Guantanamo Officers Caught Modifying Wikipedia 598
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.'"
Minor gripe (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Minor gripe (Score:4, Insightful)
When it is a government employee doing this, on the clock, paid for by tax dollars, as part of their official duties... well that is what propaganda is. Why the hell are we paying for "mass communications officers" in the first place? Does anyone support their tax dollars going to pay for someone to go post positive comments on Digg about government programs? Say, are you by any chance a "mass communications officer?"
Re:Minor gripe (Score:5, Funny)
Because they are a part of the modern military: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations [wikipedia.org] (read it quick before it get's edited)
Now you might think that it would be wrong for the US Government to use a part of the military against US citizens, but then you would be supporting the terrorists. Here's why: The Terrorists can read the internet. It's OK to trample on you if it is in the name of Stopping The Terrorists. Any red blooded American should be proud to read purposefully distorted information, because they know that it is the only way to Stop The Terrorists and protect Freedom. America, fuck yeah.
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Public relations? Winning of hearts and minds? Press liaison?
All are fairly legit functions of any administration, as is outright propaganda. You don't think Congress funds Voice of America because they listen to it on their car radios on the way to work in the morning?
With respect to the hearts and minds angle, there was a big push on this during the time of the Iraq invasion. The cynical interpretation was that the effort
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Public relations? Winning of hearts and minds? Press liaison? All are fairly legit functions of any administration, as is outright propaganda.
Bullshit. Even the former director of the CIA disagrees with you, as he stated that some of the misinformation campaigns we've run in the middle east have made their way into US news, which is counter to the interests of the US populace and unconstitutional. The army/executive branch may have a legal mandate to plant misinformation overseas, but as soon as it is meant for the US population, they've overstepped their authority. The people should rightly be outraged by this and should require such programs
Re:Minor gripe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Minor gripe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Minor gripe (Score:5, Insightful)
Way to miss the F'ing point. I don't care, so long as they aren't doing so using my involuntarily claimed tax dollars. The constitution is predicated upon the belief that the US government is the greatest danger to the freedom of the people. When homosexual groups start taxing me under threat of imprisonment, then I'll take offense. Until then, the point is what the government is doing.
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The prohibition is against military personnel in uniform attending political events or active duty personnel using their rank and position in an effort to endorse a political cause.
The U.S. military has Public Affairs Officers who are spokesmen, just like any other large organization. They deliver news to the public. Wikipedia, most certainly, is a modern form of media. US military PA people access it just the same as peo
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Because the modern military realizes it is not enough to win battles. You must also convince the homefront you are winning battles. Perception is reality and the loudest voice defines the truth.
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Re:Minor gripe (Score:5, Insightful)
*snerk*.
Showing "both sides" of every issue may be "fair and balanced" -- but if one of those sides is arguing that the atomic weight of helium is 5 or 3+3=17, it does nothing to promote popular knowledge of objective truths.
Reality check (Score:4, Informative)
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:
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In this case it might be one of those "Stopped clocks right twice a day" scenarios though. I don't know.
Despite the source, This Article [rollingstone.com] is depressingly accurate. Having been over there (A couple months in Baghdad, a couple more on a podunk FOB in Afghanistan) - I can tell you contractors are paid massive amounts of money, and the companies behind those contractors are being paid even more just to ensure people are on the gro
Re:Minor gripe (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Wait, maybe you're one of them!
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The parent message points out, and correctly, that wikipedia and other self-edit mechanisms are going to be rife for objective reporting in sheep's clothing. If you
Tag suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems rather appropriate.
In other news, (Score:5, Funny)
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I found the asumption that Wikileaks was pro-US was somewhat naive. There are plenty of folk out there on the Internet, most of them are not US citizens and a vanishingly small percentage of them approve of US run gulags.
It should be pretty obvious that anyone who has been involved in the Bush administration torture policy has become a target for assasination and worse. That is one of the many reasons why
Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job??? (Score:5, Funny)
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No, the guy is working for the Ministry of Love over there. That's why the outrage.
Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job??? (Score:5, Funny)
Wolff, Richard M. MC1, USN, Mass Communication Specialist/Webmaster
Joint Task Force Guantanamo APO AE 09360 Cuba
Phone: 011-5399-8135
Ph DSN: 660-8135
Email: richard.m.wolff@jtfgtmo.southcom.mil
Alt Email: usnavymc1@yahoo.com
Wouldn't want that to get misplaced.
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all while of course, your email is hidden. What a hypocrite you are!
That doesn't qualify as hypocritical... you might want to look up the definition of hypocritical.
hypocritical: Characterized by hypocrisy or being a hypocrite.
hypocrisy: The claim, pretense, or false representation of holding beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not actually possess.
The only way it could POSSIBLY qualify as hypocrisy was if he, too, was a military mass communications officer who was being paid to spread propaganda on the internet. Which I doubt.
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However, these people are now tracking people on the internet and monitoring communications themselves. How else does Wikileaks find out who is posting what, unless, they are monitoring traffic of people?
It might have helped had you RTFA. There was no "monitoring of traffic." Things like Wikipedia attach the IP of the editor to edits. They looked at all the edits made by the IP assigned to Guantanamo.
And, to get people to turn over goodies, they encourage them to lie in the workplace about what they are doing.
Where did this come from? There was nothing in TFA about lying.
So, in order for these people to save privacy, they throw privacy away even more
Two VERY DIFFERENT THINGS. "These people," as you call them, are looking at information that the people from Guantanamo posted on the internet. That is to say, it is a published action. However, there is no way to claim that two people's private
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That's monitoring. Just because the information was publicly available (and really, why is that?), doesn't change the nature of the activity.
You're right, it doesn't. But by your logic looking things up in a book (or Wikipedia) is monitoring since that's essentially what they did.
Wikileaks asks people to steal information from their collegues, then, misrepresent that they did so to them. Thus, they want you to lie.
No, they don't. They ask people to expose lies, fraud, and illegal activities.
You could own a site like wikipedia and grab their IP. Or you could look in the phone book or buy a social networking company that you use.
Neither a phone book nor IP addresses will tell who my friends are. And I don't use social networking sites. And it bears no relevance to the matter at hand since, AFAIK, my friends have not been in the news. Honestly, if you're against this, you must be against ALL name use in the news. So
Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that the officers were doing a job paid for by you. It is entirely appropriate that the public know where their money is going and who is spending it doing what. If the officers did this in their own private time, there would be a conflict of interest issue, but there would be no reason to leak their details. If the officers did this on your payroll, you have every right to know what they did, why they did it, and if they should have done it. If you are paying for something you have a right to know what people are doing with your money, obviously with certain exceptional limitations, this being far from any of those.
Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy - individuals VS govt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just for the record -- this is the post I'm foe'ing you for; I quite enjoyed our other thread.
I can appreciate a good devil's advocate position -- but this isn't onesuch, even remotely. To play devil's advocate, one's position needs to be plausible, something an opponent might accept long enough to draw up a reasonable counterargument.
Look -- you claim to be a Libertarian-leaning Republican. How can you claim that all activists' work is destructive, when such a large branch of activism is centered around protecting the personal freedoms you claim you value? It's activists that got women the vote; activists who helped men and women escape slavery and flee to Canada; activists that ended apartheid; activists who uprooted British rule over their American colonies and started the revolution that lead to the very existence of the country you live in.
Devil's advocate or no, your claims insult the Constitution itself -- it was people demanding, agitating and giving their lives for change that resulted in the very idea of a government existing by the consent of the governed. If you'll spit on that for a chance to score a few points in some online forum, I will have nothing to do with you.
Eerie Similarity Between Washington and Moscow (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the pro-Kremlin bloggers, A recent report [rferl.org] 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?
An Asshole In an Office Paid Tax Money (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Now I'm not defending the Russian Government, but the extraordinary rendition policy of the US, the detention of people in violation of the Geneva convention and the invasion of a country on a false premise and without a UN mandate sounds exactly the same sort of scale as what Russia gets up to.
