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Open-Government Technique Used on Iraqi Documents

Posted by Zonk on Tue Mar 28, 2006 01:03 AM
from the you're-not-busy-this-week dept.
United States Government The Internet Politics
stalebread writes "MSNBC has an article looking at an internet-based 'many hands make light work' approach to data sifting. From the article: 'The federal government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web's power and an admission that U.S. intelligence resources are overloaded. Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto.'"
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  • Really, how do you dupe your own submission (Score:4, Informative)

    by P0ldy (848358) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @01:09AM (#15008824)
    Maybe many eyes would make all dupes [slashdot.org] shallow too...

  • Nothing important will be there (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Myria (562655) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @01:12AM (#15008832)
    Does anyone *really* think that there would be anything important in those documents? It's not like the location of Osams bin Laden or of Saddam's chemical weapons in Syria will be in these documents.

    This particular arm of the government is not dumb enough to publicly release anything that has a remote chance of being important. After all, such documents likely show some of our wrongdoings too.

    Melissa
    • These documents won't contain any earth-shattering revelations, though they will be interesting for establishing details of the historical record. The first actual study [jfcom.mil] of some of them has already noted that the documents showed that Saddam's government was far weaker and more confused than we ever thought; that Saddam and his government were living in a dangerous fantasy world. It also noted that the documents established that much of what we interpreted as intent to hide WMD (esp the phone calls from P
      • ...that Saddam and his government were living in a dangerous fantasy world.
        Isn't that generally the case for opressive dictatorships? It's kind of an obvious progression: opress the people -> make enemies -> become scared -> "crack down" on enemies by opressing more -> make more enemies -> become paranoid and delusional because you're surrounded and can't supress them all.

        Ya know?
        • Agreed. But one of the study's conclusions is that the US Administration made many of its operational decisions based on the assumption that Saddam was conspiring to hide WMD, to work with al Qaeda, to prepare for an insurgency after a US invasion, etc., when the evidence shows that Saddam's government was unsure of its own capabilities, that Saddam not only did not plan an insurgency, but actually believed that France and Germany would prevent a US invasion, that Saddam made a lot of contradictory plans t

      • Re:Nothing important will be there (Score:5, Informative)

        by flyingsquid (813711) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @03:48AM (#15009182)
        The first actual study of some of them has already noted that the documents showed that Saddam's government was far weaker and more confused than we ever thought; that Saddam and his government were living in a dangerous fantasy world.

        Putting aside the question of whether invading was morally right, and the abominable postwar planning and strategy (or rather, complete and total absence of any postwar planning and strategy), this raises a very serious question: was the invasion (as opposed to the occupation we now find ourselves mired in) a good decision from a military standpoint?

        The short, superficial answer is: yes, because we won. But the question is, did we win because the U.S. military is so much better than the Iraqi military, or because Saddam did some incredibly stupid things? Was Rumsfeld a strategic genius, or arrogant and stupid, and only saved by the fact that Saddam acted even more stupid- by hobbling his army, by not listening to his commanders, and worrying about coups and Shiite uprisings instead of the U.S. military?

        Anyhow, it's a bit academic at this point- we're stuck with the outcome, and we're not going to be invading anyone else for a long time. But I think it's worth thinking about, so we draw the right lessons from the war. Kaplan, Slate.com's military columnist, wrote a piece about how the U.S. offensive was just a couple weeks away from grinding to a halt due to a lack of spare parts and supplies. http://www.slate.com/id/2103552/ [slate.com] If Hussein had done a few things differently- blown up some of the bridges into Bagdad, followed the Russian model and ceded territory to attack the supply lines with guerillas- he might have been able to slow Rumsfeld's light and lean military and inflicted some serious casualties.

        • Sure, Saddam got kicked out and lots of stuff got blown up and Bush declared "Mission Accomplished". But the war's still going on, Iraqis are still getting shot and American troops are still getting shot and the US is still spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on it and shows no sign of having an exit strategy. Your question that we might have won because of superior power or because of Saddam's incompetence or both might have been a reasonable discussion for Desert Storm - but Saddam's country has been under sanctions, no-fly-zones, and lightweight military attacks for a decade after his army was totally crushed.

          Bamford's book "A Pretense for War" does some really good analysis of the events and decision-making processes that led up to 9/11 and to the Iraqi invasion, and even with the evidence available back when he wrote it, it's obvious that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Bush and Cheney were all bleeding incompetents.

