The Iraq War Logs, a specialist website exploring the records of US forces’ actions in Iraq, obtained by Wikileaks, exposes human rights abuses by coalition and Iraqi troops during the conflict.

The coveted awards, in their 20th year, recognise excellence in human rights reporting and acknowledge journalism’s significant contribution to the public’s awareness and understanding of human rights issues.

Accepting the award on behalf of the team, the Bureau’s Deputy Director Rachel Oldroyd urged the audience to remember the continued struggles in Iraq in the week that UK forces completed their withdrawal from the country.

Amnesty International’s UK Director Kate Allen said: “With entries of the highest calibre in category after category it was a hard job for our judges to pick the winners. The awards are fantastic tribute to some of the best journalists in the trade.”

The awards ceremony included a recorded video message from Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma.

Click here for full details of all the winners.

The Media Awards recognise excellence in human rights journalism that makes a significant contribution to the UK public’s understanding of human rights.

The Iraqwarlogs.com has been shortlisted in the Digital Media category. Previous winners include the Financial Times and Wikileaks.

The winners will be announced in a ceremony at the BFI in central London on Tuesday 24 May.

Reports in the US media describe how the WikiLeaks Task Force - which has quickly earned the acronym “WTF” - has been established to provide an “extensive inventory” of all the information that has come out through a number of high profile leaks of classified information.

The task force is thought to be involved in calculating the immediate effects of the releases, such as the US ability to recruit informants.

This new role was widely unexpected given that the CIA is one of the government agencies least effected by the leaks, whose source remains unknown despite the continuing imprisonment of former intelligence officer Bradley Manning.

A reluctance on the part of senior CIA staff to share their intelligence on the same platform from which the leaks were taken has meant that only a few files out of hundreds of thousands refer to CIA activities.

The CIA’s system has always been separate from “SIPRNET” – the Pentagon’s classified worldwide three million-strong network from which the leaks were taken – despite most of the reports having a similar secret-level status.

To some within the agency, the leaks have justified the policy of separation – one that came under severe scrutiny after failed inter-agency communications led in part to the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11 2001.

“[The CIA] has not capitulated to this business of making everything available to outsiders. They don’t even make everything available to insiders. And by and large the system has worked,” an unnamed CIA veteran WAS quoted in the Washington Post.

“The consensus was that there were simply too many people potentially who had access [to SIPRNET],” another source is quoted as saying.

Julian Assange, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Wikileaks, remains on bail in the UK pending an extradition hearing in relation to an alleged case of sexual assault in Sweden.

Whistleblowing website, WikiLeaks has published thousands of diplomatic cables that give an insight into American foreign concerns.

The release caused a diplomatic storm across the globe, as Washington rushed to warn allies over the weekend of the leak.

The documents  include candid accounts of many foreign heads of state, detail which will cause international embarrassment. They also reveal a number of disclosures relating to global foreign policy.

The revelations contained in the material include:

* Reports of some Arab leaders – including Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah – urging the US to attack Iran and end its nuclear weapons programme.

* Concern over the security of Pakistani nuclear material that could be used to make an atomic weapon.

* Widespread use of hacking by the Chinese government.

* Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime.

* Criticism of the UK’s military operations in Afghanistan.

* Bargaining to empty the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

* US officials being instructed to spy on the UN’s leadership by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The leak follows the publication of 391,000 American documents relating to the Iraq war, which were given by WikiLeaks to the  Bureau.

The Iraq War Logs formed the basis of two films made by the Bureau for Dispatches and Al Jazeera, as well as a dedicated website.

The latest documents were given to newspapers including the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegal, El Pais and Le Monde. No broadcast organisations were involved.

The US government condemned the leak, saying it put lives at risk, as well as potentially compromising diplomatic discussions.

When whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released 400,000 classified US military documents relating to the Iraq war on its website late Friday night, it was a collaborative effort by news organisations, journalists and the site hosting the information to communicate its impact to the public.

