This time it’s the MBT shoes military wielding the black marker in the Sgrena shooting report

This time it’s the MBT shoes 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!