Our boys in uniform
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 17 years ago, in 2007, on the World Wide Web.
Perhaps it makes me an anti-American scumbag to point this out, but I don’t especially support these efforts by lying creeps and transphobic adolescent Internet trolls in uniform to protect my freedom
:
US military personnel at Guantanamo 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 today.
The group, Wikileaks, tracked web activity by service members with Guantanamo email 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 Guantanamo 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attempt to alter information posted elsewhere but said the military seeks to correct what it believes is incorrect or outdated information about the prison.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 Guantanamo wrote in a Wikipedia profile of the Cuban president:
Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual,the unknown writer said, misspelling the word transsexual.The US has no formal relations with Cuba and has maintained its base in the south-east 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 Guantanamo public affairs office, according to Wikileaks.
A comment on a Wired magazine story about a leaked Guantanamo operations manual that was recently posted on the Wikileaks website urged readers to learn about Guantanamo by going to the public affairs website, adding that the base is
a very professional place full of true American patriots.
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Yet another reason why the complacent tone of most anti-war folks (saying we should “support our troops” by bringing them home) bothers me. I don’t support “our” troops. I don’t know many of them personally, and while a few of them I’ve met have been decent people, I still think they’ve made a tremendous error in judgement in joining the military (one I cannot, in any meaningful sense, support).
The existence of state-paid bully-boys like these, however, makes my position a bit easier to explain to people.
On a similar theme, see Utah Phillips’ questions for hawks and doves, reprinted at Dulce Et Decorum Est.