WikiLeaks stressed that this release, which follows the disclosure of 92,000 documents relating to the Afghanistan war back in July, should maximise media coverage and reach as many readers as possible for those sources risking their lives and possible incarceration by leaking the information.

The Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times, who produced reports and data analysis of the Afghan War Logs, were this time joined by Al Jazeera, Le Monde and Channel 4′s Dispatches as well as non-profit media organisation OWNI and voluntary organisation Iraq Body Count.

OWNI designed WikiLeaks’ site for the data, while the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism was the driving force behind much of Al Jazeera, Le Monde and Channel 4′s coverage. But how did they get involved and begin processing such a vast amount of information? Journalism.co.uk spoke to the bureau’s editor Iain Overton and OWNI datajournalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril to find out more.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

When it launched in April, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism said it wanted to work on cross-media investigations and build its own programmes and tools for use in data-based projects. The build-up to the release of the Iraq War Logs data gave it the opportunity to do both of these things and the organisation helped produce hours of films for Al Jazeera English and Arabic, a programme for Channel 4′s Dispatches and stories for French newspaper Le Monde.

In addition the site built its own website, hosting more stories from the data, IraqWarLogs.com. The bureau was working for the past 11 weeks on the data, Overton tells Journalism.co.uk. The day after Dispatches was broadcast the office is empty with staff taking a necessary break from the exhausting, takeaway pizza-fuelled work of the past three months, which has involved up to 20 journalists at some stages, he says.

“We were conscious that we were probably being listened into by state security services, certainly my phone played very oddly during this process. We had a very high number of bizarre crashes on our computer system… I don’t think we were being paranoid,” he says.

Overton got involved with the investigation after the release of the Afghan War Logs and after meeting WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange. “I don’t think any journalist worth his salt would have turned this down,” he says, though the much reported issues surrounding the WikiLeaks’ set up could put some journalists off.

Overton says he has only spoken with Assange a handful of times: “It’s been like working with any other source. We’ve kept them pretty much at arm’s length. There’s more to them than just Julian. They’re good people, they have good intentions, they want to make the world a better place. I treat them as a source and they didn’t have any editorial influence on what we were doing, but they were the conduit through which we understood what other people were doing and when the embargo was lifted.

“We were so caught up in the data that unlike a lot of people I haven’t been immersed in the WikiLeaks ‘thing’. I’ve been a lot more focused on what the story is, which is what they want us to do. I think they despair slightly about the whole media circus around who they are and they’re very keen themselves that this is about what they’re giving to the world and what they’re revealing, which is clearly serious questions about coalition forces handling of the Iraq war.”

To work with the data, the bureau, led by development producer James Ball, created its own programme to analyse spreadsheets of information. Using this the team applied “good old-fashioned journalism”, looking for stories from trends and patterns in the information, anomalies and comparing reports of incidents at the time with reports contained in the logs.

“We typed in the word chocolate: chocolate came up with a sweetshop where an IED had been planted by Al Qaeda and killed lots of children; but also you saw chocolate appearing as chocolate had been given covered in drugs to would-be suicide bombers to create a narcotic euphoric state; and chocolate would also come up as bars of chocolate were thrown from the back of HUMV which resulted in children having a fight, then the mothers of the children having a fight, then the fathers, which resulted in a massive brawl and ended up with one of the children being shot in the leg.  Chocolate, such a benign little word, throws up three different stories,” he says.

“We very much had to be directed by the trends within the data. Once we’d established what the trends were or where there were anomalies to what was stated, then we followed it as a story… There were some things that were just so stark and brutal that you couldn’t help but be shocked by it.”

One drawback when dealing with this volume of data is the stories that are missed, he says. Unfortunately there are stories featured on the bureau’s own website, such as an investigation into whether Blackwater was involved in 10 previously unreported civilian deaths, that have not been followed up elsewhere.

“In a way, because there’s so much material, if we’d have had that story on its own, that would have been a very big story of the day. As it is it’s completely buried, and I sympathise with the reasons why, it is one of the slightly annoying consequences of there being so much attention on the source and the process and not what lies within,” says Overton.

