Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I would be hard pressed to call editing wikipedia articles to favor oneself "conducting a propaganda campaign", much in the same way that I would feel awkward referring to updating my blog as a press release.
This lowly anon humbly suggests tagging the story "ministryoftruth".
Seems rather appropriate.
Lets have a pity party and dance to the music of the worlds smallest violins.
Only people who share your viewpoint may edit wikipedia. People who have first hand knowledge may not. That is the cardinal rule. Experts may not edit Wikipedia if their viewpoint (or the facts) might conflict with yours. Remember, hating Bush is the end all and be all of Wikipedia.
Sorry if I can't build up any outrage over this. Wikipedia needs to remove the biased log in its own eye before bitching about specks in the eyes of others. This is what you get when you allow anyone to edit any article.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The mass communications officer is expected to make a full recovery as a Slashdot editor and meta-moderator.
Wasn't this covered a few days ago?
Pure awesomenes
Different people have different opinions on political topics. Next you're going to tell me the wikipedia article on Linux is not very nice towards Microsoft.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Certain people shouldn't be allowed to post comments or edit Wikipedia. We gotta lock the Internet down; it's the only way to preserve freedom of expression.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Government employees have the same right to free expression as I do!
I can't stand it when people have a different world view than I do, and then go out there modifying a website designed to be modifiable by anyone.
How dare they!
Actually, the guys at Gitmo are probably the ones with the most information that goes on there. I'd rather have their input in the articles than every random jackass from Daily Kos, who exist simply to fan flames and spread rumors.
And, for the record, I think it's very, very wrong to house these guys at Gitmo. This "new kind of enemy stuff" is pure bullshit. Enemy combatants, who disguise themselves as civilians, are spies. Spies are supposed to be *executed*, not detained.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The employee, formerly employed as a Microsoft "astroturfer" .....
....
The SS officer who claimed he was just following orders
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?
I don't get these flagwavers, the kind that go out and change Wikipedia. My Dad is one of them, and he shouldn't be. He flunked out of an Arkansas community college in the 60s so they sent him to Vietnam. That would pretty much sour me on any country, but there's Dad, still waving the fucking flag and taking off his hat at baseball games. What a douchebag.
I fucking hate my country. And not just because of Guantanamo and this whole "war on terror" nonsense. I hate the fact that we talk about how "free" we are when we've got more of our population in prison than any other country in the world. I hate the fact that someone that robs a bank at gunpoint gets 5 years while someone that downloads dirty pics of a 14 year old gets 3 times that, and yet they still let the local high school cheerleaders hold "bikini carwashes". I thought looking at under age girls was bad? What the hell?
I hate all this mandatory sentencing shit that ties judges hands, I hate the way my employer can declare bankruptcy, stiff me on my last 2 paychecks, and the executives walk away scot-free. If I'm a day fucking late on my credit card bill I've got fuckers calling me on the phone and telling me I'm a deadbeat. Hey, what about the 300K/year CEO that owes me 2 paychecks? Oh no, thats just a failed business, he'll get another high paying executive salary somewhere else, but god, he's no deadbeat.
I got to leave the country for 2 weeks once, I went to a USENIX in Stockholm. Did you know you can walk in the parks at night there? It was fucking amazing. I was WALKING in a park at night and not a single cop tased me or beat me with his nightstick.
Fuck the United States. I hate it here. Go ahead. Call me a pinko. It fucking sucks here, the quality of life is shit, the hypocrisy is intolerable.
This is not mentioned in the article, nor appears on the actual wikipedia edit history.
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.
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Gotta catch 'em all indeed
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The incompetence of government is our only real chance at safely. These people are the reason I don't believe the government has covered up UFO's or a massive 9/11 conspiracy. They aren't competent. They can't find their own ass using both hands, much less scratch it without getting caught. The fixed ratio of stupidity to malice being constant means the damage these people can do will be sort term. (Short term being years though.) Much the same way the malice/stupidity ratio lead to the Nazi's being responsible for the very mistakes that lead to their defeat.
fighting for "the free world"... America has lost all of its moral credibility in the world. I'm still looking up to the fathers of your constitution. That's some of the best lines of code ever written. Very, very wise men... Look what you made out of this today, look at who got 50% of your votes at the last election. That's so sad.
From the wikileak page where a purported posting from a military communications / journalist / etc officer is displayed:
[quote] I got a little lazy and gained a few pounds, ok more than a few... lol.[/quote]
Please tell me that a supposed journalist and professional communications specialist did not just use 'lol'.
a military prison has a spin-meister.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The only difference between Propaganda, PR, and Marketing is just the spelling.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
So ignore a truth unless the person saying it is guilt-free? Facts don't stand on their own anymore?
Twinstiq, game news
Maybe they're trying to correct falsehoods like the US not allowing some Muslim prisoners to pray and not given a copy of the Koran. However, this would be odd when it's widely known Gitmo Muslims are allowed to pray, given a copy of the Koran, and even have an arrow painted on the floor of their cell pointing towards Mecca.
So the edit, changed the title of link to the article "War in Afghanistan (2001-present)" to say 'War in Afghanistan' instead of 'Invasion of Afghanistan' and I'm supposed to get worked up over it?
Just may be me, but calling it Invasion of Afghanistan is just a clever way of trying to spin it the other direction.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I completely agree with Linus on this one.
The man is quite correct on the matter.
name on the jar of fucking surprise, [mit.edu] found at least.' Nobody the above is far that *BSD is the aacounting
The article doesn't assert anywhere that these amateurish Gitmo propaganda efforts were actually successful. (And they probably haven't been.) This doesn't look good, but few will likely follow this story: it'll likely be an occasional footnote in articles critiquing Gitmo's larger transgressions.
