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Open-Government Technique Used on Iraqi Documents
stalebread writes "MSNBC has an article looking at an internet-based 'many hands make light work' approach to data sifting. From the article: 'The federal government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web's power and an admission that U.S. intelligence resources are overloaded. Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto.'"
Maybe many eyes would make all dupes shallow too...
The article says "There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time -- so far, about 600".
That's correct. Intel expert Steven Aftergood called this an attempt by the right wing to find "a retrospective justification for the war in Iraq." The bloggers have made some interesting finds, it's true, but so far the ONDI's warning that "amateur translators won't find any major surprises, such as proof Hussein hid stockpiles of chemical weapons" has turned out to be true. They have also given us some bizarre misinterpretation too, such as some bloggers' belief that one document (CMPC-2003-006430.pdf) is a manual for the Mukhabarat even though it is clearly a printout of a webpage by the Federation of American Scientists from 1997 (complete with FAS logo!). Another supposed "smoking gun" was a document that had pictures of Zarqawi, cited as "proof" that Saddam trained him -- when in fact the documents clearly show that the Saddam regime is on the lookout for Zarqawi and his group, and, according to Associated Press, "Attached were three responses in which agents said there was no evidence al-Zarqawi or the other man were in Iraq." There is a lot more misreading and jumping to conclusions from this document dump. It's interesting, and I think it is good to have these documents made public, for historical reasons mostly, but the idea that these documents are where we should look for justification of Bush's war effort just shows how desperate Pete Hoekstra and other Republicans who pushed forcefully for this move really are.
Some choice quotes to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here:
Putting aside the question of whether invading was morally right, and the abominable postwar planning and strategy (or rather, complete and total absence of any postwar planning and strategy), this raises a very serious question: was the invasion (as opposed to the occupation we now find ourselves mired in) a good decision from a military standpoint?
The short, superficial answer is: yes, because we won. But the question is, did we win because the U.S. military is so much better than the Iraqi military, or because Saddam did some incredibly stupid things? Was Rumsfeld a strategic genius, or arrogant and stupid, and only saved by the fact that Saddam acted even more stupid- by hobbling his army, by not listening to his commanders, and worrying about coups and Shiite uprisings instead of the U.S. military?
Anyhow, it's a bit academic at this point- we're stuck with the outcome, and we're not going to be invading anyone else for a long time. But I think it's worth thinking about, so we draw the right lessons from the war. Kaplan, Slate.com's military columnist, wrote a piece about how the U.S. offensive was just a couple weeks away from grinding to a halt due to a lack of spare parts and supplies. http://www.slate.com/id/2103552/ If Hussein had done a few things differently- blown up some of the bridges into Bagdad, followed the Russian model and ceded territory to attack the supply lines with guerillas- he might have been able to slow Rumsfeld's light and lean military and inflicted some serious casualties.
Another thing you are underestimating - how many good arabic speakers do you think there are in the US? I heard this statistic a while back - in the US, a country of 300 million people - how many PhDs were awarded in 2004 for Arabic? 10,000? 1,000? No - 6. Arabic speakers are not exactly a dime a dozen, and I suspect a good portion of the ones that do aren't keen to work for the US government.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
This is old news. A memo from July 2002 discovered by the Times (of London) last year shows that the desicion to go to war was already taken back then.
I have all but lost my patience with you Americans. The intent to invade Iraq was published BEFORE 2000 by The Project for A New American century, to which most of the current administration are members. They only got into politics to achieve this goal after appeals to existing politicians for an Iraqi war (e.g. Clinton) fell on deaf ears. There isn't "so much evidence", it's a cold hard documented FACT. And no one is complaining about this? The invasion of Iraq was one of the principle goals of the current administration. If I had lost friends/family in 9-11, I would screaming from the rooftops about how their death has been abused to cause more unjust death.
Do you guys get lobotomised early on in school, or is your news media really so corrupt that you have no idea what's going on? How can you people not know this stuff? It's all out in the open; the link above is their offical website for fecks sake!! I really have no hope for the future of the world now, so long as you guys have the big guns.
Godwin be dammed; at least now I understand a lot more about how the Germans allowed some of the WW2 nastiness to happen. They were completely oblivious the truth and frankly don't care enough to find out. It's the same story here.
This document suggests that members of Al Qaeda met with Iraqi intelligence.
Wasn't this already known? And wasn't the result of that meeting "Fuck off, we don't want anything to do with you guys, we've got enough problems"?
Until we leave, every misfortune that Iraq suffers is and always will be our fault.
And after we leave, every misfortune that Iraq suffers will be our fault, for quite some time. The difference lies in the type of misfortune that can be expected.
Once again, we have failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam.
Vietnam was an entirely different situation. For starters, in Vietnam we never actually removed the North Vietnamese government. The differences vastly outnumber the similarities.
And we are hearing precisely the same arguments for staying in Iraq.
We are? Who was arguing that we had to ensure a peaceful transition of power to a stable government before we could leave Vietnam?
You mean like we did in Syria in 1949
Yet another invalid comparison. What we did in Syria in 1949 wasn't to invade and (attempt to) establish a democratic government, what we did was semi-covertly support a military coup as a preparatory step to forcing Syria to absorb the Palestinians. Exactly where is the parallel with Iraq?
Chile in 1973
And yet another. Again, the US covertly supported Pinochet's coup, overthrowing democratically-elected Allende because Nixon didn't like his Socialist politics. Chile is exactly the sort of thing the US is known for due to our "anything-is-better-than-communism" policy of the Cold War, and that's the reputation we have to live down by ensuring that we *don't* leave Iraq (and Afghanistan!) worse off than before we stuck our nose in.
I even think that the Cold War policy made sense at the time, but it has created problems for us now around the world and we won't fix those problems by doing it again.
There is a viable exit strategy. Just walk away. Don't look back.
That is certainly what we've done in the past, and it's created much of the ill will we deal with now. I'm not in favor of going around the world and pushing our form of government on others, but the US has a 30-year history of destroying governments and leaving a horrible mess caused by the resulting vacuum of power.
Since the US toppled the old regime, we have a responsibility to ensure that something viable is in place before we walk away.
However, that would put a huge crimp into a certain party's/company's/people's cash flow. And that's what this war(and many others) is about.
I think this supposition fails Hanlon's Razor.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents-docex/I raq/Released-20060317/CMPC-2003-012666-Translation .pdf
This document I found is an executive order from Saddam telling the army to put Kuwaiti POW's in buildings that will be targets of US air strikes. This is Dated March 14, 2003.