The Secret Iraq Files
Nearly 400,000 classified US military files on the Iraq War land with WikiLeaks and then with Al Jazeera, which spends ten weeks working through them alongside London's Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The film follows what that analysis turns up: field reports covering January 2004 through December 2009 that put the death toll at 109,000, roughly two-thirds of them civilians, numbers far beyond what US officials had acknowledged publicly. One thread centers on a specific contradiction, that the military had denied keeping a body count of Iraqi dead even as these same documents show it doing exactly that, incident by incident, for years. Reporters and analysts walk through individual reports, checkpoint shootings, contractor killings, detainee treatment, laying the paper trail against the public statements made at the time. The film stays close to the documents themselves rather than dramatizing the war, treating the leak as primary evidence and letting the gap between record and rhetoric make its own case.