Time Zones, Watson

I just watched the press conference held by Detlev Mehlis at the UN HQ in New York to address the presence of 2 different versions of his report.

As many of you know by now, there have been 2 circulating versions of the Mehlis report. In fact they are only one version, but in 2 different formats. One format, a PDF document (.pdf extension), is the official version submitted by Mehlis to the Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan. The second contains the exact same text only formatted as a MS Office Word document (.doc extension). In the latest versions of MS Word, there exists a feature called "Track Changes" which allows the different modifications/revisions done to the document to be recorded and displayed. Use of this feature is commonplace when the document is the collaborative effort of several authors and when multiple revisions and tweaks are expected.





In the Word formatted document provided to the media, several of these changes are visible and include repeated replacement of names of senior Syrian and Lebanese officials with vague descriptive titles.

PDF Version








Word Version





...appeared in Annahar Newspaper











A controversy has since erupted which aims to throw doubts over the credibility of the Mehlis Report by claiming that the intentional omission of the actual suspect names was done at the request of Annan. The reasoning behind that is that if Annan had the power to change the wording of the document then the entire factual content of the report could no longer be trusted.

Aiming to allay those fears, Mehlis held a news conference this morning in NY in which he stated that all the modifications were done by him after he learnt that the report would be released to the media for circulation. The names omitted were the testimony of one witness he interviewed, and while their inclusion would be acceptable in a confidential report, he felt that a public report should not mention specific names not yet sufficiently corroborated. This was done before the meeting with Annan, he claimed, and thus were not the result of any political pressure. This is supported by the fact that the first change to be made was the deletion of the word "Confidential" from the title page, which the public report no longer was.

The reporters however kept coming back to one 'flaw' they noted in his explanation, which was that the Word document not only notes the changes done to the document but also the time those changes were made. The computer clearly states that he changes were done at 11:55 AM which is the time Mehlis was meeting with Annan. Mehlis had no explanation for that other than his self-stated unfamiliarity with computer software and operation, and said "you either believe me or you don't".





Please, Mr. Mehlis, allow me to come to your defense with ONE simple fact that all of those reporters seem to have missed. In two words: TIME ZONES!

You see, this report in all likelihood was written on a notebook computer. Notebook computers are wonderful portable things that allow you to carry along all your work and important documents and to modify and change those documents on the fly. What they DON'T do however is automatically adjust their system clocks to the time zones of the countries they happen to be in.

So assuming that Mehlis has worked on a laptop provided by the UN in Beirut for all the months of his investigation, it stands to good reason that that laptop would have been set for Beirut local time (+3 GMT with daylight savings). It also stands to very good reason that upon arriving at New York to deliver this report the world is waiting for this investigator would not have had the inclination or the time to go about resetting the system clock to NY local time (-5 GMT). This means that, during his entire stay in New York, and during any revisions that were made to the document, that system clock would have been 8 hours ahead of NY.

Lets look at those time points again then and see if that makes sense.

Mehlis arrived at New York on October 19th 2005.
He was meeting with Kofi Annan somewhere around 11:00 AM on October 20th.
He was pictured handing Kofi Annan a folder with the printed copy of the report at the start of the meeting.
Logic dictates then that if Mehlis is truthful, the modification time and printing time of that document should lie somewhere in between Oct 19th and 11 AM Oct 20th.

As you can see in the pictures below, subtracting 8 hours from the time of the deleted comments yields 3 AM Oct 20th in NY, and doing the same to the printing time yields 7 AM Oct 20th. Makes sense, doesn't it? If however those timings were in NY time, then that print would have been made at 2 PM NY time, which is as we all know AFTER the meeting and MUCH EARLIER than the report was released to the media. Doesn't make sense.













I believe you Mr. Mehlis.
And thank you.

Next time though, just say: "Time Zone!" and leave the room...


Note: Someone will suggest that this is all somehow intentional on Mehlis' part to send an indirect message to Syrian officials, to name names despite being asked not to, or some other grand conspiracy. I think he's only human.