Entire pages of the US report had been blackened out
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You can see how much info, that the US didn't want to be made public the Italians revealed anyway.
Posted on 05/02/2005 9:05:53 AM PDT by QQQQQ
Italian media have published classified sections of an official US military inquiry into the accidental killing of an Italian agent in Baghdad. The 40-page report was censored by the Pentagon before being officially published on Saturday.
Italy has refused to accept the US report's findings and is to publish its own version of events later this week.
Details of the official report were published in newspapers on Sunday with censored material restored in full.
Missing text
A Greek medical student at Bologna University who was surfing the web early on Sunday found that with two simple clicks of his computer mouse he could restore censored portions of the report.
He passed the details to Italian newspapers which immediately put out the full text on their own websites.
The missing text contains the names and ranks of all of the American military personnel involved in the killing of Nicola Calipari, the Italian agent who was given a state funeral and awarded Italy's highest medal of valour.
It also reveals the rules of engagement in operation at the military checkpoint near Baghdad airport which have been contested by the Italian authorities.
The censored sections include recommendations that the American military modify their checkpoint procedures to give better and clearer warning signs to approaching vehicles.
The official Italian report on the incident expected to be published this week will accuse the American military of tampering with evidence at the scene of the shooting.
The Americans invited two Italians to join in their inquiry, but the Italian representatives protested at what they claimed was lack of objectivity in presenting the evidence and returned to Rome.
Relations between Rome and Washington remain tense.
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Differing Accounts:
US military: Car approaches checkpoint at high speed Troops attempt to tell driver to stop with arm signals, lights and warning shots Soldiers shoot into engine
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Italian government: Italy makes all necessary contacts with the US for safe passage The driver stops immediately when a light flashes 10m away At the same time, shots are fired into car for 10-15 seconds
Iraq shooting: Differing accounts
It is highly irresponsible on the part of the Italian media to publish the parts that the US lines out, it may jeopardize lives and give info to the terrorists about our procedures and rules of engagement at checkpoints.
Entire pages of the US report had been blackened out
=======
You can see how much info, that the US didn't want to be made public the Italians revealed anyway.
Et tu, Italia?
Being of Italian descent, this is a shock to the system.
You have to thank Bill Gates too ... MS Word saves all sorts of changes and keeps them, even though they're not displayed. Well, you can display them.
Got any links so that we can give the Italian media responsible a good old-fashioned US freeping?
Well, I am sure not all Italians are like that -- there, as here, the leftist press is trying to do everything to damage the US and Italy, I might add, by helping the terrorists.
Did they happen to dig up WHY THEY DIDN'T STOP?
this commie lady is really Full of it. I remember hearing there were hundreds of bullets shot at her.
"A forensic examination of the car found 11 bullet holes, and that a trajectory analysis showed they all came from one point of origin - implying that only one man had shot at the car."
It might be irresponsible, but how stupid is the Pentagon if they released an unredacted pdf document? All you do is convert it to a text file, and the blacked out portions magically reappear. They should have manually blacked out portions, scanned them, and posted them on-line as gifs or tiffs or anything else. Seriously, this is just incompetent. Most 13 year olds could create a more secure document. Oy.
I am sure the redactions are important, but most ROE's are not secret and are easily accesed throughout the web. Most of the ROE's are common sense I still have my green ROE card from the invasion. Its simple stuff like you always maintain the right to self defense, rule on enemy combatants that raise there arms in surrender and stuff.
Well, if they do, I'm sure it will go something like, "George Bush that evil American cowboy is the reason we couldn't stop."
That was my first thought as well. What a bonehead move...
Well, I don't have any links to the papers, but here is the link to the Italian Embassy in the US.
I don't know if the Italian government has any more influence over the press, than we do here, but they should have made sure to only provide the media the sanitized report. (Of course the US should have made sure, before handing over anything, that the censored portions couldn't be restored)
http://www.italyemb.org/Contact%20us.htm
Press and Information Office
Tel (202) 612-4444
Fax (202) 518-2154
For general information e-mail: stampa@itwash.org
But I would go light on accusing all Italians for their media, we have the same thing here, unfortunately.
"Italy has..." !!!
Remember folks this is the BBC talking here.
I doubt the Italian media can do anything more with their media than we can do with ours. And ours sucks.
IF TRUE, somebody is in deep doodoo with the information security folks.
Utterly idiotic. Whoever published a digital document with the redacted portions still imbedded ought to be drawn and quartered.
Notice that it was a Greek student and the Italian media, not the Italian government that revealed the classified material. Plus some real dumb @$$ in the US who didn't properly secure the information in the first place.
