There are two parts to this Salon piece by Pete Moore (with help from his 8 year old son): what these CPA documents say and what else they say, and how the "what else" parts were found.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the "View" menu at the top of the screen and select the "Mark up" option. If you are in a Word document where "Track changes" has been turned on, hitting "Mark up" will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors.

When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name "Administrator's Weekly Economic Report" suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author's paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors.

Now Mr. Moore is a political historian by trade. He's one of the people who will write the books by way of which our descendants will know just exactly who, how and why what we call the "Iraq Clusterfuck" came to be.

People in his line of work are the ones who read these "Consolidated Weekly Reports" even in their edited, cleaned up, "official" form, because by all evidence it's for damn sure the people back in Washington who were supposed to be reading them all along either weren't, didn't have a clue or were in on the scam too, as stateside backup to the ripoff. But the unedited versions have some substantial clues as to why, had they originally gone through unedited, some of those "mistakes made" might have been avoided.

A close look at the deletions in just one of the improperly redacted Word documents from the waning days of the CPA reveals how the enchanted mind-set worked, just before the spell wore off.

Go read. Maybe you won't have the thrill a history geek like me did--comparable to that of a paleontologist who picks up a nasty old rock to throw it away and suddenly realizes it's the skull of something amazing--but it needs to be read anyway.

Remember, these are the people who think they set up the "gwb43.com" system so that we'll never find their dirty backdoor emails. Yeah, Jeffrey, we just don't want you to think we've forgotten about you.

[sound of knives being sharpened on steel in the back room]