The Wiki Leaks' Afghan Diary

I know I am a little late on this (It was released Sunday), but artists need a break too. I haven't even started to comb through this monster document of 91,000 reports (200,000 pages), but Wiki Leaks has set up a dedicated page to help readers manage it content.

http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/

Here is part of the statement from Wiki Leaks about the diary:

The Afghan War Diary an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.

Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.

Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad type of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event as classified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit and a number of other fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an English language description of the events that are covered in the report.

And in an interview by Channel 4 News, Julian Assnage, founder of Wiki Leaks, stated:

This is really the entire war and it includes nearly every military event that has occurred. So it includes all the small things that are not normally reported but that actually result in the civilian casualties and the troop kills.
For example, a man is seen digging a road, troops think he is an insurgent placing an IED. They shout, he runs away, they try to shoot him, he runs away, then they fire some mortars. The mortar overshoots, hits a village and kills a five year old boy. The material was full of things like that.
Similarly, troops are in a field, they see some unexploded ordnance. They could leave it alone or shoot it with their guns but for some reason, probably because they're bored, they call in an airstrike. Just a single shell. The bomb comes in, hits a village, 17 people go off to hospital.
Then there are also the big events - so operation Medusa, late 2006. 181 people killed at once, most by an AC 130 gunship - a big airplane with canons fixed on the side, circling and shooting. What is the full story behind that event?
This information gives you the time, the place, the number of killed, the different aircrafts involved. But precisely what happened? It still needs to be discovered by linking up this information with reports on the ground, witnesses if there are any left, by soldiers who were involved.

Another example is Task Force 373 - US Special Forces Assassination Squad. Why this material does not tend to include Special Forces is that sometimes Special Forces work together in tandem with the US regular army. There are many reports discussing the assassination lists that the US military have - with hundreds, maybe thousands of people on these lists.
We can see bungled operations, Special Forces go in to kill an alleged Taliban or Al Qaida, fire off missiles, kill seven children and in fact the target wasn't there. 
We can see how these lists are probably abused. There's no judicial process or review. We can see governors, local warlords, unhappy with a competitor and they nominate them to go onto these assassination lists. It's something quite interesting and serious and they are called JPEL - Joint Priority Effects Lists.

Read the full interview

Update on Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 5:29 AM by Chris Revelle

Newsweek, "WikiLeaks Iraq Cache More Than Three Times As Big"

The cache of classified U.S. military reports on the Iraq War as yet unreleased by WikiLeaks may be more than three times as large as the set of roughly 76,000 similar reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistle-blower Web site earlier this week, Declassified has learned......