Category: General

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has defended the unauthorised release of 400,000 classified US military documents on the war in Iraq, saying they revealed the “truth” about the conflict. The mass of documents from 2004 to 2009 offer a grim snapshot of the conflict, especially of the abuse of Iraqi civilians by Iraqi security forces.
“This disclosure is about the truth,” Assange told a news conference in London on Saturday after the whistleblowing website published the logs on the Internet.
“The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts, and continues long after a war ends,” he said, adding that WikiLeaks hoped “to correct some of that attack on the truth”.
He claimed the documents revealed around 15,000 more civilian deaths than were previously known about.
The heavily redacted logs appear to show that the US military turned a blind eye to evidence of torture and abuse of Iraqis by the Iraqi authorities.
Assange said the documents showed the war had been “a bloodbath on every corner”.
Washington and London warned that releasing the documents could endanger the lives of coalition troops and Iraqi civilians, although the rights ministry in Baghdad said the
logs “did not contain any surprises”.
In an announcement which could further concern the United States, WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said the website would soon release a further 15,000 secret files on the war in Afghanistan which had been held back for line-by-line reviewing and redacting.
WikiLeaks enraged Washington by releasing 92,000 documents on the Afghan war in July, and drew criticism from rights groups who said the inclusion of Afghan informants’ names put lives at risk.
The files published on Friday contain graphic accounts of torture, civilian killings and Iran’s hand in the Iraq war, documenting years of bloodshed and suffering following the 2003 US-led invasion to oust dictator Saddam Hussein.
In one document, US military personnel describe abuse by Iraqis at a Baghdad facility that was holding 95 detainees in a single room.
It says “many of them bear marks of abuse to include cigarette burns, bruising consistent with beatings and open sores… according to one of the detainees questioned on site, 12 detainees have died of disease in recent weeks.”
Other reports describe Iraqis beating prisoners and women being killed at US military checkpoints. WikiLeaks made the files available several weeks ago to selected newspapers and television channels, including Al-Jazeera, Le Monde, The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian.
British newspaper The Guardian said the leaks showed “US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.”
It said “US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.”

Health officials have said there are signs that the cholera outbreak in central Haiti may be stabilising.

Although the death toll moved past 250 with more than 3,000 people infected, fewer cases were reported.

Five were detected on Saturday in the capital, Port-au-Prince, but they were quickly diagnosed and isolated.

Officials say the disease is a serious threat to the 1.3 million survivors of January’s earthquake who are living in tented camps surrounding the city.

The poor sanitary conditions make them vulnerable to cholera, which is caused by bacteria transmitted through contaminated water or food.

Cholera causes diarrhoea and vomiting leading to severe dehydration, and can kill quickly if left untreated through rehydration and antibiotics.

Anxious wait

On Sunday, the director general of Haiti’s health department, Gabriel Thimote, said the number of people who had died in the outbreak was rising, but more slowly than during the previous 24 hours.

“We have registered a diminishing in numbers of deaths and of hospitalised people in the most critical areas,” he told reporters.

“The tendency is that it is stabilising, without being able to say that we have reached a peak,” he added.

Mr Thimote also expressed optimism the outbreak could be contained.

“It’s not difficult to prevent the spread to Port-au-Prince.”

The five victims isolated in the capital had become infected in the Artibonite region – the main outbreak zone – and then travelled there, the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

“These cases thus do not represent a spread of the epidemic because this is not a new location of infection,” it explained, adding that the development was nevertheless “worrying”.

Sarah Jacobs, of the charity Save The Children, told the BBC that although there were encouraging signs, the situation remained highly dangerous.

“There are still hundreds of thousands of people living in extremely bad conditions in the capital and the key thing now is to prevent this disease from spreading,” she said.

Ms Jacobs said that informing the public would be crucial.

Haitian officials said more households were following advice on drinking clean water and taking care with personal hygiene.

However, the BBC’s Laura Trevelyan in Saint-Marc in Artibonite says some people are still using water from a river believed to be at the centre of the outbreak.

And at the town’s hospital, doctors said they were seeing about the same number of cases as they did on Saturday, our correspondent says.

Outside crowds of people continue to wait anxiously – some are desperate to be admitted, others are clamouring for news of their relatives, she adds.

Only those with the most severe cases of diarrhoea are being admitted.

The worst-hit areas of the outbreak are Saint-Marc, Grande Saline, L’Estere, Marchand Dessalines, Desdunes, Petite Riviere, Lachapelle, and St Michel de l’Attalaye.

A number of cases have also been reported in the city of Gonaives, and towns closer to the capital, including Archaei, Limbe and Mirebalais.

Officials hope to set up cholera treatment centres in Artibonite and the neighbouring Central Plateau region, and in Port-au-Prince, where patients can be isolated. International specialists are also being flown in to help.

“We must gear up for a serious epidemic, even though we hope it won’t happen,” Nigel Fisher, the UN’s deputy special representative in Haiti, told the Reuters news agency.