The Iraq War documents leak is the unsanctioned disclosure of a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 to several international media organizations and published on the Internet by WikiLeaks on 2010. The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths. The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians. It is the biggest leak in the military history of the United States, surpassing the Afghan War documents leak of 25 July 2010.

Contents

The logs contain numerous reports of previously unknown or unconfirmed events that took place during the war. According to the Iraq Body Count project, a sample of the deaths found in about 800 logs, extrapolated to the full set of records, shows around 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, out of 109,000 deaths in total. The Guardian stated that the logs show "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers"; the coalition, according to The Guardian, has "a formal policy of ignoring such allegations", unless the allegations involve coalition forces. According to Wired Magazine, "WikiLeaks may have just bolstered one of the Bush administration’s most controversial claims about the Iraq war: that Iran supplied many of the Iraq insurgency’s deadliest weapons and worked hand-in-glove with some of its most lethal militias. The documents indicate that Iran was a major combatant in the Iraq war, as its elite Quds Force trained Iraqi Shiite insurgents and imported deadly weapons like the shape-charged explosively formed penetrator bombs into Iraq for use against civilians, Sunni militants and U.S. troops." A number of the documents, as defined by Al Jazeera English, describe how US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill. At least a half-dozen incidents involved Iraqi men transporting pregnant family members to hospitals. The New York Times said the reports contain evidence of many abuses, including civilian deaths, committed by contractors. The New York Times points out some specific reports, such as one which says "after the IED strike a witness reports the Blackwater employees fired indiscriminately at the scene." A document from December 2006, as defined by The Australian, describes a plan by a Shia militia commander to kidnap US soldiers in Baghdad in late 2006 or early 2007." Also, The Australian reports that "detainee testimony" and "a captured militant's diary" are cited among the documents, in order to demonstrate "how Iran provided Iraqi militias with weapons such as rockets and lethal roadside bombs." According to The New York Times, a number of the documents "portrays the long history of tensions between Kurds and Arabs in the north of Iraq and reveals the fears of some American units about what might happen after American troops leave the country by the end of 2011." According to Dagbladet Information, which has been looking through the documents for information on the actions of soldiers from Denmark in Iraq, Danish soldiers "passed on responsibility for a much higher number of prisoners to Iraqi police than has previously been made public. The practice continued even though the coalition witnessed, and was continually warned of widespread torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the hands of the Iraqi police." An analysis published by The Jerusalem Post argues the leaked documents indicates a double standard in the international community views of human rights towards Israel's military policy:

Following Operation Cast Lead last year, Israel come under such harsh international criticism culminating in the Goldstone Report, while the war in Iraq, which has claimed the lives of over 150,000 people, has yet to lead to the establishment of a similar UN-sanctioned probe

According to an editorial in The Washington Post, the leak "mainly demonstrates that the truth about Iraq "already has been told", while it "has at least temporarily complicated negotiations to form a new government". The editor also charged that "claims such as those published by the British journal The Lancet that American forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands are the real 'attack on truth.'"

After criticism over the Afghan War documents leak, more material, including certain names and details, were redacted from these documents by WikiLeaks.

Reactions

International organizations

; The UN's chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, states that "if the files released through WikiLeaks pointed to clear violations of the United Nations Convention Against Torture the Obama administration had an obligation to investigate them." The Convention, according to Nowak, forbids the US from turning over detainees to the Iraqi government, if doing so meant they might be subjected to torture.

Other NATO's Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated that the release could cause "a very unfortunate situation", and that "such leaks ... may have a very negative security impact for people involved." US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also condemned the leak, saying that it "puts the lives of United States and its partners' service members and civilians at risk."

Countries

; In preparation for the leak, the Pentagon created an Information Review Task Force, comprising 120 people led by the Defense Intelligence Agency. A spokesperson for the Pentagon said the reports were considered to be simple observations and reports by military personnel and civilian informants, but nevertheless called their release a "tragedy," and the US Department of Defense requested the return of the documents. He also added that both WikiLeaks and the Pentagon had the same database to collate a civilian death toll and was further sceptical WikiLeaks "made any new discovery." General George Casey, the army chief of staff, said US forces went to morgues to collect data and he did not "recall downplaying civilian casualties." In response to the allegations of torture by Iraqi soldiers under US oversight, US General George Casey, in command of the Iraq War between 2004 and 2007, said that "[o]ur policy all along was if American soldiers encountered prisoner abuse, to stop it and report it immediately up the US chain of command and up the Iraqi chain of command."

; Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Nick Clegg also expressed his support for an investigation into the "allegations of killings, torture and abuse" in the documents, having stated, "We can bemoan how these leaks occurred, but I think the nature of the allegations made are extraordinarily serious".

; Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki dismissed the records as politically timed smear and as a series of "media games and bubbles" as a defense against the information contained in the documents, which included "allegations [his administration] had permitted the abuse of prisoners and other misuses of power." This was echoed by Hassan al-Sneid, a "leader of Maliki's governing State of Law coalition", who stated, in terms of the images contained in the documents, "These are all just fakes from the Internet and Photoshop". The Iraqi Government has stated that it plans to investigate the role of private contractors, specifically Blackwater Worldwide, in deaths that occurred during the war and were revealed in the logs. The Iraqi News Network stated that "The WikiLeaks documents revealed very important secrets, but the most painful among them are not those that focus on the occupier, but those that reveal what the Iraqi forces, Iraqi government and politicians did against their citizens. Those leaders who returned to remove Iraq from oppression toppled the dictator but then carried out acts that were worse than Saddam himself. If these documents make the US apologise to Iraqis, they should compel Mr Maliki to leave the political arena altogether and apologise to everyone."

; Iranian politician Mohammad-Javad Larijani claimed on Iranian state-owned news network Press TV on 25 October 2010 that the leaks were "made upon the order of the US", and that "The message of Wikileaks documents is that the Iraqi people have been tortured by Iraq's security forces, and the only wrongdoing of Americans is that they witnessed the incidents and remained silent. This is while the US had the main role in these incidents and is the defendant." Spokesman for Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ramin Mehmanparast was quoted as saying, "Serious ambiguity and doubt linger regarding the intentions behind the suspicious release of WikiLeaks documents," and that Iran will "confront this mischievous act".

; During an interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on the radio version of Democracy Now!, host Amy Goodman discussed the response from Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen, who had promised that "all allegations according to which Danish soldiers may have knowingly handed over detainees in Iraq to mistreatment at the hands of local authorities are regarded as very serious." However, he also "rejected calls by the opposition to establish an independent commission to investigate the claims." In response to Rasmussen, an investigation by the Danish military was ordered by the minister of defence, Gitte Lillelund Bech. The military also requested the original unedited documents from Wikileaks for their investigation.

Non-government organizations

Amnesty International said that the actions taken by American and coalition troops in turning over prisoners from American to Iraqi custody when it was known that the prisoners were likely to be tortured may have broken international law. The Iraq Body Count project, commenting on the projected additional 15,000 civilian casualties revealed by the logs, said that "[i]t is totally unacceptable that for so many years the US government has withheld from the public these essential details about civilian casualties in Iraq." WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that the logs were released in an attempt to show "intimate details" about the Iraq War. he said that the organization "hope[d] to correct some of the attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially concluded."

Other reactions

Retired U.S. General Stanley McChrystal was quoted as saying, "I think it's sad. The decision to leak classified information is something that is illegal, and individuals are making judgments about threats and information they are not qualified to make. There is a level of responsibility toward our people that needs to be balanced with a right or need to know. It's likely that a leak of that information could cause the death of our own people or some of our allies."

After the documents were released, US Iraq War resisters seeking refuge in Canada, including Joshua Key and the 17-year veteran Chuck Wiley, said that the October 2010 round of military documents released by WikiLeaks offers further support of their claims. Joshua Key, author, with Lawrence Hill, of The Deserter's Tale (a book chronicling his service in Iraq and his subsequent departure from military life), said, "It’s the truth actually being told. These [Wikileaks] documents coming out now are right from the level of the soldiers. I guess (the brass) never realized how much the Internet would take a part in the [Iraq] war."

Media coverage

Wikileaks made the documents available under embargo to a number of media organisations: Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Iraq Body Count project. Upon the lifting of the embargo, the media coverage by these groups was followed by further coverage by other media organisations. The Guardian said that "the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers were accused by web publications and some bloggers of downplaying the extent to which the documents revealed US complicity in torture and provided evidence that politicians in Washington "lied" about the failures of the US military mission". and Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com commented that "media outlets around the world prominently highlighted this revelation, but not The New York Times", calling their coverage of the document leak "subservient" to the Pentagon, and criticising them for what he called a "gossipy, People Magazine-style 'profile' of Assange".

Total death count

While the U.S. tally of Iraqi & US-led Coalition deaths in the war logs is 109,000, a widely quoted 2006 study published in The Lancet used a cross-sectional cluster sample to estimate about 650,000 deaths were due to the Iraq war increasing mortality. Another study by the World Health Organization called the Iraq Family Health Survey estimated 151,000 deaths due to violence (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) from March 2003 through June 2006. The Iraq Body Count reviewed the war logs data in three reports in October 2010 and concluded that the total recorded death toll, civilian and combatant, would be more than 150,000.

