Documents Reveal US Incompetence with Word, Iraq 419
notNeilCasey writes "The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, which formerly governed Iraq, accidentally published Microsoft Word documents containing information never meant for the public, according to an article in Salon. By viewing the documents using the Track Changes feature in Word (.doc), the author has been able to reconstruct internal discussions from 2004 which reflect the optimism, isolation and incompetence of the American occupation. Download the author's source document or look for more yourself. 'Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public. In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I downloaded, including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all seem to come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept pulling text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar Province -- Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page of the March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA documents that can be downloaded.)'"
I learned a long time ago... (Score:5, Interesting)
(create new document that looks like, but is not, the old one)
before sending onward. Otherwise, somebody WILL find something untoward, even if it's not track changes, it could be a now-unused hunk of crap in the OLE2 file, etc.
Re:Always see the bright side. (Score:3, Interesting)
Track Changes... (Score:2, Interesting)
always always convert to text then polish (Score:4, Interesting)
all final documents should always be converted to text to break the meta data chain.
even if you have to save the document to a cdrw and then shred the disc when you are done remove the meta data
or replace the meta data with the "correct" public data never have a document with privileged meta data "floating around"
Someone didn't follow policy (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously somebody skipped a step. Whats actually in the file is more interesting then how it got there, given that all we're talking about is human error.
Re:The deleted section from the sample (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, a little further down in the document, it even says "the sharp and now continuing drop in attacks does give the coalition a much-needed respite whose continuation will be critical...Reinforcing this trend...will be crucial to ultimate success"
So it looks like I was wrong, sorry. Mods, please mod grandparent down.
Re:The deleted section from the sample (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The deleted section from the sample (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The "U.S".? (Score:2, Interesting)
> means the "U.S." is incompetent?
No, it just means that *when people care* (i.e., on Wall Street) they know about this feature.
If you're just a drone in the streets of Baghdad - well, who cares
Re:The deleted section from the sample (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like watching somebody who has driven off a cliff, speculating as they fall about the lack of damage to the car.
Secrets? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not looking to troll here. I'm serious. Wouldn't it have been better to quietly bring it to their attention than to go public. If this is typical government ignorance, who knows how wide-spread the problem is. Could revealing something like this to the public be considered treason?
I don't think the fact that the articles are right out in the open is any defense. Anyone who's close enough to see troops knows where they are, but it could still be considered treason to pick up a phone and call the enemy and tell them where troops are.
This "Feature" Has Been Known For Years (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who don't learn from history...
Anyone using Word in any kind of sensitive capacity needs to know how to make sure the changes are all really gone. Training should address this specifically. Other word processors also store deleted text within a document and users of those need to also know how to make sure deleted text is really deleted.
Perhaps it is time that word processors kept twin files - one the actual document, and if the user wants to track changes, another that stores deleted text. Or maybe encrypt the deleted text. It wouldn't keep everyone out of it, but it would keep most people from reading the deleted passages.
Linkie linkie (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong tool for the job, (Score:4, Interesting)
The American military used to be pretty good at this sort of thing. Think post-WWII Japan and Germany. But I think you accurately describe the situation with the modern U.S. military. There are other nations that are better at policing and nation-building, so perhaps if we'd gone in with more international support, this wouldn't have been such an issue.
Re:This "Feature" Has Been Known For Years (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you data type a whole document? (Score:3, Interesting)
Suggestion for how to do this in the future (Score:2, Interesting)
Create an email address that it is possible to send Word or PDF (or any other) documents to. The documents are automatically treated and returned instantly, according to:
- Word documents have all comments stripped out
- PDF documents have all the "censored" sections (read: sections where the black text has been made unreadable by adding a black background) be truly removed from the document and replaced by black boxes
The document gets renamed accordingly, e.g. REDACTED-[previous document name].
If you want to be truly generous you could also allow for putting a number in the subject line, where the number allowed different levels of treatment - e.g. for a Word document also stripping out all details of author, last modified, etc.
Re:This "Feature" Has Been Known For Years (Score:4, Interesting)
Security through application and version requirement.
Does anyone really (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Those who don't learn from history... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, they believe whatever Bush tells them, even though they are super-smart. It's a crazy world. A few such guys even seem to hang out here on
Re:The "U.S".? (Score:3, Interesting)
but they still want us to somehow vote for candidates that promise extend government meddling in areas such as retirement and health care.
Hm. Not as flexible with these mental gymnastics as I used to be. Request additional kool-aid here.
This from the country that spends the most per-capita on healthcare in the entire world, yet still has 20% uninsured?
Maybe if you spent your taxes on healthcare instead of on no-bid contracts to haliburton? No? That's not an option?
Re:Avoiding embarassment. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Track Changes" revealed that he was either lying to me, or to the other employer he'd recently sent it to.
Either way, it spared me from having to schedule him an interview...
