Talk:CIA transnational anti-crime and anti-drug activities

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[edit] Reality check about OR

I believe it is within the safe limits of WP:OR to mention, in the same general section, Baluchi tribesmen both involved in drug smuggling into Iran, and also wikilinked to possible CIA support of these same tribesmen as guerillas. Also see CIA Activities by Region: Near East, North Africa, South and Southwest Asia#Baluchi guerillas in Iran (Iran, April 2007).

Opinions welcome, and also how much should be here rather than in Iran or Afghanistan articles. Placement is tricky as these are transborer issues. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 05:13, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed name change

This name is too cumbersome, and doesnot really fit Wikipedia guidelines on articles names. I suggest:

CIA crime and illicit drug trade activities

Any objections? Any better suggestions? Ground Zero | t 05:00, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Transnational anti-crime, perhaps, but CIA crime and illicit drug trade sounds like the CIA is doing it, not trying to suppress it (and yes, the former has happened). The transnational articles reflect things not limited to one country.
In the article, for example, there is a CIA map showing heroin flows through Southwest Asia. Having worked on the Afghanistan-centric part today, the issues really could not be limited to that country. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 05:03, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

How about:

CIA transnational anti-crime and anti-drug activities?

Ground Zero | t 18:17, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I can live with that. We should make all proposed changes at once, since there are some navigation templates. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:20, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Relevance of post, rather than edit comment of "it's all our fault"

I moved the text

Afghan filmmaker Jawed Taiman in his film Addicted In Afghanistan attributes the high incidence of opium addiction in the large refugee population in Afghanistan to the U.S. intervention, claiming that opium addiction was significantly lower under Communist and Taliban rule.[1]

to the talk page, as I don't see relevance to this article. I am willing to look at additional information that ties this film to specific CIA activities, not generic complaints about US policy or claims about blowback that show cause & effect and come from a reliable source.

Already in the article are UN (Office of Drugs and Crime, UNODOC) and other sources that indeed talk about increases in consumption, refugees, Baluchi activity on the Iranian border, and other quite specific details that may correlate with ongoing covert action against Iran. The nature of films is to be visually striking and memorable, but I tend not to regard them as preferred sources.

Can you explain why this filmmaker's information is particularly notable, and what it adds that other sourced information in the article does not? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:02, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Maybe a lot of information in the CIA drugs article should be floated up to a USA drugs article. The section where I put it in is comprised largely of non-CIA-specific general background.
I inserted the claim where I thought it was most relevant in the CIA drugs article, I'll find a home for it at USA level.
I came across this video as a featured video in Vimeo when I went there to create an account to share baby videos.
In the intelligence context it is relevant as a possible Taliban psy-op, not to get too paranoid about it. In that sense, watching the video is infinitely superior to not watching the video, if you want to know how the Taliban is pitching the US presence in Afghanistan. Cue on 15-year-old junkie saying "I wish the Taliban would come back".
If you want to exclude all points of view but UNODOC when constructing the CIA drugs article, though, then by all means, clip it out.
I just think it's interesting.
The video also quotes UNODOC, by the way, and may be right -- there may have been far fewer drug addicts under the Taliban, for the same reason that there are few visible gays in Iran (because you can't take smack with a bullet in your head).
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 18:58, 20 March 2008 (UTC)


Let's put it this way -- if this report adds information that UNODOC and other sources already in the article do not, and this information adds to information about the CIA, in a verifiable way, by all means put it in. Your observation that it gives information about Taliban psyops is perfectly relevant to an article on the Taliban.
If the CIA articles have any substantial level of detail on things where it was involved, I feel there must be a fairly stringent rule of keeping general information on US government activities, or the articles will be impossibly large. Now, if, hypothetically, the State Department had anything to do with the video or vice versa, that is perfectly appropriate for a US article. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:28, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

The following sections have nothing to do with CIA and should be broken out into a separate article:

where it might be possible to separately present and evaluate two claims:

  1. Afghani drug addiction under Taliban and Communists was less than under US occupation
  2. The previous claim is a Taliban psy-op

This separate article would lie somewhere in this space:

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 20:00, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

