By Peter Sleeth, Special to ProPublica, and Hal Bernton, The Seattle Times

A strange thing happened when Christopher DeLara filed for disability benefits after his tour in Iraq: The U.S. Army said it had no records showing he had ever been overseas.

DeLara had searing memories of his combat experiences. A friend bled to death before his eyes. He saw an insurgent shoot his commander in the head. And, most hauntingly, he recalled firing at an Iraqi boy who had attacked his convoy.

The Army said it could find no field records documenting any of these incidents.

DeLara appealed, fighting for five years before a judge accepted the testimony of an officer in his unit. By then he had divorced, was briefly homeless and had sought solace in drugs and alcohol.

DeLara's case is part of a much larger problem that has plagued the U.S. military since the 1990 Gulf War: a failure to create and maintain the types of field records that have documented American conflicts since the Revolutionary War.

A joint investigation by ProPublica and The Seattle Times has found that the recordkeeping breakdown was especially acute in the early years of the Iraq war, when insurgents deployed improvised bombs with devastating effects on U.S. soldiers. The military has also lost or destroyed records from Afghanistan, according to officials and previously undisclosed documents.

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The loss of field records — after-action write-ups, intelligence reports and other day-to-day accounts from the war zones — has far-reaching implications. It has complicated efforts by soldiers like DeLara to claim benefits. And it makes it harder for military strategists to learn the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the nation's most protracted wars.

Military officers and historians say field records provide the granular details that, when woven together, tell larger stories hidden from participants in the day-to-day confusion of combat.

The Army says it has taken steps to improve handling of records — including better training and more emphasis from top commanders. But officials familiar with the problem said the missing material may never be retrieved.

"I can't even start to describe the dimensions of the problem," said Conrad C. Crane, director of the U.S. Army's Military History Institute. "I fear we're never really going to know clearly what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan because we don't have the records."

The Army, with its dominant presence in both theaters, has the biggest deficiencies. But the U.S. Central Command in Iraq (Centcom), which had overall authority, also lost records, according to reports and other documents obtained by ProPublica under the Freedom of Information Act.

In Baghdad, Centcom and the Army disagreed about which was responsible for keeping records. There was confusion about whether classified field records could be transported back to the units' headquarters in the United States. As a result, some units were instructed to erase computer hard drives when they rotated home, destroying the records that had been stored on them.

Through 2008, dozens of Army units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan either had no field records or lacked sufficient reports for a unit history, according to Army summaries obtained by ProPublica. DeLara's outfit, the 1st Cavalry Division, was among the units lacking adequate records during his 2004 to 2005 deployment.

Recordkeeping was so poor in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2007 that "very few Operation ENDURING FREEDOM records were saved anywhere, either for historians' use, or for the services' documentary needs for unit heritage, or for the increasing challenge with documenting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)," according to an Army report from 2009.

Entire brigades deployed from 2003 to 2008 could not produce any field records, documents from the U.S. Army Center of Military History show.

The Pentagon was put on notice as early as 2005 that Army units weren't turning in records for storage to a central computer system created after a similar recordkeeping debacle in the 1990-91 Gulf War.

In that war, a lack of field records forced the Army to spend years and millions of dollars to reconstruct the locations of troops who may have been exposed to toxic plumes that were among the suspected causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

At the outset of the Iraq war, military commanders tried to avoid repeating that mistake, ordering units to preserve all historical records.

But the Army botched the job. Despite new guidelines issued in 2008 to safeguard records, some units still purged them. The next summer, the Washington National Guard's 81st Brigade Combat Team in Iraq was ordered to erase hard drives before leaving them for replacement troops to use, said a Guard spokesman, Capt. Keith Kosik.

Historians had complained about lax recordkeeping for years with little result.

"We were just on our knees begging for the Army to do something about it," said Dr. Reina Pennington, a Professor at Norwich University in Vermont who chaired the Army's Historical Advisory Committee. "It's the kind of thing that everyone nods about and agrees it's a problem but doesn't do anything about."

Critical reports from Pennington's committee went up to three different secretaries of the Army, including John McHugh, the current secretary. McHugh's office did not respond to interview requests. His predecessor, Peter Geren, said he was never told about the extent of the problem.

"I'm disappointed I didn't know about it," Geren said.

In an initial response to questions from ProPublica and the Times, the Army did not acknowledge that any field reports had been lost or destroyed. In a subsequent email, Maj. Christopher Kasker, an Army spokesman, said, "The matter of records management is of great concern to the Army; it is an issue we have acknowledged and are working to correct and improve."

Missing field records aren't necessarily an obstacle for benefit claims. The Department of Veterans Affairs also looks for medical and personnel records, which can be enough. The VA has also relaxed rules for proving post-traumatic stress to reduce the need for the detailed documentation of field reports.

But even the VA concedes that unit records are helpful. And assembling a disability case from witness statements can take much more time, said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the retired Army vice chief of staff who worked to combat suicides and improve treatment of soldiers with PTSD and brain injuries.

"You would always love to have that operational record available to document an explosion, but there are other ways," Chiarelli said. "You can provide witness statements from others who were in that explosion. But it's going to be more difficult."

After reviewing findings of the ProPublica-Times investigation, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to report on efforts to find and collect field records.

"Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are unable to document the location and functions of their military units could face the same type of problems experienced by Cold War veterans exposed to radiation, Vietnam era veterans exposed to herbicides and Gulf War veterans exposed to various environmental hazards," Murray said in a statement.

Already, thousands of veterans have reported respiratory problems and other health effects after exposure to toxic fumes from huge burn pits that were commonly used to dispose of garbage in Iraq and Afghanistan.

DeLara remains embittered about the five years he spent waiting for his disability claim. In an interview at his home in Tennessee, he pointed to Army discharge papers showing he'd received the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, awarded for service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next to that were blank spaces where his deployment dates should have been.

