Wikileaks, an online organization created by Julian Assange and the Sunshine Press in 2007, relies heavily on anonymous tips. Controversy struck when Wikileaks released a package of almost 400,000 documents titled the Iraq War Logs.
Within a year of the official launching, Wikileaks already had a database of over 1.2 million documents and steadily increasing. Most of the journalists and anonymous tippers could be prosecuted for exposing such highly-classified documents, that is if Wikileaks did not triumph over legal and political using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Iraq War Logs, the largest leak in United States military history, were released in October 2010 and discussed evidence of the occupation of Iraq from January 1st 2004 to December 31st 2009. Tips submitted by the troops themselves, brought to public the brutality of death and everyday life as soldiers fighting in Iraq. Some of these deaths included over 700 civilians merely for coming in range of military checkpoints and hundreds of cases of torture by the Iraqi officials. These documents also exposed over 15,000 deaths which were not previously included in the war’s death count, raising it to 66,000 causalities.
The documents claimed that the Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki operated a “detention squad” whose responsibility was to track down his political opponents. Both Nouri al-Maliki and politician Mohammad-Javad Larijani both dismissed the claims made the the United States Government to incriminate their forces. Hillary Clinton condemned the leaks, and claimed that Wikileaks is “an attack on the world.”
Wikileaks has created a mind blowing exposer in the world of citizen journalism. Though written by volunteers, there is a more dimensional aspect to each story. Each journalist is given tips to work with which brings in multiple points of view and insight on each situation. Other major news sources, such as The New York Times, followed up on the claims, but used a lot of information originally reported by Wikileaks.
Written by Rachel Goss