Salon.com's feature article today exposes some secret documents from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the privately appointed cabal, -er, now it seems, droning bureaucracy- given the now fruitless and hopeless duty of forcing the violently war-torn Iraq into a stable, docile money-making pseudo-democracy.
Writer Pete Moore's son accidentally stumbled upon these documents while downloading instructions for a video game. Huh.
"Through such fortunate mistakes researchers could piece together the unofficial, off-the-record history of empire," he writes.
The documents, in many pages, betray a single-minded myopia, and a good bit of mutual plagiarism.
"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.""
An amusing note:
Item IV: "Design Oil Trust Fund."
Oh, no. Invading Iraq was never about oil!
Other pages betray a hackneyed, cliché-ridden perspective that is naive at best.
A gem: "We are still in knock on wood mode here, and there is no telling what the future holds."
It's kind of like watching a bumbling bureaucracy futzing with a failed dotcom while the building's on fire, except instead of stock prices tanking and the fire department showing up, hundreds of thousands of people die.
1 comment:
His son found them by hitting keys on the computer while the CPA documents were open, turning on the Mark Up setting, allowing the previous edits to be seen.
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