No, not necessarily. Look at the introduction to the article, and you will see that two CIA offices have analytical responsibilities that cover transnational drugs, and the section "Counternarcotics mission" identifies an annual report that the Agency puts out on heroin flows. There is considerable discussion, in the CIA reports, of instability caused by drug trade, which the governance article, for example, extends. I can certainly make sure there are more cross-references to places where, for example, it is appropriate to cite UNODOC or other independent sources to confirm, or expand upon, documents such as "Heroin Movement Worldwide".
The previous paragraph dealt with the analytic aspects of counternarcotics. As you well know, some of the CIA covert action support against the Soviets strengthened local groups that also are in the opium economy, one form of blowback. Disruptions caused by the civil war against the Taliban had a major effect on the agricultural economy. For many farmers, opium was not only more profitable, but, since the raw product is stable in storage, became one of the few practical crops when transportation to market was uncertain.
In turn, the opium market is heavily dependent on hawala. While the transnational terrorism article is still a work in progress, hawala is extremely attractive to terrorist cells and sponsors, who can bypass the financial intelligence surveillance of conventional value transfer missions.
There have been speculations, although I wanted to find somewhat more definitive sources, that the involvement of Baluchi groups, traditional smugglers, on the Iranian border may be part of destabilization of Iran.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:34, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree with all that, but what you are discussing is independent of CIA observation and largely independent of CIA covert ops. Our war against Taliban was not covert, it was carried on by the military overtly. So this is more at the level of USA vs Taliban, not CIA vs Taliban. If you look at the references in the 5 subsections I listed above, none of them is a CIA work product and they don't focus on CIA. The issues discussed really can be extracted and presented as an Afghanistan issue or a U.S.-Afghanistan issue. The articles Afghanistan and United States-Afghanistan relations and War in Afghanistan (2001–present) and other areas like Drug Enforcement Administration don't really cover this issue properly. So it needs to be extracted somehow.

In other words (and you have made this argument yourself frequently -- don't attribute to CIA what is above CIA) this is a policy and consequence of policy issue where the policy is decided at the Presidential level. CIA is not the cause, solution or observer for the most part of the issues discussed in those 5 sections. Erxnmedia (talk) 23:42, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

We are not in significant disagreement when it comes to covert action and military action, although even there (not a drug matter), the operational technique against the Taliban appeared to have the initial contact with the Northern Alliance and individual warlords by CIA paramilitary teams, who then brought in and introduced Army Special Forces teams, who supported Northern Alliance teams, especially by calling in air strikes. More conventional ground forces came in after the special operators. Once the Taliban were in conventional battle, it appears that some of the special operators were then shifted to "door-kicking" operations against specific Taliban and al-Qaeda persons/places (see a rough draft of the controversy about door-kicking at User:Hcberkowitz/Sandbox-FIDscraps).
We may, however, disagree about the analytic aspects, where there is a distinct relationship among the regular World Heroin Flow reports, as well as more specific documents dealing with the drug trade, the support of transnational terrorism by hawala, etc. I see UNODOC, as well as some US military research papers I cited, as variously confirming the CIA analyses or expanding on them -- the World Heroin report is fairly high level. While it has real content, it also has a public relations and congressional relations feel.
We really don't yet have a structure of articles for the higher-level policy implications. Now, I really think that the governance and instability have a clear relationship to CIA analytic work, although State, Defense, Justice, and others may be involved, Justice in the drug area and Treasury in value transfer. Do you have a suggestion how to create a coherent framework for structuring such material? One thought would be to parallel the CIA geographic and functional struction, but make clear it is USG geographic and transnational.
While I have no inside knowledge, I think there is suggestive information that the drug trade and smuggling, in some cases with CIA working through a second nation as proxy, may be part of a covert destabilization against Iran. There are a number of interesting reports about Baluchis in this. Also, look at the fortifications that Iran has put up; these seem a bit excessive if it's simple drug smuggling rather than a guerilla war. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:49, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

Two points:

1. If the NY Times concurs with the Washington Times that Hillary lost the election in Texas, but the Washington Times story is short but the NY Times story is longer and adds some spin about how somebody should be worrying about gerrymandering in Texas, the election in Texas is still not about either the NY Times or the Washington Times. Similarly if CIA analyses concur with UNODOC analyses concerning Afghani drug addicts, the issue of cause of drug addiction among Afghani refugees stands on its own independently of having been observed by either CIA or UNODOC, unless you can document that CIA implemented a plan to hook Afghani refugee children on smack, which would make it a direct participant and not one among many observers.

2. Ghost Wars(p. 489) has Tenet saying in 1999 that

Al Queda had now emerged as "an intricate web of alliances among Sunni extremists worldwide, including North Africans, radical Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Central Asians" [and] The Taliban was an increasingly obvious part of the problem. Illicit profits that the Taliban reaped from opium trafficking reached extremists such as bin Laden "to support their campaign of terrorism".

Nevertheless

Tenet continued to place the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction just ahead of the danger of terrorism...He felt that he could not concentrate only on terrorism. The CIA had to provide intelligence for American military forces deployed worldwide. It had to watch nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological weapons, tensions in the Middle East, and other pressing issues

In this view, Tenet and CIA are observers of a phenomenon (Taliban opium trafficking to support Al Queda), they did not create the phenomenon and they weren't really doing anything about it because it was not at the top of their to-do list. At the same time, it was State Dept policy to appease the Taliban in the hopes that they would hand over bin Laden as reward for our appeasement. At the time same, it was President Clinton's policy to give no amount of support to Ahmed Shah Massoud that would change the balance of power between Massoud and the Taliban.

