No investigation required

Today’s WikiLeaks dump shows a formal military policy (dated June 2004) of ignoring violence, torture, executions, sexual assaults, etc by Iraqi military or police, beyond giving reports on the incident to the very Iraqi unit that committed the abuse, and recording “no investigation required” on the file. Which I believe was the Obama campaign motto four years later. Spooky, huh?

Fred Kaplan says that the latest leaked documents won’t necessarily please anti-war types. For example, he says, they prove that “most Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by other Iraqis” and that Lancet vastly over-estimated the number of civilian deaths. Well, they prove that if you believe that the number of civilian deaths in the two assaults on Fallujah was exactly zero, the number the Pentagon recorded. Otherwise you might think that there’s a bit of selective blindness in the record-keeping.