Military Denies Gitmo Edited Wikipedia Bios of Castro and Camp Delta
By James Gordon Meek
Today we reported in the New York Daily News about a team of Wikileaks.org sleuths who blew the cover of U.S. military hackers who edited entries for their sister site, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Among the edits was an addition to Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s biography, where they labeled him “an admitted transsexual.”
The Wikileaks snoops traced computer Internet Protocol numbers - digital fingerprints - for the people who made the Castro edit, as well as those who removed detainee ID numbers from the bios of several terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Delta and changed the phrase “invasion of Afghanistan” to the more banal “war in Afghanistan” on another page about Gitmo.
The military was asked for comment on Wednesday, but didn’t respond until this morning. In a statement, Army Lt. Col. Edward Bush insisted that no one at Joint Task Force-Guantanamo had edited any of the pages - despite the fact that Wikipedia has the hackers dead to rights as using JTF-GTMO computers.
“There has been no attempt to alter/change any information that has been posted anywhere,” Lt. Col. Bush said in the statement e-mailed to me. “That would be unethical.”
Bush said in a subsequent phone call that there’s no way to know if any of the 3,000 uniformed military at Gitmo was responsible for the documented changes, but he promised his public affairs staff was not behind it. He also blasted Wikipedia for identifying one sailor in his office by name, who has since received death threats for simply doing his job - posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.
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