The "detainees" are the scum of the earth. They are lucky that they weren't executed outright. We should honor the brave men and women who put up with the hardship of guarding this scum. I have no more pity for the terrorist "detainees" than I would have for Joseph Mengele, Klaus Barbie, or Adolph Eichmann.
Those bastards!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where did they find the time to to edits? I thought they spent all their time getting really Gay with all the prisoners.... you know parading them around naked, stacking them up naked, sticking stuff in their ass... Don't ask, don't tell indeed...
The Left is the Right's bestest friend.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
There is a rule against modifying your own wiki page. This applies to organizations as well as individuals, largely because of ulterior motives like this.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
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?
Honestly, is any "XXXXX caught modifying wikipedia" article really newsworthy nowadays?
Wikipedia is editable by anyone.
It's human nature to want to modify bad news about yourself or your business.
I guess even smart men can have terrorists for children. Maybe you should sit down with him and ask him why he loves his country so much even though they sent him against his will to fight a meaningless war. Who knows, you might learn something.
Military intelligence two words combined that can't make sense.... (Megadeth-Hangar 18) ;)
Y'know, in every DoD contractor and military facility I've worked in/visited, there are "practice opsec" posters all over the place. Everybody with a security clearance goes through a yearly security practices briefing to - among other things - remind folks to keep a low public presence. The DoD is aware that "public" includes "on-line".
Obviously, Mr. Wolff wasn't paying attention in class, and has never tried to google himself.
It's scary enough that in this country we have soldiers who seem to believe that political propaganda (or politics in general) belong to their job descriptions. What's even more frightening is that some of this discussion is about whether or not it's appropriate for Wikipedia to throw stones, entirely missing the point. Is our misunderstanding of our own birth as a nation so broken that we cannot recall that George Washington himself refused the presidency until he resigned his command on the very principle that the military should have no part in politics? What is this, Stalinist Russia?
Don't you think it is ironic that organizations that argue about goverment power are using the same methods they say are wrong to try and argue their point? Here we are with all of these organizations having their IP tracked, and suddenly, if someone posts, its a matter of publicity.
That should tell you more than anything that the lion's share of these "freedom" organizations are really just doing it to cash in. Every retarded liberal getting angry about a post by some freedom organization, moved to scream about the horror of the abuses, only wishing they had more money to give to save the world, are just as dumb as a two year old whining for Thomas the Tank Engine or Ronald McDonald. Give me some money and here's your cheeseburger of freedom, you dopes. You are ver useful engines!
All of these "freedom" organizations turn quite orwellian themselves whenever someone disagrees with them. There's no salvation there. I mean, if you want to go find a bunch of Nazis, go onto any of these places like wikileaks or moveon or dailykos and say, "hey, I think Bush is great!". You'll find more group think, suppression of dissent, and threats of violence, as you would in any organization or institution that they try to do. God forbid that the guys at Gitmo go and write their own take on the situation. Of course, they are in the wrong to do anything, because, they are automatically evil.
And yeah, I think its funny that the gitmo guys wrote that Fidel Castro is a transexual. I might write in Wikipedia that Fidel Castro is also a vampire. Fricking Commy Bastard, and that's a fact.
This is my sig.
A death threat? Did I read that right? Excuse me, but isn't dealing with people who want to kill you (and your countrymen) the first duty of anyone who puts on a military uniform? Does it matter that it's personal?
We've got grunts overseas dealing with the daily threat of being sent home in a box because of some kook's roadside IED, just for trying to set up a local police force, and this guy can't handle being "outed" for a bad PR whitewash?
So get him some freaking security, Lt. Col. Bush. This is the U.S. military, not Madison Avenue! Protect our man for doing his job, or court marshal him for doing otherwise, but for Chrissakes stop whining. When a CIA agent gets outed, they get protection if it's possible. This guy was doing no less important a job, the same job in fact, and this should be seen as a reasonable consequence of that job.
Why Langley isn't handling this kind of thing is beyond me, however. This is spy stuff.
Finally, if you are an *American* that "outed" anyone, take a good, hard look at your priorities. Screwing this administration isn't worth, to my mind, screwing the long-term credibility of our country. Clearly, that's the President's job.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
--
Toro
What's funny is that these same paranoid editors will still be called tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists, even when this obviously shows that it is justified paranoia.
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 If a wikipedia edit comes from an IP address from Guantanamo Bay, does it necessarily follow that the edit is "American government speaking to the American people?" I'm not so sure. It seems like most of these edits didn't fall within wikipedia's guidelines anyway and would be quickly reverted or changed by any one of thousands of other rabid editors on wikipedia. For this reason, wikipedia is not a good propaganda engine. But if the information provided from Guantanamo fits within the wikipedia guidelines (some of then changes actually did) then fair is fair.From TFA:
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
So what happens if people on the inside are the only ones who know the real truth about a certain subject?
I think it's called Nürnberg
But Guatanemo is being used outside of normal military usage which is probably why they also need spin meisters to make their case.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If k dawson received a government paycheck, I'm sure it would suddenly be alright for such people to edit.
I suggest you read Slashdot
How sad that of all the entities that can see benefit in defacing Wikipedia, the one that does it is our own government - which is supposed to exist for the general good. A sure sign that the U.S. culture of corruption is out of control. It trickles down from the top, doesn't it?
What is important is the veracity of the information our govt. feeds us - if they lie to us how can we as citizens make those important choices about who should govern us that are the foundation of our whole system of government. More importantly an employee of the government should NEVER lie to its citizens - one could argue that that's the provenance of the politicians, but not one of the civil service
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?