An article on the leaked documents in Science magazine commented on these sources, "Taking the WikiLeaks data into account, IBC now estimates that at least 150,000 have died violently during the war, 80% of them civilians. That falls within the range produced by an Iraq household survey conducted by the World Health Organization—and further erodes the credibility of a 2006 study published in The Lancet that estimated over 600,000 violent deaths for the first 3 years of the war."

See also

Niger uranium forgeries

Notable leaks credited to WikiLeaks

Pentagon Papers

References

External links

The War Logs. Wikileaks.

The War Logs. The New York Times.

Iraq: The war logs. The Guardian.

Iraq War Logs. Der Spiegel.

Secret Iraq Files. Al Jazeera English.

iraqwarlogs.com. Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

WikiLeaks Prepares Largest Intel Leak in US History with Release of 400,000 Iraq War Docs – video report by Democracy Now!, 22 October 2010

Iraq War Logs Expose US-Backed Torture - video report by Democracy Now!

Category:2010 in military history Category:Classified documents Category:Foreign relations of Iran Category:Foreign relations of Iraq Category:Iraq War Category:Military prisoner abuse scandals Category:Torture in Iraq Category:United States historical documents Category:WikiLeaks Category:Article Feedback Pilot

Name	Julian Assange
Caption	Assange in 2010
Birth date	July 03, 1971
Birth place	Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Alma mater	University of Melbourne
Occupation	Editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks
Awards	Economist Freedom of Expression Award (2008)Amnesty International UK Media Award (2009)Sam Adams Award (2010)
Death date
Nationality	Australian

Julian Paul Assange ( ; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian publisher, software developer and Internet activist. He is the founder, spokesperson, and editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks, with the stated purpose of creating open governments. Assange has worked as a computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth. In 2010, he published classified details about American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables. The White House has called Assange's release of the diplomatic cables "reckless and dangerous" while sources in the Kremlin linked to President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that he "could be awarded a Nobel prize."

For his work with WikiLeaks Assange has received glowing praise and accolades, along with public condemnation and calls for his execution. He received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year. He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing. Assange has denied the allegations and claimed that they are politically motivated.

Early life

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, and spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island.

When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people." and other organisations, via modem. After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody struggle, and did not agree on a custody arrangement until 1999. The entire process prompted Assange and his mother to form Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection, an activist group centered on creating a "central databank" for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia. Starting in 1994, he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. He helped to write the book (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives. On his personal web page, he described having represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005. In his blog he wrote, "the more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.... Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."

Assange sits on Wikileaks's nine-member advisory board, and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting documents submitted to the site. In 2006, CounterPunch called him "Australia's most infamous former computer hacker." The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter."

WikiLeaks has been involved in the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, a report of toxic waste dumping on the coast of Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video, and material involving large banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer among other documents.

Public appearances

, 2009]] In addition to exercising great authority and editorial control within WikiLeaks, Assange acts as its public face. He has appeared at media conferences such as New Media Days '09 in Copenhagen, He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again. He said that "from Australia's point of view, we think there are potentially a number of criminal laws that could have been breached by the release of this information. The Australian Federal Police are looking at that". McClelland would not rule out the possibility that Australian authorities will cancel Assange's passport, and warned him that he might face charges should he return to Australia. As of 11 December 2010 only 1295 cables have been released, or 0.5 percent of the total. In relation to its ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks, on the 14 December 2010 the US DoJ issued a subpoena ordering Twitter to release information relating to Assange's account, amongst others.

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange "is serving our [American] democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country." On the issue of national security considerations for the US, Ellsberg added that "He's obviously a very competent guy in many ways. I think his instincts are that most of this material deserves to be out. We are arguing over a very small fragment that doesn’t. He has not yet put out anything that hurt anybody's national security". Assange told London reporters that the leaked cables showed US ambassadors around the world were ordered "to engage in espionage behavior" which he said seemed to be "representative of a gradual shift to a lack of rule of law in US institutions that needs to be exposed and that we have been exposing."

Role as a publisher

Assange received the 2009 Media award from Amnesty International, and he has been recognized as a journalist by the Centre for Investigative Journalism. In December 2010, US State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley objected to the description of Assange as a journalist, and also stated that the US State Department does not regard WikiLeaks as a media organization. In response to a question from the press, Crowley said; "I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist." Alex Massie wrote an article in The Spectator called "Yes, Julian Assange is a journalist", but acknowledged that "newsman" might be a better description of Assange.

