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.
The mass communications officer is expected to make a full recovery as a Slashdot editor and meta-moderator.
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
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?
No, that was the CIA. Apparently every time some organization some people don't like edits Wikipedia, it's news, and grounds for a conspiracy theory. I'm not sure why.
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.
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.
You are probably remembering the article where IPs traced to CIA was used to edit the wikipedia-article about the iraq war
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
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.
Yeah, it's not the military's fault that they are employing military personal to vandalize non-profit organization's websites with biased propaganda. It's wikipedia's fault! *eyeroll*
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.
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.
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?
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
Well, you can. But in big city parks, such as Central Park in NYC, it's not a good idea.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
as to why internet child porn downloaders get longer terms than bank robbers, I'm not sure if thats true.
If it is, I'd guess that it's because it's cheaper to incarcerate a pedophile than a bank robber. And commercial prisons do need cheap labor.
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?
Uh, it was intentional posting of misinformation.
Unless someone can find a citation for Castro's admission that he is a transsexual.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
hmm, actually I thought central park was the one park you could be in at night.
Most parks in the midwestern US are "closed" at night, and if the police catch you there, they will assume you are doing something illegal (drugs, sex)
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.
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?
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.
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
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
Mate, that's the best post I've ever seen summing up life in the US. From a UK perspective that's what the majority of the rest of the world thinks. It's good to know that not every American is still floating along in the "American Dream"/"Free World" fantasy. Move to Europe, it's probably not much better after you've lived here for a while, but I'm pretty sure it's a helluva lot more free than the US. Apart from all these security cameras watching my ever move! Ah well!
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
Huh? Was that post in English?
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?
"I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners." - Theodore Dalrymple
Unless, of course, it's a leftie making fun of a conservative, in which case anything goes, no matter how nasty it is. To some people, the truth must always take second-place to their political agenda.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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
Why don't you leave and never come back? You'll be a lot happier and so will the rest of us. As a 'Nam vet myself (Gunline, '72) I'd say, "Good riddance to bad rubbish!" if you did.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Unless the US was the legitimate government of Afghanistan, it's putting troops there without the consent of the local government constitutes an invasion.
Hmmm. So public servants conducting psy-ops campaigns against the people they are supposed to be working for isn't morally different from private citizens expressing opinions you disagree with. Unless those citizens have money. Having enough money means that even if you don't work, you aren't considered "unemployed" for purposes of rights denial or opinion denigration.
*eyeroll*
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
New! Device Legs: These legs will help your poor OEM installed product escape any hamfistedness it may encounter. Ava
Aren't there still some puritan communities where that's considered an unnatural act and is forbidden by law?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
As of this writing, the Wikipedia article about Linux mentions Microsoft 4 times:
Doesn't seem like a flamefest to me.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Wikipedia is a propaganda tool. It is one of the best out there at shaping the minds of the gullible. The government knows this. So does everyone else with an ax to grind. So do the wikinazis. Wikipedia has very little in the way of genuine quality, independence or accuracy, but thanks to the vanity of its leaders and admins it has every illusion of authority and integrity.
Be indignant about that. Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there.
Don't blame the Government (or anyone else's Government, or NGO, or Political party, or Corporation or cabal...) for the propaganda, they are only doing their jobs.
No, blame Wikipedia for continually attempting to deceive people as to its integrity.
not a leftie, but I find this man to be a budding transexual.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
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?
Of course not, but when they are caught they need to be punished and more importantly, stopped.
Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there.No it isn't. The crime is the government overstepping its mandate and working against the people it is supposed to serve. That is the crime. Wikipedia has no obligation to anyone.
Don't blame the Government (or anyone else's Government, or NGO, or Political party, or Corporation or cabal...) for the propaganda, they are only doing their jobs.The government is the one that should be blamed. Their job is defined by the constitution. Read it. Whenever they overstep that, they aren't doing their job, they're violating the public trust and need to be called onto the carpet by the electorate. What are you some sort of paid shill trying to divert attention to a charitable project for not doing what you think they should? They aren't funded with tax dollars and have no responsibility to do anything and are thus, blameless.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Most countries won't accept American asylum seekers. They're not like the US of A, where you can buy a residency (no, I'm not joking -- investing 1 million dollar or more in a US business grants you residency). So moving elsewhere may not be an option.
Besides, what gives you more right to your country than he has to his and I to mine?
