Guantanamo Officers Caught Modifying Wikipedia

James Hardine writes "Wikileaks reports that US armed forces personnel at Guantanamo have conducted propaganda attacks over the Internet. (The story has been picked up by the NYTimes, The Inquirer, the New York Daily News, and the AP.) The activities documented by Wikileaks include deleting Guantanamo detainees' ID numbers from Wikipedia, posting of self-praising comments on news websites in response to negative articles, promoting pro-Guantanamo stories on the Internet news focus website Digg, and even altering Wikipedia's entry on Cuban President Fidel Castro to describe him as 'an admitted transsexual' (misspelling the word 'transsexual'). Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Bush blasted Wikileaks for identifying one 'mass communications officer' by name, who has since received death threats for 'simply doing his job — posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.'"

Comments

Re:Minor gripe

[Wordplay]

I wouldn't. Propaganda just means tilting public opinion towards positive through use of the media and other mass communications, with an implication (but not requirement) that it's less than honest. That could be adding positive info, that could be deleting negative info, given access. Wiki is unusual in that it would actually let you do the latter, oversight considerations aside.

Enough people don't understand that Wiki's only -really- valid as a collection of other cites and take it at face value that this sort of thing could be very effective if it's not outed.

Re:misspelling?

[ShieldW0lf]

From the article in question:

This is the American government speaking to the American people and to the world through Wikipedia, not identifying itself and often speaking about itself in the third person, Assange said in a telephone interview from Paris.

Army Lt. Col. Ed Bush, a prison camps spokesman, said there is no official attempt to alter information posted elsewhere but said the military seeks to correct what it believes is incorrect or outdated information about the prison.

Bush declined to answer questions about the Castro posting.

Assange said that in January 2006, someone at Guantánamo wrote in a Wikipedia profile of the Cuban president: Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual, the unknown writer said, misspelling the word transsexual.

The U.S. has no formal relations with Cuba and has maintained its base in the southeast of the island over the objections of the Castro government.

So, that's a lie. Also, from the link you posted:

Revision as of 20:55, 16 January 2006 (edit) ...my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle.'' [http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm]

Revision as of 22:22, 16 January 2006 (edit) ...my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle.'' [http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm] + Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual.

So, you're not just a liar, but also an idiot.

Re:misspelling?

[ShieldW0lf]

The user in question is simply a common wikipedia vandal. The only pro-US change he made was calling Fidel Castro a transsexual, yet he goes on to call the president "George Wanker Bush" and a "fag". Those two edits were the only politic-related pages he altered. Furthermore, his IP resolves to Romania, which is nowhere near Guantanamo or any place I would choose to conveniently locate a pro-US wikipedia propaganda artist.

More lies and propaganda. The link you posted was to the person who edited BEFORE it was altered. The link to the actual user who did this is here

Reverse DNS lookup reveals that IP belongs to:

130.22.190.5 resolves to
"public.jtfgtmo.southcom.mil"
Top Level Domain: "southcom.mil"

So, how much do you guys get paid for doing this?

Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job???

[Sergeant Pepper]

all while of course, your email is hidden. What a hypocrite you are! That doesn't qualify as hypocritical... you might want to look up the definition of hypocritical.

hypocritical: Characterized by hypocrisy or being a hypocrite.

hypocrisy: The claim, pretense, or false representation of holding beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not actually possess. The only way it could POSSIBLY qualify as hypocrisy was if he, too, was a military mass communications officer who was being paid to spread propaganda on the internet. Which I doubt.

Re:Expert on subject modifying Wikipedia! Horror!

[thirty-seven]

So what happens if people on the inside are the only ones who know the real truth about a certain subject? Wikipedia is not the place for original research; they have a policy against it. If you're the only one with firsthand knowledge of an event, or if you have made a new discovery, or even if you have some new well-argued analysis, then the thing to do is to publish it elsewhere (newspaper, book, website, press release) and, if they think it's worthwhile, others will add this information to an article on wikipedia and cite you.

Re:Minor gripe

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Public relations? Winning of hearts and minds? Press liaison? All are fairly legit functions of any administration, as is outright propaganda.

Bullshit. Even the former director of the CIA disagrees with you, as he stated that some of the misinformation campaigns we've run in the middle east have made their way into US news, which is counter to the interests of the US populace and unconstitutional. The army/executive branch may have a legal mandate to plant misinformation overseas, but as soon as it is meant for the US population, they've overstepped their authority. The people should rightly be outraged by this and should require such programs have their funding removed, especially at a time when Bush is claiming it is too expensive to help pay sick children's medical bills.

Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job???

[Sergeant Pepper]

However, these people are now tracking people on the internet and monitoring communications themselves. How else does Wikileaks find out who is posting what, unless, they are monitoring traffic of people? It might have helped had you RTFA. There was no "monitoring of traffic." Things like Wikipedia attach the IP of the editor to edits. They looked at all the edits made by the IP assigned to Guantanamo.

And, to get people to turn over goodies, they encourage them to lie in the workplace about what they are doing. Where did this come from? There was nothing in TFA about lying.

So, in order for these people to save privacy, they throw privacy away even more Two VERY DIFFERENT THINGS. "These people," as you call them, are looking at information that the people from Guantanamo posted on the internet. That is to say, it is a published action. However, there is no way to claim that two people's private phone call is a published action. They're two very different things that cannot be compared. Apples to oranges. Or, to use more slashdotter-ly terminology, a BMW to a submarine.

In order for these people to save honesty, they encourage people to lie. I have seen no lies in TFA. Only the exposing of lies.