"If they'd had the records in the first place, and all the after-action reports," DeLara said, "this never would have stretched on as long as it did."

A desperate search for records
The Army is required to produce records of its actions in war. Today, most units keep them on computers, and a 4,000-soldier brigade can churn out impressive volumes — roughly 500 gigabytes in a yearlong tour, or the digital equivalent of 445 books, each 200 pages long.

Field records include reports about fighting, casualties, intelligence activities, prisoners, battle damage and more, complete with pictures and maps. They do not include personnel or medical records, which are kept separately, or "sigact" reports — short daily dispatches on significant activities, some of which were provided to news organizations by WikiLeaks in 2010.

By mid-2007, amid alarms from historians that combat units weren't turning in records after their deployments, the Army launched an effort to collect and inventory what it could find.

Army historians were dispatched on a base-by-base search worldwide. A summary of their findings shows that at least 15 brigades serving in the Iraq war at various times from 2003 to 2008 had no records on hand. The same was true for at least five brigades deployed to Afghanistan.

Records were so scarce for another 62 units that served in Iraq and 10 in Afghanistan that they were written up as "some records, but not enough to write an adequate Army history." This group included most of the units deployed during the first four years of the Afghanistan war.

The outreach effort by the Army was highly unusual. "We were sending people to where they were being demobilized," said Robert J. Dalessandro, executive director at the Army's Center of Military History. "We even said ... 'Look we'll come to you' — that's how desperate we got."

As word of missing records circulated, the Joint Chiefs of Staff became worried enough to order a top-level delegation of records managers from each service branch to Baghdad in April 2010 for an inspection that included recordkeeping by U.S. Central Command.

Centcom coordinated action among service branches in the theater. Among other things, Centcom's records included Pentagon orders, joint-service actions, fratricide investigations and intelligence reviews, with some records from Army units occasionally captured in the mix.

After five days, the team concluded that the "volume, location, size and format of USF-1 records was unknown," referring to the acronym for combined Iraq forces. The team's report to the chiefs cited "large gaps in records collections ... the failure to capture significant operational and historical" materials and a "poorly managed" effort to preserve records that were on hand.

In a separate, more detailed memo, two of the team's members from the National Archives and Records Administration went further.

"With the exception of the Army Corps of Engineers, none of the offices visited have responsibly managed their records," they wrote. "Staff reported knowledge of only the recently created and filed records and knew little of the records created prior to their deployments, including email. ... It is unclear the extent to which records exist prior to 2006."

Part of the problem was disagreement and lack of coordination about who was responsible for certain records, including investigations into casualties and accidents, according to Michael Carlson, one of the two archivists.

"The Army would say it's Centcom's responsibility to capture after-action reports because it's a Centcom-led operation. Centcom would say it's an Army responsibility because they created their own records," Carlson said in an interview. "So there's finger-pointing ... and thus records are lost."

Nearly a year after the U.S. pullout from Iraq, Centcom said it still is trying to index 47 terabytes of records for storage, or some 54 million pages of documents. It's not clear if those include anything recovered after a 2008 computer crash the Baghdad team termed "catastrophic."

Lt. Col. Donald Walker, an Air Force officer who took over as Centcom records manager in 2009, acknowledged that there was confusion about responsibility and confirmed that that some Centcom records may have been lost. In part, he blamed computer problems and the competing demands of wartime.

"Something just had to fall off the plate, there was so much going on," said Walker, who worked out of Centcom's Tampa, Fla., headquarters but was among the Baghdad inspectors.

Rather than risk letting classified information fall into the wrong hands, some commanders appeared to buck the orders to preserve records. One Army presentation asserts that in 2005, V Corps, which oversaw all Army units then in Iraq, ordered units to wipe hard drives clean or physically destroy them before redeploying to the States.

"They did not maintain the electronic files. They just purged the servers," according to the Military History Institute's Crane, who said he heard similar accounts from more than a dozen veteran officers in classes at the Army War College.

The orders directing Washington National Guard's 81st Brigade to erase hard drives before leaving Iraq came "from on high," according to unit spokesman Kosik, who said he confirmed the erasures with a senior Guard officer with first-hand knowledge. He said the orders came from outside the Washington Guard.

"There was a lot of confidential information, and they were not allowed to take it out of theater," said Kosik. "All that was wiped clean before they came home. ... It was part of their 'to-do' list before leaving country."

Steven A. Raho III, the Army's top records manager, said in an interview that he couldn't estimate what, if any, records might be missing. But Raho said his agency wasn't responsible for collecting records, only for storing them in the Army's central records system when individual units handed them over.

Units are not required to do so, he emphasized. "All's I know is we have some and units have some," Raho said.

As a test, ProPublica filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for a month's worth of field records from four units deployed in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. The requests went to Raho's Records Management and Declassification Agency, which forwarded them to each unit.

One brigade — the 2nd Combat Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division — did not respond, but FOIA officers from the three others said they searched and could find no responsive records.

"I don't know where any Iraq operational records are," said Daniel C. Smith, a privacy act officer at Fort Carson, Colo., who handled the request for the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division. "I've never been able to find out where they went."

At Fort Riley, Kan., FOIA officer Tuanna Jeffery looked for records from the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, 1st Armored Division. "Prior to and upon the inactivation of the unit on March 15, 2008, that unit had turned in absolutely no records," she responded.

In a follow-up email, Jeffery said the entire 1st Armored Division did not turn in any field records through 2008.

'They couldn't find it'
Chris DeLara is not the type of soldier to wear his heart on his sleeve, but the 1st Cavalry Division's shoulder patch is tattooed on his right forearm in a swirling piece of body art. Beneath it are the words: "Baghdad, Iraq."

DeLara, 38, grew up in Albany, N.Y., never dreaming he might someday fight a war. Now, his tour in 2004 and 2005 haunts his every day. Since winning his appeal in March 2011, he is classified as fully disabled by post-traumatic stress and cannot work. He was awarded a stipend of about $30,000 a year and has moved near Knoxville, Tenn., where he recently bought a modest house.

