Greetings All: By now you've heard
of this incredible feat by WikiLeaks -- nothing short of hi-tech guerrilla war
-- yessss! Bearing in mind that a true guerrilla is a
revolutionary propagandist armed with the truth (and sometimes weapons to
defend it). I salute all the courageous urban guerrillas who have used
the mightiest weapon -- the pen -- to attack mendacity and expose the truth
about this longest of unholy wars destroying millions of lives -- endlessly.
The following gives you a guide to perusing the reports plus links to
where they're published. Long live the guerrilla!
Sunday, July 26 5pm EST.
WikiLeaks today released over
75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.
The Afghan War Diary an
extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in
Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal
military actions involving the United States military. They include the number
of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each
action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the
military units involved and major weapon systems used.
The Afghan War Diary is the
most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released
during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a
statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each
most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive
understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients
necessary to change its course.
Most entries have been written
by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from
front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information
from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and
development activity across Afghanistan.
Each report consists of the
time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers
significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad type
of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event
as classified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from
civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit
and a number of other fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an
English language description of the events that are covered in the report.
The Diary is available on the
web and can be viewed in chronological order and by by over 100 categories
assigned by the US Forces such as: "escalation of force",
"friendly-fire", "development meeting", etc. The reports
can also be viewed by our "severity" measure-the total number of
people killed, injured or detained. All incidents have been placed onto a map
of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to a particular window
of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of war may be
seen.
The material shows that
cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own activities US Units are
inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of
people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, when made
about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down
play criticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces
the reports tend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or
other rebel groups, bad behavior is described in comprehensive detail. The
behavior of the Afghan Army and Afghan authorities are also frequently
described.
The reports come from US Army
with the exception most Special Forces activities. The reports do not generally
cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations.
However when a combined operation involving regular Army units occurs, details
of Army partners are often revealed. For example a number of bloody operations
carried out by Task Force 373, a secret US Special Forces assassination unit,
are exposed in the Diary -- including a raid that lead to the death of seven
children.
This archive shows the vast
range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which
account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.
We have delayed the release of
some 15,000 reports from total archive as part of a harm minimization process
demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released,
with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation
in Afghanistan permits.
Additional information from
our media partners:
Der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html
The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs
The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html
Afghan War Diary - Reading guide
The Afghan War Diary (AWD for
short) consists of messages from several important US military communications
systems. The messaging systems have changed over time; as such reporting
standards and message format have changed as well. This reading guide tries to
provide some helpful hints on interpretation and understanding of the messages
contained in the AWD.
Most of the messages follow a
pre-set structure that is designed to make automated processing of the contents
easier. It is best to think of the messages in the terms of an overall
collective logbook of the Afghan war. The AWD contains the relevant events,
occurrences and intelligence experiences of the military, shared among many
recipients. The basic idea is that all the messages taken together should
provide a full picture of a days important events, intelligence, warnings, and
other statistics. Each unit, outpost, convoy, or other military action
generates report about relevant daily events. The range of topics is rather
wide: Improvised Explosives Devices encountered, offensive operations, taking
enemy fire, engagement with possible hostile forces, talking with village
elders, numbers of wounded, dead, and detained, kidnappings, broader
intelligence information and explicit threat warnings from intercepted radio
communications, local informers or the afghan police. It also includes day to
day complaints about lack of equipment and supplies.
The description of events in
the messages is often rather short and terse. To grasp the reporting style, it
is helpful to understand the conditions under which the messages are composed
and sent. Often they come from field units who have been under fire or under
other stressful conditions all day and see the report-writing as nasty
paperwork, that needs to be completed with little apparent benefit to expect.
So the reporting is kept to the necessary minimum, with as little type-work as
possible. The field units also need to expect questions from higher up or
disciplinary measures for events recorded in the messages, so they will tend to
gloss over violations of rules of engagement and other problematic behavior;
the reports are often detailed when discussing actions or interactions by enemy
forces. Once it is in the AWD messages, it is officially part of the record -
it is subject to analysis and scrutiny. The truthfulness and completeness
especially of descriptions of events must always be carefully considered.
Circumstances that completely change the meaning of an reported event may have
been omitted.
The reports need to answer the
critical questions: Who, When, Where, What, With whom, by what Means and Why.
