[NYTr] Delahunt's Hearing Testimony & a note on document formatting and preservation

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Jane Franklin notes that at Rep. Bill Delahunt's website, you can find
all of the testimony from the Nov 15, 2007 House Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee hearing on the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. See
http://www.house.gov/delahunt

Unfortunately the new material is all in .PDF or --worse-- .doc file
format! Download at your own risk, Windows users. Surely Delahunt has
a staff which could have converted these to safer and more useful .html
format.*  Please see NOTE below.

In any case, those familiar with the Posada case are already
well acquainted with the content of the testimony. What is most
significant about the hearing is that this material is finally on the
official record as part of a US Congressional subcommittee.

Delahunt's 11/13 press release (text already distributed) now has links
to witness testimony (.docs). 

Rep Bill Delahunt's opening statement (PDF) - Nov 15, 2007
http://www.house.gov/delahunt/posadahearing1115.pdf

Witness testimony:

Mr. Arturo V. Hernandez
http://www.house.gov/delahunt/hernandezstatement.doc

Mr. Blake Fleetwood
http://www.house.gov/delahunt/fleetwoodstatement.doc

Mr. Peter Kornbluh
http://www.house.gov/delahunt/kornbluhtestimony.doc

Ms. Ann Louise Bardach
http://www.house.gov/delahunt/bardachstatement.doc

Roseanne Nenninger, N.D.
http://www.house.gov/delahunt/nenningertestimony.doc

In addition, the National Security Archive* has provided much material
online (also in PDF format). 

See yesterday's post on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee Hearing
here:

Summary of First Congr'l Hearing on Terrorist Posada - Nov 15, 2007
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20071112/071633.html


A NOTE ON DOCUMENT FORMATTING, PRESERVATION AND RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS:

* The National Security Archive has insisted on using .PDF only for
many years and has not provided more readable and portable text
or .html versions, as well as the original .PDF format, of the
documents they have pried loose from the US Government. There is a
legitimate reason to keep documents in PDF format, of course, since it
is a [generally] verifiable photograph of the original document, but
they do not provide converted text in addition -- which is too bad,
since conversion would offer easier readability, wider distribution,
better preservation and portability for future hardware platforms and
technologies we cannot imagine at the present time.

This is more than a matter of convenience or virus safety.  This issue
has important implications for historians, archivists, linguists and
political researchers -- especially now, when the US Government is
censoring and retroactively re-classifying previously declassified
material. It is critically important that these documents be preserved
and archived digitally in a distributed, international fashion so that
they will be available to the public, and to future generations of
researchers for study, potentially using programming techniques and
algorithms that will be developed independently by content analysts
outside the Archive -- and perhaps after the Archive has ceased to
exist or has been shut down by an increasingly fascistic US regime.

Despite pleas and offers to help with this conversion from several
experts over the years, the National Security Archive has not seen the
need for or wisdom of doing this. One can only speculate as to why, but
it seems shortsighted to say the least. The question is one that should
be of vital interest to scholars in many disciplines and that deserves
urgent wider discussion, in our view. - NY Transfer