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05/20/2004: "Who did we kill?"


Although this discusses yesterday's attack, it is about our reaction to it. From Wretchard:


It's an imaginary scene from World War 2, though it could have happened. Battalion headquarters gets a report over the phone from a front line sector. 'Armor moving to our front, 300 yards out bearing 75 degrees.' The information is plotted in grease pencil on a 1:10,000 map with an an acetate overlay. The position of the platoon reporting is known on the map. A protractor marks out the bearing and ruler paces of the distance. A symbol for enemy armor is drawn on the acetate. Ten minutes later, more details come in. 'Armor is three tanks'. A number is written in beside the enemy armor symbol. Battalion asks the platoon commander if someone can get a better look at the armor. Twenty minutes later, another update is phoned in. 'Sir, I don't know what they are doing there, but the armor is ours.' The map plot is amended, and the symbol for enemy armor is changed to reflect friendly armor.

He displays a table of five AP reports, three filed by a single reporter, Scheherezade Faramarzi. Just as the hypothetical armor above went started as an enemy and turned into a friend, the attack's target started as a wedding party and became suspected foreign fighters.

Although the news media functions as the civilian intelligence system, collecting raw data, processing it and distributing it to the public, for historical reasons it lacks many of the features which professional intelligence systems have evolved over the years: namely a system of grading information by reliability and existence of analytic cell whose function is to follow the developments and update the results. In the example above, AP writer Scheherezade Faramarzi performed many of the tasks which our fictional battalion intelligence officer undertook. Her stories evolved from a categorical description of an American attack on a wedding party, to a middle stage in which the wedding party attack remained the primary hypothesis disputed by American military officers; and finally to one in which the roles were reversed -- a story of an attack on a militant safe house described by some Iraqis to have been an attack on a wedding party.

But for other media outlets, there was no tracking on a mental acetate overlay, no update.

Choosing to not follow updates causes harm.

On May 20, 2004 at 09:30 Zulu, after the last entry in the table above, the International Committee of the Red Cross "condemned Thursday an 'excessive' use of force by the US military." The story went on to say that "US troops faced further embarrassment amid claims they killed dozens of people at a wedding celebration in a remote western Iraqi town, at a time when the occupation forces are already reeling from a prison abuse scandal." A reaction based on old news had taken twelve hours to work its way through the Red Cross and emerged to spawn further accusations on its own power.

Wretchard suggests a solution:

(Incidentally, I wrote software a few months ago which allows the user to do something very similar to what is described above. It allows the user to define relationships between any arbitrary event, object, person, geographical location or event. The idea was to allow the user to build an unlimited network of connections between any entities so that indirect relationships could be "discovered". The user could then follow the connections or have the whole network displayed from the viewpoint of any chosen node. It took about four days to write and requires Microsoft Access 2000 or better to run. It was the quickest way to prototype the concept. I've sent free evaluation copies to a few bloggers over the last few months. One day I'll do it properly.)



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