That you've fought in a lost war for reasons that had nothing to do with your country, and everything to do with politics and commercial interests doesn't entitle you to anything, except my pity. And, if you did it voluntarily, my scorn.
So, why don't you move, and start a country without us got-hating fag-loving leftist commies, who also love our country?
No regards,
--
*Art
All of these "freedom" organizations turn quite orwellian themselves whenever someone disagrees with them.
There's a huge difference between covertly intruding on private communications and parsing a changelog on a wiki. It's not as if there are packet sniffers listening to what the military is doing, and I'm not even sure that that would count as "orwellian" if it were the case.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Anyway, these officers are "whistle blowers" - aren't they? Or because some don't like what they wrote, then it becomes a form of corruption instead. Right.
I suggest you read Slashdot
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
This would result in the worst detainees at Guantanamo being, with appropriate evidence, convicted and held accountable, instead of being detained indefinitely as US expense. I think it would also result in many detainees, if the US government has no evidence of them doing anything other than fighting openly as part of a militia or tribal force against the United States, being held as regular prisoners of war.
* - In modern time, I believe that the US has tried accused spies in civilian courts, unless, of course, they were US military members accused of spying.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
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.
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.
The War in Viet Nam was not lost on the ground. The Viet Cong and NVA never, ever defeated us. The war was "lost" because the American Left declared it lost and forced their wrong-headed opinion on the rest of the country.
I know; I was there in '72 when the NVA sent 150,000 men across the border with more armor and mechanized equipment than the Germans sent to the Battle of the Kursk Salient, and got back less than one third, all of whom had to walk home because their equipment had been smashed, at a cost of less than 50 American deaths, for the entire month.
As far as what gives me the right to tell him to leave, it's called the First Amendment. He has every right to his opinions, and I have just as much right to tell him that in my opinion he doesn't belong here.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
best bit of newspeak I've seen recently
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
This is true. And how often do you know who wrote a particular Wikipedia article? You don't know if that article you just read is by someone with a PhD on the topic, some college freshman who read one book on it for a paper and now considers himself an expert, or someone with a vested interest in making sure you have a particular opinion on the topic.
I'm not saying it's good that the government is trying to use the same lame astroturfing tactics as Sony. But that's the way Wikipedia works, and you can never 100% trust that someone who knows what they're talking about wrote any of it. I'm one of those that thinks they'd be better off if they at least gave *some* weight to contributions by those who can prove expertise of some kind, because of this very fact - though I also see the benefit of allowing anonymous edits.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
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 reality is unquestionably that politicians are inherently corrupt and will spin things as much in their favor as possible. However, this does not mean that our jobs are to champion or even accept it.
Wikipedia is not responsible for the misinformation in the least - responsibility lies squarely in the lap of those who choose to taint articles with propaganda. The message one should come away from this regarding Wikipedia (which should be common practice, anyways) is to always take articles with a grain of salt. Examine any attached sources, search for additional sources, and draw your own conclusions from what you gather. Taking anything you hear or read at face value is generally a poor idea.
The fact that allowing anyone to modify an article can occasionally lead to misinformation is simply something you should accept when reading anything on Wikipedia.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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.
The US Government doing something reprehensible! OH GOD NO TELL ME IT'S NOT TRUE.
Should the government also be announcing a religious preference? Should they be choosing a favorite candidate in this election or that? Should they issue a statement on which tastes better, Coke or Pepsi? These are all legitimate opinions that anyone can have and talk about, so surely it's ok for the government to issue an opinion too...
Play Command HQ online
And as another poster pointed out, Wikipedia owes nothing to us. It comes with no warranty of reliability, and since it is free, it is too much even to say "caveat emptor." On the other hand, dismissing government duplicity by a mere wave of "thus it has always been" is a real danger. That is the same logic that argues we should condone torture and assassinations because all governments do it. I don't want my government engaged in wholesale deception of its citizenry. Concealment has a place. I don't need to know the launch codes. Lies too have a place (e.g. sting operations) but a campaign to misinform the public with the goal of influencing policy undermines the foundations of democracy.
Besides, if wikipedia's wrong, I can always go to britannica or to a real book. If my government systemically lies, who do I go to for the truth?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Be indignant about that. Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there.
How can you be sure the same isn't true for regular media?
Take any old encyclopedia... Can you tell me for sure that they weren't edited in such a way for any type of bias or misinformation?
