Wikileaks is at it again, this time they have the Pentagon in their target sights.
Wikileaks has once again stirred the controversy pot with the release of an unclassified U.S diplomatic cable which contains scathing claims that US soldiers brutally executed Iraqi civilians, some of which were children, back in 2006. Worse yet, the report claims that the US then tried to cover up the incident.
Matthew Schofield of McClatchy Newspapers wrote about the Wikileaks report and described how U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, before calling in an airstrike to destroy the evidence.
Additionally, the unclassified cable, which was posted on the WikiLeaks‘ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials enough to make them demand some kind of action from their government.
Sadly, during war, civilians often pay the cost with their lives. But this isn’t casualties of war that Wikileaks is describing, this is closer to war crimes.
Though U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred, Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.
This latest release by Wikileaks reopens the Iraqi investigation into the massacre of a civilian family.
