Keys Corner

There has been a lot of comment on the web about the discovery published by Gianluca Neri, that a PDF file released by the US military as an unclassified report on the death of Nicola Calipari – the Italian secret agent escorting Guiliana Sgrena back to Bagdad airport – in fact contains a lot of classified material (marked up with the security classifation S/NF (Secret/No Foreign), or not releasable to foreign nationals) that the USA certainly did not want released.

The material was blacked out, but could be restored by copying the PDF’s text into an editor – showing that whoever prepared the document didn’t understand how to use the DRM features in Adobe Acrobat.

(The page linked to above is in Italian, but the original unclassified document and the “ripped” PDF on that page are both in the original English)

US journalist Michelle Malkin summarizes the main concerns from the US viewpoint:

• An itemization of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) and VBIEDs (Vehicle Born IEDs) deployment techniques which have been most effective,
• An analysis of the tactical strengths and weaknesses of specific checkpoints along “Route Irish”,
• Combat readiness assesment of the units and soldiers involved,
• A detailed description of how the checkpoint is laid out,
• Exact grid locations of various assets.
• Details of how checkpoint searches are set up and executed
• Details of how checkpoints are expected to deal with approaching vehicles, including threat assesment methods.
• A statistical analysis of “normal” traffic approaching the checkpoint.
• It names the soldiers involved and details the specific actions taken by those soldiers. It names the soldier who killed Calipari.
• It briefly describes U.S. Embassy procedures for transporting VIPs along Route Irish and in general.
• It details movement of U.S. and Italian Embassy personnel.
• It describes possible future procedures and configurations for checkpoints.

In other words it has a lot of information of potential use to an insurgent mission planner and a lot that is nobody’s business.

and provides links to several other commentaries here.

I think I’d better refrain from expressing an opinion about the competence of the US military…

Update (2005-05-03):
The Italian government has published their version of the events, which disagrees strongly with the American version. The Italian report blames the troops’ stress and inexperience for contributing to the incident.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 2nd, 2005 at 09:05:47 and is filed under Iraq, On the web, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.