FBI, CIA Scriveners Edit Wikipedia Entries

According to Reuters, “CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.” No doubt, as well, the FBI and CIA have made other changes to “the world’s most important online encyclopaedia,” editorial changes not as grandiose as expanding former CIA chief William Colby’s entry, dumping a chart on Iraq casualties, or removing satellite images of the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. You can bet they edited scads of lesser entries as well.

“The changes may violate Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said Thursday,” although Wikipedia, of course, will do nothing about it, as they are not in the business of posting factual information, instead often serving as a platform for character assassination and slander, an area familiar to both the FBI and CIA, often tasked with neutralizing or at least harassing dissidents and those who believe the First Amendment means what it says.

“It violates Wikipedia’s neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization,” Reuters continues, feeding us a line of Wikipedia public relations nonsense. “However, she said, ‘Wikipedia is self-correcting,’ meaning that misleading entries can be quickly revised by another editor. She said Wikimedia welcomed the WikiScanner.”

So neutral is Wikipedia, the site insists I am an antisemite and Holocaust denier—two quite serious allegations in this day and age of highly polarized political correctness and corporate dominated political consensus—although they provide absolutely no evidence of this beyond a blog entry defending the free speech right of David Irving, convicted of not adhering to the official historical orthodoxy. Wikipedia allowed slanderous edits on my entry for months before “self-correction” kicked in.

“According to clues accumulated by ordinary citizens around the world, it could be that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are riding the information wave and planting disinformation on Wikipedia,” Ludwig De Braeckeleer wrote for OhmyNews last month. “If so, tens of thousands of innocent and unwitting citizens around the world are translating and propagating their lies, providing these agencies with a universal news network.”

Of course, this is nothing new, as the CIA has controlled the corporate and much of the so-called “alternative” media for decades, beginning with Operation Mockingbird in the late 40s. “Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA,” writes Mary Louise, “the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone.”

It would appear Wikipedia is not simply “populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects,” as John Seigenthaler Sr., former assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, would have it, but is indeed an intelligence front, yet another puzzle piece of a sprawling, comprehensive, long-term, and quite effective propaganda effort.