Petrelis Files

Gay City News: US Knew of Anti-Gay 
Iraqi Murders in '05

As I read the New York Times' coverage on Saturday about the huge document dump of files from the U.S. war in Iraq, I thought about Duncan Osborne, reporter for Gay City News, and wondered if he would pore over them.

You may recall he broke the story last year about the State Department knowing of the killings of homosexuals in Baghdad in 2006 and 2007, and the department did little more than create talking points for its spokespersons.

How did Osborne get his story? The old-fashioned way - he filed a Freedom of Information Act. He should give lessons to other gays in how to use FOIA requests to shed light on our government and gay matters.

Let's give the man due credit for prying loose that awful news from the State Department, and now for digging through the voluminous files posted on Wikileaks.org. Do you know of any other reporter or an activist who took the time to search the files? I don't and I think Osborne deserves much praise for bring new anti-gay atrocities in Iraq to our attention.

I've excerpted just the opening paragraphs to his latest story on the killings, and I hope you all will take the time to read his piece in full. After that, please post something to your blog about Osborne's story, or share the link to it far and wide.

From Gay City News:

A 2005 document included in the nearly 400,000 US Department of Defense records recently posted on wikileaks.org shows that the Pentagon was aware of the organized killing of gay Iraqis more than 15 months before those murders were first reported, in Gay City News.

“The male was shot (___) times in the chest, and a note was discovered on the body stating that the man had been killed by ___ for stealing cars and being homosexual,” read the January 1, 2005, memo, in which some words were redacted.

The body was discovered in Ramadi, a city in central Iraq, and a note was left at the scene by the gunmen who killed the man. The fact that the note was written in advance of the killing suggests that the gunmen knew whom they were targeting and why they were killing him, and had time to plan and prepare for the murder.

“After talking with the locals (through an ___), a CO discovered that the male was killed at approximately 1545C by gunmen driving past in a vehicle,” the memo read. “The vehicle drove past, fired, dropped the note, and then fled. The note is being brought back to - -___ for further analysis. No friendly casualties or damage to equipment reported.”

Gay City News found the memo by searching on wikileaks.org with keywords such as gay, lesbian, homosexual, fag, and faggot. The 2005 memo was the only document Gay City News found that related to the killings of gay Iraqis. [...]