...despite what Rummy once told us.
If nothing else, the new Wikileaks release, while it may not contain any revelations that would be shocking to those of us in the reality-based community, at least tells us that the real story is actually, hold on to your hats, worse than we've been told. As has always been the case, if you want a sense of what's going on in Iraq, all you have to do is use "Iraqi bodies" as a Google image search.
If you index your wikileaks search to just murder, you'll get almost 25,000 incident reports filed by both Iraqi and American forces. With each page containing ten entries, you'll have to wade through dozens of pages using a general search just to get past January 1, 2004.
These 391,000+ incident reports, which often make for dry reading (and about half of the particulars are obvious, such as GSW [gunshot wound] to the ___. Virtually all execution-style murders are gunshots to the head), still provide a more comprehensive overview of what the Pentagon and the press have not been telling us.
It shows that not only are we guilty of killing innocent Iraqis but that so is the Shi'ite government that we'd installed in the wake of de-Baathification. The newest Wikileaks disclosures show that we'd relied on private "security contractors" such as Blackwater far more than had been previously admitted. No matter who did the killings, the blood eventually spatters on us because we put that bloody sham of a puppet government in power and we're the ones who'd invaded Iraq on blatantly false pretenses. You have to wonder how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive today had we not.
And, above all, even a cursory reading of all the documents shows that far more Iraqi civilians have been killed overall than had been previously admitted by the Pentagon, which claimed years ago to not bother itself doing body counts.
The Pentagon has, indeed, been keeping track and Wikileaks' latest coup shows us why they had not released this information to us.
Plus, you have to laugh and shake your head that the NY Times, with their super-serious-sounding War Logs series, is following the lead of a guy who isn't even a journalist. This is part and parcel to the problem, to begin with: If Judith Miller and the rest of the Times had just chosen to do its fucking job for a change instead of helping the Bush administration beat the war drum, then perhaps Julian Assange wouldn't have had to make this massive revelation and perhaps, just perhaps, we would've left Iraq already if we'd known way back then just how bad the situation really was on the ground.
