On July 25th, 91,000 secret US reports on the Afghan War were released to the public by the web site Wikileaks. It was one of the largest leak of documents in history. It has been named the Afghan War Logs and covers events between 2004 and the beginning of 2010. Even on the first day that the documents were released journalists were pumping out articles on the many revelations stored in the reports. With so many reports there are still thousands untold stories in the reports.
We are publishing an excerpt of the reports that includes all references to Canada*. We hope readers will down load the file and help in revealing some of the untold stories that relate to Canada.
The files affable for download at wikileaks.org are missive and hard to process. The Original .csv file has 76,911 rows, More than many spreadsheet programs can handle. However in order to help explore the Canadian angel of the story we are publishing a smaller document, that includes every every reference to Canada, Canadian, and CDN.
The attached file has 465 rows and is saved as an .xls file. NOTE: the current version of the file needs some tidying, but is published here now. This post will be updated when a more tidy version of the file is compiled.
You can download the file here
So far the most controversial log to mention Canadians, involves an incident that was recorded as friendly fire by Afghan War Logs, but that was publicly reported as a Taliban attack. Detail are below.
However another Canadian angle that is worth examining is the Afghan Detainee Affair. Although only two of the "Detainee Operations" give mention of Canada, reading through the 1208 such logs would give a sense of how Detainee operations work, which could be compared to the publicly stated versions.
If anyone has ideas for other possible was to use the logs to look at Canadian operations in Afghanistan, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
The Killing Train Already has some great coverage of the Afghan War logs. Check it out here: http://www.killingtrain.com/node/759
Here is a brief finding aid:
Although the spreadsheet is often hard to read once you have found a file that interests you, you can find the date of the incident, usually in column "B", and then try finding it in another format on this page: http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/ . The easiest way to find it is to browse by date, which narrows down you search by month, however you still need to go through the pages to find the right event.
Some logs can also be found using Google. For example if you grab the string of numbers after the colon in column "A" (the report key) you can search for that string and it may come up in google. For example one controversial document refers to four Canadian soldiers being Wounded in Action, even though the Canadian Government previously claimed that the soldiers were killed by the Taliban. It's report key is "C7D0AA09-3145-40A7-8B29-F49B5B659501" If you search for it in Google seven results come up, including this page from the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/afghanistan/warlogs/C7D0AA09-3145-40A7-8B29-F49B5B659501
CBC also has an online Database with 1967 of the reports uploaded. It can be searched here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/database-afghan-war-logs/
If you are having trouble decoding all the acronyms, the Guardian has a great glossary of terms available here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/2010/jul/25/wikileaks-afghanistan-war-logs-glossary
[This post will be updated soon with a better version of the file, and a more complete finding aid]
[If you have comments for suggestions for how to improve this post please add them in the comments]
*The file includes every reference to Canada, Canadian, and CDN. There may be other references to Canada since there are clearly references to NATO (CAN) in some of the reports, however since can is a common set of letters it was not included
