UPDATED Afghanistan: The Wikileaks "War Diary" of 91,000 Documents

UPDATE 0855 GMT: Because of the demand on its site, Wikileaks has set up an alternative location to access the "War Diary".

The Guardian of London offers a video tutorial on reading the 91,000 documents.

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From Wikileaks:

WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related detail.

Afghanistan: The Truth About the US Occupation (Guardian/Wikileaks/NY Times/Der Spiegel)

The document collection is available on a dedicated webpage.

The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception of most US Special Forces' activities. The reports do not generally cover top secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations.

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the 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.

The data is provided in HTML (web), CSV (comma-separated value) and SQL (database) formats, and also was rendered into KML (Keyhole Markup Language) mapping data that can be used with Google Earth. Please note that the checksums will change.

• Complete dump of the website, HTML format 75 MB
  
  
  
  • (SHA1: 80adb634a0d218bd0f9a0f22734e3d2e7e67acfc)
  
  
  • This is a complete dump of the website at http://wardiary.wikileaks.org. Extract this to your local hard disk and open it with your web browser. Please check the project website http://wardiary.wikileaks.org for the most recent version.
  
  
  
  


• All entries, CSV format 15 MB
  
  
  
  • (SHA1: d6b82f955a7beb9589f92e9487c74669d1912a34)
  
  
  • Raw data in comma-separated value format for further processing.
  
  
  
  


• All entries, SQL format 16M MB
  
  
  
  • (SHA1: 9463f73ebbcd3f95899a138d6ba9817e1b6b800d)
  
  
  • Raw data in SQL format for further processing.
  
  
  
  


• All entries, KML format 16 MB
  
  
  
  • (SHA1: 34562c0c7722522161e40330d80ac9082014845f)
  
  
  • This archive contains all events in one KML file. This file needs much memory if opened with Google Earth.
  
  
  
  


• All NATO entries, KML format 209 kB
  
  
  
  • (SHA1: 088ff8999a316f30e5e398021375fa3b4fc6349e)
  
  
  • Contains the events that were tagged with NATO.
  
  
  
  


• Entries by month, KML format 16 MB
  
  
  
  • (SHA1: 01a5c0639e1e1e844b10e962a44849b2a521d092)
  
  
  • This archive provides the entries split by month. This makes it easier to browse the data in Google Earth on low power machines.
  
  
  
  


• Entries with scale filter, KML format 981 kB
  
  
  
  • (SHA1: 4669c721b87775a44472f6688e768305c686beff)
  
  
  • File that will show a scale corresponding to the number of incidents in Google Earth. Each incident begins with a 0.5 base score, and 0.1 has been added for each incident involving humans. This set of data provides only events that have a scaling of 1.5.
  
  
  
  

To decompress the files you will need the program 7zip. A free client for Windows can be downloaded here. Please use your favorite search engine to find clients for other operating systems.

Iraq and the "Collateral Murder" Video: Arresting the Whistle-Blower (McGreal)

UPDATE 1115 GMT: Another Iraq-related story out of the US....



EA correspondents alert us to a documentary, being aired tonight on Current TV, on the link amongst Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans between post-traumatic stress disorder and domestic violence. "War Crimes" is presented by former Navy SEAL turned journalist Kaj Larsen.

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This spring, EA carried the Wikileaks video of alleged "collateral murder" of civilians by US forces in a 2007 incident in Iraq. Last night The Guardian of London, in a story by Chris McGreal, brought news of the first arrest in the case:

A US army intelligence analyst [has been] charged with leaking a highly classified video of American forces killing unarmed civilians in Baghdad and secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

Private Bradley Manning, who had a top-secret security clearance, has been held in military custody in Kuwait since his arrest in Iraq in May over the video, which caused great embarrassment to the US military establishment. It showed an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency. The air crew is heard falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead. WikiLeaks gave the video the title Collateral Murder.

Manning, 22, was arrested after boasting in instant messages and emails to a high-profile former hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he passed the material to WikiLeaks along with thousands of pages of confidential American diplomatic cables.

WikiLeaks has since said it plans to release a second US military video that shows one of the deadliest US air strikes in Afghanistan, in which scores of children were believed to have been killed. The site's founder, Julian Assange, said the organisation was still working to prepare the encrypted film of the bombing of the Afghan village of Garani in May 2009, in which the Afghan government said about 140 civilians died, including 92 children.

The Baghdad video shows one of two US Apache helicopter crews falsely claiming that there is shooting, opening fire and then laughing over the dead. The helicopters also attack a van attempting to rescue the wounded. One of them opens fire with armour-piercing shells. One of the crew laughs about the attack after the windscreen is blown out. Behind it were two children who were wounded.

Manning faces two charges under military law for allegedly illegally transferring the Iraq video and copies of documents to his computer and then for passing "national defence information to an unauthorised source". The charge sheet says Manning leaked the material to "bring discredit upon the armed forces".....

Read rest of story....