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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.'"
This lowly anon humbly suggests tagging the story "ministryoftruth".
Seems rather appropriate.
When it is a government employee doing this, on the clock, paid for by tax dollars, as part of their official duties... well that is what propaganda is. Why the hell are we paying for "mass communications officers" in the first place? Does anyone support their tax dollars going to pay for someone to go post positive comments on Digg about government programs? Say, are you by any chance a "mass communications officer?"
A better analogy would be "next you're going to tell me that Linus Torvals is working for the government and, while on the tax-payer's dime, is posting false information and deleting content that may be true but negative toward linux on wikipedia".
Also, the ideal goal is to keep Wikipedia as void of 'opinion' as possible anyway.
I'm shocked that the military would try to edit Gitmo facts out of Wikipedia. Don't they know that pages' history is saved, so that improper deletions can be easily restored? Don't they know that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of editors paranoid enough about the Bush administration and war on terror to monitor the Gitmo page? Couldn't the military be doing something, um, useful to prosecute the war on terror? Didn't the military realize that these efforts would come back to bite them in the ass (thanks Wikileaks!) and further hamper their efforts?
And regarding Lt. Col. Bush's "He was just doing his job" defense, I'd like to note that that defense hasn't been recognized in law since at least Nuremburg.
We apparently can't get ethical intelligence officers, but can we at least get intelligent intelligence officers?
Oh right you just wanted to troll about Wikipedia, my mistake.
While it is true that every bit of information out there is shaded by personal perceptions, I can better make my own informed decisions vis-a-vis said information if I know who is communicating it to me. What this information officer was doing is repugnant in a democratic society where people need to make informed choices. Saying that we've been doing it since forever doesn't set precedent as propaganda's general purpose is to control the public opinion: it seems antithetical to democratic societies. And while Wikipedia is not perfect on political topics, at least it's something and we can make discoveries about the editorial leanings of the contributors.
Is the officer defending his guy for "just doing his job" to abuse privately owned and operated websites and spread misinformation. His job? I'm sorry, but spreading (mis)information is what the whole .gov domain was created for. There's no need to deface private websites and spam comments pages...and be paid to do it with our tax dollars. You do that, you deserve what's coming to you and it should be the military's duty to make sure they aren't assigning soldiers to such incredibly wasteful activities.
a military prison has a spin-meister.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So ignore a truth unless the person saying it is guilt-free? Facts don't stand on their own anymore?
Twinstiq, game news
This is different. The article specifically states that the soldier is their "mass communications specialist", and that he was being paid to edit the articles to support Guantanamo.
I could see your point if the article read "military IPs used to edit wikipedia", but this is being financed by the government. Lt. Col. Ed Bush came right out and said that their "mass communications specialist" was just doing his job.
That is the point of wikipedia. That is not the important part of this story and, in fact, it mentions Digg and several other sites. The point of this story is the government is spending our tax dollars to spread "positive reviews" and misinformation related to government projects, thereby undermining the fourth estate. The other point of this story is they are incompetent at it and admit to doing it. Can't you muster up just a little bit of indignation that instead of providing ten poverty stricken youth with full scholarships to university we're paying at least one incompetent hack that money to lie to us on Web forums?
As for the pro-Kremlin bloggers, A recent report by Radio Free Europe states, "A new generation of pro-Kremlin bloggers, for example, is being cultivated to spread Putin's word online -- and to rapidly disrupt the activities of Russia's opponents, both real and imagined.
When Kasparov's Other Russia held a rally in Moscow on April 14, for example, a group of pro-Kremlin bloggers from the Young Guard youth movement flooded the Internet with reports of a smaller pro-regime demonstration on the same day. In doing so, they crowded out postings about the opposition march on Russia's top web portals -- creating a virtual news blackout in one of the last refuges of free media in the county. Pavel Danilin, the pro-Putin blogger who spearheaded the effort bragged to 'The Washington Post' that his team 'played it beautifully.'"
Is Russia becoming more like the USA, or is the USA becoming more like Russia?
This isn't a matter of opinion. This is a matter of obscuring or removing factual information portraying what actually happened. To lie about something factual is entirely different than offering an opinion. And the motive is obvious - to circumvent accountability.
If the government claims "lots of other people are doing it" as justification for anything it does, I want the same defense the next time a cop pulls me over for speeding, or when the IRS questions some of my more creative tax deductions. Otherwise, we're setting up a two track system: one for people who work the government levers, and the other for the people who pay for the levers to be there.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The difference is that the officers were doing a job paid for by you. It is entirely appropriate that the public know where their money is going and who is spending it doing what. If the officers did this in their own private time, there would be a conflict of interest issue, but there would be no reason to leak their details. If the officers did this on your payroll, you have every right to know what they did, why they did it, and if they should have done it. If you are paying for something you have a right to know what people are doing with your money, obviously with certain exceptional limitations, this being far from any of those.
The government has no right to privacy from the people, therefore this is not 'lawyerly equivocating.' The people are *supposed* to have oversight on government activities.
There are few things more annoying than when people ignore scale. What Moscow does and what Washington does in terms of media manipulation is night and day. Washington does merrily try and get its perspective thrown into a favorable light... like all the other governments in the world. It might even use shitty tactics some times. The difference is the scale. Washington performs card tricks while Moscow makes 747's disappear. Last time I checked, no one is dying to find a loop hole to keep Bush in office and his approval rating is hovering somewhere around a truly impressive 30%. If anything, all of Bush successors are trying desperately to avoid using his name as anything other than a curse word. The opposition party in the US (Democrats) are in the processes of trashing the shit out of ex-ruling party (Republicans). Moscow doesn't have any opposition parties beyond a small powerless communist party. Moscow doesn't even bother having elections for regional governors and just appoints them.
