[lbo-talk] More on Wikipedia: Now the US army is whitewashing my articles

Lance Murdoch lancemurdoch at gmail.com
Fri Jul 15 17:15:24 PDT 2005


I created an article on the US No Gun Ri Massacre during the Korean war:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri

On July 11th, someone with the IP address 214.13.216.142 began white-washing the article. They made misrepresentations about what had happened, what US policy was at the time and other such things. I reverted back to what I had written, but they reverted me, chnaging back to what they had written.

So I became curious who this 214.13.216.142 was. I consulted http://whois.arin.net , which told me that any IP address beginning with 214 belonged to the US Department of Defense. Then I did a PTR (also called a reverse DNS) lookup, and found that 214.13.216.142 was actually n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil.

Well, I knew mil meant military. CentCom I remember from the film "Control Room", they are the people trying to spin the Iraq war for the world (and especially the US corporate) media. But MNSTCI?

A little checking around showed me MNSTCI stood for the United States Central Command's Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq. So my tax dollars are paying for someone at CentCom's Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq, which I suppose is some sort of modern version of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, to go through my Wikipedia edits, removing all reference to massacres the US did over half a century ago.

If you click the link above and the "history" button, you can see the IP address. Various Internet tools (like the ARIN link) will show you where it's coming from.

-- Lance



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