AT 2355D, AN AUS PATROL CAME UNDER SAF.
/___ RETURNED FIRE AND EXTRACTED BACK TO BASE.
IPS TASKED TO INVESTIGATE.
IDENTIFIED PERSON AS VILLAGE NIGHT GUARD WHO WAS ARRESTED.
___ INJ/DAM
DATE: 24 JULY 2006, REGION: MND-SE, ENEMY DETAINED: 1, MGRS: 38RNV25
And there you have it, one of the 400,000 US military records from the ground in Iraq that the US government did not want you to see. The reports, covering a period from 2004 to 2010, were leaked to whistle-blower website WikiLeaks and released over the weekend.
The above report is one of over 60 Crikey has identified as most likely referring to Australian troops.
The records contain gaps (marked by three underscores) where WikiLeaks has redacted names of soldiers, Iraqi civilians and, perhaps controversially, even some countries. Acronyms such as SAF (Small Arms Fire) and IPS (Iraqi Police Force) are common. Each report has a GPS location attached.
The documents referencing Australian troops range from friendly fire incidents where civilians were wounded, to suicide vehicle attacks, to warnings of impending attacks by informants, false checkpoints by armed insurgents, plots to kill ambassadors and even rock throwing incidents by local kids.
Most of the activity involving Australians centres around the south-eastern cities of Samawah and Nasiriyah, a relatively safe part of the country where the troops were deployed after the initial invasion to support the reconstruction effort and to train Iraqi troops, first as the Al Muthanna Task Group and then as the Overwatch Battle Group (West).
Like the Afghan War Diaries released by WikiLeaks in July, the reports are first and second-hand accounts of incidents in the war zone.
Building on their experiences with the Afghan documents, WikiLeaks has done some serious work preparing such a large amount of information for the general public. This has included sifting through the reports, blanking names, liaising with traditional media outlets to summarise the data and, finally, presenting the information in an accessible way via the web.
One visually impressive but undoubtedly sensationalist tool is the ‘every death mapped’ page provided by The Guardian newspaper in the UK. The site overlays each of the deadly incident reports onto Google maps, drowning every town and city in Iraq in a mass of red dots.
One of the more interesting questions for Australians about the Iraqi war logs is why there are so few reports involving our soldiers. While Australian troops peaked at 2,000 during the 2003 invasion, the numbers that remained behind to provide security in the southern region of Iraq were about 500. By contrast, the US had about 120,000 troops in Iraq during this period. That ratio would suggest, all things being equal, 1600 reports instead of the roughly 65 reports provided by WikiLeaks.
There may be several reasons for this discrepancy. At the time of the occupation there was some criticism that the allied countries, tepid on the invasion from the beginning, sat in their bases and favoured checkpoints and reconstructions in safer parts of Iraq to combat operations in the more dangerous areas of Baghdad and the West.
Australians may be referred to in the American reports by different names or WikiLeaks may have redacted references to Australians at the request of the Pentagon. Like the Afghan War Diaries, reports on Australia’s SAS forces are probably not included. Finally, Australian incidents not witnessed by US ground forces were possibly reported via different mechanisms.
This leaves open the potential for an Australian version of the Iraq war logs at a later date.
On an initial survey of the massive amount of data released by WikiLeaks over the weekend, the Australian Defence Forces appear to be operating on a high level of professionalism and, yes, humanitarianism. Regardless of the disdain many Australians hold for those who sent us to war, these documents show that the men and women on the ground did a good job.
Don’t believe me? Thanks to WikiLeaks and someone inside the American military, you can see for yourself.
The reason the Australian contingent in Iraq goes largely unmentioned is because it was a deliberate token effort. The Bush administration were happy for the Australian contribution to be one of moral support only, so a company was committed to securing the Green Zone, and a task force was committed to providing overwatch to one of the safest areas of the country. So, there were occasional checkpoint shootings, occasional casualties from fire on the Green Zone, and if memory serves, one incident in which Australians patrolling the Green Zone exchanged fire with friendly Iraqi security forces at night. There’s nothing preternaturally skilled about the Australian forces that would allow them to prevail where the Americans were struggling; they were simply removed from the real difficulties of the war.
The current Australian puppet regime (both its Govt. and Opposition elements), will no doubt be dutifully following US instructions to brand Julian Assange a criminal and to recommend an immediate move against Wikileaks. Remember that site was on Conroy’s original Internet blacklist along with the requiasite pedophile sites. The Internet Nazis will no doubt ensure that their Internet political filter keeps Wikileaks away from an increasingly leery public. Clearly any instance of truthful reporting is deemed bad for our health. Certainly, the MSM appear to have adopted this thinking and will ensure that this massive scandal is removed from their pages as soon as possible. I don’t know who is writing tweedle dee and tweedle dum’s speeches but I am pretty sure they are coming from the same source. Comments from both sides of the “Party” completely disregard the fact that seven in ten Australians want us out of the places we are in. They continue to lecture us like this is non negotiable. Andrew Wilkie bravely asserted that the Australian Govt. and Opposition alike should just come clean and tell us that our advisors recommend we don’t p1$$ off the Americans and that is the end of it. Never mind the fact that we are creating mega blowback for ourselves in the process, ensuring in the longer term a domestic insurgency that otherwise would not have existed. You start killing people’s relatives in other countries and they are bound to get pretty hacked off. Wilkie goes on to say that the NZedders greatly annoyed the Americans under Lange but most of the huffing and puffing was purely theatre. Clearly we are not prepared to take such risks.
Thank God for whistleblowers
“Funny” the people most outraged at this turn of events, seem to be those with the most to hide, in all this – that have been hiding it for so long.
“Lives at risk”? “Convenient”, but from the carryings-on, it seems more like their prime concern continues to be for their “reputations”, that have been valued above “truth”, and those “extra” (“collateral”) lives, in this quest for “vainglory” – from all levels (including the PR management team) of involvement.
Then they’ll turn around and waffle on about some “right to know”, on some other matter they’re not involvd in directly.
Yes, more feel-good back-patting for our armed forces. Yawn. Andrew Riddle36’s comments are more in tune with the reality. In many ways, the recent releases of Wikileaks do not tell us much that differs from what we have understood in the past (we intrinsically know war is futile & inexcusable). However, what they are inadvertently throwing light on are the colours of bias that each media team is wearing.
Aussie coverage of this Iraq story is telling – no mention of UN’s calls to investigate war crimes as a result of these leaks; rehashing the ‘security of our troops is endangered’ chestnut (even though a cursory Google search reveals that Wikileaks redacted more details than the Pentagon – LOL); and perhaps most disappointingly – Crikey’s choice of prominently linking the New York Times’ hopelessly obvious hit piece on Assange. (See Glenn Greenwald’s surgical dissection of the latter at Salon for some perspective). Aussies can laugh at the inanity of Fox News et al, but we too are already swimming in the same swamp.