Translations of their findings into Chinese and Spanish as an experiment, however, proved hugely successful in increasing international coverage of the investigation, he says. The bureau’s stories got more coverage in China than in the rest of the world and were picked up by every major newspaper in Latin America as a result, he suggests.

But the investigation doesn’t end there for Overton or the bureau – to maximise the impact of the data and its stories, it needs to be kept alive.

“When Nick Clegg said there needs to be an investigation I’m going to hold him to that. We’re putting up a ticker tape, a rolling calendar, for the number of days since Nick Clegg said there would be an investigation till when it happens,” says Overton.

“Going forward we’re keen to keep this story alive and to continue the redaction process and other processes to make sure that that happens. Just because the story has gone out I don’t believe the relationship with WikiLeaks ends here – we will continue to interrogate this.”

To read the full article click here

The first, dated June 23, chronicles the detention five days previously of a Shia Iraqi male in his thirties who was considered to be a “possible insurgent”.

Arrested in southern Iraq, where British troops were based, the man claimed to have been punched in the face, kicked and struck with a weapon to the chest.

British soldier in Iraq - Chris Winter-Defence Images/Flickr

Upon medical examination at a British medical facility, it was thought he “likely has a rib fracture”. Processed and transferred into American hands, he then claimed to have been abused by “unknown” British forces during capture.

On another occasion a report is logged in which allegations are made of torture at the hands of British troops the day before, but this claim was not supported by a subsequent medical examination.

A number of files make reference to US interactions with the Wolf Brigade, a Ministry of Interior battalion known for savage practices and a distinct uniform of red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas.

Related article: Allegations of prisoner abuse by US troops after Abu Ghraib

In one report from Fallujah in western Iraq dated December 14 2005, a military interrogator threatened a detainee with transfer to the “Wolf Battalion” as a means of getting him to talk.

December 14 2005
[The officer] threatened the subject detainee that he would never see his family again and would be sent to the wolf battalion where he would be subject to all the pain and agony that the wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees.

Two months earlier on November 2, a report from the ‘Thunder Squadron’ of the Armed Cavalry Regiment based in Baghdad details the arrest of five Iraqis with fake identification in a car featuring on the ‘BOLO’ (be on look-out) wanted list. The individuals were, the report claims, “turned over to the Wolf Brigade”.

Graphic: Detainee abuse in Iraq

The logs also show that US troops investigated claims by detainees of abuse at Wolf Brigade hands. On December 13 2006 a report detailing the medical examination of three detainees all claiming to have been beaten with a baseball bat by Wolf Brigade officers.  The PA – ‘physician assistant’ – confirmed that each man’s wounds were consistent with their description of the weapons used against them.

The logs also contain intelligence reports of counter-attacks and reprisals against the brigade. On one occasion from January 2007 the decapitated head of an officer from the brigade was found, but no body was located. “A wire was run through the ear with the corpse’s ID attached to the wire,” states the report.

The High Commissioner also called for all alleged abuses against Iraqi civilians by US troops to be properly investigated.

The statement follows revelations by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that the US handed over more than 9,000 detainees to Iraqi authorities despite knowing of hundreds of reports of torture by Iraqi Security forces.

Navi Pillay - UN Information Services/Flickr

The military files leaked to the whistleblowers website, Wikileaks, show that US troops reported more than 1,300 claims of torture by Iraqi authorities.

Related article: Obama administration handed detainees despite reports of torture

These reports detail complaints of brutality reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s regime. They include accounts of detainees being whipped with cables, chains, wire and pistols and being burnt with acid and cigarettes. Some accounts describe people having electric shocks to their genitals, fingernails ripped out and fingers cut off. In other cases, the documents report men being sodomised with bottles, hoses and raped.

US troops were still recording allegations of abuse by Iraqi Security Forces as they started to withdraw, logging 112 instances in 2009.

