Case file 01 / Evidence atlas / Review edition
Iraq, 2003–2011.
What was claimed. What the records found.
What the evidence still cannot tell us.
Follow dated government records across time and place. A document records an account; it does not make every assertion independently proven.
Read the evidence rules ↓The geography of the record
Dated records. Visible limits.
Select a point, the Iraq outline, or a record below. National reports do not locate individual attacks. The map shows no troop routes, front lines or inferred areas of control.
The dated record
How to read this atlas
Keep the gaps
in the picture.
This is a curated pilot using primary U.S. government records. Its coverage is selective. Missing points do not mean nothing happened, and a national assessment cannot identify the attacker in a particular incident.
Download the evidence collection (JSON)
Map provenance & reuse
Event time and evidence time
The slider filters by the date of the event or assessment. Each entry labels what that date means. “Show later evidence” lets you read retrospectively. Turn it off to hide claim, finding and source text dated after the cutoff. A later-written account stays identified as a later account; unpublished evidence is never treated as contemporaneous knowledge.
What confidence means
Confidence describes how directly the cited record supports our narrow summary. It is an editorial assessment, not a probability or independent proof of the underlying event. Source-reported actors remain source-reported; unknown organizational affiliation stays unknown.
What the map does and does not locate
Points use approximate base or city locations for orientation. They are not exact impact sites, firing positions or movement tracks. The Iraq outline represents the geographic scope of a document, not a measured incident region or territory controlled by an armed group. Modern boundaries are only context.
Comparing a claim with a finding
“Contradicts” or “qualifies” is an editorial comparison of cited statements. “Context” adds evidence without asserting a contradiction. An empty comparison means we have not established one. Reports may rely on limited access, retrospective testimony or the issuing agency’s own account; read the linked sections.
Corrections and expansion
This public preview preserves the source links and limitations for each summary. Check the original document when a summary is disputed. New records require a primary-source citation, a date basis, geographic precision, source-specific attribution and explicit limits. Other wars can use the same data contract with their own collection, date range and basemap.