The Iraq War Logs: What WikiLeaks' 400,000 Documents Revealed

A month before the diplomatic cables dominated the headlines, WikiLeaks released its largest leak to that point: the Iraq War Logs. On October 22, 2010, the site published 391,832 U.S. Army field reports — "SIGACT" or Significant Action reports — documenting the war and occupation in Iraq from January 2004 through December 2009, as seen by American troops on the ground. They were released in coordination with Al Jazeera, the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde.

The headline number was 109,032: the total violent deaths recorded in the logs, of which 66,081 were civilians — more than 60 percent, or roughly 31 civilian deaths a day across the six-year period. U.S. and British officials had long insisted that no official record of civilian casualties existed. The logs showed that one did.

The analysis that followed added texture the raw numbers could not. The Iraq Body Count project, which compiles civilian deaths from press reports, used the logs to add some 15,000 previously unrecorded civilian deaths to its tally. And the logs exposed gaps of their own: no civilian deaths were recorded in Fallujah, the site of two major battles in 2004, where independent monitors counted more than 1,200.

The most damaging revelation concerned detainees. The files detailed systematic abuse and torture by Iraqi police and soldiers — shackling, whipping, electrocution, sexual assault — and showed American forces failing to investigate hundreds of such reports. The mechanism was an order known as "Frago 242," issued in 2004, which instructed coalition troops not to investigate abuse of detainees by Iraqi authorities unless Americans were directly involved.

Washington pushed back. General George Casey, who had commanded U.S. forces in Iraq, denied that America had "turned a blind eye" to prisoner abuse, and the State Department pointed to its human-rights training of Iraqi forces. But the logs' core disclosures — the casualty count, the uninvestigated torture, the scale of private contractors — survived the rebuttals.

The Iraq War Logs were, in October 2010, the biggest military leak in American history. They would hold the title for barely a month.