Negroponte Calls On The Hired Help

This is more than just kinda wierd. It's pathetic...

The US government is releasing truckloads of old Iraqi documents on the Web:

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.

Why are they releasing the Arabic versions, not the English translations?

US intelligence officials say nearly all the documents released have been given at least a cursory reading by Arabic experts.

In other words, they haven't all been translated. They say they won't release anything that could "violate the privacy or harm the reputations of innocent people" such as the names of rape victims or journalists. But if the documents have only had a "cursory reading" or less, how will they know till it's translated?

And now - take a deep breath... ready? - guess who is going to be doing the translating?

''We are currently trying to organize a network of bilingual Iraqi bloggers to translate as many of the documents as possible," said ''Omar," a Baghdad dentist who publishes IraqTheModel, which is widely read in the United States.