              • Until we leave, every misfortune that Iraq suffers is and always will be our fault.

                And after we leave, every misfortune that Iraq suffers will be our fault, for quite some time. The difference lies in the type of misfortune that can be expected.

                Once again, we have failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam.

                Vietnam was an entirely different situation. For starters, in Vietnam we never actually removed the North Vietnamese government. The differences vastly outnumber the similarities.

                And we are hear



    • I would guess that this is being used for several issues;
      1. I could see this as a way to validate what CIA/NSA interpretters have done. Keep in mind that sibel edmunds was claiming that the agencies were full of spies who were mistranslating docs.
      2. A input translating DB. To train an AI takes a lot of work to get it right. Specifically, it needs to understand the various nuances. It is only by obtaining a large sample with an even larger number of interpretations that a good training can occur.
      3. This could als
      • We have no power over the wrongdoings of other people. The only wrong we always have the power and obligation to set right is that which we do ourselves. It is also the only course of action which ensures that our credibility and honor remain intact.

        To attempt to right everyone elses' wrongs without remaining cognizant of our own is a fool's errand. We must remain ever vigilant that we don't unwittingly become that which we purport to despise. There is nothing so hated as a hypocrite.

  • Privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @01:20AM (#15008841) Homepage Journal
    Some of that stuff may contain personal information. Such might end up backfiring worse than Abu Ghraib. I hope they black out names and addresses. However, that might make them harder to understand because you don't know if A is doing X to B in paragraph 1 and B is doing Y to A in parag 7, or if A does both X and Y to B. Perhaps they can pick out the names and assign them unique numbers over the blacked out name before making the docs public. However, it still might take a lot of labor just to identify the names.
             

  • Very tiny subset (Score:3, Informative)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @01:28AM (#15008865) Homepage Journal
    The article says "There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time -- so far, about 600".

  • Something is Fishy about this Whole Story (Score:4, Interesting)

    by reporter (666905) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @01:31AM (#15008871) Homepage
    The American government has an annual budget exceeding $2 trillion [cia.gov], yet according to MSNBC, the government cannot buy an adequate number of translators. (If Washington paid a translator salary of $200,000, hordes of translators would suddenly appear out of the woodwork.) Further, if these Iraqi documents are so vital, I would expect the American government to keep them under wraps. I would not want the enemy to know that we have them in the event that those documents tell us what the enemy's next move is.

    This story simply does not add up.

    The real story behind this story is that the American government is doing one of two things: (1) psy-ops (i.e. psychological warfare) against the enemy or (2) political games to improve support for the Iraqi war effort.

    Washington knows that the Muslim fascists monitor worldwide news sources. Washington may be publicizing these documents in an effort to hint (to the fascists) that (1) these documents are just the tip of the iceberg and (2) there are additional documents (in our possession) that indicate where the fascists are hiding and what their next moves are.

    Alternatively, Washington knows that some pro-war Republican/Democratic bloggers will scan these documents. Further, Washington knows that on, say, page 15 (of the documents), there is a tidbit or blatant statement asserting that Saddam Hussein had planned to create weapons of mass destruction all along. Washington hopes that the bloggers will find page 15 and will start hollering about how right we were to invade Iraq. In short, the bloggers are mindless automatons, and Washington has just skillfully manipulated public opinion.

    P.S.
    Another version of this story [slashdot.org] was already published by SlashDot on March 19.

    • They're on to me, so I'll have to be quick! But I've learned the location of the religious fascists, and the american people must know! They're in the White House!!!
    • You have sound reasoning, but I think it relies on the government being almost too competent..... I found this article (and that woman's story) to be a good basis to think otherwise:

      http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minute s/main526954.shtml [cbsnews.com]

      What I think is up with those documents is that they got filtered, anything important taken out beforehand, and these are the scraps given to the public. If nothing comes out of it - they can say "Hey, we tried." If anything actually comes out of it, that's
      • What I think is up with those documents is that they got filtered, anything important taken out beforehand, and these are the scraps given to the public.

