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 ...
For completeness, does anyone have the link to this?
Judging by the sudden and furious outbreaks of trolls & disruptors in the "comments" section of blogs I frequent, the Other Side is running scared over this.
The are even bring up "Bush was from Texas, and Ken Lay ( Enron, for God's Sake! ) is too..."
Why isn't Fox covering any of this?
The Troops I have shown these to, bless your work.
Duty called and you answered. Thank you.
You are doing your part to fight the MSM's effort to subvert anything that supports this war and the real reasons for it.
US puts Iraqi documents on the Web ~ MSM acknowledges ...Goal is to speed up translation of files,
Release of Classified PreWar Docs ping. If you want to be added or removed to the ping list, please Freepmail me.
Good job!! I like the quote in the article where Shada states its his duty to do this!
I, for one, don't care. The case for war is already irrefutable and does not need to be buttressed. Saddam Hussein did not comply with the several UN resolutions that required him to comply with weapon inspectors. Whether he had WMD or not, he refused to comply with inspectors to prove or disprove this. He fired at our aircraft. He violated the terms of the Oil-for-Food program. He financed palestinian terrorists. These are sound, objective reasons to invade Iraq and remove the Ba'ath regime. It's time that we stopped playing this endless game of "Move the Goal Posts". We don't need further justification for this endeavor.
Fox is covering it...in fact Tony Snow had a segment about it this morning.
It was interesting, because the documents he was talking about, were found recently in Afghanistan...from Bin Ladin to Mullah Omar...talking about using the media to get their message out...
Also, some documents that were more like directions on who to notify of what....and others that were complaints about suicide bombers.
I don't think the cost is the issue. From a number of things I've been reading, it's become pretty clear that many of our government Arabic translators (many hired to meet diversity quotas) don't entirely support our government. They may have more loyalty to their religion than to their country or their employer...
Many thanks to Jim Robinson for allowing us to post on this greatest of political websites.
The really clever thing is, when somebody on the net finds something, the original source will not be the US government, forcing the MSM to report it.
Agreed :)
You welcome :)
Now, why don't LaME (Liberal Media Establishment) pay translators to work on these for their news?
I wouldn't trust their translations.....
Obviously, the MSM and Al-queda will say that all of the U.S. government translators are too busy translating false documents INTO Arabic for release on the net.
ftp://ftp.star-group.net/Satellite_PE/trspe.exe
Transit PE is free. It is a "translation editor" that may be handy.
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