Whatever idiot or combination of idiots thought that the PDF document was secure because the text was "hidden" should be severely punished. I would guess there is more than one idiot involved -- their careers ought to be truncated, and whoever hired each of them ought to get a black mark on HIS record for hiring an idiot.
With allies like this, who needs enemies?
I don't their intent was to endanger anyone. I believe their intent was to show how stupid the vaunted US military intelligence is if it cannot even properly censor a document.
Hmmmmm? More behind the scenes opportunities to embarrass the USA ..??
A PDF of copies of the report, not the digital one... Yikes.
I think its time to throw the Italians out. There doing more harm than good over there when it comes to paying huge payouts to terrorists, taking the word of known leftists scumbag rather than soldiers and sattelite recon. We dont need their limited help and their gonna leave anyways, might as well throw their a$$'es out.
I bet how they did it was 'view source' and then saw the words in html with html telling the broweser to put a black background around them. Geez...
There was a link yestedya somewhere on FR where the US military had satelite footage of the car going 60 miles/hr a the checkpoint, not the 30 mphr the communist reporter claimed.
Ain't that the truth. Italy has managed to use the checkpoint incident to take attention away from the ransom they paid and all the American deaths it caused by financing the terrorists. I wonder if part of the deal was also an agreement that the terrorists would not use the Italian ransom to kill Italian soldiers. The U.S. should call for an investigation of the entire kidnapping and ransom incident.
It was highly irresponsible for the Pentagon to put it up in the format they did. Unless they wanted the info to be published, someone should be court martialed.
I agree that the policy should be to keep names private. But if there are any sleeper cells in the US, they’re too few and too incompetent to do anything. Otherwise, we’d have heard from them. And if I’m wrong and there’s one worth a damn, it won’t be used for this.
Eleven shots took fifteen seconds? That's a lifetime if one is too stupid to stop. Who was running the stopwatch? The math doesn't work out even when translated into Italian. Their complaints seem to be mostly imaginary.
DOD needs to stop using the PDF format and any other methods that lack security.
The Washington Examiner this morning published instructions on removing the censor's blanks from the document... apparently it's as easy as saving the document as text.
The Left thinks the American "military-industrial complex" is all-knowing and all-powerful, but it's really just a bunch of regular human beings who mess up from time to time. This episode reminds of the chapter in Radical Son, where Horowitz has become a conservative and is touring the American command centers (or whatever they're called) in Nicaragua during the Contra-Sandinista conflict, to do research for a project he's working on. He gets down there and is startled by how disorganized and understaffed they are. It was anything but the disciplined, fully-coordinated operation one might imagine. It didn't seem at all like the outpost of an all-powerful empire.
I'm also reminded of a book I read a while back about American propaganda operations in the first part of the 20th century. The book was based on FOA documents and contained many copies of those documents. Again, you'd think from reading Noam Chomsky and other leftists that the American propaganda program would've been streamlined, disciplined, and in perfect ideological lockstep -- but just the opposite was true. There was a neverending debate and lots of certainty about how to approach the job. The staff was chronically demoralized by the lack of clearly defined goals and by disagreement over what methods to use.
America simply is not the Death Star, with a perfectly ordered master plan being carried out by perfectly synchronized drones. We're a nation of real people thinking independent thoughts and doing the best we can to do the right thing, and occasionally we don't stick the landing.
exactly, that would have secured it. I have to ultimately blame the Pentagon personnel for not understanding how to "easily" secure the document as you explained.
Of course, the Italian govt is being disingenuous for continually trying to place the blame on U.S. No wonder wars happen. To continuously yell that it is the U.S fault when irrefutable evidence shows the commie slut's side is at fault, makes one just want to terminate these idiots.
This could have been set up to happen. I read the report and it isn't that bad. Except for releasing the names. Which the shooter seems to have a Italian last name . And a few of the guys were NY cops. So the report seems quite favorable to the USA. < /tinfoil> :)
They're our allies? Since when?
Except for Italian ROE's............
"When travelling in a war zone that is at very high risk for suicide car bombings, travel in civilian clothes and in unmarked civilian vehicles and make absoulutely no effort to inform friendly allied forces of your presence in the vicinity when approaching an allied checkpoint a high speed.............By order of General Carlo Darwino. "
Oh Goody---it never occured to me these guys would qualify for a Darwin award. Can I come to the ceremony?
Sure. The Medal is really pretty but the acceptance speech part of the ceremony is over before you know it.
Sean Connery, in the movie "The Untopuchables":
"They put one of us in the hospital, we put one of them in the ******* morgue."
Leni
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
good movie. Excellent quote. Thanks!
No. This is just not good.
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