Financial sanctions

On 6 December, the Swiss bank, PostFinance, announced that it had frozen assets of Assange's totalling 31,000 euros, because he had "provided false information regarding his place of residence" when opening the account. MasterCard, Visa Inc., and Bank of America also halted dealings with Wikileaks. Assange described these actions as "business McCarthyism". The English-language Swedish newspaper web-site "Local" quoted Assange on 27 Dec 2010 as saying that legal costs for the whistleblowing website and his own defence had reached £500,000. The decisions to halt donations to WikiLeaks by Visa, MasterCard and PayPal had cost it £425,000, the same amount it costs the website to publish for six months. Assange claimed WikiLeaks had been receiving as much as £85,000 a day at its peak.

Autobiography

In December 2010 Assange sold the publishing rights to his autobiography for over £1million. He told the Sunday Times that he was forced to enter the deals for an autobiography due to the financial difficulties he and the site encountered, he told them "I don't want to write this book, but I have to. I have already spent £200,000 for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat".

Criticism

In July 2010, after WikiLeaks released classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, said in an interview with Democracy now, "Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point. Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." Assange responded, "There is, as far as we can tell, no incident of that. So it is a speculative charge. Of course, we are treating any possible revelation of the names of innocents seriously. That is why we held back 15,000 of these documents, to review that. ...it’s really quite fantastic that Robert Gates and Mullen...being the former head of the CIA during Iran-Contra and the overseer of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mullen being the military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan—I’m not sure what his further background is, who have ordered assassinations every day, are trying to bring people on board to look at a speculative understanding of whether we might have blood on our hands. These two men arguably are wading in the blood from those wars."

On 29 November 2010, in the aftermath of WikiLeaks release of more classified American documents Sarah Palin wrote of Assange on her Facebook page, "He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?" she added, "Assange is not a 'journalist', any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist'."

A number of political and media commentators, as well as current and former US government officials, have accused Assange of terrorism. US Vice President Joe Biden argued that Assange was "closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers." In May 2010 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had used the phrase, calling Assange "a high-tech terrorist", and saying "he has done enormous damage to our country. I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law".

Also in May 2010, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said: "Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant." In December 2010 former Nixon aide and talk radio host G. Gordon Liddy told WorldNetDaily, "Julian Assange is a severe national security threat to the U.S., and that then leads to what to do about it. This fellow Anwar al-Awlaki – a joint U.S. citizen hiding out in Yemen – is on a 'kill list' [for inciting terrorism against the U.S.]. Mr. Assange should be put on the same list."

Support

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil, expressed his "solidarity" with Assange following his 2010 arrest in the United Kingdom. He further criticised the arrest of Assange as "an attack on freedom of expression".

Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin condemned Assange’s detention as "undemocratic". A source within the office of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that Assange be nominated for a Nobel Prize, and said that "Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him."

In December 2010, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank LaRue, said Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases."

Daniel Ellsberg, who was working in the U.S. Department of Defense when he leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, was a signatory to a statement by an international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials in support of Assange’s work, which was released in late December 2010. Other signatories included David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, and five recipients of annual Sam Adams Award: Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson. Ellsberg has said, "If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me ... I would be called not only a traitor — which I was [called] then, which was false and slanderous — but I would be called a terrorist... Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has come under widespread condemnation and a backlash within her own party for failing to support Assange after calling the leaks "an illegal act" and suggesting that his Australian passport should be cancelled. Hundreds of lawyers, academics and journalists came forward in his support with Attorney-General Robert McClelland, unable to explain how Assange had broken Australian law. Opposition Legal Affairs spokesman, Senator George Brandis, a Queen's Counsel, accused Gillard of being "clumsy" with her language, stating, "As far as I can see, he (Assange) hasn't broken any Australian law, nor does it appear he has broken any American laws." Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who supports Assange, stated that any decision to cancel the passport would be his, not Gillard's. Queen's Counsel Peter Faris, who acted for Assange in a hacking case 15 years ago, said that the motives of Swedish authorities in seeking Assange's extradition for alleged sex offences are suspect: "You have to say: why are they [Sweden] pursuing it? It's pretty obvious that if it was Bill Bloggs, they wouldn't be going to the trouble." Following the Swedish Embassy issuing of a "prepared and unconvincing reply" in response to letters of protest, Gillard was called on to send a message to Sweden "querying the way charges were laid, investigated and dropped, only to be picked up again by a different prosecutor."

On 10 December 2010 over five hundred people rallied outside Sydney Town Hall and about three hundred and fifty people gathered in Brisbane where Assange's lawyer, Rob Stary, criticised Julia Gillard's position, telling the rally that the Australian government was a "sycophant" of the US. A petition circulated by GetUp!, who have placed full page ads in support of Assange in The New York Times and The Washington Times, received more than signatures. Accepting the award, Assange said, "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented." Readers' Choice in Time magazine's Person of the Year poll, and runner-up for Person of the Year., and an informal poll of editors at Postmedia Network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered".

