From: "Alamaine, IVe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: May 20, 2007 4:34:13 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ctrl] When an 8-year-old uncovers Iraq secrets
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it." Aristotle
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
May 19, 2007
When an 8-year-old uncovers Iraq secrets
Posted 12:10 pm | Printer Friendly | Spotlight
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10851.html
Political scientist Pete Moore wrote a fascinating item for Salon
about
his endeavor digging through the massive archive of Coalition
Provisional
Authority documents. As Moore acknowledged, he didn´t expect to
find too
many hidden gems - insightful personal letters may occasionally
fall out
of dusty old volumes in libraries, but the CPA´s archives are
paperless.
But I forgot to factor in the ubiquity of human error, and of
Microsoft
Word. It turns out the IT era really is different, after all. It
took my
8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden
history from
within the official transcript of the CPA.
My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer
game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45
documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated
Weekly
Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had
one of
the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with
the
computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the
"View" menu at the top of the screen and select the "Mark up"
option. If
you are in a Word document where "Track changes" has been turned on,
hitting "Mark up" will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever
made
in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the
initials
of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a
document with the innocuous name "Administrator´s Weekly Economic
Report"
suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic
equivalent of
seeing every draft of an author´s paper manuscript and all the
penciled
changes made by the editors.
I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted
passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I´d downloaded.
Let this be a lesson to all of us - keep young children around for
computer-related research projects.
Of course, this isn´t just an amusing story about a fruitful accident;
Moore (with his son´s help) also found some important CPA-related
details
in the previously-hidden passages. I don´t want to alarm anyone, but
apparently CPA officials were dangerously clueless about the
insurgency
and why it existed.
In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I
downloaded,
including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all
seem to
come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept
pulling
text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar
Province - Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page
of the
March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA
documents
that can be downloaded.)
Microsoft Word´s "Mark up" feature shows the time and date of the
deletion and the identity of the person doing the deleting, but it
doesn´t give the original author of the passage or when it was
written.
The title and hints in the text point to a memo written by one
person in
December 2003 or January 2004, when daily attacks on coalition
forces in
Anbar, the heavily Sunni province west of Baghdad that is the
heartland
of the insurgency, were the lowest in many months. These were the
CPA´s
salad days. Prior to the al-Sadr uprising and the Abu Ghraib
scandal and
the failed siege of Fallujah later in 2004, the CPA believed that
it was
succeeding in reshaping Iraq. In his book "The Assassins´ Gate,"
George
Packer depicts late 2003 and early 2004 as the last phase of quiet
isolation for the CPA, before the facts on the ground began to
impinge on
its Green Zone idyll. "Why Are the Attacks Down" shows the CPA on the
cusp, as the author gives a half-dozen different theories for the
short-
term decline in violence. [...]
Nowhere in any of these theories, including the "boring" one, does the
author address the dissolution of the Iraqi Army as a major
contributor
to the violence. Nowhere, in fact, does the author seem to know which
"bums" or "losers" are attacking the Americans or why. Indeed, the
most
remarkable passage in the entire deletion is a simple statement by an
Iraqi businessman, whom the writer quotes in passing while
explaining why
American-induced economic prosperity will end the fighting. "It is
nothing personal," the Iraqi says. "I like you and believe you
could be
bringing us a better future, but I still sympathize with those who
attack
the coalition because it is not right for Iraq to be occupied by
foreign
military forces." In the world of the CPA circa 2004, first one
American
glosses over this Iraqi´s prophetic words, and then another tries -
unsuccessfully, as it turns out - to delete them.
And to think - officials´ incompetence in Iraq was exposed thanks to
their incompetence with Word, as discovered by a 8-year-old.
Alamaine, IVe
Grand Forks, ND, US of A
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a
philosopher." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
~~~~~~~
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes.
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