        Possibly other things have been added. Especially if the deletions would otherwise be too obvious.
    • Another thing you are underestimating - how many good arabic speakers do you think there are in the US? I heard this statistic a while back - in the US, a country of 300 million people - how many PhDs were awarded in 2004 for Arabic? 10,000? 1,000? No - 6. Arabic speakers are not exactly a dime a dozen, and I suspect a good portion of the ones that do aren't keen to work for the US government.
      • Another thing you are underestimating - how many good arabic speakers do you think there are in the US? I heard this statistic a while back - in the US, a country of 300 million people - how many PhDs were awarded in 2004 for Arabic? 10,000? 1,000? No - 6.

        Not exactly a useful metric. Would you estimate the number of people literate in English by the number of English PhDs or Spanish according to the number of Spanish PhDs?
        It would make more sense to look at the number of Americans who are Arabs (especiall
    • (If Washington paid a translator salary of $200,000, hordes of translators would suddenly appear out of the woodwork.)


      I expect the majority of Arabic speakers are a) not interested in working for this particular administration and b) unable to pass the rigorous security checks required for access to top secret material. Take a look at the SF86 sometime. It's not trivial.

    • Re:Something is Fishy about this Whole Story (Score:4, Insightful)

      by (arg!)Styopa (232550) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @07:43AM (#15009747) Journal
      While it's really, really fun to play "tinfoil hattery", think for a second.

      I'm pretty sure that budget of $2 trillion isn't just lying around, money waiting to be used. It might be paying for things like, oh, highways, medicare, aircraft carriers, bridges to nowhere, etc. Could $2 billion probably be "found"? Sure, but it's not like it's manna from heaven.

      Secondly, you can't just haul any dude off the street with a knowledge of Arabic, and have him start translating documents. In just about every case, a document has to be translated from the original by TWO different translators, and then the two translations refined together by a third (government can't afford to trust mistranslations either by accident or on purpose). All of these official translators must have an adequate security clearance, which takes 6 months or more.

      And as far as "telegraphing" our next move, most of these docs are government docs (probably worthless) at elast 4 years old. I don't think there's a lot of danger in this.

      Somehow, people who personally hate George Bush manage to simultaneously believe his government is capable of staggering stupidity (didn't they see a hurricane coming?) and simultaneously amazing subtlety like this.

      If there were statements about WMD in these docs, wouldn't the administration simply, I dunno, PUBLICIZE IT?

  • Stop making political hay - here are the facts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2006, @02:07AM (#15008934)
    For God's sake put the tinfoil hat conspiracies away. they arent needed and really only serve to turn this into a political crap flinging contest between the left and right.

    Look at the facts:

    The best translators the government has are probably at NSA, CIA and in the military services doing more important and urgent (real time) work, so thats why these "background" documents have been sitting for a few years. The shortage of these folks is well publicized, so they are a scarce resource and will not be allocated to a background task like this.

    The simple truth is there are few Arabic translators that the government can hire permanently (and who would do this temporary?), and fewer still that can pass the background checks and get the requisite minimal security clearances needed for general employment in most of the usual places (Departments of Defense, State and the various Agencies). Not that they NEED the clearances and accesses (especially for documents that are now public domain apparently), but that such clearances have become almost ritual in nature and are part of the job requirements, usually at the DoD "Secret" level or above.

    Add to that the general disinterest most people have in working for the government, then blend in the public law restrictions on the pay (GS scale precludes spending sprees on hiring), and you have a ready made "shortage", or at lesat an inaiblity fo the government to get the translators it thinks it needs.

    And on top of that, add in the screwy contract rules and also consider that no congress-critter has a personal stake in a translation company, and you just about guarantee the inablity for much anything other than the titles to be looked at and a spot check done at random in almost all of these, they get scanned in to a PDF, then off to a box they go.

    It doesn't take conspiracy, just the usual incompetence and common inability of big government agencies to get anything done quickly.

    No political slant needed to left or right, just business as usual in the belly of the Leviathan.
    • fewer still that can pass the background checks and get the requisite minimal security clearances needed for general employment

      And yet the documents are being released to the public? Why can't the translators be employed by a contractor or a low security department?

