Dickie's Quickies

Via Boing Boing via Vowe Dot Net comes this pdf document of the "unclassified" report from the U.S. military on the attack on the Italian reporter's car who had just been rescued from captivity in Iraq by Italian agents. As the reader of the document will see, there are areas that have been redacted to presumably protect names as well as other sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. If this document is to be believed, however, this information is NOT protected. The reader merely needs to copy and paste the entire document into the text editor of her choosing in order to see the redacted portions. What I find interesting about this exercise is not the specific information, but rather what types of information that Pentagon finds worthy of redaction. As is often the case, the person blocking the information tends to "black out" more than she needs to do and she tends to cover areas that are particularly mundane, such as the following:

Between 1 November 2004 and 12 March 2005, there were 135 attacks or hostile incidents that occurred along Route Irish. These included 9 complex attacks (i.e., a combination of more than one type of attack, e.g., an IED followed by small arms fire or mortars), 19 explosive devices found, 3 hand grenades, 7 indirect fire attacks, 19 roadside explosions, 14 rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), 15 vehicle borne explosive devices, and 4 other types of attacks.

The attack density for the period 1 November 2004 to 12 March 2005 is 11.25 attacks per mile, or a minimum of one attack per day along Route Irish since November.

Why black this portion out? Whom are you trying to protect? What are you trying to hide and from who? Presumably, the people running the attacks are aware of this information already which leads me to the conclusion that the real hands the Pentagon doesn't want this information to fall into are the American public's hands. There's a lot more of this sort of information contained in the document.

Via Jill via Amanda comes this article on Anti-Choice folks who get abortions and how they are more than willing to make exceptions for their positions that they do not want to allow other women to make. Hypocrisy at it's worst. There are links to the studies mentioned in the quote below on the website with the article.

Although few studies have been made of this phenomenon, a study done in 1981 found that 24% of women who had abortions considered the procedure morally wrong, and 7% of women who'd had abortions disagreed with the statement, "Any woman who wants an abortion should be permitted to obtain it legally." A 1994/95 survey of nearly 10,000 abortion patients showed 18% of women having abortions are born-again or Evangelical Christians. Many of these women are likely anti-choice. The survey also showed that Catholic women have an abortion rate 29% higher than Protestant women. A Planned Parenthood handbook on abortion notes that nearly half of all abortions are for women who describe themselves as born-again Christian, Evangelical Christian, or Catholic.