Google Alerts to the Past
Old news is good news?
I have some — well, many — Google Alerts set up to follow topics in Google News. I regularly go into my Alerts page to manage, i.e., delete alerts that no longer interest me. But what I don’t do, unfortunately, is manage those longstanding old alerts for news I want to follow every day. Resolved: I need to do this to comply with my 2025 New Year resolutions to make my email feed more manageable.
The problem I can fix with my alert query is to perfect the search itself to be more specific. But this is always a quandary: how to make the search terms specific without losing the broader answers, the news stories I could miss?
The problem I can’t fix — can someone tell me if I can? — is that Google “News” is retrieving stories from the past. I assume that these are stories that have more recently be ADDED to the Google data, not the “most recent” stories about the topic. These are my choices for editing the settingss:
Nothing here about retrieving only news, not history.
Usually I am just annoyed, and move on to the next. But an example today got me more than annoyed, I now resolve to fix it, but how?
Here’s the alert:
Wow! A scoop from the reputable Reuters news agency about an “historic agreement!” Could President Biden have decided to renew a relationship with the Cuban government in the last days of his administration? Was the Guantanamo base on the negotiation table?
I opened the link. Here’s the story:
Oh, it’s something President Obama did, ten years ago. My spirits sank.
I have had an alert for: guantanamo released since the first day alerts were made possible. I don’t remember when, but I’m guessing it could have been possible since Guantanamo first opened to detainee men in the “war on terror.” That would be January 11, 2002. Yes, yesterday was the 23rd anniversary of the detention camp on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. There were many stories in my email feed yesterday.
Oh, no, but my alert was possibly created in 2003, because that was when Google’s alert feature was launched. Now I’m guessing I didn’t create an alert until the first detainee was transferred,
Bad guess, again. The first detainee to be transferred (barring any secret transfers that may have happened) was Yaser Hamdi, an “enemy combatant” who was born in the USA. That was in April 2002, when he was transferred to a mainland U.S. military brig, and subsequently stripped of his citizenship and in 2004 was sent to Saudi Arabia without charges ever being filed. Still before the alert feature was offered.
Now this made me wonder, exactly who was transferred from Guantanamo after Mr. Hamdi?
Fortunately, I know where to go to find out: Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. I have a bookmark for an old Department of Defense web page showing the detainees transferred from April 2002 to October 2008, in order of their transfer (or death) and date of transfer. That’s old news, too. For the current number, go to the New York Times Guantanamo Docket: It was updated on January 6, 2025, and shows that only 15 men remain detained there, of the roughly 790 men who were held over these 23 years.
I’m digressing, and I apologize. I’ve been following and reporting on Guantanamo news since that day in January 2002, as I moved through jobs at the Washington Post, the New York Times, ICIJ, NPR and The Intercept. On Friday, I was prepared to watch 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammad plead guilty to his crimes. But a federal court halted the hearing on the night before his appearance.
That’s why I was watching my email alerts. And that’s why the arrival of an “alert” from 2015 got my attention. Like the families of 9/11 victims, I want to see the end of it.