Le Monde named him person of the year with fifty six percent of the votes in their online poll. Le Monde is one of the five publications to cooperate with Wikileaks' publication of the recent document leaking.

Allegations of sexual assault

On 20 August 2010, Swedish police opened an investigation against Assange in connection with sexual encounters with two women, aged 26 and 31, one in Enköping and the other in Stockholm. Within hours, Stockholm's chief prosecutor Eva Finne reviewed the case and dropped the rape investigation, saying there was insufficient evidence to suggest rape but kept open the molestation investigation, and on 30 August Stockholm police questioned Assange. He denied the allegations, saying he had consensual sexual encounters with the two women.

Claes Borgström, who represents the two women, appealed against the decision to drop the rape investigation. The Swedish Director of Public Prosecution then reopened and expanded the investigation on 1 September. Swedish investigators reinterviewed the two women, wanting to clarify their allegations before talking to Assange but he left Sweden on 27 September, according to statements in UK court, and refused to return to Stockholm for questioning in October, according to Borgström. According to Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, Assange made repeated attempts to contact the prosecution, spending over a month in Stockholm before obtaining permission to leave the country, with the Swedish prosecution stating an interview would not be required.

On 18 November 2010 the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny asked the local district court for a warrant for Assange in order for him to be heard by the prosecutor. The court ordered detention as a suspect with probable cause for rape, sexual assault, and coercion. An appeal from the legal representatives of Assange was turned down by the Svea Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Sweden declined to hear the case. On 6 December 2010, Scotland Yard notified Assange that a valid European arrest warrant had been received. He presented himself to the Metropolitan Police the next morning and was remanded to London's Wandsworth Prison. On 16 December he was granted bail and placed under house arrest at Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, the High Court Judge rejected the prosecution's argument that he was a flight risk. Bail was set at £240,000 surety with £200,000 ($312,700) required to be actually deposited in the courts account.

On release Assange said "I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter," Assange claimed that the extradition proceedings to Sweden were "actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US." Swedish prosecutors have denied the case has anything to do with WikiLeaks. His defence team outlined seven strands of their argument, including a challenge for abuse of process as well as the potential risks to Assange's person were he "rendered" to the US.

Residency

Though an Australian citizen, Assange has not had a permanent address for several years. Assange has described himself as constantly on the move. He has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and began renting a house in Iceland on 30 March 2010, from which he and other activists, including Birgitta Jónsdóttir, worked on the 'Collateral Murder' video. In December 2010 it was reported that US Ambassador to Switzerland Donald S Beyer had warned the Swiss government against offering asylum to Assange.

In late November 2010, Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas of Ecuador spoke about giving Assange residency with "no conditions... so he can freely present the information he possesses and all the documentation, not just over the Internet but in a variety of public forums". Lucas believed that Ecuador may benefit from initiating a dialogue with Assange. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino stated on 30 November that the residency application would "have to be studied from the legal and diplomatic perspective". A few hours later, President Rafael Correa stated that WikiLeaks "committed an error by breaking the laws of the United States and leaking this type of information... no official offer was [ever] made." Correa noted that Lucas was speaking "on his own behalf"; additionally, he will launch an investigation into possible ramifications Ecuador would suffer from the release of the cables. He was ultimately released, in part because journalist Vaughan Smith offered to provide Assange with an address for bail during the extradition proceedings, Smith's Norfolk mansion, Ellingham Hall.

References

External links

Full coverage at Aljazeera

Profile: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at BBC News

Julian Assange: Hero or Villain? – slideshow by Life magazine

Archived versions of the home page on Julian Assange's web site iq.org (at the Internet Archive)

Russia Today via You tube">WikiLeaks editor on Apache combat video: No excuse for US killing civilians - April 2010. Russia Today via You tube

Interview with Julian Assange on release of Afghan war files - 1 August 2010 Russia Today via YouTube

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks - July 2010 video at ted.com

Frost Over the World - Julian Assange - December 2010. Al Jazeera English via You tube

Category:1971 births Category:Australian Internet personalities Category:Australian activists Category:Australian computer programmers Category:Australian journalists Category:Australian whistleblowers Category:Internet activists Category:Living people Category:People from Townsville, Queensland Category:University of Melbourne alumni Category:WikiLeaks

Name	Daniel Ellsberg
Caption	Daniel Ellsberg in 2006
Birth date	(age 79)
Known for	Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg paradox
Education	Harvard University,Ph.D. (Economics),Cambridge University
Employer	RAND Corporation
Spouses	Carol Cummings (divorced)Patricia Marx
Children	Robert, Mary (1st marriage)Michael Ellsberg (2nd marriage)
Website	Daniel Ellsberg's Website"">"Daniel Ellsberg's Website"}}

Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.