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A. Yes (to both.)
As a Briton, caught between the two I am becoming seriously worried, both by Putin's increasingly strident attacks on anyone who opposes him and the USA's seeming inability to elect anyone other than a clown as president.
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Curse them, this is our Internet! (Score:4, Funny)
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This is why military intelligence is an oxymoron (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Something is very broken when.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Military prisons have a purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
But Guatanemo is being used outside of normal military usage which is probably why they also need spin meisters to make their case.
Re:Military prisons have a purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you read David Hick's Australian lawyers account of why he was barred from attending his client's trial? The Presiding Officer wanted him to sign a disclaimer, stating that he would abide by the Commission's rules, and that he would be in trouble if he didn't. He says he was prepared to sign, once he had been allowed to SEE the rules he was agreeing to abide by.
So, why couldn't he see them? BECAUSE THEY HADN'T YET BEEN WRITTEN.
Nevertheless, the Presiding Officer insisted the lawyer agree to abide by these not yet written rules. And, when he wouldn't do so he was barred from attendance.
Military Prisons, like Leavenworth, hold people convicted of crimes. None of the captives currently at Guantanamo has been convicted of a crime. With three exceptions, none of the captives are even charged with a crime.
The DoD does not call Guantanamo a Military Prison. It does not call Guantanamo a POW camp. It calls Guantanamo a "detention camp".
David Hicks was convicted, because he pled guilty. But he only pled guilty after this shameful act where one of his lawyers, the one his family chose, was barred from attending his trial. Please don't confuse this with justice.
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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
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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 so
What's really funny (Score:5, Insightful)
The incompetence of goverment.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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As soon as you get national/multinational organizations, be they governmental or corporate, incompetence inevitable creeps in.
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The incompetence of government
Interestingly there is some research indicating that people acting as individuals can be intelligent, but when placed within a bureaucracy then everyone acts as if they were completely stupid. I think that's a good reason to avoid creating massive bureaucracies. But I cannot understand why people in general continue building bureaucracies over and over again... new departments, bigger governments, massive multinationals, franchises... Everything is overbureaucratised even though everyone with an open m
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What a pathetic administration (Score:2, Offtopic)
Correcting falsehoods (Score:2)
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That said, there's a difference between a propaganda campaign orchestrated at high levels, vs. some bored private being a dork. Then again, powerful people tend to do their dirty work through disposable minions, so it's not always easy to tell.
Call the Waaaaaambulance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Just may be me, but calling it Invasion of Afghanistan is just a clever way of trying to spin it the other direction.
an admitted transsexual? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a job? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit (Score:5, Informative)
Now, Wikipedia does maintain a NPOV policy [wikipedia.org] 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.
Number 5 not true (Score:3, Informative)
My clear and unambiguous take (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Nothing really to see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can read here [southcom.mil], 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.
Just an idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wow what a shock (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, the ideal goal is to keep Wikipedia as void of 'opinion' as possible anyway.
Re:Wow what a shock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow what a shock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow what a shock (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Wow what a shock (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course not, but when they are caught they need to be punished and more importantly, stopped.
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.
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.
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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 gra
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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.
You are mistaken about this, at least with respect to accuracy. The whole reason why propaganda on Wikipedia has any chance of being effective is because Wikipedia is mostly accurate. For any random fact that you care to look up on the site, chances are it will be true. The site's overall accuracy has been repeatedly tested and found to be generally [independent.co.uk] high [firstmonday.org]. And there lies the danger. Because it is mostly accurate, it encourages a lack of skepticism in areas where it is not so accurate. But this is no di
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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 ar
Re:Fuck Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh right you just wanted to troll about Wikipedia, my mistake.
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Re:uhm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Ignorant (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ignorant (Score:5, Insightful)
Please explain how your conclusion (Wikileaks acts against the interest of the United States as a sovereign nation) in the second sentence follows from your claim (Wikileaks has international support) ? And please explain how the implied statement that Wikileaks doens't have facts in the first sentence follows from your conclusion in the second ?