Perhaps they realize that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of editors who are biased against the Bush administration and war on terror who are willing to let inaccuracies get posted as long as they promote their personal bias?
Unless the US was the legitimate government of Afghanistan, it's putting troops there without the consent of the local government constitutes an invasion.
Didn't we just have an article here about some guy murdered right after getting out of jail for being on a sex offender's list? Criminally accountable is one thing; but the media needs to understand that they put people in mortal danger by releasing their personal information. You can argue the ethics behind what these people did, but you can't ignore the ethics behind what the media does when they leave somebody subject to death threats.
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Come election day, Ron Paul will be getting tea-bagged. I'm not against him at all; in fact I might just vote for him. But he has no chance. If he gets more than 4% of the popular vote I would be shocked. Most of all, I can't wait to see the reaction on Digg when Paul loses hard. That is going to be the most hilarious thing ever. The only thing that could make it better is if he were to get tasered; I think Digg would spontaneously combust. Bunch of pre-teen idiots.
This was discovered hundreds of years ago as people tried to create democracies.
The OP isn't the one who modified the Wikipedia articles with Gitmo propaganda (or maybe he is?). It would only be hypocritical of him to post it if he did the same.
Positively contributing to the content is one matter. Spreading lies and misinformation is another.
One sex offender has a list all to himself? Wow.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
These stories wouldn't even get past five diggs on that website before they got buried into oblivion. You wouldn't even need the bury brigade for that sort of action. Pro-Guantanamo stories on Digg? What could the content of those possibly be? What possible pros exist?
What is that supposed to mean? Fidel Castro is trying to pass as the bearded lady?
I'm from Arkansas. I have an uncle who sounds just like this fellow's father. He was a high school dropout who got sent to 'nam. Took a bullet to his scrotum, and eventually got sent home. He was homeless for several years, eventually got a job as a mechanic, and is now at least able to afford to live in a trailer park home. Not having a very usable penis due to his war injury, women have avoided him. Not having testes has resulted in him gaining massive amounts of weight, even with hormone replacement therapy. In short, he got screwed over pretty badly.
Yet he's as patriotic as they come. When I was younger, I once asked him why he's so patriotic, and he said, "'Cuz Ima 'Merican." So I asked him what that actually means, and he couldn't give me an answer. I asked him if it was worth losing his balls for America. I asked him if it was worth never having sex for America. I asked him if it was worth having women laugh at him for his sacrifices for America. He never did answer my questions. He just got huffy and started swearing. Maybe deep inside he knows that his sacrifices were all for naught. He just doesn't have the guts to admit it.
Hey, I thought EVERYBODY could contribute to Wikipedia and that the 'wisdom of the crowd' would prevail. How is 'some officer from Guantanamo' different than some left-wing whacko socialist pushing his own agenda? If it's the latter, you'll say this is an example of democracy in action. If the former, you say, "That's not fair!" Seems to me the bias is obvious. People don't want a 'free and open' encyclopedia; thay want an organ for their own politics, looked over by Big Brother Jimmy Wales making sure they say the 'right' things and don't step over the line into a point of view other than what is acceptable, including anything and everything the least bit pro American.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Once a democrat is elected all this will change and the U.S. will be a government/military that is respected round the world, because it's OBVIOUSLY the result of republican evil dooers.
I sure hope all these people watching GW and his crowd don't put on magic eyeshades when/if a democrat prez comes into office.
My bet is they will (ignore all this evil) once their guy comes to power
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Unless you're Jimbo Wales. Then you can modify your own page. And to put complete falsehoods on there.
Way to miss the point. No one is saying that propagandicizing Wikipedia is a crime against humanity, we're saying that you can't justify something by saying you were just doing your job, or following orders, or whatever. The point is, everyone is responsible for evaluating whether or not it's right to do what they're doing, and thus, accountable for it. "I was just doing my job" does not grant immunity to repercussions for your actions.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yes, it's sad. I spend hours laying in bed crying about it. I sigh deeply at times, and feel distracted at work. I can hardly go on, it's so sad. (*sucks thumb*)
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a minute here! It's an actual job -- meaning something you can be paid for -- to sit around all day anonymously accusing Fidel Castro of being a transsexual on the Internet?
Wow, I suddenly feel like a sucker for writing software when I could get the Army to pay me for cutting and pasting between bash.org and Wikipedia.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
If all your friends jumped off a cliff, according to your thinking, you should as well.
You miss the point that any concept of ethics is absent from the behavior in question and this particular nonsense should not be a function of government.
But if you still feel the way you do, please validate your belief and follow your friends.
Can we be sure anyone defendng this policy (and others) in these replies isn't being paid by the US government to do so?
The long term outcome of these polices is the questioning the credibility and honesty of anyone defending the US.
Guantanamo and what goes on there is a festering sore on the entire western world. People are locked up for having a beard and being in the wrong place, this is well known. All the pseudo-legal ranting and raving about non-military combattants and so on is just a way to avoid the Geneva convention. Noone would be allowed to treat prisoners of war like the inmates at Guantanamo are. So you do need all the propaganda you can get.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
From the summary ('cause having been indoctrinated into the
Which is to say, now that this has happened, next time, the next guy in the same position might think twice about 'just doing his job.' And that would be a (very) small victory in an increasingly hopeless war to prevent the government from amassing more power.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
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
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.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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.
The FREE encyclopedia that anyone can get caught modifying.
Yeah, not to mention that these people who are complaining about this have no problem when someone of their own political belief slant engages in the same behaviors to make their points. They see that as just standard operating procedure, and correct, because the result is something they agree with. But god forbid, when those who are on the other side of the issue do it, its PROPOGANDA and every other negative buzz word they can throw at it.
