Blaming International Diplomacy on Microsoft
Slate has a fascinating article on the investigation into the murder of Lebanon's Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri. But here's the part that struck me funny:
What really disturbed the Syrians was that the names of senior officials, including President Bashar Assad's brother Maher, who heads the Republican Guard, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, who heads Syria's military intelligence, were visible in an initial release of the report, thanks to the "Track Changes" function of Microsoft Word, though they were deleted in the final version. (The Word document can be found here.)
The incident provoked confusion, with Mehlis telling a press conference he had removed names from the final version because the men were identified by a single source and he wanted to maintain the presumption of innocence. That was nonsense: In other parts of the report, suspects who are also identified by single sources are named. Moreover, Shawkat reappears elsewhere in the document on the basis of a single source, who says he forced the apparent scapegoat of the assassination to tape a bogus statement claiming responsibility. It may well be that Mehlis and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan agreed to release the report with the track changes visible as a warning to Syria that suspicion has reached the highest levels of the regime, so, Assad had better cooperate.
(emphasis mine).
This reporter speculates that the UN is carrying off international diplomacy by abusing the track changes function in Word. "Oops. Damn Microsoft software, revealing the names of our prime suspects like that."
