Yeah, the excrement hit the fan, all right.  But it flew in different faces than the ones you suppose:

First, those political propaganda Lancet 'studies; are shot to shit:


WikiLeaks Nails The Wild Lancet Scare
Andrew Bolt
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/wikileaks_nails_the_wild_lancet_scare/

I’m not sure it’s what WikiLeaks intended, but its latest leaks reveal that the infamous Lancet paper which claimed the US-led liberation of Iraq cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis in fact exaggerated the death toll by at least 600 per cent:

"The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq (over six years). These include 66,081 “civilians,” 23,984 “enemy” insurgents, 15,196 “host nation” (Iraqi government forces), and 3,771 “friendly” (coalition) forces. Some 60 percent of the total is civilian deaths."

And that’s leaving aside the argument about who actually killed the Iraqis, and whether more would have died under Saddam. Note also that this death toll is less than the number of people murdered in South Africa over the same period, and that even allowing for population differences, Iraq’s death toll is now lower.

Settle back and see if that’s how the ABC and Fairfax report these latest leaks.


And then the no-WMDs-in-Iraq contention took a hit:


WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results
By Noah Schactman
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/


By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to
look in on a “chemical weapons” complex. “One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interesting in trying to get into the bunkers.”


Meanwhile, the second battle of Fallujah was raging in Anbar province. In the southeastern corner of the city, American forces came across a “house with a chemical lab … substances found are similar to ones (in lesser quantities located a previous chemical lab.” The following day, there’s a call in another part of the city for explosive experts to dispose of a “chemical cache.”

Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”

In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. Most of those are intelligence reports or initial suspicions of WMD that don’t pan out. In July 2004, for example, U.S. forces come across a Baghdad building with gas masks, gas filters, and containers with “unknown contents” inside. Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins.

But even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

A small group — mostly of the political right — has long maintained that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the American people were led to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.

The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.

But the more salient issue may be how insurgents and Islamic extremists (possibly with the help of Iran) attempted to use these lethal and exotic arms. As Spencer noted earlier, a January 2006 war log claims that “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons were smuggled in from Iran.

That same month, then “chemical weapons specialists” were apprehended in Balad. These “foreigners” were there specifically “to support the chemical weapons operations.” The following month, an intelligence report refers to a “chemical weapons expert” that “provided assistance with the gas weapons.” What happened to that specialist, the WikiLeaked document doesn’t say.


And now we learn of the dissension in the Wikileaks ranks:


Secret War At The Heart Of Wikileaks
By Jerome Taylor
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/secret-war-at-the-heart-of-wikileaks-2115637.html

A civil war at the heart of Wikileaks has virtually paralysed the whistle-blowing website from publishing any new exposés outside of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, say former staffers and volunteers.


The website's recent unveiling of more than 390,000 secret US military documents from the Iraq war – on top of the 77,000 Afghan war logs it published earlier this year – has been hailed as one of the most explosive intelligence leaks in living memory, providing an astonishing level of previously unknown detail on two deeply controversial conflicts.

But a number of former members say that the website's obsession with pursuing the US military has resulted in Wikileaks losing sight of its founding principle that all leaks should be made available to the public no matter how large or small.

Speaking to The Independent last night, the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange hit back at the claims, accusing former colleagues of being "peripheral players... spreading poisonous false rumours".

At least a dozen key supporters of the website are known to have left in recent months. They say Wikileaks has ignored reams of new exposés because so much attention has been paid to the Iraq and Afghan conflicts.

The heavily encrypted arm of the website that allows users to safely send information to the organisation has been offline for four weeks, making new submissions impossible.

According to former supporters, the submission section is down because a number of key personnel have fallen out with Assange over the direction of the website and his behaviour. "Outside of the Iraq and Afghan dossiers, Wikileaks has been incapacitated by internal turmoil and politics," Smari McCarthy, a former Wikileaks volunteer and freedom of information campaigners from Iceland, told The Independent.

"Key people have become very concerned about the direction of Wikileaks with regard to its strong focus on US military files at the expense of ignoring everything else. There were also serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians; something which I'm pleased to see was not repeated with the Iraq dossiers."

Wikileaks admits that one member of the submission team has left but says that wing of the website is down for a system overhaul and will be back online soon.

Part of the problem for Wikileaks has been the huge amount of data it has had to mine in processing the Afghan and Iraq war logs, which comprised tens of thousands of field reports written in dense military jargon. But some of those who have grown uncomfortable with the direction of the website say more attention should still have been paid to leaks from outside of the US military – specifically the dramatic increase in submissions from whistleblowers within closed countries, dictatorships and corporations.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of Iceland's parliament who recently quit Wikileaks, played a key role in the website's release earlier this year of "Collateral Murder", the 39-minute video showing an Apache helicopter gunning down a group of armed men, civilians and two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. Its release brought Wikileaks global notoriety but Jónsdóttir believes the website should have paid more attention to the smaller, less headline-grabbing leaks.

"I don't want to take away from the importance of the Iraq dossiers," she said yesterday. "But I have been saying for some time that before all these big scoops came along, Wikileaks was very much about creating small hubs in different countries where people could leak important information to. It shouldn't just be about the international scoops."

The sometimes erratic behaviour of Wikileaks' founder has also caused a number of fallouts within the organisation. The Australian-born 39-year-old walked out of a CNN interview when an interviewer pressed him on the disagreements within Wikileaks and asked him to comment on an ongoing "molestation" investigation against him in Sweden. Assange, who vehemently insists that recent relationships he had with two women in Sweden were entirely consensual, criticised CNN's interviewer for dwelling on his private life.

Last month the website's second most visible face after Assange – a German spokesperson who went by the name Daniel Schmidt, but whose real name is Daniel Domscheit-Berg – broke ranks to disclose that he had quit after being suspended by Assange for unspecified "bad behaviour". Like others who have since left Wikileaks, he cited both the website's direction and Assange's behaviour as motivating factors behind his leaving. "This one-dimensional confrontation with the USA is not what we set out to do," Mr Domscheit-Berg told Der Spiegel.

Asked about Mr Domscheit-Berg's comments Mr Assange replied: "Like many former employees who are suspended from a group he has now decided to turn on his former employer. But these are not valid criticisms."

He also says those who accuse Wikileaks of ignoring whistleblowers outside of Iraq and Afghanistan are wrong.

"We are definitely concerned about that perception, but it's important to stress that such a perception is not correct," he said. "Over the past four years we have published leaks from more than 100 countries, from New York to Nairobi. We always prioritise our releases based on their potential impact and the timeliness. The next release will be relating to Afghanistan. After that we will probably do some smaller releases of a timely nature."