I was very tempted to put "Breaking" and "Wikileaks" in the title, but that would be a cynical way of getting attention. Nonetheless, this is an important story which has just been posted on the Guardian website, and it deserves attention. Allegedly, the same person who leaked the military papers from Afghanistan has done it again with respect to Iraq, and the results are not pretty.
Some quotes from the article:
On allegations of torture:
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".
On coverup:
Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.
This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.
This is a small portion of the original article. I would have posted this as a comment to an existing story, but I couldn't find one on this particular subject. Nonetheless, I really think it deserves attention. Daily Kos was one of the main places I went to to gather news during the Iraq war, because I knew that stories there would have unbiased links. I know that the economy and the election are more important to readers here right now, but I think that the original premise that we should not be persecuting, and condoning persecution stands.