Getting to a stable point wasn't easy.

DeLara was an administrative specialist, essentially a personnel clerk. But he was repeatedly pulled out of his scrivener's life for missions as a roof gunner on convoys. It was a time of insurgency and exploding factional violence in Baghdad.

"They told us, 'This may be your job, but guess what? You're going to be doing everything,'" he said. "We had many hats. You go to combat, your job is secondary. Combat is first."

DeLara did not want to discuss his combat experiences, but they are described in part by a judge in the Board of Veterans' Appeals ruling that approved his PTSD claim.

In the years after his deployment, DeLara told psychiatrists and others who treated him at various times that two of his friends were killed in an insurgent attack on his convoy, and that he was unable to stop one of them from bleeding to death from a ruptured artery.

He said that one his commanders was shot in the head in front of him by insurgents, and reported that he had killed an Iraqi youth who had tried to attack his convoy after it was stopped because of a roadside bomb, according to the judge's summary.

After his return in 2005, DeLara was diagnosed several times with PTSD or its symptoms, according to VA exam records cited by the appeals judge. He drank and used drugs even though he'd abstained from them in the Army. In 2006, he overdosed on prescription drugs.

DeLara said he lived for a time in a shelter for troubled vets. He and his wife eventually divorced, but he credits her for helping him fight for his claim when he might have given up.

They first applied for a PTSD benefit in 2006, DeLara said. A denial came the next year because his separation document, called a DD-214, did not list any dates of overseas deployment, he said.

"They couldn't find it. Well my ex-wife, she being as persistent as she is, we started pulling all the stuff" to send to the VA, he said. DeLara dug out the movement order sending his unit to Iraq and the brigade roster with his name on it. He added descriptions of his combat experiences. "Basically what it was, I needed to provide proof," he said.

But he was denied again, this time because the VA said his symptoms were of bipolar disorder, not PTSD. DeLara said he appealed but got a letter saying there was insufficient evidence that he'd experienced combat stress. The VA told him that it had "no records, none whatsoever" of his time in combat, DeLara said.

"We basically put the whole packet together from scratch again," DeLara said. This time, he tracked down his former company commander, who was incensed about the VA denials and provided a letter confirming an incident in which DeLara came under enemy fire. Still, two years went by before DeLara received word that his appeal was set for a hearing in January 2011.

Although the judge found in his favor, the ruling notes that, in June 2008, the center responsible for locating his records "made a formal finding of a lack of information to corroborate a stressor for service connection for PTSD." The center even looked a second time but still came up empty-handed.

DeLara said he still can't believe it. "I had dates and everything" in the supporting material he and his ex-wife sent to the VA, he said. "The simple fact is that nobody filled out after-action reports," DeLara said. "There was no record of it."

Asked how often a search for unit records comes up empty, officials at the VA said they didn't know — the agency doesn't track that statistic. A VA spokesperson said missing field records are not a major factor delaying veterans' claims, however. And some veterans' advocates agree.

"As long as an officer or a buddy who witnessed the event is willing to sign a notarized statement, that's good," said John Waterbrook, who advises vets on disability issues in Walla Walla, Wash.

In 2009, as DeLara was refiling his case, veterans' groups complained to Congress that soldiers serving as clerks or mechanics unfairly faced a higher burden of proof for PTSD than those with an obvious combat role, even though they faced the same dangers in wars with no front lines.

The VA relaxed its rules the next year, so that a vet's account of combat stress is proof enough if a VA medical examiner agrees. But while the change helps, it hasn't sped up claims or made field records less valuable, said Richard Dumancas, the American Legion's deputy director of claims.

Field records can come into play for other injuries. Take the case of Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lorenzo Campbell, a 53-year-old soldier with the Washington Guard who filed a disability claim resulting from a 2004 injury in Iraq.

During a rocket attack, Campbell banged his knee on a concrete bumper after jumping out of a Humvee to find cover. He saw a doctor, but there was no record in his medical files. His knee gradually deteriorated, and he now wears a brace and is unable to run.

Campbell said he tried to get records of the rocket attack from the state Guard but was told they were classified and left on computers in Iraq. He said he offered a letter from another soldier testifying to the incident and swore out a statement himself, but it didn't suffice.

"I tried to keep fighting it," he said. "They kept writing me saying they need more information, they need more information."

Campbell said his disability claim took four years to be approved — a delay that could have been shortened had the records been available. "If you have no records," he said, "you can be fighting for five or six years and still not prevail."

Tradition eroded, warnings brushed aside
Military recordkeeping has been the cornerstone of the nation's war history for centuries. From the founding of the republic through the Vietnam War, recordkeeping was a disciplined part of military life, one that ensured that detailed accounts of the fighting were available to historians and veterans alike.

The records can hold untold stories that can surface decades after a conflict.

The massacre of civilians by U.S. forces at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in July 1950 came to full national attention only in 1999, nearly 50 years after the fact. Journalists at The Associated Press, working in part with military field records, uncovered the extent of the tragedy. Later, other reporters used the records to show that one purported witness wasn't really present.

By the Gulf War, however, what had been a long tradition of keeping accurate, comprehensive field records had begun to erode. Old-style paper recordkeeping was giving way to computers. And Army clerks had been reduced in number, leaving officers to take care of records work.

According to the Army's "Commander's Guide to Operational Records and Data Collection," published in 2009, the problem became evident months after the end of Desert Storm, when vets began reporting fatigue, skin disease, weight loss and other unexplained health conditions.

"When the Army began investigating this rash of symptoms, its first thought was to try and establish a pattern of those affected: What units were they in? Where were they located? What operations were they engaged in?" the guide says. "The answers provided by investigators were: 'We don't know. We didn't keep our records.'"

