Al Jazeera has just begun reporting on the 10,000 Wikileaks documents they've had for weeks now. There is no text yet, but here is the link to the first 6-minute clip, which centers on 1300 reports US soldiers made of Iraqi-on-Iraqi detainee torture and murder that were covered up by the Defense Department.
Al-Jazeera's Wiki-leaks on Iraqi Torture
The piece is hard to watch, and hard to listen to. Accounts of sodomy with water bottles and hoses, electrodes attached to feet and genitals, people being beaten to death or unarmed people shot at roadblocks. The rape of a 15-year-old boy.
It is heartening that soldiers reported this, but it is disgusting that per Donald Rumsfeld they were told the proper action was not to try and STOP this type of thing, but to REPORT it only through "proper channels." There is a press conference in which you see him overruling a general on this. There was a specific rule, FRAGO-242, a fragmentary order that ruled out any US intervention in Iraqi on Iraqi torture.
Naturally the proper channels eventually led to people with no interest in investigating the torture or stopping it.
This is the first in a series of reports, covering from 2004 to 2010 The White House has refused comment, and directed all questions be directed to the Department of Defense.
I am sorry this is so fragmentary. I can't watch it again.
Obama can't avoid dealing with this issue of torture. It won't go away.
UPDATE 1:
681 unarmed civilian were killed at coalition checkpoints and shot by convoys
115 militants at checkpoints
13 coalition deaths are recorded at checkpoints
.
After the numbers in the documents are added, a civilian death figure of 122,000 is arrived at.
UPDATE 2
At least 14 additional cases of unprovoked Blackwater shootings. NO prosecutions of Blackwater employees.