Early life and career

Ellsberg was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1931 to Christian Scientist ethnic Jewish parents and raised in a devout Christian atmosphere. He grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and attended Cranbrook School. His mother had wanted her son to be a concert pianist but he stopped playing in July 1946 when she was killed in a car crash, together with his sister, after his father fell asleep at the wheel of the car in which the family was traveling and crashed into a culvert wall.

Ellsberg attended Harvard University on a scholarship, graduating with B.S. in economics in 1952 (summa cum laude). He then studied at Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and one year later he returned to Harvard for graduate school. In 1954, he left Harvard for the U.S. Marine Corps. His dissertation introduced a paradox in decision theory now known as the Ellsberg paradox.

Ellsberg served in the Pentagon from August 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (and, in fact, was on duty on the evening of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, reporting the incident to McNamara). He then served for two years in Vietnam working for General Edward Lansdale as a civilian in the State Department.

After serving in Vietnam, Ellsberg resumed working at RAND. In 1967, he contributed to a top-secret study of classified documents regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara. These documents, completed in 1968, later became known collectively as the Pentagon Papers. It was because Ellsberg held an extremely high-level security clearance and desired to create a further synthesis from this research effort that he was one of very few individuals who had access to the complete set of documents.

Disaffection with Vietnam War

By 1969 Ellsberg began attending anti-war events while still remaining in his position at RAND. He experienced an epiphany attending a War Resisters League conference at Haverford College in August 1969, listening to a speech given by a draft resister named Randy Kehler, who said he was "very excited" that he would soon be able to join his friends in prison. Ellsberg described his reaction:

Decades later, reflecting on Kehler's decision, Ellsberg said;

The Pentagon Papers

In late 1969 - with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague, Anthony Russo  and the staff of Senator Edward Kennedy — Ellsberg secretly made several sets of photocopies of the classified documents to which he had access; these later became known as the Pentagon Papers. As an editor of the New York Times was to write much later, these documents "demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance". They revealed that the government had knowledge, early on, that the war could most likely not be won, and that continuing the war would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly. Further, the papers showed the government had lied to Congress and the public.

Throughout 1970, Ellsberg covertly attempted to persuade a few sympathetic U.S. Senators — among them J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern, a leading opponent of the war — to release the papers on the Senate floor, because a Senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said on the record before the Senate. Ellsberg told U.S. Senators that they should be prepared to go to jail in order to end the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg allowed some copies of the documents to circulate privately, including among scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Ellsberg also shared the documents with New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan under a pledge of confidentiality. Sheehan broke his promise to Ellsberg, and built a scoop around what he'd received both directly from Ellsberg and from contacts at IPS.

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the Times published the first of nine excerpts and commentaries on the 7,000 page collection. For 15 days, the Times was prevented from publishing its articles by court order requested by the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, Ellsberg leaked the documents to The Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. On June 30, the Supreme Court ordered publication of the Times to resume freely (New York Times Co. v. United States). Although the Times did not reveal Ellsberg as their source, he went into hiding for 13 days afterwards, suspecting that the evidence would point to him as the source of the unauthorized release of the study.

On June 29, 1971, U.S. Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds—pages which he had received from Ellsberg via Ben Bagdikian—then an editor at the Washington Post. These portions of the Papers were subsequently published by Beacon Press.

Fallout

The release of these papers was politically embarrassing to not only those involved in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations but also the incumbent Nixon administration. Nixon's Oval Office tape from June 14, 1972, shows H. R. Haldeman describing the situation to Nixon:

:then cabinet-member Donald Rumsfeld was making this point this morning. To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing.... It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.

John Mitchell, Nixon's Attorney General, almost immediately issued a telegram to the Times ordering that it halt publication. The Times refused, and the government brought suit against it.

Although the Times eventually won the trial before the Supreme Court, an appellate court ordered that the Times temporarily halt further publication. This was the first successful attempt by the federal government to restrain the publication of a major newspaper since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War. Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to 17 other newspapers in rapid succession. The right of the press to publish the papers was upheld in New York Times Co. v. United States.

As a response to the leaks, the Nixon administration began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally. Aides Egil Krogh and David Young, under the supervision of John Ehrlichman, created the "White House Plumbers", which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries.