Afterward, the Army created Raho's records agency and a central records system. As the war on terror began, however, inspections and penalties for recordkeeping at the command level had largely fallen by the wayside, according to Army documents and interviews with officers who helped search for Gulf War records.

Robert Wright, a retired Army historian, said training broke down. "They fight as they train, and they never were trained," he said.

On March 28, 2003, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz ordered retention of all records in the Iraq war. Military records, he wrote, "are of enduring significance for U.S. and world history and have been indispensable for rendering complete, accurate and objective accountings of the government's activities to the American people."

But in the combat zones, there were other priorities.

Kelly Howard served as operations officer to Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who was in charge of the Iraq war from 2004 to 2007. Her primary job was archiving Casey's papers, a task that had been ignored until her arrival in 2006. Casey stored them in a foot locker, among other places.

"The reason so many things got lost ... is because so many people at higher levels weren't requiring it," Howard said, referring to systematic recordkeeping. "You do what your boss wants you to do. It's not that anyone said, 'No, I don't care about that.' It's just so many other things were important."

Alarms mounted at about the same time as DeLara finished his Baghdad tour.

In 2005, the Army's Historical Advisory Committee learned that Raho's agency had not "received any records from units deployed in Afghanistan & Iraq."

This came as a shock. Members of the group include a mix of civilian historians and officials from the Army War College and Center of Military History.

"So we go through the whole meeting," said Richard Davis, senior historian at the National Museum of the U.S. Army. "So I ask the records manager point blank. I said, 'How many records have been retired from overseas by U.S. Army units?' And the answer was zero.

"By late October the records management people here in Washington had received not a single document from Afghanistan or Iraq," Davis said. "At that point all the historians looked at each other and said 'Holy @!$%#! '"

Minutes from the committee's 2006 meeting quote Raho as saying, "Our problems are that the training for Army personnel is incomplete, the responses are uneven, and the records themselves are either incomplete or nonexistent."

Another member suggested writing a book. "As an institutional history, I think it's a great idea," responded historian Pennington, then the committee's chairwoman. "'Losing History': It's a topic that merits visibility and study."

The committee included regular warnings about a broken recordkeeping system in its annual reports to the secretary of the Army.

The 2006 report to Secretary Francis J. Harvey said Raho had described "major problems" in records collection, including "the lack of centralized control of data collection, the destruction of records without evaluation, and inadequate communications between Army units and records collection personnel."

Raho, the report said, "observed that 17 to 23 percent of all Iraq/Afghanistan War veterans will suffer from various forms of PTSD. ... Without strong and immediate action to remedy present shortcomings, the Army's ability to substantiate veteran disability claims will be degraded seriously, with potentially highly troublesome and expensive consequences."

In its 2008 report, the committee said: "Units are losing their own history. This will create a snowball effect, resulting in problems with awards and heritage activities in the future."

Pennington signed the report, adding a personal comment: "After six years of service on DAHAC, and now as its chair, I am frankly discouraged by the frequency with which DAHAC has expressed some of the same concerns, and how little progress has been made on some issues."

Then-Secretary Geren's office responded with a thank-you letter under his signature. But Geren said in an interview that he was not personally informed about missing records, despite his March 31, 2009, letter. "I'm confident it was not brought to my attention."

When McHugh, the current secretary, arrived in 2009, he received a committee report reiterating that the system was broken and pleading for resources to fix it. "This has been requested every year since 1997," the report said.

"It's probably the most serious problem historians have ever had," Pennington said in an interview. "I honestly don't know how we're going to be writing records-based history in 20 to 30 years." Typically, field records remain classified for two to three decades after a war, then are transferred to the National Archives.

Although committee members felt unheard, wheels had slowly begun moving in the Army. In 2007, Raho's agency and the Center of Military History launched the outreach project that discovered the historians were right: Scores of units did not have the records they should.

Because Raho did not have enough staff, the Center of Military History provided detachments for the search. For more than two years they collected field reports, turning up about 5.5 terabytes' worth.

Some additional records have dribbled in since: Dalessandro, the center's director, said one brigade of the 1st Armored Division handed over field records from its 2007 Iraq deployment. It's possible that more might be found from other units, but historians say the chances fade with each year.

Burn pits: the new Agent Orange?
The demand for the field records isn't likely to abate as members of Congress ratchet up pressure to investigate exposure to burn pits.

Veterans' groups say the long-term health impacts could be similar to those of herbicides in Vietnam. Rep. Michael Michaud of Maine, ranking Democrat on the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Health, said missing field records "could have consequences for veterans for years to come."

In September, the House passed the Open Burn Pit Registry Act to track veterans with symptoms and find out where they were exposed and for how long. A similar measure is pending in the Senate. The VA currently runs registries for Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome, and last year the Institute of Medicine said more research is needed.

Some veterans' advocates say field records could provide critical.

"It's going to be very hard to connect individuals without the field records," said Dan Sullivan, director of the Sgt. Thomas Sullivan Center, a nonprofit named after his brother, an Iraq vet who died from mysterious health complications.

"It would strike me that they are very important."

Are you a veteran who can't obtain your military field records? Tell us your story. 

Versions of this story will be published by The Seattle Times and Stars and Stripes.

Peter Sleeth is a veteran investigative reporter who covered the Iraq war for The Oregonian and helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize in 2007  for breaking news. Now freelancing, his most recent piece for the Oregon Historical Quarterly is a profile of progressive-era activist Tom Burns.

Hal Bernton has been a staff reporter for The Seattle Times since 2000. He has covered military and veterans affairs, reporting from Iraq in 2003 and from Afghanistan in 2009 and this fall. Among other things, Bernton has reported on veterans' health issues, post-traumatic stress and, recently, improvised explosive devices.

ProPublica's Marshall Allen, Liz Day and Kirsten Berg contributed to this story.

