User:Geo Swan/DoD Forgeries

In another discussion I disputed that it was always better to merely supply a link that would allow our readers to download DoD documents from the DoD's servers.

The DoD has a record of moving or removing from their servers pages that are important for historical reasons.

I also wrote that when they found they had released material that proved embarrassing they showed no reservations against silently replacing the original material with a censored version. I called this forgery.

Here is a case in point. On March 3rd, 2006, the DoD was under a court imposed deadline to publish documents, including the transcripts from the Guantanamo captives' CSR Tribunals. The deadline had been imposed two months earlier. They weren't ready. They were supposed to deliver the documents to the Associated Press by 6pm. They were late. They didn't not meet that 6pm deadline. Then, after delivering a CDROM with those documents, they sent armed guards to demand the return of the original CDROM, and its replacement with a more limited set of documents.

Those documents were numbered using something called the Bates System. On March 3rd, 2006, they published 60 large portable document files. Each page had a sequential Bates number appended to it. And the Bates numbers of the first page in each file usually followed on directly from the last Bates number of the last page of the previous file.

In the next couple of months they published an additional 12 large files, with an additional several thousand pages of documents. They also silently replaced some of the original files.

One of the files for which they silently replaced with a new version was http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/Set_53_3870-3959.pdf This has been replaced with a version at http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/Set_53_3870-3959.pdf

The 53rd file was the last file containing documents from the CSR Tribunals. Big surprise that the last page of the last file wasn't properly checked. Unlike every other document the document on the last page was a secret document -- CSRT Classified Summary of Mohamed Ben Moujane. There is nothing like this in the documents made public.

The last page in the later revisions of http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/Set_53_3870-3959.pdf replace it with Unsworn Statement from Mohamed Ben Moujane 's CSRT. Similary, it too is unlike any other document in the 25,000 that have been released so far.

If you read the files you will find instances where a series of pages have been replaced by a page that says "page numbers N-M were not used". But they couldn't do that with page 3959, because it was part of the name of the .pdf file. So they decided to draft a crude forgery.

When captives didn't appear at their hearings the DoD skipped convening an unclassified session. So there were no unclassified transcripts of those unclassified sessions.