Fielding break-in

In August 1971, Krogh and Young met with G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt in a basement office in the Old Executive Office Building. Hunt and Liddy recommended a "covert operation" to get a "mother lode" of information about Ellsberg's mental state in order to discredit him. Krogh and Young sent a memo to Ehrlichman seeking his approval for a "covert operation [to] be undertaken to examine all of the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychiatrist." Ehrlichman approved under the condition that it be "done under your assurance that it is not traceable."

On September 3, 1971, the burglary of Lewis Fielding's office — titled "Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1" in Ehrlichman's notes — was carried out by Hunt, Liddy and CIA officers Eugenio Martinez, Felipe de Diego and Bernard Barker. The "Plumbers" failed to find Ellsberg's file. Hunt and Liddy subsequently planned to break into Fielding's home, but Ehrlichman did not approve the second burglary. The break-in was not known to Ellsberg or to the public until it came to light during Ellsberg and Russo's trial in April 1973.

Trial and mistrial

On June 28, 1971, two days before a Supreme Court ruling saying that a federal judge had ruled incorrectly about the right of the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers,

On May 9, further evidence of illegal wiretapping against Ellsberg was revealed in court. The FBI had recorded numerous conversations between Morton Halperin and Ellsberg without a court order, and furthermore the prosecution had failed to share this evidence with the defense. During the trial, Byrne also revealed that he personally met twice with John Ehrlichman, who offered him directorship of the FBI. Byrne said he refused to consider the offer while the Ellsberg case was pending, though he was criticized for even agreeing to meet with Ehrlichman during the case.

Ellsberg later claimed that after his trial ended, Watergate prosecutor William H. Merrill informed him of an aborted plot by Liddy and the "plumbers" to have 12 Cuban-Americans who had previously worked for the CIA to "totally incapacitate" Ellsberg as he appeared at a public rally, though it is unclear whether that meant to assassinate Ellsberg or merely to hospitalize him. In his autobiography, Liddy describes an "Ellsberg neutralization proposal" originating from Howard Hunt, which involved drugging Ellsberg with LSD, by dissolving it in his soup, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington in order to "have Ellsberg incoherent by the time he was to speak" and thus "make him appear a near burnt-out drug case" and "discredit him". The plot involved waiters from the Miami Cuban community. According to Liddy, when the plan was finally approved, "there was no longer enough lead time to get the Cuban waiters up from their Miami hotels and into place in the Washington Hotel where the dinner was to take place" and the plan was "put into abeyance pending another opportunity".

Later activism and views

Reflecting on his time in government, Ellsberg has said the following, based on his extensive access to classified material:

:The public is lied to every day by the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can't handle the thought that the President lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn’t stay in the government at that level, or you’re made aware of it, a week. ... The fact is Presidents rarely say the whole truth—essentially, never say the whole truth—of what they expect and what they’re doing and what they believe and why they’re doing it and rarely refrain from lying, actually, about these matters.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has continued his political activism, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events. During the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq he warned of a possible "Tonkin Gulf scenario" that could be used to justify going to war, and called on government "insiders" to go public with information to counter the Bush administration's pro-war propaganda campaign, praising Scott Ritter for his efforts in that regard. He later provoked criticism from the Bush administration for supporting British GCHQ translator Katharine Gun and calling on others to leak any papers that reveal government deception about the invasion. Ellsberg also testified at the 2004 conscientious objector hearing of Camilo Mejia at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

In September 2006, Ellsberg wrote in Harper's Magazine that he hoped someone would leak information about a potential US invasion of Iran before the invasion happened, to stop the war. Subsequently, information on the acceleration of US-sponsored anti-government activity in Iran was leaked to journalist Seymour Hersh. In November 2007, Ellsberg was interviewed by Brad Friedman on his Bradblog in regard to former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. "I'd say what she has is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers", Ellsberg told Friedman.

In a speech on March 30, 2008 in San Francisco's Unitarian Universalist church, Ellsberg observed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't really have the authority to declare impeachment "off the table". The oath of office taken by members of congress requires them to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic". He also argued that under the US Constitution, treaties, including the United Nations Charter, become the supreme law of the land that neither the states, the president, nor the congress have the power to break. For example, if the Congress votes to authorize an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, that authorization wouldn't make the attack legal. A president citing the authorization as just cause could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court for war crimes, and it is the duty of congress to impeach the offending president regardless of any agreements that may have been made.

On June 17, 2010, Ellsberg was interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on the Democracy Now! program regarding the parallels between his actions in releasing the Pentagon Papers and those of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was arrested by the U.S. Military in Kuwait after allegedly providing to the WikiLeaks web site a classified video showing U.S. military helicopter gunships strafing and killing Iraqis alleged to be civilians, including two Reuters journalists. Manning reportedly claims to have provided WikiLeaks with secret videos of additional massacres of alleged civilians in Afghanistan, as well as 260,000 classified State Department cables. Ellsberg has said that he fears for Manning and for Julian Assange, as he feared for himself after the initial publication of the Pentagon Papers. WikiLeaks initially said it had not received the cables, but did plan to post the video of an attack that may have killed 140 Afghani civilians in the village of Garani. Ellsberg expressed hope that either Assange or President Obama would post the video, and expressed his strong support for Assange and Manning, who he called "two new heroes of mine".