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Prosecutors on Thursday made public a trove of evidence used to justify murder charges against Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman, including a police report that concluded "the encounter between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin was ultimately avoidable by Zimmerman."

The evidence – including 183 pages of documents, witness statements and other material – was released Thursday to news organizations and other requestors by special prosecutor Angela Corey’s office, which has charged the 28-year-old Zimmerman with second-degree murder in the killing of 17-year-old Martin on Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla. Also included was a document explaining what material was withheld.

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The evidence, which was provided to Zimmerman’s attorney early this week, will be helpful to both prosecutors and the defense.

An autopsy by the Volusia County Medical Examiner on Martin's body found that the teenager was killed by a shot to the heart and that traces of THC -- or tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana -- were found in Martin's blood, though below the level that medical studies indicate would have caused "performance impairment."

But the documents give contradictory assessments of how far away Zimmerman was when he shot Martin. 

Lab tests by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Orlando operations center concluded that residue tests on Martin's sweatshirt were "consistent with a contact shot" — that is, one in which the muzzle of the weapon is physically touching the victim.

But the autopsy report from the Volusia County (Fla.) Medical Examiner's office reached a different conclusion based on examination of the wound itself, saying, "This wound is consistent with a wound of entrance of intermediate range."

The report doesn't define "intermediate range."

In another report, a police officer responding to the shooting said that after Zimmerman was handcuffed, he saw “that his back appeared to be wet and was covered with grass,” and that he had suffered a bloody nose – consistent with Zimmerman’s account that he was attacked by Martin.

A photo showing Zimmerman's bloodied head also is included in the report, as is a paramedic’s reports saying that he had a 1-inch laceration on his head and forehead abrasion.

"Bleeding tenderness to his nose, and a small laceration to the back of his head. All injuries have minor bleeding," paramedic Michael Brandy wrote about Zimmerman's injuries.

Another police report indicated that Zimmerman, who is white and of Hispanic heritage, had called Sanford police on at least four previous occasions while residing in the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community in Sanford, and in each case the “suspicious person” was a black male.

“Investigation reveals that on Aug. 4, Aug. 5 and Oct. 6, 2011, and on Feb. 2, 2012, George Zimmerman reported suspicious persons – all young black males – in the Retreat neighborhood to Sanford Police Department,” it said. “According to records checks, all of Zimmerman’s suspicious persons calls while residing in the Retreat neighborhood have identified black males as the subjects.”

Zimmerman himself was on a prescription for Tamazepam, according to the paramedic's incident report reproducing his medical records. (Tamazepam is also known as Restoril and is prescribed for anxiety and insomnia.) 

Read the police reports and other documentary evidence 

Read what was excluded from the release and the reasons it was withheld 

Another police report  indicated that Sanford police thought Zimmerman was at fault, even though they let him go after questioning him.  

"Investigation reveals that Martin was in fact running generally in the direction of where he was staying as a guest in the neighborhood," it said.

An eight-page summary of the evidence against Zimmerman released earlier this week listed 50 possible law enforcement witnesses -- including 18 Sanford police officers as primary witnesses, including lead Investigator Chris Serino -- and 28 civilian witnesses, including Martin's brother, mother and father, Zimmerman’s father and two of his friends . Twenty-two other potential civilian witnesses were not identified. 

Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O'Mara, acknowledged receiving the materials Monday on a website his office set up to release information from the case Zimmerman's, but said, "Please remember and understand that it is inappropriate for us to comment on particular pieces of evidence."

Zimmerman shot Martin during a confrontation inside the Retreat at Twin Lakes  community, while the teenager was visiting his father’s fiancée.

The shooting came after Zimmerman called 911 reporting that Martin was acting suspiciously, as if he was on drugs. He later told police that he shot Martin in self-defense, after Martin punched him and pushed him to the ground.

Police initially failed to arrest Zimmerman or charge him with any crime because Florida's Stand Your Ground self-defense law allows the use of deadly force whenever someone feels threatened with serious bodily injury.

But after questions about possible racial motivation for the slaying, a special prosecutor took over the case and, on April 11, Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder. Zimmerman, who pleaded not guilty to the charge, was released on April 23 on a $150,000 bond and has been out of the public eye since then.

Msnbc.com's Mike Brunker, Bill Dedman and M. Alex Johnson, NBC News producer Tom Winter and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Four staffers at the Associated Press shared a 2012 Pulitzer Prize on Monday for exposing the New York Police Department's clandestine spying that monitored daily life of Muslim communities. The Pulitzer board at Columbia University in New York said the AP series resulted in "congressional calls for a federal investigation, and a debate over the proper role of domestic intelligence gathering." The journalists are Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley. The AP is a non-profit news cooperative owned by U.S. newspapers.

The Seattle Times also was honored in the investigative reporting category for articles showing "how a little-known governmental body in Washington State moved vulnerable patients from safer pain-control medication to methadone, a cheaper but more dangerous drug, coverage that prompted statewide health warnings." The journalists are Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong. You can read that series here.

Highlights of the AP investigation are here. A summary:

Domestic spying
"AP's investigation has revealed that the NYPD dispatched undercover officers into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program. Police also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there was no evidence of wrongdoing. The articles showed that police systemically listened in on sermons, hung out at cafes and other public places, infiltrated colleges and photographed law-abiding residents as part of a broad effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

"Individuals and groups were monitored even when there was no evidence they were linked to terrorism.

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"The AP also determined that police subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after 9/11."

Reporter Apuzo describes the reporting on the series in a podcast for Pro Publica, the nonprofit investigative news organization. You can listen to the podcast here.

More winners
The winners in journalism, letters and the arts are listed at the Pulitzer Prizes site at Columbia University, and nominated finalists who did not win are listed separately.

The Huffington Post news website won its first Pulitzer Prize, for national reporting, for articles describing wounds suffered by American veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan. The series is called "Beyond the Battlefield."

 

Who says there's no free lunch?

