A Primer on Early WikiLeaks Coverage
WikiLeaks calls the coordinated media coverage "an
extraordinary moment in journalism"
Campaign Desk,
October 22, 2010
By CJR Staff
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/a_primer_on_early_wikileaks_co.php
Around 5 p.m. on Friday, the online secret-sharing site
WikiLeaks released almost 400,000 previously classified
with their last document dump, WikiLeaks shared the
documents with a number of news organizations before
they were widely released. Here's a basic rundown of
those outlets' initial coverage. The French newspaper
Le Monde was also given access to the documents.
The New York Times
Just as it focused on
in
dump, The New York Times focuses heavily on the
involvement of
today. Reporters Michael R. Gordon and Andrew W. Lehren
do the bulk of reporting in four main stories posted
online Friday afternoon, which were published in a
package with an introduction, overview, links to
selected documents from the war logs, and two harrowing
slideshows. Reportage is expected to be bolstered over
the weekend, with a profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange to be published on the weekend.
The Times's current online lead WikiLeaks story is
"Leaked Reports Detail
which details the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' backing
of Iraqi militias.
The piece draws on specific incidents from the logs to
demonstrate that
low-profile, arranging for Hezbollah to train Iraqi
militias in
to insurgents. Other times the Iranian forces sponsored
assassinations; at others, they sought to influence
politics.
Gordon and Lehren's reporting is strong, and they
provide much needed context to the documents-Quds
Force-backed attacks continued during Obama's term, for
instance-with jarring summaries of specific incidences
and weapons halls, tagged with links to the original
reports. For example:
The provision of Iranian rockets, mortars and
bombs to Shiite militants has also been a major
concern. A Nov. 22, 2005, report recounted an
effort by the Iraqi border police to stop the
smuggling of weapons from
quantity of bomb- making equipment, including
explosively formed projectiles," which are capable
of blasting a metal projectile through the door of
an armored Humvee.
Most striking is the account of a particularly brazen
plan to carry out a kidnapping against American
soldiers.
According to the Dec. 22, 2006, report, a militia
commander, Hasan Salim, devised a plan to capture
American soldiers in
in
To carry out the plan, Mr. Salim turned to Mr.
Dulaimi, a Sunni who converted to the Shiite
branch of the faith while studying in the holy
Shiite city of
report noted, was picked for the operation because
he "allegedly trained in
precision, military style kidnappings."
Those kidnappings were never carried out. But the
next month, militants conducted a raid to kidnap
American soldiers working at the Iraqi security
headquarters in
The documents made public by WikiLeaks do not
include an intelligence assessment as to who
carried out the
military officials said after the attack that Mr.
Dulaimi was the tactical commander of the
operation and that his fingerprints were found on
the getaway car. American officials have said he
collaborated with Qais and Laith Khazali, two
Shiite militant leaders who were captured after
the raid along with a Hezbollah operative. The
Khazali brothers were released after the raid as
part of an effort at political reconciliation and
are now believed to be in
The Times's second report appears at first more in line
with the outraged approach being taken by the Guardian
and Der Spiegel. Lehren teams with reporter Sabrina
Tavernise for "A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in
deaths-a particularly numbing example being the
incident in which a sniper accidentally shoots a
employed interpreter. Almost jarringly, though, it
opens with a defensive tone. The second paragraph
begins, "The reports make it clear that most civilians,
by far, were killed by other Iraqis." And there is
little emphasis, unlike at other outlets, on the fact
that many of the civilian casualties revealed in the
logs were previously unreported.
A third story, also by Tavernise and Lehren, "Detainees
Fare Worse in Iraqi Hands," reports on abuses carried
out by the Iraqi army and police forces against
prisoners. Despite the headline, though, the
not exonerated; Lehren and Tavernise note that "while
some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans,
most noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored,
with the equivalent of an institutional shrug: soldiers
told their officers and asked the Iraqis to
investigate." Readers learn that the most serious
abuses often come during arrests, when there is
resistence, and damningly, the authors point out that
the "worse examples of Iraqi abuse came later in the
war." The implications are dark:
It is a frightening portrait of violence by any
standards, but particularly disturbing because
Iraq's army and police are central to President
Obama's plan to draw down American troops in
Iraqi forces are already the backbone of security
in
officially gone, and are also in charge of running
its prisons.
Elsewhere, Gordon and Lehren burrow into one specific
report for a shorter story to reveal that the three
American hikers taken into Iranian custody for
illegally crossing into
on the Iraqi side of the border.
On first read it appears that for the Times, the Iraq
war logs reveal much about that country, ours, and
The Guardian
The Guardian calls its package "
and goes high with revelations of "serial detainee
abuse" and "15,000 [previously] unknown civilian
deaths." (A subhed on the homepage bills the Guardian's
coverage as the summary of "five years of carnage.") As
of this posting, there are two ambitious multimedia
components, the most impressive-and difficult to
stomach-being "every death mapped," which breaks down
the new data on both civilian and military deaths into
little pink dots scattered across the country.
The lede for the Guardian's introduction to the package
doesn't mince words, saying that the WikiLeaks
documents detail "torture, summary executions and war
crimes." The intro focuses on the sheer volume of
incidents, while breakout stories-on detainee abuse, an
Apache helicopter that killed insurgents trying to
surrender, civilian deaths at checkpoints, etc.-turn
the data into vivid anecdotes.
The paper puts the most emphasis on the 15,000
previously unreported civilian deaths revealed in the
logs. It also emphasizes repeatedly the fact that U.S.
and British officials have both denied the existence of
military data on civilian deaths, noting a 2002 quote
from General Tommy Franks: "We don't do body counts."