If it has sources, then what if the sources are suspect? If you have an authority, what do you to have to prove (other than gut instinct and the authorities references which could also be suspect) they aren't a paid shill too?
I think it all comes down to trust.
Do you trust Wikipedia? Could you trust your school text books? Could you trust the news? Can you even trust your parents to tell you the truth about things?
Example, I have an old copy of a 1944 encyclopedia reference (not the entire series) which mentions the Soviets as our allies. Are there any references to Soviet atrocities from the 1930s? Nope. They are our allies.
From a personal perspective, you should assume that everyone is either lying to you or misinformed themselves without anyone disclaiming the fact but I have to trust them because I have no other choice, but it doesn't help to ask "Are you sure?".
We agree that Wikipedia isn't as authoritative as they make it out to be, but what I disagree with you is that they have to disclaim it or that anything else in life is better.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
Yes. We should refrain from solving any problem until some other problem gets fixed. That'll get things done.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Does anyone speak Ranting Lunatic who can translate this into something coherent?
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
There's a big difference between the government invading the privacy of individuals versus individuals monitoring what their government does.
And you are condoning it.
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
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?
I feel genuine pity for all the mods who thought cynical surrender to hopelessness was "insightful".
Yes, yes, all men are evil, nothing anyone does will ever have any positive effect on any of humanity, all effort is wasted and we each die alone and miserable. Do you do Bar Mitzvahs?
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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
could be them spy satellites can zoom in a lot better than they admit and sexual perversions are high on most government wish list for blackmail info. There are other methods less exotic like aerial photography, internet and signal intelligence. Of course it's more likely someone though it was funny.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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?
Does Encyclopedia Brittanica have such disclaimers? Does the New York Times?
All media is prone to inaccuracies. In my experience, most news periodicals are chock full of misinformation (hell, the only time I ever appeared in print, it was a severe misquote.) Print encylopedias are better, but still contain a fair number of errors and even more omissions. If you discount the minority articles in Wikipedia that are OBVIOUSLY badly written/biased/whatever (it's usually immediately obvious), the remainder is MUCH more accurate than anything you'll read in a newspaper, read in an encyclopedia, or hear about on the evening news. As another poster noted, there have been studies done that confirm this--Wikipedia is more accurate than most print encyclopedias.
I applaud the spirit of your post, but I severely question singling out Wikipedia. IMO, they're much less guilty of this than most sources because people already KNOW the potential for misinformation (see: Stephen Colbert, etc.). People are much more gullible when it comes to the evening news, even though they're actually (in my experience, anyway) much less accurate... ESPECIALLY if you count important omissions against them.
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.
Thus says the Anonymous Coward, and never was a post more aptly attributed.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
calling Castro a transexual might reasonably be considered vandalism, but truthfully other than that I don't see what the problem is; they didn't hide their IP addresses, they emphasized the positive and deemphasized the negative but they didn't make things up. Deleting ID numbers oohh that's bad, sending the black helicopters to wikileaks for publishing classified information might be bad, but it would be understandable.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I recognize the sarcasm, however:
There are, in fact, Republicans that think GW and the rest of the administration are doing a completely shitty job. Heck, some of these will continue to vote Republican anyways. (I'm thinking of Ron Paul here.)
A good US patriot should always monitor/question the elected leaders, regardless of political bias.
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
True, but this isn't about politicians being corrupt, this is about The Military being corrupt. That is a rather important line we have crossed. This isn't about hiding a lucrative exclusive contract to your nephew's business or fucking hookers in the Lincoln Bedroom. This is about the largest military in the world pursuing it's own agenda rather than the will of the American people. Of course this has been going on for some time.
We have been fed false information for the entire "War on Terror". This isn't about some politician trying to get re-elected, this is about military/government that has slipped away from the control of the people and has started a war killing tens of thousands of people, indebted us trillions of dollars, and made a mockery of ever virtue that America ever (nominally) stood for.
We are all just people.
I once saw a movie about Nam veterans. They we're living like bums and when the reporters asked them questions about the war they could only answer with one question:"We won the war but the people made us lose it". Probably a sad case of PTSS. The war was lost and still, many years later, veterans are saying they won it. Makes me sigh when I read it. It's a sad sad world sometimes.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Normally I don't bother to reply to any post that contains the word "wikinazis" because it reveals a certain mindset in its author that means there is little hope of having a reasonable discussion with him. But since I can't edit his post to provide the below links, I thought I might at least make a comment for the benefit of readers, since it is modded high enough that people may see it. Unless he's thinking of some other Wikipedia which doesn't "encourag[e] users to question the data" (a page which is in rotation with about 10 other informative pages at the top of the site except during the fundraiser), or which does not provide "disclaimers and warnings". In which case, carry on.