You may have read over the past week about the release of 1940 Census records on a new U.S. government website, a site that buckled under the huge demand from people looking up details on the lives of their friends and relatives from the Great Depression.

You may not have realized that the site was built for U.S. taxpayers for the price of — not one dime. A company from Silicon Valley built the site, and is operating it, for free. Genealogy buffs have been using the site for a week now to check millions of records. (See our earlier story for tips on searching the 1940 Census, and examples of people who have found relatives.)

Of course, the company, Inflection LLC of Redwood City, Calif., did get something in return for its effort: a free copy of those 3.8 million images of records from the 1940 Census. While other companies paid $200,000 for a set of the public records, Inflection can use those records in its for-profit business, a genealogy site called Archives.com.

It's a barter system for federal records: the public gets a free official U.S. website, and the company gets free data. It's been done before, as when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gave data to Google, which since 2006 has hosted the site for free as Google Patents.

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Do you approve of the approach that the National Archives took, giving the data away in exchange for the free website? And what stories have you found in the 1940 Census? Add your story in the comments below or on our Open Channel page on Facebook.

Inflection also was hoping to get a boost to its reputation for building websites that could withstand a storm of traffic.

Performance standards in the contract
Both the company and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had anticipated that the site would draw a crowd, as 72-year privacy restrictions expired and the records became available. What happened next lends credence to the boast that genealogy is the country's favorite hobby.

The contract says, "Drawing from NARA's experience in releasing the 1930 Census, and the experience of the National Archives of the United Kingdom when they released their 1901 and 1911 Censuses, NARA anticipates immense interest in the 1940 Census and a tremendous increase in traffic to its www.archives.gov web site." (Here's the contract in a PDF file.)

But how much of a crowd?

Here are the performance standards in the contract:

• "When browsing from one image to another, each image should be presented to the user in 3 seconds or less."
• "When moving from the standard rendered image to each zoom level (e.g. zoom 1x, 2x, 3x), the reformatted image should be rendered in 2 seconds or less."
• "Support up to 10 million hits per day while providing response times of less than three seconds for keyword searches of the descriptive metadata."
• "Support up to 25,000 concurrent users."

There was one more element in the contract, a somewhat vague requirement that Inflection increase service if demand was greater than anticipated.

• "Scale on demand in the event that 10 million hits and/or 25,000 concurrent users are exceeded to ensure that the performance requirements ... are still achieved."

The crowd certainly exceeded those levels, as the most old-fashioned sounding search term possible, "1940 Census," became a top "trending topic" on Google and Twitter.

Most people seemed to get little or nothing from the site on the first day, including Census leaders, who were prepared to show off how easy it was to look up their grandparents. When the site stuck on "loading image," as it did for many other users, the officials resorted to showing a PowerPoint presentation with the results from an earlier search.

A 'tsunami'
As Inflection's general manager, Joe Godfrey, told us last week, "We were expecting a flood, but we got a tsunami."

• On Day One, Monday, an estimated 100 million hits, or requests, with 22.5 million hits in just the first three hours. Though Inflection scrambled to improve service, the site was unusable for many users on the first day. The company added more servers through Amazon Simple Storage Service, its cloud data service provider, and also restricted some features on the site (such as zooming of images), until finally it was able to get on top of the traffic.
• On Day Two, Tuesday, the numbers haven't been totaled, but it's believed to be higher than on Day One, with an estimated 40.1 million hits in the three-hour peak.
• By Friday, the site was stable with about 60 million hits per day, and had served up more than 80 million images, or about 61 terabytes of data, the National Archives said. (That's more than the data contained in the first 20 years of astronomical observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.) The service quality was better than called for in the contract, with a load time of about 1.8 seconds per page, according to the Archives.

In other words, this might have been a good project for a "soft launch."

The contract called for extensive load testing before the release. We asked the National Archives for copies of those test results, but its spokeswoman said it wouldn't be able to provide them. But it said the site was tested to handle more than 70,000 simultaneous users — more than the contract called for, and fewer than the level that resulted.

A 'no-cost contract'
No-cost contracts are allowed under Federal Acquisition Regulation competitive procedures. This contract has a one-year base period and options to extend for four more one-year periods.

"NARA provided a copy of the data to Inflection at no cost, copies that were sold to others for $200K," said spokeswoman Laura Diachenko of the National Archives. "Why Inflection agreed to this is a better question for them, but we are very happy to have them as a partner. They have experience with Census data, and managing access to large data sets, the capabilities we were seeking for this project."

She added, "Even though this is called a no-cost contract, the Government did incur costs — in this case, aside from our resources, we also provided a copy of the 1940 Census to Inflection, at no cost.  In this particular case, we provided them data that they wanted in exchange for hosting access to this data.  Their interest was in getting the data (for their archives.com business), and for business development (attracting users to their site and eventually converting them to a subscriber."

Inflection's Godfrey said, "The primary value for us was in building our brand/notoriety, leveraging and expanding our technical expertise/infrastructure and helping to getting this extremely valuable record collection into the hands of as many people as possible.  Also, our engineering team (like all great engineers) are motivated by tackling challenging technical problems, and so the team was very excited to work on this."

Competition
All or most of the 1940 Census is now available free from several other companies, which had to pay for the public records. As a sort of loss leader, other genealogy sites, even the commercial ones, are making the 1940 Census records available for free, to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Here's how the race worked: All the commercial sites that chose to buy the data for $200,000 were handed a rack of hard drives full of 20 terabytes of images, taken from 4,745 rolls of microfilm, at 12:01 a.m. on April 2, or 72 years and a day after the Census Day in 1940.

By Thursday, a relatively new genealogy site called myHeritage, was the first to have all the images online. Also making images available for free are Ancestry.com, a commercial site, and FamilySearch.org, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Thousands of volunteers are working on the next step: indexing the records by name, just as previous Census releases have been indexed by volunteers. Until those indexes are finished, searching is done only by address or neighborhood.

