As you might have heard last Sunday an Italian blogger, Gianluca Neri, managed to expose some information which had been blackened out on a report issued by the US Military. The report was about the killing by US troops of the Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, which happened at a check point on the way to the Baghdad airport during an Italian operation to liberate a journalist who had been kidnapped.

The 'declassified' parts of the report (you can get the here, apparently the original document has been pulled from the Pentagon site) contain names of US and Italian personnel involved in the incident but also some interesting bits about the engagement rules and some stats. For example we learn that:

From 1 November 2004 to 12 March 2005 there were a total of 3306 attacks in the Baghdad area. Of these, 2400 were directed against Coalition Forces.

It means an average of 25 attacks per day, wasn't this information interesting for the public (especially the American one)?

Part of the Italian blogosphere is now debating about the credibility of the recovered information: can the Pentagon really be so clueless? Or maybe they are "seeding" this information knowing that somebody would have found out that blackening some text in a pdf file is not enough to remove it?

Anyway, we have had our first blogger hitting a big scoop, congratulations. :-)