The story on deaths at checkpoints is the best of the
Guardian's more anecdotal stories; a very good subhed
also provides context on checkpoint violence from both
the soldier and civilian perspective: "Fear of suicide
bombers means troops have shot drivers and passengers
who were simply too scared or confused to stop."
The Guardian's coverage of detainee abuse highlights a
coalition "fragmentary order" called "Frago 242." A
"frago," as the story explains, is a military order
"which summarises a complex requirment. Frago 242 was a
decision not to investigate any instances of detainee
abuse in which coalition troops were not directly
involved (in other words, torture by Iraqi soldiers or
police). The result was that
treated victims of torture, documented the incidents,
and sent them through the proper channels, only to hear
back that no investigation was required. The Guardian
explains that Frago 242 resulted in both isolated and
"systematic" instances of detainee abuse being buried-
that is, until WikiLeaks brought them to the surface. -
Michael Meyer
Al Jazeera English
Al Jazeera English focuses on the same secret U.S.
military order not to investigate Iraqi torture. "The
reports reveal how torture was rampant and how ordinary
civilians bore the brunt of the conflict," reporter
Gregg Carlstrom writes. "The files record horrifying
tales: of pregnant women being shot dead at
checkpoints, of priests kidnapped and murdered, of
Iraqi prison guards using electric drills to force
their prisoners to confess."
The site bolsters these findings with a dozen or so
feature articles, focusing on individual topics such as
civilian deaths at checkpoints, additional revelations
about the helicopter squadron "Crazy Horse" that was
responsible for the deaths of two Reuters journalists
in 2007, a closer look at
bombing in August 2007, and the story of the murder of
a Catholic archbishop by al-Qaeda in
2008. In the "Showcase" section of the site, thirty-
four reports are provided for readers in full and
translated into plain English, but with most names
redacted.
The Al Jazeera site has several interactive features,
such as a Flash timeline of IED attacks much like the
one The Guardian produced for the previous WikiLeaks
dump. The data has been fed into several easily
readable graphs, charting and mapping the casualties,
roadside bombs, and reports of detainee abuse. All in
all, Al Jazeera's coverage of the secret files is
straightforward, except perhaps for a six-and-a-half
minute documentary video posted prominently throughout
the site, a video that is awkwardly edited and features
weird, cable-TV-style reenactments and dramatic
readings of some of the reports. - Lauren Kirchner
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel's English-language coverage of the
logs is relatively thin, compared to the Times and The
Guardian's packages, at least as of Friday evening. But
it does feature a very thorough interactive map of
casualties and "events," called "An Atlas of Horror."
If that proves too hard to absorb, the map can also be
collapsed into "One Day in
2006 with several civilian deaths by IED attack as well
as a surprising number of "criminal events (murders)"
in which unidentified civilian corpses were discovered
by coalition troops. Der Spiegel also, like Al Jazeera,
embellishes on the story of the "Crazyhorse" apache
helicopters, who were involved in several "dubious"
attacks. And one feature in the package takes a step
back and dicsusses the ethics of publishing the secret
reports, analyzing the shifts in reactions of the
government to this latest leak, as opposed to the
previous leak of 75,000 reports from
Lauren Kirchner
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a U.K.-based
nonprofit, had three months to analyze the
logs. The result is approximately twenty stories, all
of which are published and freely distributable under a
Creative Commons license. ("Steal our stories," the
homepage blares.)
The site seems primarily concerned with documenting
ostensible war crimes-or at least bad behavior-on the
part of coalition soldiers. The lead story, titled
"Biggest document leak in history exposes real war,"
calls the documents "the uncensored detail
did not want us to know." Other stories on the site
emphasize civilian deaths and torture at coalition
hands: an Apache helicopter crew that killed insurgents
who were trying to surrender; Iraqi-instigated prisoner
abuse that went uninvestigated by the
and so on. A story dubbing December 2006 the war's
bloodiest month notes that 3,784 people died during
that time period, a body count that far exceeds that
which was officially reported. There's also a Flash
timeline of important events in the Iraq war, a
glossary of relevant military terminology, and at least
one article that is translated into Arabic. - Justin
Peters
Channel 4 (
The
program about the documents on Monday. In advance of
that, its website has published several articles and
video clips reporting on and analyzing the data. The
lead story features a graphic seven-minute video that
claims the documents "expose the lie that the
no body counts" in
interview with the uncle of a boy who was killed by a
Hellfire missle: "The children came towards us
screaming `Alawi has been blown to pieces.' We
collected the remains bit by bit. His head was more
than 100 metres away."
Other stories emphasize Iraqi-on-Iraqi tortrure that
was apparently condoned by
2005 George W Bush said: `Any activity we conduct is
within the law. We do not torture..' The above examples
of
President's claim was inaccurate."), and report that
more civilians were killed at checkpoints than
insurgents. In another story, Channel 4 reports that it
actually traveled to
of an incident in which a car came under fire for
failing to stop at a checkpoint (the car's driver was
killed), and notes the drastic difference between the
survivors' version of events and the military's version
of events.
Chief correspondent Alex Thomson offers a robust what-
it-all-means analysis, and ends on this note:
The reality today is that there are one million
war widows across
mortuary in
the body of missing loved ones. Because of the
numbers of names in these leaked secret Sigacts,
that search might just get a little easier in
future.
That is just one of several significant truths
revealed by this sudden avalanche of hitherto
secret information. In that regard, its
significance is hard to underestimate.
We'll be watching for the station's full program on
Monday. - Justin Peters
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