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.'"

Re:Minor gripe

[Wordplay]

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.

Re:misspelling?

[ShieldW0lf]

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attempt to alter information posted elsewhere but said the military seeks to correct what it believes is incorrect or outdated information about the prison.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) ...my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle.'' [http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm]

Revision as of 22:22, 16 January 2006 (edit) ...my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle.'' [http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm] + Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual.

So, you're not just a liar, but also an idiot.

Re:misspelling?

[ShieldW0lf]

The user in question is simply a common wikipedia vandal. The only pro-US change he made was calling Fidel Castro a transsexual, yet he goes on to call the president "George Wanker Bush" and a "fag". Those two edits were the only politic-related pages he altered. Furthermore, his IP resolves to Romania, which is nowhere near Guantanamo or any place I would choose to conveniently locate a pro-US wikipedia propaganda artist.

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?

Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job???

[Sergeant Pepper]

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.

Re:Expert on subject modifying Wikipedia! Horror!

[thirty-seven]

So what happens if people on the inside are the only ones who know the real truth about a certain subject?

Wikipedia is not the place for original research; they have a policy against it. If you're the only one with firsthand knowledge of an event, or if you have made a new discovery, or even if you have some new well-argued analysis, then the thing to do is to publish it elsewhere (newspaper, book, website, press release) and, if they think it's worthwhile, others will add this information to an article on wikipedia and cite you.

Re:Minor gripe

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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 have their funding removed, especially at a time when Bush is claiming it is too expensive to help pay sick children's medical bills.

Re:Altering Wikipedia is an assigned job???

[Sergeant Pepper]

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 phone call is a published action. They're two very different things that cannot be compared. Apples to oranges. Or, to use more slashdotter-ly terminology, a BMW to a submarine.

In order for these people to save honesty, they encourage people to lie.

I have seen no lies in TFA. Only the exposing of lies.

And now, you defend someone's right to publicize another person's contact information, but, if someone else ran a web site with names addresses of people that you liked, you would be up in arms.

The only way for people to get names and addresses of people that I liked would be to do things illegal. Again, apples to oranges. You're comparing the gathering of freely available information and forming a conclusion based on it to wiretapping.

There's only one thing to conclude:

The only thing to conclude is that you are incapable of rational and logical thought. You started with wrong assumptions and then used bad analogies and illogic to come to an even worse conclusion.

the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit

[TopSpin]

That's the slogan which appears on the Main_Page [wikipedia.org] of Wikipedia. The provided link leads to Wikipedia:Introduction [wikipedia.org] which states:

anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold

I presume the "almost any page" refers to that tiny subset of pages that are locked at any one moment. No criterion for who is and is not permitted to edit Wikipedia are provided.

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 /. story lists the 60 edits [wikipedia.org] in question. If you actually examine these edits you'll find they appear to have no general focus. Edits include grammar and spelling corrections, elaborations on pop culture topics and other matters. Since the vast majority of these edits lack any obvious political agenda, Wikileaks helpfully "highlights" the 5 controversial edits, otherwise you might miss them:

1. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
2. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
3. Remove one sentence containing a gitmo detainee ID number. Remainder of topic unmodified
4. Alter one word to characterize the current Afghanistan conflict as a "war" instead of an "invasion".
5. Add the sentence "Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual."

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.

Re:The incompetence of goverment....

[budword]

Have you meet many people in our government ? Competence would be great. But it's not there. It's either incompetence or malice, pick one. When I'm traveling I'm much more afraid of the security screener on a power trip than I am of a religious nutball with a bomb in his shoe. This isn't irrational. I'm much more likely to run into a security screener with some personal problems looking to take it out on someone than I am a shoe bomber. Who puts murders behind bars ? I hate to burst your bubble, but over half of all crime in the US isn't solved at all, and the average murderer is out in less than 10 years. The government isn't responsible for the safety of food supply, they can't check even 1% of it, the farmers and companies we buy food from make sure it's safe. Sure, the government promises to have harsh words with them if they screw up, but it's not a very big stick, and isn't much of a threat, when it's carried out at all. Our government is a larger threat to the average US citizen than any foreigner. The Founding Fathers knew it as well, you can see their care in limiting the scope of the Federal Government. Unfortunately the courts have allowed the Feds to get out of hand, by not slapping down the abuse of the interstate commerce clause, among others.

Re:Military prisons have a purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

there are crimes such as desertion which have no civilian parallel.

FWIW, in some countries (fewer these days, maybe), it is a crime for citizens to defect.

Number 5 not true

[Derling Whirvish]

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.