Someone tell me since when has it been unlawful for the government to go out and make its case and drum up PR for its policies and actions? It's ok when its a policy (or government for that matter) that they support, no that's not "PROPOGANDA", but when they don't support the administration or policy, its something sinister and bad.
This type of thing really gets very old, and that slashdot is so full of it is one of the reasons slashdot continues to decline as a place of useful and interesting information.
Now go read this article about well-intentioned young men, bravely and I would even say heroically volunteering to put their lives on the line... to defend what? That pack of thieves, liars, crooks and lunatics? To treat such courage and dedication with the contempt that this junta has done makes me truly sick.
Semper fi USMC motto ("Always faithful") "There's nothing new under the sun" Old English folk saying. Joe StrummerThe US Government doing something reprehensible! OH GOD NO TELL ME IT'S NOT TRUE.
I disagree. The Wikipedia is not there for anybody to use for any purpose they wish. It is not a public resource. It is a privately owned and operated site that the public is invited to contribute to according to the owner's policies and terms of use. Those policies include viewpoint neutrality.
Using Wikipedia for issue advocacy is an abuse. If a private individual knowing conducts abuse, the site operators are within their rights to ban him. Of course that person can sneak back in under a false name, but in that case the site operators would be within their rights to seek a court injunction preventing him from doing so. It's not much of a deterrent, mind you: stop doing that or we'll get a court order telling you to stop doing that!
Naturally, a determined and sneaky person can probably continue to vandalize the Wikipedia indefinitely. However the difficulty of enforcing their rights has no bearing whatsoever on the rights the site operator enjoys.
When the government starts meddling with private individual's sites, the same considerations apply and more. The site operators are not limited to common law and statutory protections. The US government is Constitutionally prohibited from interfering with free speech or freedom of assembly, either of the site operators or the site's contributors.
When a federal employee overwrites some private citizen's Wikipedia contribution because of its political slant (or lack thereof), he is in effect censoring that entry. Intent may matter here: if a government agent alters an entry for composition style, or to correct a clear factual mistake, he may be on thin ice, but when he alters it for political slant he's definitely gone through the ice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's a big difference between the government invading the privacy of individuals versus individuals monitoring what their government does.
Fuck that. Post his name everywhere. If he can't take the pressure of public naming, maybe he'll ask for a transfer and finally do something constructive with his life that he can be proud of later.
So.. what's the problem here?
I am the maverick of Slashdot
In Soviet USA, the KGB (King George Guantanomo Brigade) is preserving your way of life by torturing brown people until they confess to whatever statement we invent for them, to preserve our way of life. But white Americans cannot handle the truth, so our KGB must edit the wikipedia and censor the news, so as not to scare us. The Ministry of Information is only thinking of us, and their bribes, and important things.
And your number 5 was not actually edited by anyone in Guantanamo, but is vandalism by someone with a Romanian IP. The fact that it is included in the article in an attempt to smear the Guantanamo poster is propaganda of another sort.
OK, look...you are subject to death threats. If I find you, I'm going to kill you. See how that works?
But there's a big difference between someone receiving death threats based on something that has been misreported -- like, a guy who was reported to be a sex offender getting death threats even after all the charges have been dropped -- and somebody getting death threats for something they really, actually did do. Now, death threats are illegal, and whomever was threatening this poor schmuck should probably get to spend a night or two in the can. But come on ... if the government had an official "rape squad" and they got outed by the media, and those people then received death threats ... cry me a river!
The media has a responsibility to report the truth. The fact that everybody complains about it when they actually succeed is one of the things that's reducing our media to a pile of worthless crap. There is probably an ethics question around the wisdom of posting this person's full name, or whatever. But to decry the media for doing so on the basis that some yahoo decided to send the dude a death threat kinda sounds like shooting the messenger, to me.
Breakfast served all day!
"Wikipedia is a propaganda tool."
... for the propaganda, they are only doing their jobs."
No. However, it is a tool that can be used to spread propaganda. Similarly, one can use a screwdriver to stab someone, yet the screwdriver itself is not a killing tool.
"Wikipedia has very little in the way of genuine quality, independence or accuracy..."
Of course, that's debatable. There are many articles about many topics that are completely unbiased and completely accurate. The articles that are questionable are typically the ones involving current affairs, politics, and religion.
"Don't blame the Government
Since when has propaganda been part of the job definition of any (democratic) government?
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
Yes, it is news when it is shown that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread mis/dis-information. Furthermore, it should always be news.
Or do you propose that people should just accept the fact that the government does do these things and that we should ignore it?
Have many unique login names all digg the same posted stories. It doesn't need to be unique people, just IDs. For instance, the military could decide to task a single soldier with this, spending hours (if that long) to up the digg count on what they want. Actually, forget that. A computer could be automated to do this quite easily. -- Login, +digg, logout, repeat with different ID.
"Pro-Guantanamo stories on Digg? What could the content of those possibly be? What possible pros exist?"
It'd depend on the spin and or truth of the stories. Use your imagination here. Lemme try a few:
"Gitmo detainees have better living conditions that prisoners in the US"
"Incredible levels of cheerfulness and glee found in Gitmo residents."
"Guantanamo tenants have unlimited supply to Havana cigars!"
"Twenty-five terror plots discovered and halted due to Gitmo interrogations."
"Rate of conversion to Christianity found to be the worldwide greatest in Guantanamo"
"Castro visits Gitmo. Heard to say "This is nicer than MY place!""
Like I said -- the "pros" depends on the spin/truth of the stories.
