Read the unredacted Sgrena shooting report

This time it’s the US military wielding the black marker in the Sgrena shooting report. Fortunately for fans of complete, unredacted reports, it’s far less effective to black out text distributed on a PDF file than it is to black out faces of honor guard soldiers.Sgrena_report

Kevin Drum explains how to read the whole report and shows how ridiculous the redactions were in the first place.

For example, the name of the third person in the car is Andrea Carpani. Was there any reason to keep this a secret? Beats me. But they didn’t do a very good job of it.

Another section describes the methods used by insurgents to place bombs along “Route Irish,” the road to the Baghdad airport, including: positioning explosives alongside guard rails, staging equipment in vehicles or near overpasses, wrapping explosives in brown paper bags, using timers, etc. I can’t imagine that this stuff is even remotely worth classifying, since these techniques are obvious to anyone who thinks about how to place explosives for more than a minute or two, but for some reason they were redacted.

I may go through the report later to see if anything more interesting was redacted, but for now I just wanted to let enterprising journalists know that the full report is available to anyone with a copy of Acrobat Reader. Go to it, guys!

In other news, the US admits there were “flaws” in the procedures that resulted in the shooting of Calipari that night. Though the Italians disagree with the report released by the US clearing the soldiers involved in the shooting incident, they’d likely agree with the “flawed procedures” admission.

Petty Pentagon vandalism an “outrage”

From the Washington Post:

From a row of silhouetted hearses on a rain-drenched tarmac to a convoy of olive-green trucks each bearing a casket, hundreds of images of flag-draped coffins of American service members killed at war were released by the Pentagon this week in response to a lawsuit.

The more than 700 photographs, taken by military photographers from 2001 to 2004, show coffins from Iraq and Afghanistan lining the mechanical silver interiors of Air Force C-17 jets. Many depict solemn honor guard ceremonies for the fallen troops at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and other U.S. military facilities.
[…]
“Individual judgments were made to black out some faces and identifying information to protect privacy information,” said James Turner, a Pentagon spokesman.

Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, which assisted in the lawsuit, said it was “an outrage and an insult that they blacked out those faces of the honor guard, when today on . . . [the Pentagon Web site] you can see photos of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. I can only imagine they put those black boxes there to make the photos unusable.”

Blacked_out
The Pentagon blacked out the faces and identifying information in some photos showing honor guards for coffins lining the interiors of C-17 transports. Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive called the edited images “an outrage and an insult.”
Photo Credit: Defense Department Photos Via Nsarchive.org

UPDATE – Mithras, on the above photo: “Nothing more evocative of this war for me than the officially-anonymous living honoring the anonymous dead. “

Whither Steele?

Today’s spotlight article by Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail is certainly compelling. Having read some of Jamail’s dispatches from Iraq, I was not surprised.

What did strike me as strange, though, is that just last Friday, I read a rant by Steele about Blair’s “good war” in Kosovo – which, just to be clear, Steele supported then, and supports now. Steele was in full-froth mode, glorifying the ICG advocacy of Albanian separatism and declaring that not rewarding the KLA would be a “victory for Milosevic.” So forgive me if I take his “antiwar” sentiments with a grain of salt.

Steele – just like Georgie Anne Geyer and Anthony Lewis, to name just two notable pundits – opposes aggression in Iraq, not aggression as such. It would be interesting to find out what reasoning they can offer for such a position.

Their War Party and Ours

Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show, 3-5 pm Texas time (that’s central) I will, in a case of the most blatant interest-conflicting nepotism, be interviewing my boss, Justin Raimondo, all about the neoconservatives, and how they lied us into war in Iraq.

In the second hour, I’ll be talking with Peter Lance about his book A Thousand Years for Revenge, and the history of bin Laden, Yousef, Rahman, Zawahiri, etc.

Update: Show’s over, Archives here.

More Red-State Fascism

One of the ads on the right side of Instapundit just caught my eye. In it, an attractive model wears a T-shirt that reads:

The C in ACLU is a hammer and sickle.

Since when is communism anti-state? And since when do conservatives, much less self-styled libertarians, consider “enemy of the state” a pejorative?

Lew Rockwell is right:

    The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

Of course, no one ever accused these people of ideological coherence.

Other shirts from the same site: Peace Through Superior Firepower (why not “peace through free trade” or “peace through minding our own business”?), US Military World Tour, An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Patriots/Evildoers, Why’s Our Oil Under Their Soil?, First Iraq, Then France.