    • Why are people crying "conspiracy theory" here? It is public knowledge that the government has already given these docs the once over and determined that translation was a low priority; they mined them for gems already and the Pentagon has already released a study on a few hundred of the documents that were considered worth translating. About the rest they were not going to release them at all until Rep Hoekstra, under the influence of Stephen Hayes, put intense public pressure on Negroponte's office; Negroponte finally relented and allowed them to be put on the internet. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is published in the Congressional Record.
  • I don't quite get it.
    Why would a person volunteer their time and energies into helping with this? As compared to something you (and possibly other people) would use with open-source software, I don't see anything gained by taking part in this. If a person is (a) fluent enough in both languages and (b) willing to do this sort of translation work, wouldn't they be able to find a job to pay them to do this? Or if they wouldn't want a full time job out of it, find something more people can use and translate
    • Another related thought on this is how the government knows that the translations are accurate?

      This is just as much (if not more) of a problem with governments (who invariably have political leanings) doing the translations. Consider the "Bin Laden Tapes", where other people found the translation put out by the US Government to be at best misleading.
      Where you have the possibility of many translators you'd need a vast conspiracy to ensure consistent mistranslation. The larger the number of people involved

  • Can't it be gray? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by manchld (936052) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @02:38AM (#15009023)
    I dont see why it always has to be either an evil political move or an idealistically brilliant move. To me its just as possible that it was some decision made by someone with a mix of good intentions and laziness.

  • While the real news falls under the public's radar (Score:5, Informative)

    by Y-Crate (540566) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @03:18AM (#15009119)
    Meanwhile, The New York Times has come across a memo of their own [nytimes.com]...from Britain concerning a meeting between Bush and Blair in early 2003. It's probably far more interesting than anything these amateur translators will find. Needless to say, this was stamped with "Extremely Sensitive" and was never supposed to get out.

    Some choice quotes to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here:
    During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

    "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides....

    The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

    ...The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.
      • This is old news. A memo from July 2002 discovered by the Times (of London) last year shows that the desicion to go to war was already taken back then.

        SO??? this memo still needs to be brought to the attention of as many people as possible... for some weird reason the entire existence of these memos is being ignored widely.

  • Iraqi Government? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by adnonsense (826530) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @04:09AM (#15009237) Homepage Journal

    Err, shouldn't the Iraqi government have all these documents? You know, the democratically elected sovereign body which the US and its allies went to all that trouble of having installed, and who I gather has access to a large number of Arabic speakers.

  • They're trusting the medium that spawned SomethingAwful, GNAA, goatse, tubgirl, etc.? That's... not very reassuring. :P

  • Open Source Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fortinbras47 (457756) on Tuesday March 28 2006, @06:50AM (#15009627)
    This is to intelligence as open source is to programming. Anyone on the Internet can go in and do analysis based upon these original documents. I would have thought Slashdot people would love something like this.

    And INTERESTING stuff has come out. For example, ABC News found documents that seem to show that the Russian ambassador gave the US war plans to Iraq. [go.com]

    Individuals are looking too. Here [blogspot.com] is a link from an Iraq blogger who blogs from Baghdad. This document suggests that members of Al Qaeda met with Iraqi intelligence.

    I just find it really cool that enterprising people can go in and look at ORIGINAL documents, and that we don't have to purely rely on what the government says they say. Pro-war, anti-war, historians, anyone can go in and look at what was going on inside Iraq.

    • Re:Make no mistake... (Score:5, Informative)

      by commodoresloat (172735) * on Tuesday March 28 2006, @02:15AM (#15008963) Homepage
      That's correct. Intel expert Steven Aftergood called this [latimes.com] an attempt by the right wing to find "a retrospective justification for the war in Iraq." The bloggers have made some interesting finds, it's true, but so far the ONDI's warning [boston.com] that "amateur translators won't find any major surprises, such as proof Hussein hid stockpiles of chemical weapons" has turned out to be true. They have also given us some bizarre misinterpretation too, such as some bloggers' belief [investors.com] that one document (CMPC-2003-006430.pdf) is a manual for the Mukhabarat even though it is clearly a printout of a webpage by the Federation of American Scientists from 1997 (complete with FAS logo!). Another supposed "smoking gun" was a document that had pictures of Zarqawi, cited as "proof" that Saddam trained him -- when in fact the documents clearly show that the Saddam regime is on the lookout for Zarqawi and his group, and, according to Associated Press [forbes.com], "Attached were three responses in which agents said there was no evidence al-Zarqawi or the other man were in Iraq." There is a lot more misreading and jumping to conclusions from this document dump. It's interesting, and I think it is good to have these documents made public, for historical reasons mostly, but the idea that these documents are where we should look for justification of Bush's war effort just shows how desperate Pete Hoekstra and other Republicans who pushed forcefully for this move really are.
      • I'm interested. If you think there were no weapons of mass destruction why do you suppose Saddam kept stalling the UN inspectors over all those years?