...the encyclopedia anyone can edit? Doesn't say "anyone who agrees with what the groupthink considers right can edit".
JTF: In your heart, you know we're right.
I don't really understand how that can work for a country that is on the receiving end of an invasion. If the USA were invaded would the general populace stay out of it because they don't have uniforms or would they pick up whatever arms they had and do what they could in the situation?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
So deleting facts from the articles ( i.e. the prisoner identification numbers ) without explaining why is making a "correction"?
.mil really screwed the pooch on this one.
I'm sorry fella, but your heroes in
Just imagine what kind of disinformation is going to be coming our way online next year.
Yes, we definitely need a smaller government, let's eliminate the Ministry of Truth.
Truth in Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a trash heap. Rummage around in it enough and you may find something useful. Most of the time it's usually self centered, holier than thou, leftist crap.
Anybody working at the Guantanamo prison deserves death threats.
Fuck 'em.
They deserve to be arrested, charged with war crimes, and sentenced to significant time in a military prison.
The US is torturing prisoners who have not been formally and legally charged with any crime. That is a war crime. The responsibility goes right up to the Commander in Chief George W. Bush and he needs to be arrested and sent to The Hague for trial as a war criminal along with the complete chain of command down to the prison guards executing the orders.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.
We here at the ministry staying-on-message have approved for immediate use, the picture of the always-truthful, ever-lovin' and --surprisingly-- hired after 2002 picture of our information minister so you can identify him in the future. He is always reliable and sticks to the message we ask him to tell with amazing accuracy. And so now, for your information, the picture:
Our Mass Communications Officer.
I know I'm amazed people still try to pull this stuff when wikiScanner has gotten so much play in the news lately or maybe its just on internet news.
It's not the traditional military with the usual chain of command and accountability in most cases but young political hacks with no experience in anything getting appointed to be unaccountable spooks paid far too much to spread propaganda. Remember the fabricated WMD garbage that was traced back to an advertising agency of all things - that is what is going on. Fortunately it would take a lot for the professional military to take action from those who are ruining their good name - it would take far worse than Bush and Cheney for some general to turn Caesar in a crisis (plus there's a vast number of spooks under direct executive branch control if there is anybody controlling them).
Man this story would have never made the news or Slashdot if the part about there being a typo of 'transsexual' hadn't been included!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Man I wish I still had some mod points. There must be a hundred "what's the problem? -Wikipedia allows anyone to edit" posts here. THIS ISN'T ABOUT WIKIPEDIA, this is about tax dollars being used to pay soldiers to spread falsehoods to the public.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Personally, I don't see it as the military trying to edit Gitmo facts out of Wikipedia. If this was some kind of conspiracy, it would be better hidden, using proxy and everything. It's far more likely to be a few people who happen to be in the military trying to deal with the cognitive dissonance brought about by the actions of the organization they are involved with.
There are plenty of POV pushers who get away with it. During Huricane Katrina there was a team of GOP staffers diligently removing any material that mentioned the fact that the federal govt. was asleep at the switch. And quite often you find that the GOP propaganda is being spread from a military IP address. Seems like all they are allowed to listen to in the military is Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
Some edits from Congress are actually useful, the staffers usually get things like the biography right and usually on the ball with graphiti removal. But its pretty hard to scrub the page of any well known politician. Katherine Harris tried to have the Cruella Deville stuff taken out of her article but it never worked, the people were just not subtle enough.
The POV peddling that sticks is in the subtler edits, like the guy who tried to turn 'First Responder' into a page redefining what a first responder is to fit with some wingnut conspiracy theory.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Don't they know that pages' history is saved, so that improper deletions can be easily restored?
{sigh} you'd think they would have learned that from Ollie North.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
(Not talking about the numbers now.) Did they kill US soldiers, or did they kill uniformed enemy combatants? Or, by chance, both at once? (Posting anonymously. Fearing being stopped on some border and googled.)
Better an anonymous coward todday, than getting googled on the border and getting heat (if a citizen) or kicked out (if a visitor) tomorrow. The Internet has dangerously long memory.
What we see here looks more like a college prank because it was committed by young enlisted GIs who were probably no older than college students. As various newspapers pointed out, they couldn't spell. They called Fidel Castro a "transexual", when the correct spelling is "transsexual". This was not a campaign of disinformation, it was a couple of bored kids goofing off on company time.
Now, is the Bush administration capable of out-sourcing a less-traceable campaign of disinformation? Well, was it capable of giving secret payoffs to corrupt journalists like Armstrong Williams?
All stories of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds get buried in DIGG and elsewhere too.
I guess too much importance is given to wikipedia. Google shows wikipedia results among it's top 5. I understand open knowledge is good but take the case of medical information. Would information available on http://www.nih.gov/ be more trust worthy or that available on wikipedia ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
FIdel Castrol real name is FIdelina Castro and join the guerrilla following her beloved boyfriend Che Guevara.
I call. This has been recognized as a valid defense, in very limited cases. I am not a lawyer. Find one to give you examples. If you have every reason to believe that your actions are lawful, and under the direction of your employer, you're not likely to be prosecuted at all.
On the international level, look at South Africa's "reconciliation" following apartheid.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
He's enlisted as evidenced by his rate and rank as a MC1.
Registrant:
Richard Wolff
28 Ridgley St.
Hackettstown, NJ 07840
United States
Registrar: DOTSTER
Domain Name: RICHARDWOLFF.COM
Created on: 12-FEB-02
Expires on: 12-FEB-09
Last Updated on: 06-OCT-03
Administrative Contact:
Wolff, Richard rich0917@yahoo.com
Richard Wolff
28 Ridgley St.
Hackettstown, NJ 07840
US
(908)303-1130
Technical Contact:
Wolff, Richard rich0917@yahoo.com
Richard Wolff
28 Ridgley St.
Hackettstown, NJ 07840
US
(908)303-1130
Seems to be the registrant to this domain. US Military Mass Communication Specialist, with expertise on harrassing anti-war activists.