Graphic: Detentions in Iraq

Commenting on the revelations the High Commissioner said: “The information adds to concerns that serious breaches of international human rights law have occurred in Iraq, including summary executions of a large number of civilians and torture and ill-treatment of detainees.

“The US and Iraqi authorities should take necessary measures to investigate all allegations made in these reports and to bring to justice those responsible for unlawful killings, summary executions, torture and other serious human rights abuses, in line with obligations under international human rights law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which both the US and Iraq are parties.”

Wikileaks gave access to nearly 400,000 military files to key media organsations including the Bureau, the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and Le Monde.

Related article: Torture widespread in Iraqi detention facilities

There are 32,563 cases of civilian murders by insurgent groups, according to the files substantially more than the 20,228 killed in IED explosions.

In hundreds of cases there are also references to torture, including that of 32 children.

The violence detailed in the documents is horrific. It includes skin peeled from bodies, acid burns, attacks with electric drills, electrocution, branding, fingers and limbs torn off, eyes pulled out, ears, noses and parts of the face sliced off.

Iraqi workers carry a body to be buried in Najaf - Getty

The first case of insurgent torture was recorded on April 20 2004. It describes a corpse found near Fallujah with indications of mutilation.

The level of violence got worse as the civil war progressed, and was not only confined to adults.

In 2006 in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, a six-year-old boy’s body was found. The log recorded “several small holes originally thought to be gunshot wounds were holes caused by a drill.”

In June 2007 in a Baghdad district, the corpse of a man, around 30-35 years old, dressed in a tan dishdasha was discovered. The flesh of his arm was missing, “as if peeled off”.

Related article: Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints

Deaths in Baghdad from TBIJ on Vimeo.

Killed for working for the Coalition
In most cases, it is unclear why the victim had been tortured.

There are a couple of instances, however, where signs were hung, pinned or written on the mutilated corpses, giving stark warnings to anyone aiding the Coalition forces.

On June 20 2007, the bodies of two teenage boys were found by an Iraqi officer. They had both been executed with a single gunshot wound to the head, and both exhibited signs of torture. A sign around their necks read “This is what happens when you work for CF”.

One man was found tied to a lamp pole, blindfolded with his hands lashed behind his back. The message inscribed on his body read “Killed for helping the Americans.” The report states that his body bore the signs of torture. His corpse was found in al Karkh in October 2007.

Violence in Baghdad
Many of the bodies exhibiting extreme torture were found in al Karkh, a central district of Baghdad between 2006 and 2009.

In one case, on September 28 2006, a body was found in front of a graveyard by local civilians. Witnesses said the victim had been kidnapped a day earlier outside a ceramics shop by four masked insurgents. He had then been submitted to vicious abuse.

On December 1 2006, a body was found that had been disemboweled. Two weeks later another body, in the same area, was found with the face “cut up” and missing an ear.

In a particularly gruesome example, on February 6 2007, a body was unidentifiable due to the victim’s face being entirely removed, or “skinned”.

Women and children killed
In some incidents, the bodies of women and children are discovered. In one harrowing case, again in the Karkh district of Baghdad, the body of a pregnant woman was found flex-cuffed, bearing the signs of torture. She had been executed with a 9mm round to the head.

In another, a Sunni woman in her thirties was found murdered in her apartment. One of her eyes was missing, and her entire body has been tortured using a drill.

Interactive: All casualties, month by month

Mass Graves
The logs also detail how US troops discovered mass graves – sometimes containing dozens of corpses at a time.

On July 12 2006, a US aircraft spotted a large number of corpses dumped in a quarry in the northern Iraq province of Diyala. Ground troops investigating the grave discovered 19 bodies, badly burned with nitric acid. They later discovered four additional bodies, all male, displaying signs of torture, and killed by a gunshot wound to the head. The group had been kidnapped earlier that day.

Washington was warned by the United Nations and many human rights organisations that torture was widespread in Iraqi detention centres. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal the US’s own troops informed their commanders of more than 1,300 claims of torture by Iraqi Security forces between 2005 and 2009.