Re:Eerie Similarity Between Washington and Moscow

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see anything particularly eerie about this.

Before Condoleezza Rice was a Secretary of State, and before she was a National Security Advisor, and before she was a member of the Board of Chevron Oil with a fat-assed oil tanker named after her, she was a Kremlinologist with a specific focus on repressive measures used in Czechoslovakia.

She brought to the Bush Administration a level of understanding of how to implement KGB type techniques that is relatively rare among persons raised in the American culture. There can be no question that her expertise has enabled the Bush Administration to more easily engage in practices that would be repugnant to Americans if they were not presented within the exotic contextual framings that she had studied when she was younger.

The idea of incarcerating a 15 year old for more than five years without trial or any other kind of constitutional review is as repugnant as... well, as calling filling somebody's lungs with water until they are on the edge of death by the euphemistic term "waterboarding", and saying it isn't torture (apparently because it doesn't leave any visible scars).

I'll post this one anonymously. This thread will be analyzed by at least one security agency. No sense it making things easy for them.

Re:misspelling?

[replicant108]

Bullshit.

You can seen from this link [wikipedia.org] that the Castro edit was made by 130.22.190.5 - the Gitmo IP.

 

Re:i live in the USA

[iluvcapra]

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 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.

Re:Eerie Similarity Between Washington and Moscow

[Pecisk]

Man, Russia now has hole army of Wikipedia editors to edit USSR, Russia, USSR bloody history articles. It was common sense in ninetees that USSR was bad. Utterly, ugly bad. Guess what. It is not anymore, according to articles. Of course, if you will read "Talk" pages, you will discover, that there are special army of nuts who works like advocates of some serial killer - deny everything, spin facts, NEVER back down to opponent.

Re:Minor gripe

[FredThompson]

How did this get to be rated 5, insightful? The post is entirely void of comprehension.

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 people who are engaged in agitprop against them. (Let's forget, for the moment, the behind the scenes power plays at Wikipedia and assume it's a democratically operating, self policing entity and not an Orwellian "heads I win, tails you lose" propaganda site like KOS.)

Their tasks include correcting misunderstandings, countering propaganda and protecting the forces by doing what they can to remove information about operations. That's no different than how any police department handles vice and other dangerous operations. They don't announce all the details about how they catch criminals and they most certainly do whatever they can to prevent information about how prisons work from the public. That's being responsible. The blanket term is Operational Security. It's just as true now as it was during WWII when President FDR censored all communications between military personnel and everyone else as well as a huge majority of the civilian communications. Well, the difference is he didn't have the legal authority to do that and PA officers most certainly have the authority to make public statements. Wikipedia is a public area of discourse.

There was a really funny occurrence during Gulf War I in which the reporter asked where the Allied invasion forces where going and their plans. The military reply was something along the lines of, "Right, well, if we tell you then that information will be on the television and our enemies also watch it, don't they?"

RichardWolff.com disappeared

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [e-mail]
            Richard Wolff
            28 Ridgley St.
            Hackettstown, NJ 07840
            US
            [phone]

      Technical Contact:
            Wolff, Richard [e-mail]
            Richard Wolff
            28 Ridgley St.
            Hackettstown, NJ 07840
            US
            [phone]

Seems to be the registrant to this domain. US Military Mass Communication Specialist, with expertise on harrassing anti-war activists.

Reality check

[geoswan]

In this day and age, there is a decidedly anti-government and anti-Bush perspective that is promoted by many in the mainstream media and, often, in places like Slashdot and Wikipedia.

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:

Finding: CPT Carolyn A. Wood, Officer in Charge, Interrogation Control Element (ICE), Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, 519 MI BDE A preponderance of evidence supports that CPT Wood failed to do the following: *Failed to implement the necessary checks and balances to detect and prevent detainee abuse. Given her knowledge of prior abuse in Afghanistan, as well as the reported sexual assault of a female detainee by three 519 MI BN Soldiers working in the ICE, CPT Wood should have been aware of the potential for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. As the Officer-in-Charge (OIC) she was in a position to take steps to prevent further abuse. Her failure to do so allowed the abuse by Soldiers and civilians to undetected and unchecked.
*Failed to assist in gaining control of a chaotic situation during the IP Roundup, even after SGT Eckroth approached her for help.
*Failed to provide proper supervision. Should have been more alert due to the following incidents:

*An ongoing investigation on the 519 MI BN in Afghanistan.
*Prior reports of 519 MI BN interrogators conducting unauthorized interrogations.
*SOLDIER29's repo