I was just being flippant before. But personally I think that's a stupid rule in general - after all, if people want to they can easily get around the "restriction" (as we see in this tory here). Why not make it easier for the reader to figure out what the organization as added vs. what outside sources claim?
There are already stores that have a great deal of conflict in changes, and there are procedures to handle those cases. If people outside an organization feel a page is being modified incorrectly by the organization itself why would changes not fall under that process? That seems more fair and a process that is more transparent and quicker to gain accurate information.
I don't think it's fair to inherently bias Wikipedia entries against whatever organization they cover, but making it impossible to refute them directly via Wikipedia...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All personnel on Gitmo use the same ISP and have the same IP. The US government provides all communications links to/from there. How do you know this edit was not made by one of the children of the soldiers who are stationed there? It's not like they can get a private account from a Cuban company or any other commercial provider. They HAVE to use the US government links. There's no proof the PAO officer did this.
When it is a government employee doing this, on the clock, paid for by tax dollars, as part of their official duties...
Err...don't you pay your president and other politicians? So technically aren't they government employees? Notice them doing much more than spread propaganda? If you want to clean things up shouldn't you start at the top?
I don't believe even the most draconian Neocon wants power just so he can stomp an orphan in the face--to him he is doing the right thing. Left or right, the totalitarians always have ideals somewhere in there, and though we may disagree with their Vision of how the world should be, they really do want to make it "better". Pol Pot thought that intellectuals had undermined his country, so he fixed their wagon. Rinse, wash, repeat. Evil comes not always from evil, and I don't think the only alternative is stupidity. In my opinion, "good intentions" unrestrained by humility does a lot of the damage.
Plus, none of us are immune to vanity, convenience, self-interest, and so on, and all of these taint our everyday decisions. When your everyday decisions involve such things as habeus corpus and torture for people of a different skin color, of a different religion (which you consider to be foolish at best and devil worship at worst), who speak a different language, and who you're afraid might want to hurt you and yours, then you get, well, evil. It's not out there--it's in us.
The parent's current current rating (0) shows the problem with the mod system :-( 20% insightful, 20% interesting and 40% troll. This must be one of those times when "troll" means "I really disagree with the comment so I'm modifying it down".
THAT's the massive misinformation campaign ? If it is, it's the lamest effort at propaganda ever!
I beg to differ. The most effective propaganda campaigns are those that use some subtlety. Had these people/this person not been caught out, they would have succeeded in quietly shifting the language from a stance neutral or critical of their actions and government's policies, to one favourable. Now multiply this effect 10,000 times, and you get an idea of what is happening...default headlines resembling Fox News on more topics than they do the BBC, die Welt, or Le Monde (all of whom have their biases, but none anywhere close to as extreme as the Republican Ministry of Propaganda that is Fox News).
In many ways, this activity is far more insidious, and far more dangerous, than more obvious attempts at silencing the opposition, such as those Putin, Nixon, and Bush Jr. are using in other venues.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
WHY is it a problem when people AT THE SOURCE of what the article is about post THEIR opinions on a matter? You people make me sick - get your heads out of your asses. The only reason most of you have a problem with this is because your part of the 'peace at any price' crowd and have an issue with Bush. They aren't doing anything that isn't done every day on that worthless wikipedia site. Why is it that the detractors get to post whatever crap they want? Because that's typical liberal speak - silence the opposition (just watch what happens on 90% of the college campuses when a conservative trys to do a speech - people should be INCISED by the attempt to silence free speech, yet you LET THEM HIDE behind the idea that shouting down people is free speech) I LOVE the edits they have a problem with. Changed Invasion to War. As someone else stated, neither is probably correct, but BY GOD (now that's funny) the liberals say 'Invasion' is the 'fact' here. As far as removing IDs, well sorry but that sounds like a good idea to me - where's the privacy advocates now? How can you not SEE the hypocrisy? How can you be SO BLIND? The ONLY remote issue here..and it's VERY remote..is that it was part of his job to make changes. You think the mindless drones behind dailykos are NOT on wiki makeing changes all the time? Which is worse - a fanatic making changes or someone being paid to make changes? Careful on your answer there sport! Pathethic. Most of you are just pathetic.
Anyone who would participate in such an aggressive act as destroying a country's government, military and infrastructure and just assuming the thousand-year-old rivalries would have been pacified by a mere century of British rule and conglomeration of regions....well, they deserve to die.
Blar.
The government probably considers internal detainee information sensitive, so it shouldn't shock normal people that the government would want to remove that data. Nor should it shock any reasonable people that the government has something to say about its operations that isn't vituperative.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
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:
Look in the mirror folks.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Only if you assume that they are halfways competent, intellectually honest, and not blinded by preconceptions.
The DoD fought tooth and nail to keep these documents arising from the captive's administrative proceedings secret. But they failed. There are about 2300 documents released under the freedom of information Act where you can read the actual "Summary of Evidence" memos, and the captives' testimony.
Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) and Administrative Review Board (ARB) Documents
Try reading them and I suspect you might find some of the stories surprisingly compelling. Try reading them and I guarantee your charming faith in your government shaken.
Here is a package of documents released around Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari's Combatant Status Review Tribunal. It is not the most shocking. But is the first one I read that really shocked me.
