Italian newspapers are posting both the unclassified and the highly secret classified versions of a US military report. This new report cleared the US military of any wrongdoing in the death of an Italian secret service agent at a US military checkpoint near Baghdad back in March.
This is a very big deal in Italy, where the fallen secret service agent has become a national hero and a tragic symbol of the folly of trying to help the US in Iraq. There's quite the anti-American atmosphere in Italy right now, and this will not do much to quiet the anti-Americanists. Oy.
This is a scandal. According to the technology wizards at ZDNet, the only thing necessary to reveal the text behind the black bars in the unclassified report was a simple "copy and paste." Wow. So, according to the BBC, a Greek medical student did just that -- copied and pasted to reveal all of the blacked-out text -- and then he forwarded the full, unredacted classified report to Italian media.
Comparing the two versions of the report is very illuminating. What did the US military decide to black out? Of course, all names of US soldiers were blacked out, and some operational details were blacked out as well. Whether any possibly incriminating evidence was blacked out is in the eye of the beholder.
There's an interesting passage about a communication failure just before the Italians' car approached the checkpoint. Apparently, the driver of the car communicated their position to the commander of the US troops in the region, but due to both a failure of a high-tech communication channel and the commander's subsequent failure to try to use old-style FM radios to communicate the car's position, the troops on the ground had no idea that they were firing at a VIP car. This information jives with the Italians' insistence that they did everything right -- they conducted all required communication with the Americans to ensure a safe passage for their VIP car.
Further, it seems to me that the redacted version left out pages of criticism of the US military's procedures and protocols at the checkpoint. There were suggestions that changes needed to be made before the killing of the Italian secret service agent, who died of bullet wounds caused by US soldiers while he was protecting a kidnapped and newly released Italian journalist. Sounds like more could have been done to prevent the killing.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. There's no report about this scandal on CNN.com right now, so I'm not sure whether this will make headlines in the US or not. I think it should -- whoever was in charge of redacting that classified document made a huge mistake and let out even more information about yet another huge mistake. Way to go.
Tomorrow, the Italians will release their own version of what happened, and the Italian Prime Minister is expected to continue to pressure Washington to bring charges against the US soldiers at the scene.
This is a very big deal in Italy, where the fallen secret service agent has become a national hero and a tragic symbol of the folly of trying to help the US in Iraq. There's quite the anti-American atmosphere in Italy right now, and this will not do much to quiet the anti-Americanists. Oy.
This is a scandal. According to the technology wizards at ZDNet, the only thing necessary to reveal the text behind the black bars in the unclassified report was a simple "copy and paste." Wow. So, according to the BBC, a Greek medical student did just that -- copied and pasted to reveal all of the blacked-out text -- and then he forwarded the full, unredacted classified report to Italian media.
Comparing the two versions of the report is very illuminating. What did the US military decide to black out? Of course, all names of US soldiers were blacked out, and some operational details were blacked out as well. Whether any possibly incriminating evidence was blacked out is in the eye of the beholder.
There's an interesting passage about a communication failure just before the Italians' car approached the checkpoint. Apparently, the driver of the car communicated their position to the commander of the US troops in the region, but due to both a failure of a high-tech communication channel and the commander's subsequent failure to try to use old-style FM radios to communicate the car's position, the troops on the ground had no idea that they were firing at a VIP car. This information jives with the Italians' insistence that they did everything right -- they conducted all required communication with the Americans to ensure a safe passage for their VIP car.
Further, it seems to me that the redacted version left out pages of criticism of the US military's procedures and protocols at the checkpoint. There were suggestions that changes needed to be made before the killing of the Italian secret service agent, who died of bullet wounds caused by US soldiers while he was protecting a kidnapped and newly released Italian journalist. Sounds like more could have been done to prevent the killing.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. There's no report about this scandal on CNN.com right now, so I'm not sure whether this will make headlines in the US or not. I think it should -- whoever was in charge of redacting that classified document made a huge mistake and let out even more information about yet another huge mistake. Way to go.
Tomorrow, the Italians will release their own version of what happened, and the Italian Prime Minister is expected to continue to pressure Washington to bring charges against the US soldiers at the scene.
i'm confused erik. how do you reveal blacked out passages with copy and paste. is there something like this in ms word? what do you copy to remove the blacked out section and where do you paste it? that doesn't make any sense to me.
OK, here's how it works. go click on the "unclassified" link above in the post. That will take you to the PDF document that the military released with all the blacked out regions.
Then, select some text including blacked out regions. Hit Control-C or right click and select 'copy to clipboard.'
Open Word or another word processor and hit Control-V or right click and select 'paste.' The text, including the blacked out portions, will appear in full.
So, someone did that for the whole document and removed the US military's black-outs. Pretty amazing how we can subvert the military using our windows clipboard.
I'll be happy to show you where the My Computer window is, too.