The Iraq War Diaries: Insights from Wikileaks

People use the phrases war diaries and war logs interchangeably, and they were two different releases, three months apart, handled in two very different ways. The difference between them is one of the more useful things in this whole story.

Two releases, not one

Both came from the same source as the airstrike video, and both were published with newspaper partners who had advance access.

What the Afghan set showed

Mostly that the public account of the war had been smoother than the reality. The reports contained incidents that had never been reported, friendly-fire episodes, civilian deaths at checkpoints and in air support, and the activity of special operations units that operated largely outside public view.

None of it was a single bombshell. The effect was cumulative, and the cumulative effect was a war noticeably worse-going than the briefings suggested.

The redaction problem

The Afghan release included names of Afghans who had given information to coalition forces. That was a serious mistake and it was recognised as one immediately, including by organisations sympathetic to the release.

Officials warned at the time that people would be killed as a result. In the years since, no government has publicly identified anyone killed because of the disclosure. That does not make the exposure acceptable; it means the specific harm predicted was never demonstrated. Both halves belong in an honest account.

The objection that has no answer

The case for publishing was accountability. Publishing the name of a villager who spoke to a patrol serves no accountability purpose whatsoever and exposes that person to reprisal. No version of the public-interest argument reaches it.

How the Iraq release was handled differently

By the October release the process had tightened. Names were stripped more aggressively, partners had longer to review, and an automated redaction pass was applied before human review.

The change came from criticism, including from the media partners, some of whom had threatened to walk away. That is worth noting because it is a rare case of a publisher visibly changing method mid-story in response to being told it was wrong.

• Names stripped more aggressively before release.
• Longer review windows for the newspaper partners.
• An automated redaction pass ahead of human checking.

What the Iraq set added

Two things the Afghan set did not. First, the sheer scale made statistical work possible, which is how the roughly fifteen thousand previously uncounted civilian deaths were identified. Second, a sustained record of detainee abuse by Iraqi forces, logged by American units and frequently not investigated. The detail is here.

Why the partnerships broke

The newspapers and WikiLeaks wanted different things. The papers wanted control over timing, redaction and framing, and they wanted the ability to walk away from material they thought too dangerous. WikiLeaks wanted publication and considered the papers cautious to the point of complicity.

Both positions are defensible and they were not reconcilable. The relationships collapsed over the following year, and the later unredacted release of the cable set destroyed what was left of the trust.

Why volume changes the ethical question

One video of one engagement can be examined by a handful of people in a week. Four hundred thousand documents cannot be examined by anyone properly, and that difference is not a detail.

With a single file, a publisher can know what they are putting out. With a database, they are relying on sampling, automated filtering and the judgement of partners, and they are certain to publish some things they have not read. The honest position is that nobody releasing material at that scale can fully know what they are releasing.

This is the strongest argument the prosecution made in 2013 and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal. A person who copies hundreds of thousands of documents is not in a position to weigh the public interest in each one, because they have not read each one. Whether that makes the act wrong, or simply makes it a different kind of act from the video, is where reasonable people separate.

What the two war diaries actually demonstrate

That publishing at scale is a craft, and that doing it badly damages the case for doing it at all.

The Afghan release handed every critic of the project a permanent and legitimate objection. The Iraq release, three months later, showed the same organisation doing the job properly. The lesson newsrooms took from watching both is the one they still work by: the argument for publishing a document is only as strong as the care taken over who it might hurt. That is the ethical core of the whole subject.