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!
The war wasn't lost on the battlefield, and that's what we're talking about. The war was lost because cowards at home forced the government to give the North what it could never have won on its own.
Yes, it's not PC to say that now, but it is the truth, and it's not only those of us who were there that say it. I have a friend who fought in Korea who's been saying the same things I do about 'Nam for decades because he understands what happened instead of mouthing the popular lies that the left has spent decades pushing down our throats.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
So you think there was still a "light at the end of the tunnel". Sorry, but if you still haven't achieved victory after over 10 years and more explosives than used in WWII, then you lost. You were never going to win. Game over.
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
Be indignant about that. Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there. You mean the disclaimer found here? The one that has a link at the bottom of this page?
Where most disclaimers appear?
Please. If you're going to try to point out inaccuracies, be sure to have your own material vetted. Perhaps you could even provide some sources. Wikipedia usually does.
Do You Experiment?
Sorry, which was a joke? The claim that they edited Wiki to say Castro is a transsexual, or the edit itself?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
"If you hate the US, then leave!" It's so easy for people to say that -- usually uptight conservatives, I've noticed -- but much harder to actually do. Besides the sheer expense of moving, the associated travel costs, the fees and such for paperwork both in the US and in the destination country, obtaining permits, visas, citizenship, and securing a job in a foreign nation where your native language may not even be spoken, there's also the fact that many countries just aren't interested in Americans, making it more difficult. Getting asylum as a workaround is even more difficult still.
I've thought about making an offer to the types of people who spout that nonsense: If you want to get together and fund me, I'll get the hell out of here. I don't make enough to leave on my own in any reasonable timeframe, but you can pool your resources, get me out of the US, and you'll have one less liberal agitator in your midst. What a deal!
Finally, the "love or it leave it" mantra is one of cowardice. It's easy to hold an opinion when everyone else around you holds the same opinion, and I find it interesting how quick some people want to excise all contrary opinions from their society.
Personally I find blind jingoism to be one of the most un-American attitudes possible, and a bit of time with a history book, and the reason this place was founded in the first place, might support that idea. If I'm right, then I'd say it's the "love it or leave it" crowd who should be leaving, since they clearly have no idea what the United States is really about, but I'll give you a hint: It's not about running away from a bad situation, nor is it about standing your ground and bleating platitudes in the face of wrong.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
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 very easy to declare that we lost, isn't it? Do you really like the idea, or is it just easier than admitting that the left was full of cowards who stabbed their own country in the back and abandoned our ally?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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).
Written by somebody hiding as an Anonymous Coward. Why do you think anybody is going to give any credence to your venomous blather when you can't even stand up and admit that it's you talking? Coward you post as because coward is what you are.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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!
Actually, I'm a moderate, but I understand where you're coming from. You also make a good point about the costs of moving, instead of just attacking me for my opinions as several other's have. (It's so easy, you know, especially when you do so while hiding behind AC.)
As far as "Love it or leave it," I don't say that. I do say that if you're going to live here and take advantage of all we have to offer and what's left of our Constitutional civil liberties, you should, at the very least, show respect.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
My post is not about Republicans in particular. A fact that people who marked me as "Troll" are too brainwashed to see.
Paying attention to the government and your military is a good thing, it just seems that the only people who watch them are the partisans of the politicians out of power. Maybe I'm jaded but I'm not betting that whomever replaces GW is going to shut down Gitmo immediately, give an order to withdrawal troops from Iraq/Afghanistan on day 1 of their administration , rescind executive orders or give up executive power that GW and congress have given the presidency.
People need to wake up, but I'd bet all the uproar about gitmo and everything else people are foaming at the mouth about will "magically" switch when the other side getting in power with republicans trying to pin the Dems as hypocrites and Dems claiming either 1) "It's not us" or 2) Dragging their feet
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/
This is 100% a separate matter from the fact that it is repugnat to have the governemnt do that kind of edits, no?
