Propaganda analysis data

All,

I'm not sure if anyone on this list is interested in such things, but Google
should pick this message up soon enough, so perhaps someone else will find
it valuable.

The story:

Before 9/11, I subscribed to the US State Department's mailing list of
official press releases related to Iraq, mainly because I wanted to
correlate US & UK bombings in Iraq with official acknowledgments of the
bombings.

But once Bush decided (by some accounts, as early as 17 Sept 2001) to invade
Iraq, the State Dep't turned up the heat, often sending as many as 10
messages per day related to Iraq. Like the patient squirrel that I am, I
carefully kept all of these mailings (only reading a few of them at a time).
Recently I wrote some software to extract these mailings from my mail
archives, and I've collected all of them into a single mailbox (Unix-style,
in case you're interested -- but most mail readers should handle this
format).

The mailbox file is about 10mb uncompressed, around 700 messages. I'm making
it available online, in compressed (gzip) format -- which weights in at
about 3 mb and change.

While all of this is public information, it would be very handy, if you're
doing particular kinds of research or writing projects, to have it readily
available. If I had a little more free time (or a grant or some extra $$), I
would undertake one of several projects using this data, including:

   * examining which press stories the State Dept thought worth blessing
   with its imprimatur, including the frequency with which those stories quote
   non-administration sources;
   
   * correlating progress of the pre-war diplomatic activities with the
   State Dept's information releases (I suspect interesting patterns
   would emerge);
   
   * comparing the State Dept's view of the war and the run-up with the
   Pentagon's, particularly the neo-con chicken hawks;
   
   * examining the degree to which the State Dept dealt with the problem of
   acknowledging military mistakes, excesses, and so on.
   
Anyway, it was easy enough to collect, store, and "publish", and I haven't
seen this anywhere else (particularly not in such a handy form for reading),
so here it is:

   http://monkeyfist.com/kendall/state-dept-iraq-releases.mbox.gz
   
Best,
Kendall Clark

-- 
You're one in a million
You've got to burn to shine
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