Four hundred pages of military interrogations about the massacre of civilians in Hadithah, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last U.S. troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.
Told about the documents, Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, said many of the documents remain classified and should have been destroyed.
“Despite the way in which they were improperly discarded and came into your possession, we are not at liberty to discuss classified information,” he said.
The documents were hauled to the junkyard by an Iraqi contractor who was trying to sell the surplus from U.S. bases, the attendant said. He said he had no idea what any of the documents were about, only that they were important to the Americans.
The New York Times