The dolchstosslegende is always with us. The "American Left," neither the Democrats nor the Black Panthers (I assume you distinguish between the two), never held the white house during the draw down and Vietnamization of the 70s, and as we can all see from current events a determined president, particularly a second-termer like Nixon, is quite capable of keeping soldiers in the field for as long as he damn well pleases. Of course the Republican leadership was compromised by its stupendously illegal conduct over the previous years. The "American Left" didn't tap peoples phones without a warrant, or kidnap people and perform truth drug experiments on them. That was left to Dick Helms and Charles Colson and J. Edgar.
I know; I was there in '72 when the NVA sent 150,000 men across the border with more armor and mechanized equipment than the Germans sent to the Battle of the Kursk Salient, and got back less than one third, all of whom had to walk home because their equipment had been smashed, at a cost of less than 50 American deaths, for the entire month.You see that, or did you hear it in briefings? David Halberstam and the other war correspondents basically demolished the veracity of the briefings the military gave, and the sort of statistics the US military would produce made Baghdad Bob look like Ed Murrow. The Pentagon considered lying about such things an important strategic maneuver.
Even if we were killing guys at the rate you give, why weren't we marching on Hanoi right then and there? Maybe because it probably would've triggered a world war with China and or Russia, and even the most die hard Republicans didn't care so much about the RVN that they were willing to even chance that, even if meant "appeasement" (remember Kissinger had been negotiating with Le Duc Tho since '68). Also, once we've marched into Hanoi and pulled down all the Ho Chi Minh statues, what do we do then? The south vietnamese government was little more than a junta run by whichever general Westmoreland, Cabot Lodge or Kissinger liked the best at the time, and was profoundly unpopular and illegitimate. It's the same crap all over again, "if we kill all the bad guys the good guys obviously win," instead in this case it was Kennedy and Johnson making the assumption.
Some purchase has been gotten over the last few years by pundits who claim that the essential characteristic of the "domino theory," that SE Asia would fall to Communism, in fact played out exactly as we'd been warned. What is neglected is that, in fact, the number one factor in predicting if a country would fall to Communism was the level of US involvement in it. The more we tried to help with our bombs, the more likely it was that Communism would overrun the country. Countries we didn't touch might have leftist or Communists in there parliament, but would generally stay non-aligned and pacific. Countries we "helped" had killing fields.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
That's right, because it's true.
Do you really like the idea, or is it just easier than admitting that the left was full of cowards who stabbed their own country in the back and abandoned our ally?And the failure of the military to achieve its goals after more than 10 years had nothing to do with it? Face it, the plug got pulled because of FAILURE. People eventually get sick and tired of pouring money and lives into a black hole. It's not cowardice to fire someone and cancel their project when they are incompetent and cannot complete the task to which they have been assigned.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Brings a whole new meaning to "data integrity."
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.
Neither. I learned that part years later from a friend with access to the facts. I'll not name him, but I have good reason to think he knows what he's talking about or I wouldn't have quoted him. I don't know from my own knowledge how big the force sent was, but I do know that it was big, and that we pushed them back mostly by using air and sea power (My ship was doing shore bombardment with its 5" gun.) instead of throwing infantry into the meat grinder.
As far as our "marching on Hanoi" is concerned, there was no possibility of that by '72 even if, as you point out so accurately, we were willing to risk war with the Soviets or (more likely) the Chinese.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The anti-war crowd was already crying about how evil we were back in 1967, back when LBJ was in charge, so I doubt your claim of "more than 10 years" is accurate.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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?
Thanks for your service regardless. Both the Left and the Right were frantic to end the war, the left for moral reasons, whatever the value of that, and the right because they could claim to have set right the "idealistic mistakes" of the Kennedy/Johnson years, cutting off the opposition.
The whole "the Left pulled us back from the threshold of victory" argument is interesting for historical analysis, but more often it's just a bat that militarists and rightists use to beat political opposition. It's not really about the vietnam war at all, it's about how people like Dean Acheson and Walt Rostow and George Kennan really really thought people like Kissinger and Zbrigniew Brzinski were "pussies" (of course I don't recall seeing anybody on that list proposing a land invasion of North Vietnam, either). Saying they lost us the war was just a really powerful way of making that point. A very similar process occurred in the government after the fall of China to Mao in the 50s, where Acheson and Truman were accused of having "allowed" China to go Communist by people like Nixon and Henry Luce.
