Feb

Tell-tale date format?

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We have heard US blame Iran many time for the deaths of their troops in Iraq. There is however, new evidence to support the fact that the bombs used were supplied by the US themselves….

In a letter published in the New York Times on 2/26/07 (p. A24), M. A. Mohammadi, the Press Secretary in the Mission of Iran to the United Nations, attacks U.S. allegations about his country:

The United States media should not become the conduit for the systematic disinformation campaign against Iran reflected in a new wave of baseless accusations about Iranian weapons inside Iraq.

Iran flatly denies the United States‘ allegations aimed at deflecting attention from the failures of American policy in Iraq.

… The evidence that has been produced is preposterous (the dates on the evidence are in American date format — month first, day second — whereas the rest of the world does not use this format).

I don’t know what the facts are for this particular evidence, but an American date format on putatively Iranian material would indeed be suspicious.

As the Wikipedia entry on “calendar date” explains, there are three systems for ordering the three components of dates:

Little endian, from smallest to largest unit: 27 February 2007; 27/2/07 or 27/2/2007. Used in “the vast majority of the world’s countries”, including Iran.

Big endian, from largest to smallest unit: 2007 February 27; 2007-02-07. The ISO 8601 standard, used in computer dates. Also used in a dozen or so countries, notably China and Japan, sometimes coexisting with other systems.

Middle endian, starting with the month: February 27, 2007; 2/27/07 or 2/27/07. “Used in the United States and countries with U.S. influence”.

(There are also variations in the separating characters — slash, hyphen, period, or space — and in details of the date components.)

So a middle-endian date would strongly suggest that the date was written by an American, not an Iranian.