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Copy-and-Paste Reveals Classified U.S. Documents
cyclop writes "In March, U.S. troops in Iraq shot to death Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent that rescued the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena. U.S. commission on the incident produced a report which public version was censored for more than one third. Now Italian press is reporting that all confidential information in the report is available to the public, just by copying "hidden" text from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor (Italian). The uncensored report can now be directly downloaded (evil .DOC format, sorry)"
That gives the term "security by obscurity" a whole new meaning... Hidden text?! What were they thinking!
Interesting the the people that posted this don't point out any smoking guns. It's mildly interesting that they were able to thwart the ridiculously inane classified protections, but it's telling that they didn't find anything that further incriminated the U.S. service personnel.
It's unfortunate but if you choose to negotiate with kidnappers (and thereby encourage more kidnapping) and further don't tell someone who's subject to daily suicide car bombs that you're going to be speeding down a road that is infamous for daily suicide car bombs, is it any surprise this happened?
Should I expect less if I make jerky motions into my pockets when a police officer pulls me over for a routine traffic accident?
There might actually have been respectable and perhaps important reasons for redacting some of that information. Not that it matters now, but it seems a bit imprudent to fervishly publicize information about troops that could have serious ramifications for them.
It appears that this all boils down to a blame game - the US wants to defend its soldiers and assign blame to the Italians for not sharing information, whereas the Italians want the American soldiers held responsible for what is, essentially, a tragic circumstance in a war zone.
The Italians in the car weren't expecting a roadblock at that location, and the Americans didn't know about the rescue operation that was in progress...
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Since when is breaking the law morally wrong? The reason the US has guns is so that its citizents can break unjust laws and defent themselves from an unreasonable government. There is nothing "wrong" with breaking the law, and I wish peopld would start realizing that.
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As an american living in Italy, we've seen a lot of coverage of this over here.
The Italians involved said they weren't speeding. The Americans said the vehicle was travelling too quickly.
I think anyone, italian or american, can figure out the reason for this disagreement by watching a cowering family of american tourists trying to cross the street in Rome or any other large italian city. Some people obviously have different ideas about what 'fast' or 'dangerous' driving is.
I like Italy in many ways, but sometimes I really have to agree with Bill Bryson's "never should have let the Italians in on the invention of the automobile" sometimes!
Well, now we'll see, won't we?
The US government has for a long time, and this adiminstration in particular, classified things reflexively, whether secrecy was actually required or not.
In many ways it'll be scarier if the redactions show nothing of interest at all: not protecting anybody's privacy or any actual secrets. (A quick scan suggests exactly that.) It leaves open the question, "Why is the government keeping that information secret? Why is the government keeping so much information secret?"
There are many things that people would like to know to keep an eye on their government. Not all of that information should be released, for national security reasons, but it's always been the government who makes that decision. This lack of a check on the power of government makes people increasingly nervous as crimes (e.g. Abu Ghraib) are discovered anyway.
Most people in government over-classify things in order to protect their jobs. It's not a crime to overclassify; it's a big crime to release national security info, even accidentally. That's understandable, but a failure to release information that people are allowed to know makes it extremely difficult to check up on what the government does and whether it is still acting in our interest.
So yeah, maybe this is a bad thing. Maybe this is a release of national security information and lives may be lost. Or maybe it's laziness, somebody redacting because it's easier than checking on whether or not it was OK to release. Now we'll find out, and perhaps gain some broader insight.
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I'm not American, I'm Canadian, and I'm saying you are a great example of the total idiocy that *many* people in all countries of this world display. (Including a few co-workers of mine.)
You've been watching way too much TV - it's rare that there's "absolute proof". Are you asking for every single person in the world to carry around running video camera's 24 hours a day? That's the only way you can expect "absolute proof"?
When it comes right down to it, you end up with 10 witnesses for the defence - and 3 witnesses for the "procecution". What you see in the document is the testimony. Solider A says that person B did this, person C said that, etc etc.
As far as I am concerned, with 1 of the 3 Italian witnesses being a virulent anti-American/anti-war zealot, and the other 2 having TONS of reasons to cover up their own stupidity and non-performance of their job, I believe the other 10 witnesses.
