"The US and UK forces cannot turn a blind eye on the basis that it wasn't their soldiers that were doing the torture and that's what happened," stated Shiner. They have an "international obligation to take action to stop torture" and "that they did not makes them complicit."
As far as torture of Iraqis by US and UK forces goes, Shiner said there appeared to be many instances where Iraqis died in UK custody and were certified as dying of natural causes. None of the deaths had been investigated, many were hooded and abused and his law firm does not accept the Ministry of Defense explanation that these deaths all have an innocent explanation.
Shiner explained hundreds of Iraqis have been complaining for a long time about ill-treatment and torture, often a result of coercive interrogation by UK interrogators in secret facilities run by the Joint Forward Interrogation Team. The evidence of torture would help promote support for a formal inquiry into the detention policy and practice used by forces in southeast Iraq.
Daniel Ellsberg, known for leaking the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War, flew from the US to stand in support of Julian Assange and others in the WikiLeaks coalition, which released the reports. He said he had been waiting to see something like this for forty years and suggested that if he was the "most dangerous man in America" than Julian Assange might be, to US officialas, "the most dangerous man in the world."
According to Ellsberg, President Obama has started as many
prosecutions for leaks as all previous presidents put together: three
prosecutions, Bradley Manning being the latest. That is because, prior to
President Obama and President George W. Bush, presidents didn't think they
could use the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers. They thought that
using the act to halt whistleblowing would be viewed as unconstitutional and a
violation of First Amendment rights. But, after 9/11 and with the current
Supreme Court, President Obama has no problem with "mounting a new experiment"
to "change the relationship between press and sources." Now, press has to know
taking leaked information means risk of prison. (*For more, see Glenn Greenwald's previous coverage of the Obama Administration's war on whistleblowers: "What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ").
Up to this point, the US has no Official Secrets Act while
the UK does. What might be worth noting is the possibility of some type of
Official Secrets Act criminalizing the leaking of information being passed as a
way to combat the effectiveness of WikiLeaks in getting the truth about wars
into the press and in the hands of millions of people around the world.
Also, Ellsberg made a distinction about the Iraq War that because the justification for invasion by US forces was based on lies the civilian casualties may not only be considered victims of a war of aggression but the non-civilian casualties reported may be victims of a war of aggression because "they were fighting foreign occupiers."
Assange and Shiner both communicated their dissatisfaction with how the press has previously handled not only stories related to WikiLeaks but also stories related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in general.
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