That shit is no good. It's not good when Americans just make the leap in their mind that other Americans would wreck the country just to win elections.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
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.
Now that you mention it, with everything about Gitmo being top secret, I guess a mass communication officer wouldn't have much to do except edit Wikipedia.
Reminds me of communists and their military political officers.
rd
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?
And in 2003 the anti-war crowd were saying we shouldn't go to Iraq. That wouldn't make it any less of a loss if we are still there in 2013.
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.
Another captive who stands accused of having a role in an attack where an American soldier was injured was also a teenager when the alleged incident occurred. He was only charged recently.
One stands accused of playing a role in an attack where a Red Cross worker was killed. One of the allegations that JTF-GTMO analysts suggests his denials of involvement in, or knowledge of this attack? Interrogators pounced on how, in his initial replies to this allegation he referred to the Red Cross worker as a "he" -- when his interrogator said they never mentioned the Red Cross worker's gender. Need I point out how flimsy this allegation is? It is hardly surprising that someone from a patriarchal society, where women are covered from head to foot, and aren't allowed out of their home unless they are in the company of a male relative, would refer to every stranger they hear about as male.
One of the seven other captives who were charged under the military commissions President Bush initially authorized, and which were over-ruled as unconstitutional by Supreme Court faced extremely flimsy allegations that he played a role in a third incident where a grenade was tossed into a van with Canadian journalists, seriously wounding Canadian journalist Kathleen Keena. His transcript is on pages 108 of this .pdf.
Do any of the allegations against other captives support the allegation they were captured near an incident where uniformed Pakistanis or uniformed Afghans were killed or injured?
What you have to understand about how the captives came into US custody is that Omar Khadr's capture was the exception. Most captives were turned over by bounty hunters, who merely told the Americans the captive was an enemy. And the Americans did absolutely zero sanity checking before they paid the bounties. Of the remainder, who were captured by Americans, it wasn't following a skirmish, but was based on a denunciation, for which the denunciator got a big bounty.
IMO, none of the claims of these bounty hunters should be given any trust whatsoever.
I have to disagree. We actually have been using propaganda for years. I would further make the arguement that propaganda is not only important in any society; it's especially important in a democratic society. Assuming you're American or Italian or whatever, I doubt they didn't present the more unflattering points in your culture when you learned about your own history. Infact, I would go so far as to say - it IS the government's duty to indoctrinate you into your culture. Maybe I'm totally wrong - but I imagine this has something to do with why these officer's were editing wikipedia articles.
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
Yeah.
Fuck off.
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
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 ***
And I'm not saying they were wrong in this case. However, I'd like to point out that historically, subduing insurrections of this nature generally take seven to ten years, often longer, so if we're still there in 2013, it wouldn't be surprising. What would be surprising would be if we were still fighting there in 2023.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
What's scary is that you seem to think this was a good thing. 100,050 people killed, and for what? The north still won. So what good did this killing of 100,050 human beings accomplish?
Sir, you're a loser in more than one sense of the word, and I'm truly ashamed to share a country with you. If you could leave the US (like you told another person to do), I'd be happy. Then I could start working on improving the country which I love.
Not so. As I've explained before, at the peace conference, the anti-war fanatics gave the North everything they could never have won on the field of battle.
If you could leave the US (like you told another person to do), I'd be happy. Then I could start working on improving the country which I love.
How? By teaching children that defending their country is a Bad Thing and that allowing two-bit, tin-horn dictators with delusions of godhead to push us around is right and proper? Or would you prefer just to let them believe that scientific truth is decided by consensus and that historical facts are less important than political doctrine? Our country has not only survived over two centuries of being governed by people with attitudes similar to mine, it's prospered. I doubt, quite frankly, that it could survive even one century governed by people who believe as you do, but I'm afraid that that's the way we're headed. We had our chance, and you're doing the best you can to piss it away.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
Terrorists?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
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
China doesn't have prisoners the same way Iran doesn't have homosexuals. If we used the death penalty as liberally as China we wouldn't have very many prisoners either.
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
The Supreme Court got rid of that recently.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
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
For example, NPR's "This I Believe" supposedly personal-account audio essays had on Dec 9th a submission from a stated Gitmo prison officer. www.thisIbelieve.org then read the Dec 9 essay.
Story ends with a "self-stated" "horrible person" Muslim prisoner crying when confronted with the self-effacing, magnanimous Christion prison guard.
Puleeze.
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