Iraq War

Friday, May 18, 2007 04:19 PDT

The views of Iraq you weren't supposed to see

Staffers should have deleted some revealing notes from the Coalition Provisional Authority's official reports about Iraq, but didn't -- now see them for yourself.

By Pete Moore

I'm a political scientist who specializes in the Middle East. While studying the wartime economy of Iraq, I downloaded some documents from the Web site of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the former American occupation government of Iraq. Imagine my surprise when my 8-year-old son, impatient to play a computer game, revealed with a few accidental clicks of a mouse that someone from the CPA had left behind notes in those documents that were often more revealing than the documents themselves.

One of the more interesting of the CPA's reports, if only for its deletions, is the March 28, 2004, Administrator's Weekly Economic Report. On this page, you can see what a page from that report looks like in its published form; on the next page is a screen shot of what the document looks like with the CPA's deletions included. On the third page is a screen shot of one deleted passage from the report, which shows a CPA staffer's Pollyanna-ish reasoning in trying to explain a lessening of violence in the Iraqi province of Anbar.

The full document is available for download here. To replicate what my son did, check "Mark up," under Microsoft Word's "View" menu. Then, in the "Tools" menu, choose "Track changes," then "Highlight changes," and check the box marked "Highlight changes on screen." (This is the procedure applicable for Word 2004 for Mac; others may vary.)

If you'd like to examine similar contents of other CPA reports, you can download three others: April 16, May 7 and May 28.

Primary Sources