        The whole charade reminds me of the "You haven't given us time to hide!" skit from Monty Pythons Life of Bryan.

        Recall that Clinton bombed Iraq in '98 for not letting the UN inspectors in. Is he part of this grand right-wing conspiracy, do you think?

        • There is no "grand right wing conspiracy." There was an open pressuring of Negroponte's office by Hoekstra. This is a matter of public record. Hoekstra was egged on by Stephen Hayes with incendiary articles in the Weakly Standard. Again, this is all in the public record -- no conspiracy about it. As for Saddam's WMD's, I don't see the need to engage in that conversation; the record is pretty clear that no such weapons were found, and in any case that is not part of my point at all.
            • There's still a big mystery about the WMDs. We know Saddam had a bunch in the 90s - what happened to them?

              No, no mystery. The US Senate published a report on it ages ago, that Saddam had indeed ordered stockpiles destroyed and all programs shut down. That Saddam had in fact wanted to return to the "good old days" when the US was actively supporting Iraq and Saddam as an ally of political convience, as Iraq had the most secular government in the region and as a counterbalance to the religious fundamentalist
        • I'm interested. If you think there were no weapons of mass destruction why do you suppose Saddam kept stalling the UN inspectors over all those years?

          Because he accused UNSCOM of being a front for an American spy operation. Which it turned out they were.
          • And there is another aspect: Saddam Hussein had to keep the image of strongman at least for his people, his supporters and the neighbouring countries to stay in power. So in all official documents he was probably correct (as far as a giant bureaucracy can be correct about reality), but in his speeches he hinted that there might be something hidden no one knows about. Unluckily for him, not only the local people felt for the bluff, the George W. Bush administration did also.
        • I'm interested. If you think there were no weapons of mass destruction why do you suppose Saddam kept stalling the UN inspectors over all those years?

          Some of one lot were caught spying. Plenty of the stalling came from places other than Iraq anyway.

          Recall that Clinton bombed Iraq in '98 for not letting the UN inspectors in.

          When was the US not bombing Iraq? It's rather hard to find weapons inspectors who actually want to go somewhere which is being bombed.
    • So, don't be fooled. This is not some wonderful egalitarian thought experiment. It's politics as usual.

      QED.
    • If the Bush Administration doesn't destroy their records of the decisions that led up to the war, it'll be real interesting to some future researchers to find out what really happened and when. There's so much evidence that they were planning for the war from the first few weeks after Bush took office, but it wasn't until after 9/11 that they had a story they could successfully sell to the public. They're doing the best they can to lock up records and intimidate leakers, but at least reasonable shards of
      • If the Bush Administration doesn't destroy their records of the decisions that led up to the war,

        They may just classify them for a long time and hope they rot...

        it'll be real interesting to some future researchers to find out what really happened and when.

        Historians have more chance of getting hold of documents involving Tony Blair and co. AFAIK the US has nothing functionaly equivalent to the "Thirty Year Act".

        There's so much evidence that they were planning for the war from the first few weeks aft
    • This is no test of "open government" or any such claptrap.

      Wasn't this on Slashdot last week anyway :)

      This is pablum that lets right wing folks cloud the air with cries of "...but...but...tomorrow document X comes out, and it'll PROVE we're right!"

      Or rather "In the future the evidence to prove our conspiracy theory correct will be found. Because currently we have no evidence at all."
      • you think the usa government would release all of these docs out into the wild without knowing what was in them?

        Probably more important what wasn't in them.

        the last thing they'd want is some more proof of weapon sales to iraq from the 80's. these docs have all been examined already by the government and were determined worthless.

        They may or may not be worthless. But they certainly will be non-harmful to anyone the US Government currently cares about.
        Assuming they (all) are actual Iraqi documents and n
    • Who cares about someone getting their balls zapped.

      I want full disclosed info on aliens, inter galactic treaties, hyperdrive anti-gravity technology, and
      everything of the real past put out.

      If the govt wont, trust me, the aliens will one day, say, "screw you, we'll appear with 50,000 space ships and you cannot hide
      that can you"

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