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The uninteresting Baghdad secrets of WikiLeaks

“What did WikiLeaks eventually deliver?” asked the Dutch magazine Villamedia in a report last March. Two months after three national media outlets in the Netherlands had obtained the 3,000 cables stemming from the US embassy in The Hague the answer was disappointing: Not that much really, six scoops in total.

WikiLeaks didn’t turn out to be the whistleblower it claimed it was in Iraq either. High expectations were aroused when WikiLeaks announced that the biggest, most talked about topic in the 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables was the war in Iraq.

As the webmaster of an Iraqi newspaper, I already saw myself feasting on mountains of secret information. WikiLeaks claimed it had over 6,600 cables from the US embassy in Baghdad and that the Iraq war featured in another 9,000 cables from other capital cities.

US embassy in Baghdad - Opening day

Hopes were soon dashed when only two newspapers, the New York Times and the Guardian, were given access to the full set of cables. Other Western newspapers were later offered access but they had to fulfil a list of conditions, such as providing the curriculum vitae of the journalists who were to be handling the content. For this reason the Dutch television channel RTL Nieuws and the daily NRC obtained the cables from the Norwegian daily Aftenposten which had received the same full collection of cables from a source that still remains foggy. WikiLeaks published only 24 cables from Baghdad for free. Now, in April 2011, that amount has grown to 32, which is just peanuts! Our newspaper in Iraq is in a bind as it cannot buy the rest of the material, at least not from WikiLeaks, and Aftenposten has flatly refused to share the cables with us.

Deciphering the Iraq war logs

The Iraq war logs were published on the Internet in full and for free (with the exception of some names which were deleted). Many Iraqi journalists were disappointed however due to the fact that entire chunks of the conflict were missing from the war logs, such as the siege of the holy city of Najaf in 2004.

What is more, the logs contain stories that are not immediately understandable. One reads: “TF %%%, during a VCP in AN %%% stopped a car and confiscated %%% x AK-%%% and %%% x possible falls %%%. One male was handed over to local IZP.”

The war logs read like a kind of military digital forms used to quickly fill in events, with dozens of acronyms that need to be deciphered first (see list). Making sense of these military hyper telegrams is a real challenge.

The war logs database can be searched with keywords such as names of cities, or words such as “torture”, “rape” or “AIF” (anti-Iraqi forces, the enemy) or dates. Despite this however, after having tried dozens of search terms, I was unable to find any important storylines that were still unknown to the Iraqi public.

War Logs, by Thierry Ehrmann, via Flickr

The Guardian came up with two brilliant ideas to sort out the mess of the military logs. The first was to share the war logs with Iraq Body Count, a London-based organisation which keeps a record of every person killed by violence in Iraq since 2003. The bookkeepers of death discovered in the war logs around 15,000 civilians who were killed and who had not previously been mentioned anywhere else. While this, of course, was huge, Iraqi politicians and public opinion did nothing with these findings.

The Guardian and its sister publication The Observer had a second stroke of genius when they decided to collect all the logs from a specific day from all over Iraq – 17 October 2006 - and show readers the dozens of violent incidents that can take place on a given day in Iraq. This listing showed the real face of the war in Iraq in 2006, the bloodiest year of the conflict. For Iraqis, this was nothing new. 

Limited value

The value of the war logs, in terms of knowledge and understanding the conflict in Iraq, is very limited. Wikipedia has already thoroughly documented the devastating Battle of Falluja in 2004.  Dozens of memoires written by American soldiers, available worldwide on Amazon.com, examine in detail what it means to fight in Iraq. The corruption raging in the US army and the State Department has been documented time and again by US government inspectors and institutions such as the American Centre for Public Integrity. Compared to efforts such as these, the war logs do poorly.

The “Cablegate” story in Iraq is short because there is no story. According to the few published cables, Iraqi politicians hardly said anything within the US embassy’s walls that they had not stated earlier in public.

US embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world

Journalists who do not follow events through the Iraqi media may find some cables mind-blowing, such as the report on Shiite clerics expressing their utter dislike of religious political parties. But in Iraq all of this information is communicated through the usual channels.

For reasons only WikiLeaks might know, the first 24 war related cables provided mostly an unflattering insight into Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs, including the offering of prostitutes to Iraqi sheikhs visiting Iran. This however is no news in Iraq, and it still remains a mystery as to why WikiLeaks chose to focus on this angle while censoring out thousands of others.

An AP story reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “expressed frustration with the slow pace of the release of the cables”, and said “releasing country-specific files to selected local media would serve to push them out faster”. Our Iraqi newspaper however was never approached and we did not receive any reply to our request for sharing the cables.

One of the last leaks to be released was a cable about the increasing number of Iraqi citizens flocking to the Baghdad Zoo. Truly interesting until now– but mainly for historians - are in my opinion just two memos from Baghdad: one revealing a request for US help from what is left from Saddam’s Baath Party’s to be integrated in the new political system and another one with details about the practical aspects of Saddam’s execution – we now know for sure it was an amateurish affair.

WikiLeaks is not serving Iraq. The war in this unfortunate country has only been used to sell more newspapers in peaceful countries where the killing of 15,000 citizens would not go unnoticed by the media.

——
Photographs: Anneke van Ammelrooy; Thierry Ehrmann via Flickr, some rights reserved

Tags: baghdad, iraq, logs, newspapers, war, wikileaks,

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