So, does Washington run propaganda campaigns? Sure. They should be. It isn't like the various groups opposed to the US are not running their own. They should be ethical in how they run their campaigns, but it absolutely is their duty to run them. If there is a breach of ethics, it should be investigated and dealt with. That said, I have to roll my eyes and yawn at the editing Wikipedia articles. If they hacked into Wikipedia and deleted change logs, I would be on the OMGWTF bandwagon. If some ass hole in a government office who was tasked with fighting a propaganda campaign was an absolute dumb shit and interpreted those orders as "go edit Wikipedia and leave behind my IP and change logs", than my out rage is reserved to the fact that we would hire such a dumb ass in the first place, not the fact that it was done. I am far more pissed off that my money was wasted on paying some dumbass who thinks that making a few edits to wikipedia, a website specifically design to be resistant against such bone headed attacks, counts as scoring a victory in a propaganda effort against Islamic extremist.
In the realm of "counter to the interests of the US populace and unconstitutional" there is so much more important stuff than this. This is just an aftershock of the much bigger "counter to the interests of the US populace and unconstitutional" practices going on like Gitmo itself, not the Wikipedia entry.
We are all just people.
There's a big difference between the government invading the privacy of individuals versus individuals monitoring what their government does.
Actually, Colbert's truthy line is "...For as we are all aware, the Facts have a well-known Liberal bias." ...his implication being, that when you understand cause and effect, you realize that life is something that needs to be nurtured, not dominated, and that only by investing directly in the health, education, and general welfare of the people do you get a healthy and prosperous body politic.
Those whom he indicts in the government and press for distorting the truth, he also calls cowards. When the truth doesn't serve your ends, it is courageous and moral to change your course. But again and again those who have usurped the reins of power consider only their own distorted ends, without consideration for the reasonable will of the people. They would have us be ruled by false images so that we relinquish all our power.
One only wonders, to what end are they deceiving us and stealing our power? I suppose it must be private elite world domination, and the well-being of the people be damned.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Way to miss the F'ing point. I don't care, so long as they aren't doing so using my involuntarily claimed tax dollars. The constitution is predicated upon the belief that the US government is the greatest danger to the freedom of the people. When homosexual groups start taxing me under threat of imprisonment, then I'll take offense. Until then, the point is what the government is doing.
You can read here, on page 3 of this pdf, about the most recent rotation of public affairs GIs. They are just kids. Most of what they do are puff pieces -- interviews for the "Chaplain's Corner". Sixty wikipedia edits, of this sort, could have been done by a couple of bored privates, over their lunch hour, the day the Sergeant was out of the office.
More notable is the goodbye essay of Colonel Lora L. Tucker, a retiring PCH officer, on page 2. The way I see it her retiring essay provides a big part of the answer to the question how could American soldiers be involved in abusing captives?
Guarding men, held without charge, for an indefinite term, would be bad for the morale of young American GIs. What I think happened is that officers like Geoffrey Miller, Harry Harris, made the conscious decision to demonize the Guantanamo captives, keeping up the GI's morale by vastly overstating the importance of the captives, the danger they represented, and the confidence responsible officers could have about their role in terrorist attacks.
Colonel Tucker seems to have accepted the unsubstantiated claims of spin doctors at face value.
Back in 2005 there was a brief period when camp authorities allowed the press to interview some of the ordinary troops who served as the camp's guards. I remember a brief clip the BBC broadcast about his frustrations about serving as a camp guard. He made two points:
Guards weren't given enough scope to retaliate against captives who spit on them, or threw urine on them.
(paraphrasing) "Half of these guys killed a US soldier." Well, I checked. At the time the guard made this comment 192 American GIs had died in Afghanistan -- including those like Pat Tillman who were victims of "friendly fire". At that point about 500 captives remained in Guantanamo. So even if every American death could be attributed to a Guantanamo captive, that still wouldn't have been "half".
When examined in detail the allegations faced by only a few dozen captives could be honestly reported to have been "captured on the battlefield" -- for any reasonable definition of battlefield. The allegations against most of the captives don't support the claim that they were "combatants". Under the Geneva Conventions a demobilized soldier is considered a civilian. According to the Geneva Conventions only soldier who are currently part of an army, or militia -- or civilians who choose to engage in hostilities against their countries invaders, are combatants. A veteran might be highly decorated, or admired -- according to the Geneva Convention, if that demobilized veteran stayed home, didn't try to re-enlist, and left his rifle hanging over his mantle, he remained a civilian.
The Guantanamo captives included a couple of dozen grandfathers, who were considered combatants because they fought against Afghanistan's Soviet invaders during the 1980s. One grandfather's military service dated back to 1960s, when he served in the Afghanistan Army when Afghanistan was still a monarchy.
And yet the guards believed, "over half these guys killed a US soldier". The authorities demonized them. And this set the stage for the abuse.
And you reactionaries often cry, "It was a joke!" when people call you out for being a dick. And please enlighten me as to how writing words, any words, can make one a thug. For instance, saying "tjstork is an enormous tool who kisses the ass of any American fascist he can lay his lips on" does not make one a thug. Thugs torture people with waterboarding and electric shocks to the testicles. They don't post messages on Slashdot saying things like, "tjstork's grasp of logic is as piss-poor as his grasp of sociopolitical realities."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
*snerk*.
Showing "both sides" of every issue may be "fair and balanced" -- but if one of those sides is arguing that the atomic weight of helium is 5 or 3+3=17, it does nothing to promote popular knowledge of objective truths.
I think planting information to try to mislead the US populace is actually right up there among the most serious misdeeds the administration can do. Our entire democratic system relies on well informed people being able to vote for who best represents them. Any misinformation campaign run by the government can only be seen as a deliberate attempt to make the voters vote against their best interests. That's a pretty serious charge in my book.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace