[13][14] Some civilian deaths were classified as enemy casualties, such as the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike by US helicopter gunships which killed two Reuters journalists along with several men thought to be armed and suspected to be insurgents.
[17] According to The Guardian, the logs also show that "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.
In one recorded case, US troops confiscated a "hand cranked generator with wire clamps" from a Baghdad police station, after a detainee claimed to have been brutalised there.
[9] One report analysed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism seemed to show a US military Apache helicopter gunship open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender.
The Australian also reported 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.
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.
[26] 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.
Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com commented that "media outlets around the world prominently highlighted this revelation, but not The New York Times",[31][32] calling their coverage of the document leak "subservient" to the Pentagon.
[37][36] Other writers said the War Logs highlighted the danger of Iran in Iraq and "may well derail the formation of a government by implicating caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in running death squads".
[39] The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay said that "the US and Iraq should investigate claims of abuse contained in files published on the WikiLeaks website".
Dardagan said that, for some of the deaths, WikiLeaks provided "hitherto undisclosed identifying details including their names — no small matter when so many Iraqi families were still desperately searching for their missing loved ones".
[41] In preparation for the leak, the Pentagon created an Information Review Task Force to look for names, keywords and other issues that would be particularly sensitive, comprising 120 people led by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan added that "the US military never claimed to have an exact count of the number of civilians killed in Iraq.
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.
[47] 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 defence against the information contained in the documents, which included "allegations [his administration] had permitted the abuse of prisoners and other misuses of power."
[48] The Iraqi Government stated that it planned to investigate the role of private contractors, specifically Blackwater Worldwide, in deaths that occurred during the war and were revealed in the logs.
Joshua Key, author, with Lawrence Hill, of The Deserter's Tale[57] (a book chronicling his service in Iraq and his subsequent departure from military life[58]), said, "It’s the truth actually being told.
[62] 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.