Note the three allegations on page 20. One of the allegations was that he was found wearing a Casio F91W digital watch. When I read that allegation in September 2005 I did what any of you would do. I spent thirty seconds doing a google image search, so I could see what a Casio F91W looks like. I recognized this watch. I used to own one. It is one of the most widely produced digital watches ever made.
I found it kind of shocking that this very weak allegation was being used to justify his continued detention.
But, it got worse. In his testimony, (pages 12-18) he expresses his distress at learning that the watch was one of the triggers for his detention. As part of this distress he gave a detailed description of his watch. Guess what?
His watch wasn't a Casio F91W. The F91W is an accurate, reliable, water resistant watch, with a stop-watch, a little light, a little beeper, and a daily alarm. It has no other features.
The watch he described was much more featureful. It was a watch specifically designed for observant Muslims. Observant Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day. This watch called out a call to prayers at the required times. Observant Muslims are supposed to bow down facing Mecca when they pray. This watch pointed to Mecca. It had a little magnetic compass. If the wearer was a world traveler, when they landed in a new city, they told the watch where they were, and the watch had enough computing power to do the spherical trigonometry to calculate the direction of Mecca. When the compass was pointing North an LCD arrow on the compass would point at Mecca. The wearer entered their current location either by picking a nearby city from a list of 200 cities, or by entering their latitude and longitude.
That is technically cool.
Well, thirty seconds to find the image of the F91W. About five minutes to figure out that Al Kandari's watch was the "Casio Prayer Watch". It looks NOTHING like an F91W. The Casio logo doesn't even look the same. And it costs about six times as much.
How competent can the JTF-GTMO staff be, how interested can they have been in determining who was an actual threat if any competent computer user can blow away one of the allegations in just a few minutes?
In March 2006 the DoD was forced, by court order, to release about a thousand documents. They showed that well over a dozen captives faced the allegation that owned a Casio F91W watch. In September 2007 the DoD released the second thousand documents. Almost two dozen captives faced this very flimsy allegation. The record shows only one courageous officer challenging the credibility of this allegation.
One of the other two allegations was that his "known alias" was found on a suspicious list on a suspected al Qaeda member's computer. This alias wasn't listed for him to challenge. But
What you point out is the inherent deficiency in lofty idealistic ideas like "freedom of speech" and democracy. It is the tyranny of the majority and/or the tyranny of the ones with the most money/power. Democracy and "freedom of speech" don't work in the real world because there are always those that have the power to open the press floodgates and stifle all opoosing theories. These noble ideas only give people false hope and a false sense of security. In a real democratic/free-speech environment, everytime one view was expressed, the opposite view(s), myriads of which could exist, would be given equal footing. No one would be able to buy opinions and brute-force their opinion on others.
However, what I think people are arguing with regards to encyclopedias is not freedom of speech, which is a political idea, but rather non-biased information. In this case, information should really be
written by an unbiased third-party with no stake in the opinons. Furthermore, the information presented should be peer-reviewed to ensure lack of bias.
What you are doing is mixing politics and encyclopedias. Politics is infinitely more broken than excyclopedias. And it is not the job of encyclopedias to interpret information or provide misinformation like the spin-doctors.
The same way they would stop Microsoft IPs from interfering against policy with the Microsoft articles, and the same weigh they reign in Congressional edits.
Dude, where's my packet?
But in practice, wrong. Transparency should be maximized, with the recognition it can't be 100%. The government has your tax records, it playing with the data, but I'd be reluctant to say that your tax records should be public. Same with nuclear launch codes and all sorts of other stuff that might be better kept confidential. Now your point was more about what they are doing, not information. But the distinction could be blurred.
Is there a good definition of what should be confidential and how to keep the line from getting moved inappropriately or blurred. Probably not. But we should at least recognize there is a line.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I don't understand what the hubbub is all about. I have been through the list of edits from that IP address, and the vast majority of them are constructive edits with NPOV. The editor appears to be a Star Trek and Star Wars fan from Beeville, TX with a hankering for cartoons. The only thing that stands out is the systematic removal of detainee numbers, but there's probably an obvious non-sinister reason. Perhaps detainees don't actually have numbers, or those aren't the right numbers. This all seems a little blown out of proportion. I'd like to point out that the Castro edit was reverted in less that three minutes. It is common for new Wikipedians to not understand that their edits take effect right away, so they'll "test" like that and fix it later or it gets reverted by others.
Much as I hate to come to the defence of GITMO, of the highlighted changes three are removing information that is readily available in referenced pages. Why the prisoner IDs were removed is an interesting question, but not necessarily malicious.
When you look at the total list of edits from that address, they include pages about Pokemon, roller coasters, Japanese cartoons, and Welsh mythology. There are some more obvious "propoganda" edits, including personal opinions (which were all quickly removed) that seem more like the work of bored browsers[1] than any kind of directed program of misinformation.
===References===
[1] http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902 *** ERIC IS A FAG ***
While I won't speak to the validity of your core claim, I want to point out a fundamental flaw in your attempt at logical proof:
"Killing a U.S. Soldier" does not get credited like "making a sack" in football. When a two-man team makes a kill they aren't each "credited" with "having killed half-a-person." When a gang of 3 hoodlums all brutally beat and stomp a victim to death, they can all justly be convicted of murder and punished as severely as it they'd committed the murder independently. If a team of Jordanians with AK-47s manage to kill 1 member of a squad deployed in Iraq before 6 of them are captured at the conclusion of a fire-fight, then you've got 6 prisoners on your hands who would be accurately described as "having a killed a U.S. Soldier" while you only have 1 dead U.S. Soldier. Similarly, a team that assembles and deploys a road-side bomb can give you a 1-to-many relationship of casualty-to-killer.
