The US Government released their official report describing the circumstances of the shooting in Bagdad earlier this year of the Italian car carrying the Italian journalist. Naturally this report generated a lot of interest in Italy and was quickly examined.
The report was written, of course, by American military personnel. Apparently, the folks writing the report don’t keep up with either basic file management information or current news. The report was a PDF file of a word document. From the looks of it, and I haven’t compared the various versions of the report, the writer simply deleted the classified lines and saved as a PDF. :smack:
The writer apparently isn’t aware that this does not actually delete the lines from the document and Italian journalists were quick to reconstruct the full classified report and publish it on the internet. Slashdot is carrying the story already and I imagine the mainline media will pick it up soon.
My question for the smart Dopers here is-is this a woosh? Did the US military release this document with the classified information (very sobering information it is to), knowing it would be discovered quickly and thereby give more credence to the US report? Or is it as it appears-another case of clueless computer users thinking that the delete button in Word really works? The conclusions of the report are the same with or without the classified information-the Italians thought they could slip into and out of Bagdad without anyone noticing and could drive through a war zone without being shot at. They were wrong. Obviously the Italians don’t believe that is an accurate description of their actions.
I am not trying to determine what really happened that night, whether the Americans were wrong or the Italians or no one or everyone was wrong. I am trying to outguess the writers of this report. Did they deliberately leave the classified information in the report to make it look better, or are they just clueless?
There’s another section on Slashdot in which the poster compared the censored report with the original. The deleted sections give details about the unit, their record and postings, how many checkpoints they’ve run (at least a thousand, so they weren’t amateurs at this duty). There’s also a layout of the checkpoint and SOP for dealing with motorists. They also list the names of the individuals involved, and identified the soldier who shot the Italian agent.
So there was no information that contradicted the findings, just a lot of information that could help the enemy.
Although I’m not an intelligence agent, I would chalk this up to not being familiar with MS Word. I’m a longtime PC computer user, and while I knew that Word docs retain a lot of information, I wouldn’t have thought that the information would be ported over to the PDF. In other words, I go by the motto: “Never chalk up to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.”
I go by the motto: “Never chalk up to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.”
I follow the same motto. In my opinion this was just a stupid mistake.
In fact, I had read, though only once, that turning a Word doc into a PDF does in fact remove the deleted text. I read that after Tony Blair’s Iraq war justification was found to be based in part on a Masters thesis by some student in California. British intelligence apparently found the thesis on the web, thought it sounded good and cut and pasted parts of it into the official report without attibution. Reporters of course discovered it quickly and made a big deal about the quality of the British work. The British government spokesman apparently said that from now on, official government documents would only be released in PDF form to avoid such embarrassments.
But the slashdot article says this document was converted to PDF so apparently that isn’t a complete defense.
I keep finding reasons to avoid using Word. I like to substitute Wordpad, not being one of those geeks who proudly insists on using Notepad as if to say “what a hardcore geek I am!” Sure, Notepad is the way to make sure you get a clean file unburdened with lots of extra useless code and stuff. (Stuff like the memory of deleted text.) Wordpad seems to me a happy medium, since it provides plenty of word-processing functions but without the ridiculous amount of excess gunk that Word throws in. Wordpad does have an undo button, meaning it saves something of deleted text, but I imagine not to the extent that Word does. Anyone know?