"First, there is a great deal of evidence to confirm that the modus operandi of United States and coalition forces has directly contributed to the civilian death-toll. The initial devastating bombardment, the pursuit of insurgents from the air, the shoot-first-ask-questions-after policy at checkpoints - in these ways and more, coalition choices have directly produced civilian deaths. The processes involved have already been analysed carefully in a study a in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) (see "The Weapons That Kill Civilians - Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, 2003-2008" (New England Journal of Medicine, 360/16, 16 April 2009).
Among the results are that: “in events with at least one Iraqi civilian victim, the methods that killed the most civilians per event were aerial bombings (17%), combined use of aerial and ground weapons (17%), and suicide-bombers on foot (sixteen per event). Aerial bombs killed, on average, nine more civilians per event than aerial missiles (seventeen vs eight per event). Indeed, if an aerial bomb killed civilians at all, it tended to kill many.” In short, two of the three most indiscriminately lethal methods used in Iraq have been specialities of the coalition forces; and women and children have been most likely to be victims of such methods. This makes a mockery of coalition claims to be “liberating” civilians in general and women in particular.
Second, the logs strikingly confirm the extent to which the overall death-toll is the product of executions and torture, many of them by official Iraqi forces with the direct or indirect complicity of the US-led coalition. This pattern may have been “hardly secret”; but the logs make newly clear how much more widespread it was, and about the US licence to torture” - US order Frago 242 - which permitted it. Indeed, the widespread US involvement in torture in these logs reveals - even more than do Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo - the degenerate nature of the “war on terror”.
If the nature of the killing of civilians by the US’s coalition’s allies tended to be highly selective, the US’s own was mostly the result of its relatively indiscriminate methods. The aforementioned NEJM study found that a third of all victims “were killed by execution after abduction or capture”; 97% of the victims of execution with torture were male.
Third, and perhaps least commented on so far, the logs confirm that the cases in which official Iraqi forces can be clearly identified as the perpetrators are only a part of a much wider pattern of violence. A report by Iraq Body Count in 2008 on the effects of the US military “surge” found that “three-quarters of the reported civilian killings in Iraq since January 2006 have no clearly distinguishable perpetrator. This is particularly true in most instances of bodies being found after execution, or of attacks on what appear to be purely civilian targets, e.g. car-bombings of marketplaces and mosques (see “Post-surge violence: its extent and nature”, Iraq Body Count, 28 December 2008)."
http://www.opendemocracy.net/martin-shaw/iraq-war-and-wikileaks-real-story
