More Wikileaks.Follow

BBC site has coverage of the WikiLeaks press conference.

Very well prosecuted arguments.

True. Where did you see that they were tallying deaths in that manner? Like Aeth, reading these documents is Greek to me, this is an honest question.

One of the local radio stations was talking about that this morning. They didn't cite any sources, but it makes a certain degree of sense in how the numbers line up. Politically during the Bush years at very least there was no reason to underreport civilian casualty figures because they were looking for justifications to send more troops, and thats the kind of number that can be used for that exact purpose.

In every after action report I have ever seen, which admittedly isn't all that many, a death of a non combatant is usually noted as an approximate location and sometimes a description. If they aren't sure a given individual was a civilian or an insurgent, then sometimes they get identification and further information that make it into those reports, but usually not.

Realistically, counting the number of new graves and cremations subtracting known deaths of other non war related causes would be the best way to get a baseline number to compare against, though even that would be spotty because of the advanced state of Iraqi records keeping these days...

That would probably at least get you a ballpark figure, and would be something visible from the resolution of the civilian earthwatch satilite if any of those groups chose to get it to take some pictures for the remote, enemy held areas and compare them with older pictures?

That huuuuge conventional munitions depot falling intact into terrorist hands was responsable for most of the civilain deaths, munitions smuggled in from Iran, the bulk of the rest. We killed our fair share too I'm sure, but the blame for that unsecured munitions depot lies squarely on the U.S. unfortunatly. A few hundred thousand artilliary rounds makes a hell of alot of IED's,

I'll look more into the methodology when its not 1:30 a.m. over here, that link showed the methodology from journalism sources, but id doesn't really go into how they were fitting the after action reports into that framework. I suppose over a 7 year conflict the total numbers aren't unreasonable, they just seem higher than one would expect given known population densities, and the fairly solid existing counts of "insurgents" killed and coalition troops killed.

Things were covered up, thats for sure, but we already knew that prior to this. Im just not convinced that the numbers of people killed was one of those things.

How do you use a high number of civilian casualties as a reason to send in more troops?

But if there's multiple reports on the same action then they'll all still describe the same action and the same number of (civilian) casualties so I doubt that would lead to 6 reports with 5 casualties = 30 casualties scenario.


See, I wasn't even aware that this happened, is this some years ago or more recent?

And I don't think that anyone is argueing that all the civilian casualties are because of the US, the civilian casualties are also not my biggest concern as a large part of those are probably suicide bombings.
What does concern me is the reports of torture and random killings and the fact that it is, once more, shown that the truth is quickly hidden when convenient for the government up to the point of ignoring crimes of war.

Edited, Oct 24th 2010 11:43am by Aethien

"oh noes, the evil bad terrorist bad guys who are bad are killing the poor innocent people we are trying to protect and who want peace and fluffy bunnies. we can only protect them by sending in more divisiions of troops! " Something like that.

This statement, and


tell me all I need to know.

fUcker

Considering that precautions were taken to minimize potential harm to individuals I am indeed more worried about torture and murder than about the leaking of the documents.
And if the government fails to tell the truth it's only a matter of time before things like this happen.

Serious question: did you miss the part where the documents were scanned for names that could be dangerous if released and were redacted?

Serious question: Do you honestly think that makes any difference or has any relevance to the fact that classified material was compromised?

I'm trying to find the connection of how that has any relevance at all and who was being protected, in either case you still didn't answer the question. What names? Not literally who like "Bob Smith", but are we talking about people committing the war crimes? The people responsible for covering up the war crimes? The person who leaked the information or the people who were tortured? Not like any of that matters, but just curious.



Yea, that can't be further from the truth. Most documents are classified for security purposes. This is why it's terrifying. I'm all about punishing people who have committed crimes and disclosing the people who hid them, but who says it'll stop there? Who's to say that an entire unit of our troops don't get wiped out because their assault on city x was "wiki-leaked".

This is why people need to be concerned about classified material being disclosed. In this case, it may "benefit" us, but what about the next story? It's the concept that is of concern