The whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks today released a trove of classified reports that it said documented at least 109,000 deaths in the Iraq war, more

than the United States previously has acknowledged, as well as what it
described as cases of torture and other abuses by Iraqi and coalition
forces.

"The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081
'civilians'; 23,984 'enemy' (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 'host
nation' (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 'friendly' (coalition
forces)," WikiLeaks said in a statement regarding the documents'
release. "The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60 percent) of these
are civilian deaths. That is 31 civilians dying every day during the
six-year period."

The new documents covered 2004 through 2009, WikiLeaks said, with the exception of May 2004 and March 2009.

A review of the documents by Iraq Body Count, an advocacy group that
long has monitored civilian casualties in the war, found 15,000
previously unknown civilian deaths, according to WikiLeaks -- a detail
first reported in The Guardian newspaper, one of a handful of
international news organizations that got an advance look at the
documents.

The U.S. military long has maintained that it does not keep an official
death tally, but earlier this month following a Freedom of Information
Act request, the Pentagon said some 77,000 Iraqis had been killed from
2004 to mid-2008 -- a shorter period than that covered by WikiLeaks.

Besides the different time periods, the New York Times, which also saw
the WikiLeaks documents early, noted that "some deaths are reported more
than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures."

Al Jazeera, which also got an advance look at the documents, reported a
total of 285,000 war casualties on its Arabic-language website, a number
that included both dead and wounded. It also reported that the
documents said 681 Iraqi civilians were killed at U.S. checkpoints,
180,000 Iraqis were arrested during the war and 15,000 Iraqis were
buried without being identified.

The massive leak of 391,832 documents at 5 p.m. ET today, which
WikiLeaks billed as "the largest classified military leak in history,"
followed WikiLeaks' similar but smaller release on the war in
Afghanistan.

The new release was anticipated by the Pentagon, which has warned that publicizing the information could endanger U.S. troops.

"We strongly condemn the unauthorized disclosure of classified
information," said Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell prior to the
documents becoming public.

Morrell said the documents "expose secret information that could make
our troops even more vulnerable to attack in the future. Just as with
the leaked Afghan documents, we know our enemies will mine this
information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources
and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment.
This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are
fighting with killed."

Amid such criticism, WikiLeaks said this time it "undertook the arduous
task of redacting any piece of information contained that might lead to
the identification of any innocent Iraqi."

The Pentagon said the documents it expected would be released include
tactical reports from late 2003 to 2010 containing brief unit-level
observations of what those units saw on a daily basis.

Those documents included descriptions of attacks on Iraqi security
forces and U.S. forces, detainee abuse, civilian casualty incidents, IED
blasts, discussions with Iraqis and inquiries into socio-political
relations, according to Department of Defense spokesman Col. David
Lapan.

Sources that saw the WikiLeaks documents in advance reported no major
revelations, but said taken together they could be read as a secret
history of the war written from a troop's-eye-view of the conflict.

WikiLeaks collectively referred to the trove as "The Iraq War Logs" and seemed to suggest they did contain revelations.

"There are reports of civilians being indiscriminately killed at
checkpoints, such as speeding to get a pregnant woman to hospital; of
Iraqi detainees being tortured by coalition forces; and of U.S. soldiers
blowing up entire civilian buildings because of one suspected insurgent
on the roof," WikiLeaks said in its statement.

"There are over 300 recorded reports of coalition forces committing
torture and abuse of detainees across 284 reports and over 1,000 cases
of Iraqi security forces committing similar crimes," WikiLeaks added.
"There are numerous cases of what appear to be clear war crimes by U.S.
forces, such as the deliberate killing of persons trying to surrender."

The documents also included evidence of state-sanctioned torture by the
Iraqi government, new evidence of Iraqi government death squads, and
Iran's involvement in funneling arms to Shiite militias, according to .
the international news outlets that reviewed them before their release.

ABC News did not begin to review the nearly 400,000 documents firsthand until after their release this evening.

As the details on the documents emerged, the main WikiLeaks site was down for "scheduled maintenance," but the 400,000 documents later could be searched by categories on a specially created Wikileaks page.

WikiLeaks said it would hold a press conference Saturday morning in Europe to elaborate on the documents.