A 2007 photograph shows a North Carolina memorial for U.S. casualties in the Iraq War. Since then, the American death toll has risen from 3883 to 4426, and classified death counts revealed by WikiLeaks put the total documented deaths from 2004 to 2009, including civilians, at 109,032.

Photo © Nils Fretwurst. Obtained under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License via Wikipedia.

Nearly 400,000 classified U.S. military documents made public today by WikiLeaks show that the United States lied about civilian death counts and made a policy of not investigating torture allegations during the Iraq War.

Major global newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde had early access to the classified material. The British Bureau for Investigative Journalism has also created a detailed website about the Iraq War Logs.

Although the Pentagon previously denied that it kept records of civilian deaths, the classified war logs document the deaths of 66,081 Iraqi civilians from 2004 to 2009, out of a total 109,032. These numbers fit estimates by the Iraq Body Count project, which the New York Times reminds us is an organization that the “Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers.” The Times also notes that as late as this summer, the Pentagon reported an official death count far lower than the numbers now revealed in the classified war logs.

The leaked documents also reveal that the U.S. made a policy of ignoring incidents of prisoner abuse and torture committed by Iraqi security forces. American Troops were required to report such abuse to their superiors, but military officials were not required to investigate reports of torture unless Americans had actually taken part. This led the U.S. to cover its eyes to over 1000 reports of abuse by the very Iraqi security forces that the U.S. has been backing up and training to take control of the country.

Incidents that the United States ignored included reports of “men and women blindfolded, beaten with cables, their genitals electrocuted, fingernails ripped out, sodomised with bottles and hoses” (IraqWarLogs.com) and “prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks” as well as “rape and even murder” (The Guardian). Despite knowledge of this widespread torture, the United States transfered at least 9,250 detainees to Iraqi supervision as late as 2010, despite a written 2008 campaign pledge that “Barack Obama will end the use torture without exception” (PolitiFact.com). The lack of real change from the Obama Administration is not surprising given Obama’s choice to maintain Bush appointee Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense.

When Britain’s Bureau for Investigative Journalism sent a letter to the Pentagon asking for comment on the allegation that “the US Government handed over detainees to Iraqi authorities, knowing of concerns that torture was rife in Iraqi detention facilities,” the Pentagon replied only to say:

“We strongly condemn the unauthorised disclosure of classified information and will not comment on these leaked documents other than to note that ‘significant activities’ reports are initial, raw observations by tactical units. They are essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story. That said, the period covered by these reports has been well-chronicled in news stories, books and films and the release of these field reports does not bring new understanding to Iraq’s past.” (IraqWarLogs.com)

As an American citizen, I abhor that my country has tacitly allowed these sickening human rights violations to take place by under-reporting casualties and failing to investigate clear reports of torture and abuse. I cannot and will not give my support to any politician or official who enables this disgusting degradation of human life to continue.