The AWD messages are not addressed to individuals but to groups of recipients
that are fulfilling certain functions, such as duty officers in a certain
region. The systems where the messages originate perform distribution based on
criteria like region, classification level and other information. The goal of
distribution is to provide those with access and the need to know, all of the
information that relevant to their duties. In practice, this seems to be
working imperfectly. The messages contain geo-location information in the forms
of latitude-longitude, military grid coordinates and region.
The messages contain a large
number of abbreviations that are essential to understanding its contents. When
browsing through the messages, underlined abbreviations pop up an little
explanation, when the mouse is hovering over it. The meanings and use of some
shorthands have changed over time, others are sometimes ambiguous or have
several meanings that are used depending on context, region or reporting unit.
If you discover the meaning of a so far unresolved acronym or abbreviations, or
if you have corrections, please submit them to wl-office@sunshinepress.org.
An especially helpful
reference to names of military units and task-forces and their respective
responsibilities can be found at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/enduring-freedom.htm
The site also contains a list
of bases, airfields http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/afghanistan.htm
Location names are also often shortened to three-character acronyms.
Messages may contain date and
time information. Dates are mostly presented in either US numeric form
(Year-Month-Day, e.g. 2009-09-04) or various Euro-style shorthands
(Day-Month-Year, e.g. 2 Jan 04 or 02-Jan-04 or 2jan04 etc.).
Times are frequently noted
with a time-zone identifier behind the time, e.g. "09:32Z". Most
common are Z (Zulu Time, aka. UTC time zone), D (Delta Time, aka. UTC + 4
hours) and B (Bravo Time, aka UTC + 2 hours). A full list off time zones can be
found here: http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/military/
Other times are noted without
any time zone identifier at all. The Afghanistan time zone is AFT (UTC + 4:30),
which may complicate things further if you are looking up messages based on
local time.
Finding messages relating to
known events may be complicated by date and time zone shifting; if the event is
in the night or early morning, it may cause a report to appear to be be
misfiled. It is advisable to always look through messages before and on the
proceeding day for any event.
David Leigh, the Guardian's
investigations editor, explains the online tools they have created to help you
understand the secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/video/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-video-tutorial
Understanding the structure of the report
The message starts with a unique ReportKey; it may be used
to find messages and also to reference them.
The next field is DateOccurred; this provides the date and
time of the event or message. See Time and Date formats for details on the used
formats.
Type contains typically a broad classification of the type
of event, like Friendly Action, Enemy Action, Non-Combat Event. It can be used
to filter for messages of a certain type.
Category further describes what kind of event the message
is about. There are a lot of categories, from propaganda, weapons cache finds
to various types of combat activities.
TrackingNumber Is an internal tracking number.
Title contains the title of the message.
Summary is the actual description of the event. Usually it
contains the bulk of the message content.
Region contains the broader region of the event.
AttackOn contains the information who was attacked during
an event.
ComplexAttack is a flag that signifies that an attack was a
larger operation that required more planning, coordination and preparation.
This is used as a quick filter criterion to detect events that were out of the
ordinary in terms of enemy capabilities.
ReportingUnit, UnitName, TypeOfUnit contains the
information on the military unit that authored the report.
Wounded and death are listed as numeric values, sorted by
affiliation. WIA is the abbreviation for Wounded In Action. KIA is the
abbreviation for Killed In Action. The numbers are recorded in the fields
FriendlyWIA,FriendlyKIA,HostNationWIA,HostNationKIA,CivilianWIA,CivilianKIA,EnemyWIA,EnemyKIA
Captured enemies are numbered in the field EnemyDetained.
The location of events are recorded in the fields MGRS
(Military Grid Reference System), Latitude, Longitude.
The next group of fields contains information on the
overall military unit, like ISAF Headquarter, that a message originated from or
was updated by. Updates frequently occur when an analysis group, like one that
investigated an incident or looked into the makeup of an Improvised Explosive
Device added its results to a message.
OriginatorGroup, UpdatedByGroup
CCIR Commander's Critical Information Requirements
If an activity that is reported is deemed
"significant", this is noted in the field Sigact. Significant
activities are analyzed and evaluated by a special group in the command
structure.
Affiliation describes if the event was of friendly or enemy
nature.
DColor controls the display color of the message in the
messaging system and map views. Messages relating to enemy activity have the
color Red, those relating to friendly activity are colored Blue.
Classification contains the classification
level of the message, e.g. Secret
http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/