So the claim that you can't have 250+ prisoners who "have killed a U.S. Soldier" when you only have 125 KIAs is simply untrue.
I hope someone you care about dies as a result of the USA's bungling of Iraq in specific and the 'war on terror' in general. Ta!
Blar.
Any group of guys who could completely sanitize all references to the recent Jeff Gerstmann scandal from both the Gamespot and Kane & Lynch wikipedia entries (and keep them that way) have to be the envy of all historical revisionists.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Wikipedia, or any other "reference" work is biased by definition. All authors are inherently biased in some way and their writing reflects it. Any conclusion drawn in a research task should be supported by a minimum of 3 sources.
It is a pity you ignored the entirety of the post you replied to.
The assertion that because there are only 125 soldiers killed you can not have more than 125 people who are killers of those soldiers is false. Period.
Whether particular individuals or groups of individuals have actually killed people is distinct matter of facts to which I am not speaking. I merely take issue with the flawed logic presented in one particular assertion - nothing more and nothing less.
Your post is an example of one of the USA's weaknesses. The USA is still in a kind of paralyzing state of shock after the 9-11 attacks. One consequence is to imagine your enemies are a funhouse mirror reflection of yourselves, or your worst fears.
Cast your mind back to late 2001 early 2002. The DoD kept leaking these very detailed technical drawings of Osama bin Laden's underground shelters. These drawings looked like Islamic versions of Cheyenne Mountain.
Osama didn't, in fact, have any underground shelters like Cheyenne Mountain.
Saddam didn't, in fact, have an arsenal of WMD. An example of projecting your worst fears on your opponent.
Don't get me wrong. I am not unsympathetic. They death of almost 3,000 innocent civilians should be shocking. But it is not responsible to react on a hyterical purely emotional level. Which, no offense, the US reaction to those attacks largely remains.
You write:
My advice to Americans is that your most realistic fear of tyranny and oppression comes from within, not without. Many commentators, including, it seems to me, yourself, suggest rolling over, and surrendering vast rights to the Presidency, with zero oversight, in spite of the current administrations shocking record of corruption, incompetence, and deceit.Seriously, I've heard the same argument against reporting US atrocities in war. My response is the same as yours: don't commit the atrocities.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Psychological_operations&action=history
Absolutely. If Wikipedia (or any other wiki) was out there specifically for whistleblowers without some sort of controls, then the actual whistleblowing would be lost in the crapflood of schizophrenics, bored kids, conspiracy theorists, and communists.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
What odds do you want to give me that Bush wont do an FDR and stay in office because the country is at war? At least Putin tries political ways instead of going out and destroying countries.
**Life is too short to be serious**
So?
We know. And Geoffrey Miller must have known that 90 plus percent of the captive were captured by bounty hunters, not GIs, on the battlefield.
Those who we know were captured by Americans were mainly rounded up in the middle of the night, or reasonable equivalent.
As I wrote above Khadr is the only captive who has been accused of killing a GI. So, even though you think it is important that, in theory 777 Guantanamo captives could have been part of a 777 man firing squad, they weren't, and Miller knew they weren't. But he encouraged his soldiers to believe half the captives were real killers.
Why did Miller do that?
My theory? Boredom is bad for morale. Taking highly trained soldiers, skilled, full of courage, fighting spirit, and making them serve as prison guards is going to be bad for morale. They are going to feel their efforts are pointless, when they know former comrades are putting their lives on the line every day. I think Miller knowingly wildly inflated how dangerous the captives were to keep up the guard's morale.
One of consequences of exaggerating how dangerous the captives were, and the role they played in 911, is that it pushed the guards into thinking it was okay to commit atrocities.
One of first five British captives, one of the unquestionably innocent ones, gave an account of one of the child captives. One of the techniques used that isn't talked about much is moving captives from one cell to another in the middle of the night. Re-assigning the captives to different cells presumably is not something that looks like abuse, if the log sin't detailed enough to show it was done in the middle of the night. The Brits said it was done often enough to keep the intended victims sleep deprived.
The guard force keeps riot squads suited up, and ready to go. Called the IRF, or ERF. Short for Immediate Response Force, or Emergency Response Force. They are only supposed to perform a "cell extraction" if a captive has been violent. But, in this particular incident the IRF did something I gather they were known to do. Invade the cell of a captive who hadn't been broken yet, when he is still asleep, and beat him senseless when he was still half asleep, then record in the log that he had performed something that justified the cell extraction.
The trouble with these unoffical, off-the-books, acts of retaliation, is that two different sets of guards can both target one captive, and end up royally screwing up.
One set of guards targeted one captive they wanted to break, woke him up, make him pack up his meager belongings -- so you can make him switch cells. Of course this disrupts the sleep of the captive you make him switch with.
Guantanamo contained aobut two dozen children. Three of the youngest, who were about 11, 12 and 13 years old, got to stay in camp iguana, where they were treated humanely, provided schooling, access to a fridge, with fresh fruit, got to play soccer with their guards, and go to the beach. The remaining children were confined with the adult captives. One of these children was the captive who was made to switch cells with the tough guy the guards wanted to retaliated against.
So, the second set of guards, in the IRF squad want to wake the hard guy up with a brutal beating. But the hard guy has already been moved. So, they bust in and wail away on the kid, and beat him senseless, before they realize they got the wrong guy. The Brit said the beating left the kid catatonic for a month.
Were the guards explicitly ordered to take these steps? I suspect that, either, as at Abu Ghraib, the guards weren't given orders, they were given hints, or that Miller had them keyed up to hate the captives so much, because they were told they were all responsible for 9-11, that they administered these beatings without any hints.
I don't think most Ame