Wikileaks has released nearly 400,000 classified US files on the Iraq war, some detailing gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the US military knew about but did not seem to investigate.
The Pentagon decried the website's publication of the secret reports - the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history, far surpassing the group's dump of more than 70,000 Afghan war files in July.
US officials said the leak endangered US troops and threatened to put some 300 Iraqi collaborators at risk by exposing their identities.
Amnesty International today called on the US to investigate how much was officially known about the alleged torture and other ill-treatment of detainees held by Iraqi security forces.
Iraq vowed today to probe allegations that police or soldiers committed crimes during the war.
"The government will show no leniency when it comes to the rights of its citizens," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office said, while also decrying the timing of the reports while Iraqi political groups are trying to negotiate a new government.
Iraqi officials including Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani said many of the cases mentioned in the US military documents appeared to be old. Nevertheless, a committee would vet them.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said the documents showed evidence of war crimes, but the Pentagon dismissed the files as "ground-level" field reports from a well-chronicled war with no real surprises.
"We deplore Wikileaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world," Geoff Morrell, Pentagon press secretary, said.
The Iraq war files touched on other themes, including well-known US concerns about Iranian training and support for Iraqi militias. The documents, which spanned 2003 to 2009, also detailed 66,081 civilian deaths in the Iraqi conflict, Wikileaks said.
Assange told Al Jazeera television the documents had provided enough material for 40 wrongful killing lawsuits.
"There are reports of civilians being indiscriminately killed at checkpoints ... of Iraqi detainees being tortured by coalition forces, and of US soldiers blowing up entire civilian buildings because of one suspected insurgent on the roof," he said
In one 2007 case, according to the documents, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis suspects who had made signs that they wanted to surrender. The document said, "They can not surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."
Although the Iraq conflict has faded from US public debate in recent years, the document dump threatens to revive memories of some of the most trying times in the war, including the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Julian Assange told a news conference in London this morning that he was seeking to create the “maximum political impact possible” through their latest release.
“This disclosure is about the truth,” he said.
“We hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued on since the war officially concluded.”
He added: “While I am not sure we have achieved the maximum possible (political impact) I think we are getting pretty close.”
Agencies