Posted on 03/18/2006 10:24:23 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Joseph Shahda of Randolph earns his living as an engineer. But in his spare time, he's an intelligence agent, working to ferret out the truth about the regime of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
When the US government on Thursday began publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, Shahda eagerly began to translate the files into English and publish them on a conservative website.
''I feel a sense of duty," said Shahda, a native of Lebanon who supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. ''I think it's a duty for people who know Arabic to translate the documents."
US officials hope that thousands of other Arabic speakers feel the same. Goaded by Congress, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte has begun to release millions of pages of captured files online in an unprecedented effort to harness the Internet to disseminate raw intelligence material. There, anybody with a knowledge of Arabic can download the files and translate them for the world.
It's the same ''open source" principle that drove the successful development of the Internet and of powerful free software like the Linux operating system. Instead of hiring a team of brilliant professionals to analyze Iraqi documents in secret, the open source systems will use hundreds of clever amateurs, who'll publish their work for anyone to analyze and improve upon.
''Workers control the means of production, but without all that tedious communism," said Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and author of ''An Army of Davids," a book that shows how the Internet encourages public activism.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
...but note this little nugget I found, and the date:
Stephen Hayes most recent article in the Weekly Standard is a real eye-opener too.
In the minutes to come, we regained composure, biting our lips as Amir worked away at the rest of the document with the knife blade, as if performing open-heart surgery. A second blob of corrective fluid came off, revealing another "bin Laden." And then a third.
You are doing a great service for our country.
Wide dissemination. "Real smart move."
On the 16th I read an FR post entitled "Document: Afghani Taliban Consul Spoke of a Relationship Between Iraq and Bin Laden." This had been translated and posted. I suggested that the translator send it back to the source (Foreign Military Studies Office: Joint Reserve Intelligence Center)
so it could be posted by them in English as well as Arabic, but when he tried he could not do it. Is this more incomplete planning by the Administration, or his lack of computer skills?
God bless our troops.
will get a lot of eyes looking at it.....
Right....SADDAM nailed!!!
Thanks for your excellent efforts....
Thank you for your efforts and your great attitude!
God bless our troops
God bless America.
I suspect the WH knows what is in most of this stuff.
Thank you for saying this. I said the same thing a day or two ago and provided the links. Of course, I received no reply. ;*)
After the President began calling for the release, a couple of critters jumped on the band wagon and "made it happen" dontchaknow
Thank you for this great service to our country!
We have got to highlight that for our readers:
************************************
SEE THIS:
***************************************AN EXCERPT *********************************
SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group.
The fax comes from the vast collection of documents recovered in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. Up to this point, those materials have been kept from the American public. Now the proverbial dam has broken. On March 16, the U.S. government posted on the web 9 documents captured in Iraq, as well as 28 al Qaeda documents that had been released in February. Earlier last week, Foreign Affairs magazine published a lengthy article based on a review of 700 Iraqi documents by analysts with the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. Plans for the release of many more documents have been announced. And if the contents of the recently released materials and other documents obtained by The Weekly Standard are any indication, the discussion of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is about to get more interesting.
Thank you :) I am just doing my duty.
This is starting to look like a tidal wave heading for the Main Stream Media....
One or two Israelis might fit that bill . . .
Good work!
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