Your view
Do you approve of the approach that the National Archives took, giving the data away in exchange for the free website? And what stories have you found in the 1940 Census? Add your story in the comments below or on our Open Channel page on Facebook. See our earlier story for tips on searching the 1940 Census.

Update, 5:40 p.m. ET: The firm at the center of today's census records meltdown says, "We were expecting a flood, but we got a tsunami."

"We had estimates of how much traffic was going to hit the site, and we did performance testing at several levels above that, but we were surprised by the traffic," Joe Godfrey, senior director of product and general manager for Inflection, a Silicon Valley database company."

Inflection was hired by the National Archives and Records Administration, which provided the 1940 census records. Inflection buiilt the search engine to serve up the records, and relied on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as the cloud service provider. Inflection has been adding more of a pipeline to Amazon all day, adding the ability for more simultaneous connections, but so far searches for census records are running slowly or not running at all for many users.

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The company is trying to serve up 3.8 million images of census documents, each with multiple views at different zoom levels, with each file being 10 megabytes or larger.

Godfrey said the situation has improved, and engineers are hoping by the end of today to have the situation squared away.

Earlier:

Embarrassed by a computer system that crumbled under public demand, the National Archives and Records Administration said Monday that it's working to add more servers for the release of 1940 Census records. For more users the wait to see records on family members from the Great Depression era will go on for a while longer.

The Archives had hired Inflection, a Silicon Valley database company, to run the computers, but frustrated users lit up Facebook and Twitter with complaints about images that were said to be "loading" but never arrived.

"Our testing indicated NARA and Inflection could handle the load, but 1.9 mil visitors caused issues we're working to resolve," the Archives said via Twitter. Later it added, "We'll let you know as soon as we have another update - thank you for your patience, we know it's incredibly frustrating."

Even agency officials, during the webcast to kick off the day, couldn't get images to load when they tried to look up their own relatives.

In Springfield, Ohio, Facebook user Val Lough commented on our page: "It's very sweet of them to put all of these records on line. It would be even nicer of them to make the records VISIBLE. None of them will download, I have a browser window opening that's 'loading' the documents and has been for about 20 minutes. You might want to find out what their issues are. It would be faster to mail a public records request to the National Archives." Many others are tweeting about delays.

The National Archives says it is putting more servers online to handle the crush.  At one point, the Archives said, its computers were receiving 100,000 hits per second.

Hey, you've waited 72 years to see these records, so what's another day or two.

Earlier:

A time capsule from 1940 was opened on Monday at 9 a.m. ET, and we invite readers to share what they find. If you use the new records to find information about the loved or lost in your family, please post a note in the comments below or on our Open Channel page on Facebook.

U.S. Census records for individuals from April 1, 1940, protected until now by a 72-year privacy law, are now public for the first time, revealing details about millions of Americans from that day, as the country lingered in a Great Depression, still a year away from entry into war in Europe and the Pacific.

"I'm so excited!" Gary Robert Del Carlo of Martinsburg, W.Va., posted on Facebook. "Maybe for the first time ever, I'll be able to find out something about my father. All I have is my birth certificate with his name, date of birth, state born in, and that he was in the Army stationed in Washington State. His military records burned up in St. Louis in a fire in 1973. They would have told me a lot. Wrote for his birth certificate, and there was no records of his birth. I have done nothing but hit brick walls every which way I turn. I'm praying I find something useful tomorrow, anything."

NPR describes the release as the "Super Bowl for Genealogists." Librarians around the country are ready to provide assistance. At the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the staff will be serving cake and providing help.

 

When the 120,000 census takers counted 132,164,569 people living in the country on that day, the information collected included the address, whether the house was owned or rented, value of the home or monthly rent, is it considered a farm, names of adults and children, familiy relationships, sex, race, age, place of birth, citizenship, residence five years earlier, education. And for a small subset of people, about 5 percent, they were asked about place of birth of mother and father, language spoken in the home as a child, veteran status, wars served in, Social Security status, occupation, employment status, occupation, number of weeks worked in 1939, income and, for women, whether they had been married more than once, age at first marriage, and number of children ever born.

There is a catch. As the records go online, they can't be searched by name. For a city it's helpful to know an exact address, but often you can work with a neighborhood (near the corner of Canal and Varrick streets in New York City). Your public library may have old city directories or telephone directories from that period, allowing you to look up people by name to find an address. For a rural area, you need to know at least the county and the name of the town or township.

Genealogists, librarians and volunteers will begin the work of indexing the records, which eventually will allow searches by name. Two sites, the commercial Ancestry.com and the Mormon Church's FamilySearch.org, have announced plans to provide indexes to their customers as quickly as possible, with some images going online on Monday. FamilySearch and Ancestry.com started putting images from the Census files online early on Monday, but for now without a name index. 

For now, you must know at least an approximate address to get started. You use that address to find an "enumeration district," which in a big city might be only a few blocks, and would be a larger area in a small town.

Another approach, for those interested in a specific place, is to look at all the records for your block or street. If your area was settled in 1940, who lived there then, and what were their lives like?

Your goal: With that district number, you can look on the Census website at the online copy of the form filled out by the census taker in 1940. In 70 years, it has gone from paper to microfilm to computer.

Here are resources to help you with the search (links open in a new window), though as with most things in life, the key is: Ask a librarian.

• Most important page No. 1: Step-by-step help from private researchers with free aids to help you find the enumeration district map for a particular address
• Most important page No. 2: A Census explainer on starting your search.
• The home of the 1940 Census
• A Census page with general information on the 1940 release
• A copy of the 1940 Census form (PDF file) that you can fill in when you find information
• Census aids to finding information
• Ancestry.com, a commercial service for genealogists
• FamilySearch.org from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Tell us what you find: Post your story on Open Channel's Facebook page

 

In the field of climate science, when someone — especially skeptics — did something ethically questionable or misrepresented facts, scientist Peter Gleick was usually among the first and loudest to cry foul. He chaired a prominent scientific society's ethics committee. He created an award for what he considered lies about global warming.