On December 9, 2010, Ellsberg appeared on the Colbert Report where he commented that existence of Wikileaks helps to build a better government.

Awards and honors

Ellsberg is the recipient of the Inaugural Ron Ridenhour Courage Prize, a prize established by The Nation Institute and The Fertel Foundation. In 1978 he accepted the Gandhi Peace Award from Promoting Enduring Peace. On September 28, 2006 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award.

Personal life

Ellsberg has been married twice. His first marriage, to Carol Cummings, the daughter of a Marine Corps Brigadier General, lasted 13 years before ending in divorce (at her request, as he has stated in his memoirs titled "Secrets"). Two children (Robert and Mary) were born of this marriage. In 1970, he married Patricia Marx, whom he had dated earlier.

Books

Daniel Ellsberg. 2002. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers."">"Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers." New York: Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-03030-9

Daniel Ellsberg. 2001. Risk, Ambiguity and Decision"">"Risk, Ambiguity and Decision" Routledge. ISBN 0-8153-4022-2 (Ellsberg's 1962 PhD was released as a book)

Daniel Ellsberg. 1972. Papers on the War"">"Papers on the War" Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-21185-4 (Collection of essays and testimony)

Books with foreword or introduction by Daniel Ellsberg:

Dissent: Voices of Conscience"-(publishers catalog P.1)">"Dissent: Voices of Conscience"-(publishers catalog P.1) by Ann Wright, Susan Dixon (Foreword by) Daniel Ellsberg, January 2008 - Publisher: Koa Books

Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental"">"Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental" by Marc S. Gerstein, Michael Ellsberg, (Foreword by) Daniel Ellsberg, June 2008 - Publisher: Sterling Publishing

Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State"">"Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State" By Norman Solomon, Foreword by Daniel Ellsberg, September 2007 - Publisher: Polipoint Press

Protest and Survive"">"Protest and Survive" by E. Thompson, Dan Smith, Introduction by Daniel Ellsberg, 1981 - Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Movies

The Pentagon Papers (2003) is a historical film directed by Rod Holcomb about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg's involvement in their publication. The movie documents Ellsberg's life, starting with his work for RAND Corp and ending with the day on which the judge declared his espionage trial a mistrial.

(2009) documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith.

See also

Jack Anderson

Thomas Andrews Drake

References

Further reading

Official name of the Pentagon Papers: "History of United States Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy, 1945-1967".

The New York Times version of Pentagon Papers: June 13, 14, 15 and July 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, 1971. Late in this year this edited version was published in the book "The Pentagon Papers as published by N.Y. Times", Bantam Books, Toronto - New York - London, 1971.

"United States-Vietnam Relations 1945–67, Department of Defense Study", 12 vols., Government Printing Office, Washington, 1971. This is the official and complete edition of the Pentagon Papers, published by the Government after the release by the press.

UNGAR, Sanford, "The Papers and the Papers. An account of the legal and political battle over the Pentagon Papers", E.P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1972.

External links

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, official website of the documentary film (Nominated for Academy Award 2010 - Best Documentary Feature)

The Truth-Telling Project – Project formed by Ellsberg for whistleblowers

Travels of John Interview – More Dangerous Than Julian Assange?

Reason Magazine Interview – June 1973

"Top Secret: Battle for the Pentagon Papers" a resource site that supports a currently-playing docu-drama about the Pentagon Papers. The site provides historical context, time lines, bibliographical resources, information on discussions with current journalists, and helpful links.

Democracy Now! Special: "How the Pentagon Papers Came to Be Published by the Beacon Press: Mike Gravel and Daniel Ellsberg (audio/video and transcript)

2006 Right Livelihood Award Recipient Daniel Ellsberg

Interview with Daniel Ellsberg Daniel Ellsberg gives a 20 min. interview at Roskilde Universitets Center [Denmark] Fall 2004. (With links to "Related videos")

Daniel Ellsberg/William Kristol debate Iraq war in 2003 on C-Span

NNDB page on Daniel Ellsberg

Pentagon Papers Whistleblower on President Obama and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

Daniel Ellsberg on Wikileaks Iraq War Docs (YouTube)

Daniel Ellsberg: "Julian Assange is Not a Terrorist" - video report by Democracy Now!

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