Re:Secrets? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That's actually a pretty good analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
The memo acknowledges collateral damage, but is blithely unaware of the implications. "Most raids also leave in their wake a number of innocents who were either rounded up and detained or had their houses busted up
No it isn't unaware at all, it says the implications are mild. I'd like to know how the author knows exactly what the impact is of the collateral damage. They are thinking about this stuff, and have concluded the impact is mild. And Abu Graib- it isn't concievable that the Iraqis know that was an abberation, since many may know peole who were detained and released, who told everyone it wasn't so bad?
A second explanation hinges explicitly on an old ethnic stereotype about how Arabs only understand force. The "Crossed the Line" argument insists that violence is intrinsic to Arab culture: "[It] is a form of political discourse as well as being culturally acceptable for settling disputes and scores." The memo then argues that the violence in Anbar was quelled once the Americans proved they could be more violent. The Americans brought out a bigger stick, namely Gen. Abizaid's threat to "some 70 Sheikhs and community leaders" in Anbar "to unleash hell," twinned with the U.S. Air Force dropping some timely Joint Direct Action Munitions on the province.
The writer of the memo wasn't be racist at all. Saying Iraqi culture is very violent is not the same as saying anything about arabs. It maybe very well be true that Iraqi culture is very violent. If you say that american culture is very literate, it doesn't mean all white people can read. The analyst is the one being racist, equating Iraqi with arab.
"A third explanation, "Occupation Ending," says that the insurgents are backing off because they think the U.S. is about to depart. "What they" -- meaning the Iraqis -- "have gotten wrong," says the memo's author, "is the idea that the military will be leaving Iraq in June, which one individual said he was sure was a major factor in the diminishing attacks. Oh well, this is one time it might be best that folks don't fully understand things." Supposedly, the CPA's June 2004 deadline for handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis was misread by some locals as implying the withdrawal of American troops, and thus caused the number of insurgent attacks to decrease. (Four years later, the Bush administration often says any deadline for troop withdrawal would increase attacks.)"
Bush is not the military. Military analysts are not Bush. Don't equate the two.
A fifth theory, "Engagement," says that Iraqis have begun to have hope thanks to sustained contact with Americans. "We'll take some credit here. We have been engaging widely with
Yes, losers, as in, people who had position and power in the old Iraq, but have little in the new Iraq. People who lost as a result of the invasion. Perfectly fair.
Nowhere in any of these theories, including the "boring" one, does the author address the dissolution of the Iraqi Army as a major contributor to the violence.
That's because this is about why violence has stopped, not why it's been happening in the first place.
Nowhere, in fact, does the author seem to know which "bums" or
Re:That's actually a pretty good analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
What the Salon author is missing - actually, misreading - is the military tone. Taken at face value, yes, it comes off as arrogant and even a little clueless. But when read by a person accustomed to the military tone in writing (which is usually heavy in irony and black humour) one sees the actual intent. For example, I can tell that the author is more than a little frustrated at his inability to nail down the precise cause of the reduction of the attacks. He *knows* he doesn't know the exact answer. When he calls the idea of an operational pause "boring", this is an acknowledgment that this isn't the answer that anybody wants to hear, but is quite possibly the most likely answer. And he genuinely thinks they are doing a better job of engaging the local people, although he subtly hints that barging into the homes of innocents isn't doing them any favours.
I like Salon; I read it almost daily, and agree with a large part of what I read there. But this time, they're off base.
DG
Re:Wrong tool for the job, (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had this document linked at my site for a long time:
http://www.usace.army.mil/publications/eng-manual
I think the US Army had something to do with its creation, and I don't expect you to read or understand it.
Re:That's actually a pretty good analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right the racism thing was pedantic, but that's not exactly what I meant. I meant it's ok to generalize about cultures. It's useful. Certain cultures have different attitudes toward violence than others. Certain ones are more literate. Certain ones are more religious. These are useful generalizations, and when you're talking about reactions of populations, you have to take into account the general trends of attitudes and beliefs of that population. Even though it says nothing about an individual, it will give you useful information about a population.
About the ex-iraqi army contribution, maybe there's no plausable theory regarding the ex-iraqi sodiers which would explain why the violence stopped in the last five weeks. What exactly changed five weeks before writing that which effects them? If nothing changed regarding them they can be left out of the speculation.
Personally I thought this war was a terrible idea, but I don't fault the military on the way it went. As I see they were given an impossible job. War is ugly and we should have learned in Veitnam that you can't have a clean one. I'm certainly not going to fault the soliders for being slightly insensitive in an internal memo, non-PC concepts don't fit well into PC language. Concepts like "Iraq has a violent culture and widespread hatred between sunnis and shiites." I'm also by no means think the Army is stupid. And I certainly trust what they have to say about the condition on the ground over there more than I trust analysts thousands of miles away or the lying politicians that sent them in the first place.
Re:This "Feature" Has Been Known For Years (Score:3, Interesting)
-