The US government is actively manipulating new media sites including Wikipedia, Digg and others

[MikeWB]

Evidence is here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks_busts_...ropaganda_team/

JULIAN ASSANGE (investigative editor, julian@wikileaks.org)
2007-12-12 (Wednesday)

Guantanamo Bay deletes detainee ID numbers, labels Fidel Castro "an admitted transexual" and more.
WASHINGTON--The US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has been caught conducting covert propaganda attacks on the internet. The attacks, exposed this week in a report by the government transparency group Wikileaks, include deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia last month, the systematic posting of unattributed "self praise" comments on news organization web sites in response to negative press, boosting pro-Guantanamo stories on the internet news site Digg and even modifying Fidel Castro's encyclopedia article to describe the Cuban president as "an admitted transexual" [sic].

Shayana Kadidal, Managing Attorney of the Center for Constitutional Rights Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative, said in response to the report:

"The military's efforts to alter the record by vandalizing Wikipedia are of a piece with the amateurism of their other public relations efforts: their ridiculous claims that released detainees who criticize the United States in the media have 'returned to the battlefield,'.


Follow up article from the Associated Press:
By MICHAEL MELIA
Associated Press
In this Oct. 10, 2007 photo, reviewed by a Pentagon official, an American soldier drives past the detention facility at the U.S. Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico --

U.S. military personnel at Guantánamo Bay called Fidel Castro a transsexual and defended the prison for terrorism suspects in anonymous Web postings, an Internet group that publishes government documents said Wednesday.

The group, Wikileaks, tracked Web activity by service members with Guantánamo e-mail addresses and also found they deleted prisoner identification numbers from three detainee profiles on Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that allows anyone to change articles.

Julian Assange, who led the research effort, said the postings amount to propaganda and deception.
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.

Comments on news stories were posted by people using apparently fictitious names to news sites -- and were prepared by the Guantánamo public affairs office, according to Wikileaks. A comment on a Wired magazine story about a leaked Guantánamo operations manual that was recently posted on the Wikileaks Web site urged readers to learn about Guantánamo by going to the public affairs Web site, adding that the base is ``a very professional place full of true American patriots.

Assange's group could not specifically identify who from Guantánamo made about 60 edits to Wikipedia entries on topics that included not only the prison but also subjects such as football, cars and television programs.

The detention center at the U.S. Navy base currently has about 305 men on suspicion of links to terrorism, al Qaeda or the Taliban.

[LivingPharaoh]

On and on South of Heaven!

We are not amused... nor surprised, really.

[nataraja]

this is not the first time, and this will surely not be the last time.

:(

[LivingPharaoh]

The Internet has officially left America.

Good knowing you guys, as short as it was.