Now Gleick admits that he posed as a board member to get and then distribute to the media sensitive documents from a conservative think tank that is a leader in questioning mainstream climate change science.

And ethicists are criticizing the man who took others to task for what they say was stepping way over the ethical line. The think tank, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, said it is considering legal action against him.

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Gleick, who won a MacArthur genius award and is co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, was chairman of the American Geophysical Union's ethics committee. He also had a column at Forbes.com where he criticized climate skeptics and trumpeted the resignation of a scientific journal editor who published a disputed study. He admitted Monday night that he solicited and leaked the Heartland documents, writing in a blog post on The Huffington Post.

Gleick resigned from the chairmanship of the ethics panel last week.

"What a mess," said Mark Frankel, head of scientific responsibility for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's leading scientific society, which also had Gleick as a panel member on some committees. "It's compounded by the fact that he was chairman of the ethics committee of a professional society. ... It's an ethical morass that he finds himself in."

And Gleick's actions cast unwarranted doubt on the work of other scientists, Frankel said.

Last week, someone identifying himself as "Heartland insider" sent 15 media members and others six documents, purportedly from Heartland. They included a fundraising document, a budget and a two-page "climate strategy." They showed the think tank receiving millions of dollars — more than $14 million over six years from one anonymous man — in big contributions with plans to teach school children to question mainstream climate science. It also showed funding of scientists who are climate-change skeptics.

Heartland said the two-page strategy document was a fake and the others were stolen. The Associated Press, which received the documents along with other news organizations, was able to verify the accuracy of several of the most sensational parts with the individuals named. The documents caused a stir, mirroring the hacking of climate scientists' emails two years earlier from a British research center.

"My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists," Gleick wrote. "Nevertheless, I deeply regret my own actions in this case."

Not good enough, Heartland president Joseph Bast said in a press release: "It has caused major and permanent damage to the reputations of The Heartland Institute and many of the scientists, policy experts and organizations we work with."

The issue is about deception and there are only a few things that could possibly warrant that — and embarrassing Heartland isn't one of them, said Dani Elliott, who teaches ethics at the University of South Florida.

The geophysical union, a scientific society, said in a statement that Gleick's actions are "inconsistent with our organization's values."

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Updated: 4:40 p.m. ET on Feb. 15: The Heartland Institute says the documents referred to below were obtained through "pretexting," in which a person posing as a board member sent an e-mail asking a staffer to "resend" documents from board meetings. The Institute says one of the documents, a "climate strategy" memo, "is a total fake," and the institute says it has not had a chance to reach its president, who is traveling, to determine whether any of the other documents were altered. See the full statement from Heartland below. The group later said that the president had returned, that one document is definitely faked, and that it would not comment on the rest.

Internal documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago nonprofit think tank, showing its funding of leading skeptics of global warming and a plan to teach climate change skepticism in schools. An anonymous person leaked the documents to several publications and activists supporting the science of climate change. 

"The heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses, including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris) RJR Tobacco and more," reports the DeSmogBlog, which published the documents on Tuesday. The blog opposes what it calls the "climate denial machine." (Disclosure: msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The first batch of documents is here on the DeSmogBlog, and a second batch dealing with fundraising.

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The documents show a plan to develop a curriculum for teaching about climate change in K-12 schools:

Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education.

Dr. David Wojick has presented Heartland a proposal to produce a global warming curriculum or K-12 schools that appears to have great potential for success. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. He has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Tech. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon and the staffs of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab.

Dr. Wojick has conducted extensive research on environmental and science education for the Department of Energy. In the course of this research, he has identified what subjects and concepts teachers must teach, and in what order (year by year), in order to harmonize with national test requirements. He has contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting science curricula.

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $5,000 per module, about $25,000 a quarter, starting in the second quarter of 2012, for this work. The Anonymous Donor has pledged the first $100,000 for this project, and we will circulate a proposal to match and then expand upon that investment.

Here's a copy of the group's fundraising plan, with a list of donors.

The documents also show funding of leading voices among the opponents of the idea of global warming: "At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found."

About its funders, the group refers to a single anonymous donor: "Our climate work is attractive to funders, especially our key Anonymous Donor (whose contribution dropped from $1,664,150 in 2010 to $979,000 in 2011 - about 20% of our total 2011 revenue). He has promised an increase in 2012…"

Other donors are named: "We will also pursue additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. They returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000. We expect to push up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to their network of philanthropists, if our focus continues to align with their interests. Other contributions will be pursued for this work, especially from corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies."

Statement from the Heartland Institute

Heartland Institute Responds to Stolen and Fake Documents

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.

Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.

Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.

But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.

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The document that Heartland says is a fake is this one titled "2012 Heartland Climate Strategy." The spokesman, Lakely, said it was defamatory to suggest that Heartland did not want science to be taught in schools, or that it would try to keep opposing views out of the press, or would think that it could.

The DeSmogBlog says about the "faked document":

The DeSmogBlog has reviewed that Strategy document and compared its content to other material we have in hand. It addresses five elements:

The Increased Climate Project Fundraising material is reproduced in and confirmed by Heartland's own budget.

The "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms" is also a Heartland budget item and has been confirmed independently by the author, Dr. David Wojick.

The Funding for Parallel Organizations; Funding for Selected Individuals Outside Heartland are both reproduced and confirmed in the Heartland budget. And Anthony Watts has confirmed independently the payments in Expanded Climate Communications.

The DeSmogBlog has received no direct communications from the Heartland Institute identifying any misstatement of fact in the "Climate Strategy" document and is therefore leaving the material available to those who may judge their content and veracity based on these and other sources.