ever received any kind of punishment for the atrocity.

On the other hand, if Megrahi was allowed to die in a Scottish prison (the fragments of the plane had fallen on a Scottish town, and Scotland had its own legal system) then Muammar Gaddafi, the megalomaniac ruler of Libya, was threatening dire commercial reprisals. The British amba.s.sador was privately warning that UK interests could be "cut off at the knees". It was the crucial truth no British politician wanted to come clean about in public.

The British administration in London managed to push the decision for Megrahi's release and the subsequent blame for it on to the autonomous government in Scotland. The Scottish nationalist politicians complained bitterly to the US that they had got nothing out of the deal. The US diplomats recorded privately that it served the Scot Nats right for getting out of their depth. The Americans also noted their own suspicions that the Scots might have been in effect bribed with the offer of Qatari trade loans to let Megrahi out (both parties vociferously denied it) and that Tony Blair, when prime minister, might have cynically promised leniency for Megrahi in return for lucrative British oil deals. (The British equally vociferously denied that accusation.) The cables left the British looking ineffectual: they failed to prevent Gaddafi's son Saif from arranging an embarra.s.sing hero's welcome for Megrahi, although celebrations were somewhat toned down. And UK intelligence was so weak that diplomats were wringing their hands over the prospect of a public Megrahi funeral the following year but on the basis of false information, duly pa.s.sed on to the US, that he was now due to die any minute.

The cables also disclosed that the Americans spoke with forked tongues. While it was left to US domestic politicians to huff angrily about Libyan perfidy, the state department signalled that Gaddafi might be co-opted to help hunt down al-Qaida fundamentalists. And the Libyan ruler was continuing to dismantle his would-be nuclear a.r.s.enal, even if Hillary Clinton had to personally sign a grovelling letter to mollify one of his ma.s.sive sulks.

This particular sulk came about, the cables revealed, when Gaddafi, who appeared at the UN accompanied everywhere by a "voluptuous blonde Ukrainian nurse", flew into a rage at the derisive reception accorded to his lengthy general a.s.sembly speech. His pique was compounded by US refusal to let him pitch his iconic Bedouin-style tent in New York. Gaddaffi vented his ire, it transpired, by suddenly refusing to allow a "hot" s.h.i.+pment of highly enriched uranium be loaded on a transport plane and s.h.i.+pped back to Russia, as part of his nuclear-dismantling agreement. US diplomats and experts warned in terrified tones of a radioactive calamity, as the uranium container sat for a month, unguarded and in danger of heating up and cracking open.