October 22, 2010

WikiLeaks Iraq Dump Is On

WikiLeaks/<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/WL_Helping_Hand.jpg/500px-WL_Helping_Hand.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>

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[UPDATE: As of 5 p.m. EDT Friday, the WikiLeaks Iraq documents have dropped…all 391,831 of them. They are accessible in a searchable database here. Find anything you think is worth highlighting? Want to help drive MoJo‘s coverage? Let us know in the comments below, or email scoop@motherjones.com.]

WikiLeaks and its erstwhile mainstream media partners this weekend will release hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the Iraq war’s conduct, a representative of one of the news organizations confirmed to Mother Jones.

A New York Times representative told MoJo that the data dump is coming soon, and other news outlets are reporting that the leak will form the basis of the Times’ page 1 coverage Saturday. Al-Jazeera also confirmed the leak, saying it “has had full access to the documents.” That would be a new development; in previous Afganistan coverage, WikiLeaks has leaned exclusively on the Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel.

The Iraq document dump had been rumored to occur earlier this week, but WikiLeaks’ secretive honcho, Julian Assange, took potshots at those reports. It appears the leak had been held off to give the mainstream news organizations more time to mull the documents over, but that couldn’t immediately be confirmed Friday.

In any case, like the DOD, Mother Jones has a team of knowledgeable investigators ready to pore over the document database once it’s published. What specific issues or incidents would you most like to see investigated? Leave a comment below or email scoop@motherjones.com.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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