But nooooo, you need "absolute proof". And the fact that something bad happened can't possibly be because one excited Italian secret agent hurrying to get his biggest triumph in years to the airport while talking on the phone while listening to a conversation in the back seat - made a mistake. Nooo, it's big ass conspiracy, the entire US Army was out to get them, all the soldiers at the checkpoint were out to committ cold blooded murder.
Get a fucking clue.
(Don't get me wrong. There are other situations where someone did something clearly wrong, and for some reason the US Military justice system totally failed to do the right thing. The shooting of the wounded prisoner in Fallujah is one example. And American's aren't alone in having bad apples in their ranks or young guys who make really bad/stupid mistakes. But that doesn't mean that there's *always* something rotten going on.)
No, in fact it is rented from Cuba (even though they refuse the payment) and the U.S. government's position is that it is therefore foreign soil and not subject to U.S. laws or Constitution.
"They were captured in disguise and according to the laws of warfare could be summarily executed as spies."
While it's nice to refer to what the actual laws and interpretations allow, you miss the most important point: they have no due process rights. As you state, they have no Geneva Convention protection, even though they were captured as "the enemy" in a war. They are also not protected by the U.S. Constitution (see above link) because they are considered on foreign soil, even though they were captured by Americans, are being held by Americans, and are on an American base. In short, they have no protected rights for due process that civilized nations provide to everyone including war criminals, enemy soldiers, and civilian criminals.
Some people may not care. After all, these are terrorists, right? Well, how do we know? Is the military infallable? Is every accused person guilty? That's what due process is for. Is this not the "absolute power" behaviour that pissed off American's enough to create the U.S. in the first place, and provide such basic protections to all people?
You're just a repressed coincidence theorist. Let's see: a group of high government officials go out of power with the change in party control. They publish a detailed plan for invading Iraq for unilateral strategic reasons, noting that without other justification, they'll need a "Pearl Harbor" scale event to invade. A decade later, they return to their old offices when their party retakes the White House. A few months later, a Pearl Harbor scale event occurs. The officials claim falsely that the event is connected to Iraq, and invade.
That's not very complicated. Every part is public knowledge all along. It is deluded people like you, who won't accept the truth, who enable the outrageous acts of these evil officials. Your kind of zombie is easy to identify: you can't dispute the facts, or the simple logic, so you attack the messenger with rhetoric and extreme exaggeration. I hope you're enjoying Bush's America, composed of lies, hatred, war, poverty, and rapid decline. Maybe you'll get a date with one of the Bush twins!
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make install -not war
And do you consider the result "ok"?
With all due respect, USA had nothing to do in Iraq, it wasn't threatened by it and it knew that it poses no danger. Also, at the current stage there are open admissions that intelligence data was twisted for political needs not to represent actual situations.
How often do you shoot your neighbors just because they might be holding a gun and planning to shoot you? And claim that this was just a self-defense out of necessity? Try it out! It works! It's the american way, after all!
The fact that USA tries to enforce its laws across the world is NOT acceptable, regardless of what your comment shows you think. This just isn't how the law is supposed to work.
There are cultures where murder is a very encouraged and normal (if not mandatory) response to a case if someone rapes your daughter (in example).
There are cultures where there are no needs for cops, because the justice is enforced by everyone and any criminal risk loosing not only his position in society, but home and friends too.
You just might have heard that there are cultures where the LAW is defined and exact and don't depends on 15 tomes of decisions of similar cases or your capabilities to appear as a victim of society to the jurors.
I'm not saying that Sadam Hussein wasn't a criminal. Yes, he was, he was involved in war crimes, genocide, just plain power stretching around and enforced really harsh means to silence the opposition, but this wasn't the USA's business. For heaven's sake, Iraq even isn't a border country for the USA, what would add some credibility to the "World Cop" role it postulates.
In short: US law is law that is (and should be) enforced only in USA. One step across the border - and you have a different set of laws. And that's how it should stay - each culture deciding itself on the laws it needs and the enforcement methods it should use.
There is a really, really big difference between McJunkie Girl (violently raped at each of last three parties she attended and happy for that) and the wife of some Taliban Man (violently beaten up each evening, and happy for that). And laws are made to reflect that.