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.
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.