UPDATE: See part II of Al Jazeera’s Secret Iraq Files below. Also see Part 1 and Part 2 of Democracy Now‘s interview with Julian Assange, and Daniel Ellsberg on why he supports Wikileaks.
The Wikileaks war logs present irrefutable evidence of the murder, torture and rape which has been occuring for the past seven years in Iraq. However, it is not clear why it has chosen to collaborate with the dubious Iraq Body Count which for years has been providing a convenient underestimate of Iraqi casualties to war supporters.
It is the biggest leak of military secrets ever. Al Jazeera has obtained access to almost 400,000 classified American documents. Torture, claims of murder at the checkpoint – revelations that make a mockery of the rules of combat. This special programme reveals the truth about the war in Iraq.
P U L S E 
We need to remember that these are US military documents, so they will have a naturally US narrative of the war. We have to be careful before judging Wikileaks. If Wikileaks had obtained AlQaida’s logs, if they exist, that will show their version. Wikileaks is merely the messenger.
About the body count- again, the numbers are of those that US forces killed/witnessed being killed. So it’s going to be a lot lesser than the actual number. Wilileaks is not to be blamed for that. Iraq body count does sound sleazy, however.
I wonder, however, what the internal documents of Indian forces in Kashmir, Pakistani forces in NWFP and Israeli forces in Palestine reveal. I seriously hope somebody leaks some of those.
“lowballing of Iraqi civilian casualties”
Wikileaks is in no way “lowballing” casualties. The Iraq War Logs do nothing more than stating that the US army counted 109,032 deaths in Iraq in it’s common secret database.
Of course there are more direct deaths to attribute to violence caused by the invasion like eg:
– top secret files
– reports from special forces
– reports from CIA
– reports from private security contractors
And of course on top of this comes a large number of indirect deaths:
– deadly diseases from DU contamination, bad sanitary situation etc
– deaths caused by spoiled water, hunger …
– deaths due to an increase of common criminal violence
– suicides due to the invasion
Assange said already to the Afghan War Logs, that it’s important to understand, what the data don’t tell about.
Wikileaks doesn’t deny this but has no data on this. To state that the Wikileaks data reflect all deaths is a complete and broad misrepresentation of the data.
We need to remember that these are US military documents, so they will naturally have the US narrative of the war.