Letters to the Editor
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And another thing...
How great a discovery this is depends on the content, and whether the original was considered sensitive. To me, the content to me seems very revealing about the flawed mind-set of the CPA. The question is though…was that original memo/report (whether it was written in December or March) actually considered confidential?
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Three words ...
Save as PDF.
I assume markup isn't transferred in this way (please: someone correct me if I'm mistaken). In any case, I am amazed at how people casually send readily editable documents flying around the Internet. It's almost as mysterious as the use of Powerpoint for written presentations.
But not quite.
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Something else cool you can find on the Internet
The set of declassified documents from the Nixon State Department showing that not only was the Nixon administration fully informed of the pending 1973 authoritarian pseudo-Marxist coup in Afganistan, but they also contrived through a doctor in Kabul's Noor Eye Clinic to lie to the King about his bruised eyeball (from being smacked in the face by a volleyball, supposedly) needing special treatment in Italy in order to get him out of the country so the coup could take place.
You can also read in Raja Anwar's "The Tragedy of Afghanistan" that the Shah of Iran helped make the coup possible by promising Daoud ten million dollars of aid from Iran.
After Nixon was forced out of office, the Shah decided to renege on his offer. Daoud's government went into a financial crisis and there was another coup and he was assassinated and the guy who replaced him was assassinated and the Soviet Union installed a puppet but then had him assassinated and the Red Army came rolling on in and Osama Bin Laden looked up from the hooker he was screwing and saw the news and got religion.
Who lost Afghanistan? Probably Nixon, the moment he decided that the authoritarian strong man Daoud would make a better ruler for the country than would the effete hash-smoking King.
Just Google around for the Noor Eye Clinic in Kabul in 1973 and you'll see what I mean.
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you all are missing the point entirely
by focusing on why the hidden texts are still there, you all are completely ignoring the importance of these discoveries. It doesn't matter whether how the writer of the newer documents planned on using the old ones (e.g. cutting and pasting various selections of the old memos, using the old memos as templates). What matters is that they allow us to a glimpse into other, previously available documents.
These older memos may not be "canonical" in the sense that they were deemed a part of official conversations within the CPA. In fact, it might even be a memo that was written but never distributed. Nevertheless, it allows us some fairly uncensored data as to how at least one person in the CPA was thinking.
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Well, That Didn't Take Long!
Another blow for Freedom of Information:
As of this morning, it appears that the Consolidated Weekly Reports for April 2 2004 and earlier have been pulled from the website. The remaining reports are either PDF files, or Word Docs that don't (at least to me) show previous text.
I guess someone is catching hell this morning.
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I sure hope you downloaded the rest of the documents before
you wrote this article. Of course you'll need to spread them on the net so when you are detained the world will still have access to them.
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The intent doesn't matter
Everyone here who is hung up on the "intent" of the pasting the original memo is far too smitten with the CSI aspect of this, and missing the big picture. The fact that the original pasting might have been innocuous -- which Mr. Moore acknowledges -- is irrelevant. The point of the story is not that the original source materials was deleted by the thought police.
What matters here is the insight that this memo shines upon the failings of our occupational forces, and how such failings have lead to the tragic mess that currently exists in Iraq. This administration, remember, does not always have to be evil in its intent; its mere incompetence is shame enough.
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I've got your deletion right here!
"Its worst miscalculation was probably dissolving the Iraqi military on May 16, 2003, which jump-started the insurgency by sending 400,000 trained soldiers into the streets without jobs."
Actually, those 400,000 trained soldiers were sent home with their weapons, mostly Kalishnikovs.
Um, here you are. An unemployed soldier. A family to support. No food on the table. And there's that AK-47 propped up against the bedroom wall.
What to do? What to do?
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HA! I'll always have work...
I'm on contract for the Federal Government as a software trainer, and this one of the things I train people on. God only knows what security breaches have resulted from people just not knowing how to use the software... and the government being too cheap to teach them.
The reason stupid shit like this happens is because the government managers say, "We need to upgrade." They don't consider that the new version might be a wee bit different than what they had been using. They barely read the box that ships from CDW-G, much less access user impact. The IT contractors dutifully install it and when the users freak out that their e-mail isn’t like it was when they left Friday, the contractors answer is, “we were told to upgrade you – and we did.”
Keep looking for those unaccepted/unrejected changes. I’m sure you could find some goodies about the private sector too – oil companies, Halliburton, the sky’s the limit!
It’s good to know I’ll always have work.
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War and MS Office
> ...these people planned a war, yet can't handle MS Office.
Well, that's not all that surprising. Conducting a war is far simpler than working with Microsoft Word.
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For the record
While PDF's are more or less mandated they are not entirely uneditable either. Particularly black bar redacted documents. It's been known for a while that there's a way to scavenge text from behind a black bar in Acrobat. Too bad these guys don't use the White House email system which seemingly crushes everything into oblivion?
In the meantime try using the remove hidden metadata tool from MS. It's free and even a monkey could use it.
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Realname
you said:
"In the meantime try using the remove hidden metadata tool from MS. It's free and even a monkey could use it."
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a monkey to work for the federal government?
Next time, I would suggest using "even a caveman could use it."