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.'"
This lowly anon humbly suggests tagging the story "ministryoftruth".
Seems rather appropriate.
I wouldn't. Propaganda just means tilting public opinion towards positive through use of the media and other mass communications, with an implication (but not requirement) that it's less than honest. That could be adding positive info, that could be deleting negative info, given access. Wiki is unusual in that it would actually let you do the latter, oversight considerations aside.
Enough people don't understand that Wiki's only -really- valid as a collection of other cites and take it at face value that this sort of thing could be very effective if it's not outed.
The mass communications officer is expected to make a full recovery as a Slashdot editor and meta-moderator.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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.