Leaked Documents Provide Bonanza for Researchers

摘要

The Pentagon is fuming after last week's release of a huge cache of classified Iraq War data by the organization WikiLeaks. But researchers struggling to build an accurate picture of the death toll in post-invasion Iraq are thrilled. "It is hard to overstate the significance of this development for the conflict field," says Michael Spagat, an economist at Royal Holloway, University of London, U.K. Within the nearly 400,000 leaked documents is a stream of raw data called SIGACTS-for Significant Activities-that chronicles the casualties directly observed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.