Or are you simply spreading FUD about Wikileaks in an attempt to discredit it ?
Re:Ignorant (Score:5, Funny)
Wikileaks contains facts, and is therefore by the transitive property operating with an anti-US bias.
thats math, you cant argue with that.
Truthiness revised (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Yawn... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yawn... (Score:5, Insightful)
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"It's ok because everyone else is doing it", is just the weakest excuse for justifying this thing especially when they're not, which is more mis-information.
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Re:Okay, so who isn't doing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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-Mike
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The war was "lost" because the American Left declared it lost and forced their wrong-headed opinion on the rest of the country.
The dolchstosslegende [wikipedia.org] 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 cond
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News at 11.
Re:misspelling? (Score:5, Informative)
From the article in question:
This is the American government speaking to the American people and to the world through Wikipedia, not identifying itself and often speaking about itself in the third person, Assange said in a telephone interview from Paris.
Army Lt. Col. Ed Bush, a prison camps spokesman, said there is no official attempt to alter information posted elsewhere but said the military seeks to correct what it believes is incorrect or outdated information about the prison.
Bush declined to answer questions about the Castro posting.
Assange said that in January 2006, someone at Guantánamo wrote in a Wikipedia profile of the Cuban president: Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual, the unknown writer said, misspelling the word transsexual.
The U.S. has no formal relations with Cuba and has maintained its base in the southeast of the island over the objections of the Castro government.
So, that's a lie. Also, from the link you posted:
Revision as of 20:55, 16 January 2006 (edit)
Revision as of 22:22, 16 January 2006 (edit)
So, you're not just a liar, but also an idiot.
Re:misspelling? (Score:5, Informative)
More lies and propaganda. The link you posted was to the person who edited BEFORE it was altered. The link to the actual user who did this is here [wikipedia.org]
Reverse DNS lookup reveals that IP belongs to:
130.22.190.5 resolves to
"public.jtfgtmo.southcom.mil"
Top Level Domain: "southcom.mil"
So, how much do you guys get paid for doing this?
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You can seen from this link [wikipedia.org] that the Castro edit was made by 130.22.190.5 - the Gitmo IP.
Re:Expert on subject modifying Wikipedia! Horror! (Score:5, Informative)
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Honestly, is any "XXXXX caught modifying wikipedia" article really newsworthy nowadays?
It's not the fact that Wikipedia was edited that makes this story newsworthy. I agree that stories saying "an article about X was edited by an editor with an IP address belonging to X", which we have seen a lot of recently, are not really interesting.
But this story is newsworthy because, allegedly, a US military officer, as part of his paid duties, was removing information from Wikipedia, and other websites, that put the detention camp at Guantanamo in a bad light or that (apparently) gave more informat
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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.
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And, for the record, I think it's very, very wrong to house these guys at Gitmo. This "new kind of enemy stuff" is pure bullshit. Enemy combatants, who disguise themselves as civilians, are spies. Spies are supposed to be *executed*, not detained.
I was thinking about this a few days ago; I agree with you. Generally, captured enemy combatants, whether part of a state's military, an irregular militia, etc should be detained and treated in accordance with the Geneva conventions as prisoners of war. However, if the US government claims that some of them were "unlawful combatants" or disguised as civilians then they should be brought to a civilian trial*. If they are convicted of spying, which fighting while disguised as civilians usually qualifies a
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Feel free to look it up for yourself.
That patriotic civilian could be held for the duration of hostilities -- but not under the conditions the Guantanamo captives were held.
But, what should be said here is, the a
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Perhaps Wikipedia's motto should be something like, "By the people for the people." --After all, the various secret services of the world already own the rest of the media, so to heck with them. They don't play fair so they shouldn't be invited to join.
Anyway, psychopaths are not people. They are sharks who feed on people, they infest government, and they cannot be reformed. Only a fo