There were high expectations when Wikileaks announced that the biggest topic in its 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables was the war in Iraq.
As the webmaster of an Iraqi newspaper, I imagined myself feasting on mountains of secret information. Wikileaks claimed it had over 6,600 cables from the US embassy in Baghdad alone, and that the Iraq war featured in another 9,000 cables from other capital cities.
Hopes were soon dashed when only two newspapers, the New York Times and the Guardian, were given access to the full set of cables. Other Western newspapers were later offered access but they had to fulfil a list of conditions, such as providing the curriculum vitae of the journalists who were to be handling the content.
For this reason, the Dutch television channel RTL Nieuws and the daily NRC obtained the cables from the Norwegian daily Aftenposten which had received the same full collection of cables (from a source that still remains foggy). Wikileaks published only 24 cables from Baghdad for free. Today, that amount has grown to 32, which is peanuts! Our newspaper in Iraq is in a bind as it cannot buy the rest of the material - at least not from Wikileaks - and Aftenposten has flatly refused to share the cables with us.
The Iraq war logs were published on the internet in full and for free (with the exception of some names which were deleted). Many Iraqi journalists were disappointed, however, because entire chunks of the conflict were missing from the logs, such as the siege of the holy city of Najaf in 2004.
What's more, the logs contain stories that are not immediately understandable. So one reads: "TF %%%, during a VCP in AN %%% stopped a car and confiscated %%% x AK-%%% and %%% x possible falls %%%. One male was handed over to local IZP."
The logs read like military digital forms used to fill in events quickly, with dozens of acronyms that need to be deciphered (see list). Making sense of them is a real challenge.
The logs database can be searched with keywords such as names of cities, or words such as 'torture', 'rape' or 'AIF' (anti-Iraqi forces, the enemy), or dates. But, after trying dozens of search terms, I was unable to find any important storylines that were unknown to the Iraqi public.
The Guardian came up with two brilliant ideas to sort out the information in the military logs. The first was to share them with Iraq Body Count, a London-based organisation which keeps a record of every person killed by violence in Iraq since 2003. The bookkeepers of death discovered in the war logs around 15,000 civilians who were killed and who had not previously been mentioned anywhere else. While this, of course, was huge, Iraqi politicians and public opinion did nothing with these findings.
The Guardian and its sister publication the Observer had a second idea when they decided to collect all the logs from a specific day from all over Iraq - 17 October 2006 - and show readers the dozens of violent incidents that took place on just one day in Iraq. The list showed the real face of the war in 2006, the bloodiest year of the conflict. For Iraqis, this was nothing new.
The value of the logs in adding to knowledge and understanding is very limited. Wikipedia has already documented the devastating Battle of Falluja in 2004. Dozens of published memoires written by US soldiers have already recorded in detail what it means to fight in Iraq.
Corruption in the US army and the State Department has been documented time and again by US government inspectors and institutions such as the American Centre for Public Integrity. Compared to efforts such as these, the war logs do poorly.
The 'Cablegate' story in Iraq is short because there is no story. According to the few published cables, Iraqi politicians hardly said anything within the US embassy's walls that they had not already stated in public.
Journalists who do not follow events through the Iraqi media may find some cables mind-blowing, such as the report on Shiite clerics expressing their utter dislike of religious political parties. But in Iraq all of this information is communicated through the usual channels.
For reasons only Wikileaks might know, the first 24 war-related cables provided mostly an unflattering insight into Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs, including the offering of prostitutes to Iraqi sheikhs visiting Iran. This, however, is not news in Iraq, and it still remains a mystery as to why Wikileaks chose to focus on this angle while censoring thousands of other cables.
An Associated Press story reports that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange "expressed frustration with the slow pace of the release of the cables", and said "releasing country-specific files to selected local media would serve to push them out faster". Our Iraqi newspaper, however, was never approached and we did not receive any reply to our request for sharing the cables.
One of the last leaks to be released was a cable about the increasing number of Iraqi citizens visiting Baghdad Zoo.
Truly interesting until now - but mainly for historians - are in my opinion just two memos from Baghdad: the first revealed a request for US help from what is left of Saddam's Baath Party for it be integrated into the new political system; the other had details about the practical aspects of Saddam's execution. We now know for sure it was an amateurish affair.
Wikileaks is not serving Iraq. The war in this unfortunate country has only been used to sell newspapers in peaceful countries - countries where the killing of 15,000 citizens would not go unnoticed by the media.
A version of this article by Dutch journalist Anneke van Ammelrooy was published by the European Journalism Centre. The writer has worked for Dutch newspapers and weeklies and, while living in Iraq from 2003 to 2009 with her husband, Ismael Zayer, established the independent newspaper The New Morning (in Arabic). She was one of the founders of Iraq's first independent online news agency, and is now the webmaster of the online edition of the Iraqi independent daily newspaperNew Sabah.
