These documents were made public less than a year after WikiLeaks’ monumental release of approximately 400,000 top secret U.S. Army documents—a leak believed to be the largest in
U.S. history. The leaked Army documents purportedly uncovered instances in which American soldiers stood aside as the Iraqi Shiite-dominated security forces tortured Sunni prisoners. The documents also allegedly disclosed an additional unreported 15,000 civilian deaths during the Iraq War. This “document dump” was in fact the third major leak of U.S. military secrets of 2010. In April, the organization had posted a video of U.S. Army
helicopter carrying out an operation in which civilians and two Reuters reporters were killed in Iraq. Then in July, Wiki-Leaks posted 92,000 military memos that supposedly confirmed that Pakistan’s intelligence
agency regularly met with Taliban fighters.