And now, you defend someone's right to publicize another person's contact information, but, if someone else ran a web site with names addresses of people that you liked, you would be up in arms. The only way for people to get names and addresses of people that I liked would be to do things illegal. Again, apples to oranges. You're comparing the gathering of freely available information and forming a conclusion based on it to wiretapping.

There's only one thing to conclude: The only thing to conclude is that you are incapable of rational and logical thought. You started with wrong assumptions and then used bad analogies and illogic to come to an even worse conclusion.

the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit

[TopSpin]

That's the slogan which appears on the Main_Page of Wikipedia. The provided link leads to Wikipedia:Introduction which states:

anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold I presume the "almost any page" refers to that tiny subset of pages that are locked at any one moment. No criterion for who is and is not permitted to edit Wikipedia are provided.

Now, Wikipedia does maintain a NPOV policy that one might consider relevant to the case at hand. However, NPOV applies to the nature of contributed content, not the nature of the contributor. When he's not ordering political opponents assassinated, Putin is free to work to his own page, as long as the contributed content maintains a NPOV.

The Wikileaks page linked from our /. story lists the 60 edits in question. If you actually examine these edits you'll find they appear to have no general focus. Edits include grammar and spelling corrections, elaborations on pop culture topics and other matters. Since the vast majority of these edits lack any obvious political agenda, Wikileaks helpfully "highlights" the 5 controversial edits, otherwise you might miss them:

1. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
2. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
3. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
4. Alter one word to characterize the current Afghanistan conflict as a "war" instead of an "invasion".
5. Add the sentence "Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual."

Having read all of the same edits myself I can confirm that these 5 edits constitute the complete propaganda attack. I can only speculate why someone from Gitmo might feel the need to remove detainee ID numbers; perhaps the practice is obsolete. Who knows? The detainee topics themselves weren't harmed in any substantive way by the lack of ID numbers. The petty "war" verses "invasion" thing; they're both wrong. The only NPOV word that comes to mind for me is "conflict". As for the transsexual bit; puerile crap like this appears at a frequency of several Hz on Wikipedia, and is removed almost as quickly by various bots and many diligent editors. Ascribing this to some propaganda machine when it could just as easily have been some twit among the 3000+ active duty troops in Gitmo is a real stretch.

There you have it; 3 unexplained detainee ID removals which failed to significantly propagandize anything, a single word edit war in which both sides are guilty of violating NPOV and some vandalism.

Wow.

Reality check

[geoswan]

In this day and age, there is a decidedly anti-government and anti-Bush perspective that is promoted by many in the mainstream media and, often, in places like Slashdot and Wikipedia.

Oh? Examples please? If this claim was really true why have so few of the stories about rogue GI had any legs. It seems to me that the MSM has dropped a lot of stories as if they were radioactive.

Here is a counter-example. Carolyn Wood. This officer was in charge of interrogations at Bagram when her troops slowly, methodically, brutally beat two innocent men to death. All the captives in her prison were subjected to a couple of days or a couple of weeks of beatings, isolation and sleep deprivation. The sleep deprivation was administered by having their hands shackled above their heads. If passing guards saw them nodding off, in spite the shackling, they were supposed to administer a "peroneal strike".

These two men died, while the others survived, because they got more than their share of blows. One was rumored to have a brother who was a taliban commander. He wasn't accused of being a member of the Taliban himself. But he was mouthy. Even though his autopsy showed he died of these blows. Even though the military pathologist classed his death as a homicided Wood failed to rein in her troops, and the other man was beaten to death. The troops didn't believe he was really an enemy. They just found his cries amusing. He was estimated to have received over 400 of these peroneal strikes. The military pathologist who examined his body said she had only seen legs so badly damaged once -- someone whose legs had been run over by a bus.

So, what happened to Wood? Court-martial? Dishonorable discharge?

Nope. She was given a Bronze Star, and a promotion, and a new assignment.

Next stop Abu Ghraib.

No. I am not making this up. It was mainly military police in the pictures the DoD released from the Abu Ghraib gallery. But in the background of some of those pictures you can see some of Wood's interrogators. The hapless MPs said that they had been instructed and egged on by Wood's troops.

Wood drafted the infamous "Interrogation Rules of Engagement" that went out of Sanchez's signature in September 2003. Wood's interrogators are known to have used unauthorized interrogation methods she developed in Bagram in Iraq.

So, what happened next? Court-martial? Dishonorable discharge? Have her Bronze Star stripped from her?

Another Bronze Star. And a plum assignment. She was made an interrogation instructor at Camp Huaxcha, the US Army's intelligence college.

No. I am not making this up.

The Fay-Jones Inquiry made the following recommendations to her commanding officers:

Finding: CPT Carolyn A. Wood, Officer in Charge, Interrogation Control Element (ICE), Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, 519 MI BDE A preponderance of evidence supports that CPT Wood failed to do the following: *Failed to implement the necessary checks and balances to detect and prevent detainee abuse. Given her knowledge of prior abuse in Afghanistan, as well as the reported sexual assault of a female detainee by three 519 MI BN Soldiers working in the ICE, CPT Wood should have been aware of the potential for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. As the Officer-in-Charge (OIC) she was in a position to take steps to prevent further abuse. Her failure to do so allowed the abuse by Soldiers and civilians to undetected and unchecked.
*Failed to assist in gaining control of a chaotic situation during the IP Roundup, even after SGT Eckroth approached her for help.
*Failed to provide proper supervision. Should have been more alert due to the following incidents:

*An ongoing investigation on the 519 MI BN in Afghanistan.
*Prior reports of 519 MI BN interrogators conducting unauthorized interrogations.
*SOLDIER29's repo