Prisoner handover
In July 2010, the US completed the handover of 9,250 detainees to the Iraqi authorities.

Related article: War logs challenge US prison inspection all-clear

It would be a clear violation of international law, drawn up by the United Nations Convention Against Torture, ratified by the US in 1994, for any government to transfer detainees to a regime at whose hands they face torture or other serious human rights violations.

However, the 1,365 cases of alleged torture by the Iraqi authorities found by the Bureau, raise questions as to why the US government handed over detainees to these authorities.

Human rights organisations have expressed outrage at the revelations. Professor Novak, the UN Rapporteur on Torture told the Bureau: “If the United States forces handed over detainees to Iraqi jurisdiction, despite the fact that they were at serious risk of being subjected to torture, that is a violation of Article 3C of the Convention Against Torture of which the US is a signatory.”

He said there should be a full and thorough investigation to ascertain whether any of the detainees handed over to the Iraqi authorities by the US have been abused.

“The burden of proof is on the US to prove that they can categorically state that the detainees they are handing over are not at risk of torture.There should be an investigation to look into the fate of those individuals to see whether they have been abused.”

President Obama meets US troops in Iraq by the US Army/Flickr

Graphic: detentions in Iraq

It is likely that the detainees handed over could face torture. Many of the reports in the logs detail complaints of brutality reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s regime. They include accounts of detainees being whipped with cables, chains, wire and pistols and being burnt with acid and cigarettes. Some accounts describe people having electric shocks to their genitals, fingernails ripped out and fingers cut off. In other cases, the documents report men being sodomised with bottles, hoses and raped.

One of the worst cases relates to a man held in an underground bunker and tortured for two months in Diyala Prison, run by the Iraqi Ministry of Justice.

March 25 2006
His hands were bound/shackled and he was suspended from the ceiling; the use of blunt objects (pipes) to beat him on the back and legs; and the use of electric drills to bore holes in his legs.

Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Porgramme said: “This adds further weight, if it were needed, that US authorities committed a serious breach of international law when they handed over thousands of detainees to Iraqi security forces who, they clearly knew, were responsible for widespread and systematic torture. It is our view that the current US administration is complicit in torture.

“The US authorities, like all other governments, have an obligation not only to ensure that their own forces do not use torture, but also that people who were detained and are being held by US forces are not handed over to other authorities who are likely to torture them.”

He continued: “The US failed to respect this obligation in Iraq, despite the great volume of evidence available from many different quarters showing that the Iraqi security forces use torture widely and are allowed to do so with impunity.

Graphic: detainee abuse in Iraq

The US military records add to a body of evidence gathered by the international community concerning allegations of torture within Iraqi state facilities.

Evidence of abuse
In 2008 the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) warned, “Ongoing widespread ill-treatment and torture of detainees by Iraqi law enforcement authorities, amidst pervasive impunity of current and past human rights abuses, constitute severe breaches of international human rights obligations.”

Related article: Allegations of prisoner abuse by US troops after Abu Ghraib

Despite this, on January 1 2009, the Iraq-United States Bilateral Security Agreement came into force. This provided for the release and transfer from US jurisdiction of detainees to Iraqi custody. At the time, the UNAMI called on both parties “to implement the agreement in strict compliance with human rights norms and standards”.

US forces continued to gather evidence of alleged detainee abuse throughout this period, logging 112 cases in 2009. The last detainee case reported in the military files is dated December 23. It describes an incident in a video recording that showed 12 Iraqi Army officers executing a detainee. This, even when the handover was occurring.

December 23 2009
The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him, and shooting him.

Related article: Torture widespread in Iraqi detention facilities

The bulk of the torture allegations are against facilities run by either the Iraqi Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Defence – establishments such as police stations and army buildings. But there are allegations also  against the MOJ recorded in the SIGACTS.

Camp Cropper WIGuardPics/Flickr

Related article: US troops ordered not to investigate Iraqi torture