SGRENA REPORT GOODIES….The U.S. military released a report last week clearing American troops in the March gunfire incident that injured Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena and killed Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence agent, as they were driving to the Baghdad airport. Italian reaction has been outraged, and the Italian government is expected to issue a report on Monday contradicting many of the U.S. findings.
But here’s a question: do you think the Italian computer whizzes will be any more competent than their American counterparts when they release their report? The U.S. report is full of redactions, as you can see in the picture above, but once again an American agency has used the searchable PDF format to distribute a report, and all you have to do is save the report as a text file in order to recover all the redacted parts.
For example, the name of the third person in the car is Andrea Carpani. Was there any reason to keep this a secret? Beats me. But they didn’t do a very good job of it.
Another section describes the methods used by insurgents to place bombs along “Route Irish,” the road to the Baghdad airport, including: positioning explosives alongside guard rails, staging equipment in vehicles or near overpasses, wrapping explosives in brown paper bags, using timers, etc. I can’t imagine that this stuff is even remotely worth classifying, since these techniques are obvious to anyone who thinks about how to place explosives for more than a minute or two, but for some reason they were redacted.
I may go through the report later to see if anything more interesting was redacted, but for now I just wanted to let enterprising journalists know that the full report is available to anyone with a copy of Acrobat Reader. Go to it, guys!
