Military Intelligence

What's the line about that being an oxymoron? That was confirmed once again this weekend when the US put out their official report on the Giuliana Sgrena shooting incident at a Baghdad-area checkpoint:

The U.S. report is full of redactions... 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.

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.

And we wonder why we are losing all the high-tech jobs to India and China. Good to know that state secrets are held with such vigor.

The redacted items in the report itself show some interesting revelations: the soldiers on patrol were on their first day manning checkpoints; they were not specifically trained for this practice during basic training, but instead told how to perform their duties by the soldiers they replaced; the reason they were on patrol, to guard a vehicle carrying then-Ambassador John Negroponte, was complete by the time Sgrena got there (they never got the message); and it took a matter of seconds from Sgrena's arrival to their firing on her car.

I don't know what's worse, the incompetence in Baghdad that leads to tragedies like this, or the incompetence in Washington that leads to the whole world knowing about tragedies like this. Oh wait, I know what's worse, the incompetence in the White House getting us into tragedies like this. There now.