Letters to the Editor
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Technical suggestion, maybe
I downloaded a couple of the documents referenced here, and I'm not sure Moore has reconstructed the most likely chain of events correctly. It looks to me as if whoever created the March report began by opening a pre-existing document dated December 28th. The 12/28 document was in the form of a memo, and perhaps the author of the March document thought that the report he or she was writing would be going out in memo format as well and picked this 12/28 document as a usable 'template.' The March author then deleted the main text of the 12/28 memo and proceeded to type the body of the March report, later (perhaps) deleting the memo header and adding a report-style header instead. It looks as if the April report was then started as a resave over the March report, the May reports took the April report as a starting point, etc. It appears that MS Word's Track Changes feature was enabled, but its View Markup feature was not, so the authors of the March, April, and May reports didn't realize that the documents they were using as 'templates' continued to be visible to anybody who turned View Markup on.
I don't know how clear this is, but I mean to point out that the document's editing history doesn't necessarily suggest that the author of the March report originally included a bunch of text from some other source and then decided to delete it from the official report. And the fact that the stricken out material continues to show up in the April and May reports supports my theory, I think.
You can try a simple experiment to see what I'm suggesting here. Open a new document in MS Word. Make sure Track Changes is on and View Markup is off. Type in some bogus text. Close and save the document, naming it something like DecemberMemo. Now reopen the document, and begin by clicking File and Save As -- name it something new, like MarchReport. Now delete your bogus text and type in some different bogus text. Save and close the document.
Reopen your second document and turn on View Markup. You'll see the original document text in strikethrough, and the new document text underlined.
I'm not saying the Anbar attack information isn't really interesting -- it is! As a historian, I'm totally fascinated. I just am not convinced that the March report was originally intended to include anything relating to Anbar attacks. I think it's more likely that the Anbar memo was taken as a 'template' for the March report, and the March report was a template for the April report, and so on...
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Scary Thought
That these people planned a war, yet can't handle MS Office. Perhaps it's part of the problem? In addition to the arrogance, incompetence, malfeasance, greed, blind-ambition, etc... part of the problem is that we have people who think in terms of fingers on triggers rather than fingers on keyboards? Maybe the entire adult middle-age ruling class of America are on the wrong side of a paradigmatic cultural shift from grunts with guns to electronic information? Yet they are still in charge despite having become obsolete in their own lifetimes. Our rulers are all 20th century thinkers in a 21st century environment. Of course the fact that they are all criminal lying murderers shouldn't be overlooked.
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Spoken too soon?
I really hope, in the interest of truthseekers and historians everywhere, that before going public with this story (in spite of the Hollywood-esque hook of an 8-year-old discoverer of 'government secrets'), that Pete Moore downloaded all available CPA documents written in MS Word. And, further, that he might have alerted someone clever enough to search out all MS Word documents on all government websites so that they too could be saved and searched for unwittingly readable deleted material.
Seriously. I've seen the same problem show up in an office setting, but would not have expected to see it in official government websites ... on second thought, to not expect that type of thing was probably delusional of me. Anyway, such raw material inadvertantly posted to government websites probably exists across a broad spectrum of government sites on the web, but probably not so many that a comprehensive download of .docs from .gov sites wouldn't be doable. That is, before everyone scrambles to correct the situation as word of mouth spreads about Pete Moore's 8-year-old.
I mean, c'mon, wouldn't you love to read the outtakes from whatever might have been made public in .doc form about, say, Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings? If you're reading this and you're technologically savvy enough to accomplish the saving of public .doc pages from .gov websites before they're scrubbed ... please, GET BUSY!
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Don't know about this one..
I agree with Aholibah, I don't think this is quite as sensational as the Salon article is making it out to be. I also looked at the documents, and I'd guess some employee who was not great at Word grabbed the original memo and just used it as a template. I think anyone who has struggled with formatting in Word can understand this. The article makes it seem like they were just grabbing sensitive documents and carelessly overwriting them. I'm not sure that's the case here. Besides, you can just read the laugh riot 20040628_historic_review_cpa.doc to see firsthand how incompetent the CPA really was.
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Aholibah I think you may be right
When I write sales proposals, I usually open up an old proposal and delete it, then do a save-as. I do this so that I can comply with my company's visual identity guidelines for text formatting. The comments/ reviewing notes problem we see here is probably extremely common, and does not imply *extreme* incompetence on the part of the report writers...although, I would assume that someone writing a report which has national - security implications should be more careful. Or…actually…I would assume that those people managing the report process should have set in place some systems to make sure this does not happen.
FYI, in MS Word 2003, the feature “Track Changes” must be enabled first in order for Word to track the changes. So one of two things happened:
1. They were working on a collaborative report and forgot to “Accept Final Changes” before publishing, or
2. Someone who commonly works on collaborative reports opened a previous report that had tracking enabled. He then deleted the previous report and over-wrote it (in order to preserve formatting), and then forgot to do the “Accept Final Changes” function.