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attempt to alter information posted elsewhere but said the military seeks to correct what it believes is incorrect or outdated information about the prison.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: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.

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.