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.  Read more…

Saturday News Dump, hidden under JonBenet's rotting little corpse. Have I got your attention now? Good, because you need to pay attention to this. Small headline in WaPo this morning:

Verdict Against Iraq Contractor Overturned

What is this? Our old pals Custer Battles, war profiteers of the stinkiest ilk, looters of uncounted millions of US dollars from the US (Republican) controlled "Coalition Provisional Authority". You know why they are being given an oopsie on this theft? Because a judge has ruled that the Coalition Provisional Authority was not an agency of the US Government:

Although a jury found the company guilty, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III ruled on review that the firm could not be sued under the federal False Claims Act because of the ambiguous structure of the authority, which issued the contract. The judge also concluded that the way in which the company had been paid distanced it from the U.S. government. Read more…