Tales of torture

WikiLeaks is performing an important service by putting reality before us as it unfolds.


Editorial October 23, 2010

The newspaper editors and their staff who have spent hours filtering through the huge swathe of 400,000 documents put out on the Iraq war by the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks, and handed over to publications under an embargo in advance, have almost all headlined a similar theme in their account of the contents of the material. The tale that emerges is one of the most terrible brutality and torture inflicted by both Iraqi and US soldiers. This of course does not come as a surprise — accounts of such torture have surfaced from time to time — perhaps most notoriously in the case of incidents in prison.

But the minute details contained in the documents are still shocking. They describe US airmen shooting dead Iraqi insurgents attempting to surrender, detail thousands of civilian deaths with over 66,000 ‘non-combatants’, reportedly killed, and describe the ruthlessness with which US and Iraqi soldiers, as well as groups such as Blackwater acted. In the wilderness of Iraq, life, it seemed, lost all value. The image that was displayed a few weeks ago of US soldiers pulling out of Iraq and shouting ‘we won’ seem absurd in the context of what really happened in a country that may never recover from the US invasion. The latest leaks, coming months after 92,000 documents from the Afghan war,  demonstrate how in an age where information flows faster than ever before it has become harder to keep secrets. This of course is why Wikileaks is important. Criticism or concern that the leaked documents put anti-Taliban informers or Us soldiers at risk in Afghanistan, and now Iraq, has so far been unfounded. Rather than acting irresponsibly as the Pentagon had accused, Wikileaks is in many ways performing an important service by putting reality before us as it unfolds.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 24th, 2010.

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