Clearly there was an evolution of policy, arranged by bin Laden on 9/11, to the extent that we did start fighting the Taliban. That decision to start fighting was not taken by the CIA, it was taken by the President. And it is possible that when we did go in in force, it caused flow of refugees to Iran and Pakistan, some portion of whom became junkies because it is more fun being high when you're starving on the Durand Line than it is to be sober, and returned as junkies to Afghanistan when the coast was clear. We fought Taliban because they supported bin Laden who attacked us. There were fewer junkies under Taliban because they were dealers but not users and punished users severely. When we fought Taliban they were busy fighting us and couldn't go around punishing people. I don't see how anything in that scenario implicates CIA or the US as an intentional instigator of Afghani refugee opium addiction. The discussion of Afghani opium addiction and reliance on drug trade thus doesn't really belong at CIA level, it should be raised up.

Raised up just where I can't say this early in the morning. Usually in past cases like this you would tell me "Well that goes in the US-Cuba relations page, not the CIA page". So maybe it goes in the US-Afghanistan relations page. However that page is practically a stub. The key words in the problem are Taliban, Opium, US War in Afghanistan, Afghani Refugees, and Afghani drug addiction.

By the way we most certainly did not invent the opium trade or the possibility of the locals tasting the product. Normal working people in Iran smoked opium at the turn of the 20th century and that was well before the CIA was born. Plenty of people in the Iranian society today have opium habits. The opium trade and local opium consumption are really not CIA topics, they are sui generis.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 08:28, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree with much of what you say about the operational aspects, which certainly involved higher levels of USG as well as other USG agencies: military, law enforcement, financial. There should be an article on that, but I've pretty much committed my Wiki writing time, as well as doing a possible book-length biography.
My concern, however, is that you may be ignoring the intelligence role of CIA. If the discussion of worldwide heroin flow, with a significant section on Southwest Asia, is a regular and required report from the DI, that is as much a CIA activity as the paramilitaries that worked with warlords -- different focus and organization within CIA, but still CIA. The fact that UNODOC, etc., confirm statements in a CIA analytic report is notable, if for no other Wikireason that the report becomes WP:RS. Given the frequent, and sometimes justified, accusations of analytic failures, it seems pertinent to the CIA article to discuss analytic work that is more open and ties into other sources much more easily than analyses on other subjects.
You said,

unless you can document that CIA implemented a plan to hook Afghani refugee children on smack, which would make it a direct participant and not one among many observers

. That sounds as if you are only considering CIA as an operational agency. The Directorate of Intelligence is supposed to be an observer and reporter, and they release at least one unclassified and recurring report about their observations an analysis. Is our difficulty here that you see CIA as operations only, while I see it as operations and intelligence (both collection and analysis)??

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 10:54, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

My intention is to keep enough general context here to explain the role of the analytic product, and also to explain any possible ongoing operations, perhaps by proxy, as with the Baluchi. Of course, the earlier blowback issues are important.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 10:51, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm saying that CIA is a competent observer but the phenomenon is independent of the observer. If you cut out and print those 5 sections and read them without knowing what article they were from, you wouldn't know they were from an article about CIA. That's why they should be in a standalone article or a different article, which the current article can point to for context. There is nothing in those 5 sections which refers to CIA intelligence product or operations, the 5 sections are, with respect to the whole article, purely background. The background deserves to be the foreground of a different article, which you can point to. It doesn't require any editing time other than, cut, new title, paste.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 12:29, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

If it does not appear to link to analytic product, then I need to clarify, and perhaps extend it, to show that the discussion specifically relates both to published documents and analytic methods. I can't stop you from putting them in a separate article, but, if nothing else, how is that article going to be part of a structure that has some coherent navigation? There are other discussions suggesting that country-specific material, in the geographic articles, is getting too big, and the regional country section needs to be reduced to summaries and wikilinks. Even now, the country-specific sections should be open both to general issues, as well as the chronology now there. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:39, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

I went ahead and merged the 5 sections into Opium production in Afghanistan. I think both articles are better for it.

I was quite surprised at how short the United States-Afghanistan relations page is. I think this mirrors a general lack of thoughtfulness about Afghanistan in our society as a whole and in our Government in particular over the last 20 years. (I say "our society" here because en.wikipedia is to a large extent U.S.-centric.)

Afghanistan has been a pawn in other country's games and does not have a clear national identity, which may be why it receives less careful analysis. It has the misfortune to be both centrally located and landlocked which puts it at the mercy of its neighbors.

For a glimpse of what truly literate coverage of Afghanistan might look like, take a look at Afghanistanica, an excellent blog which has apparently just ended iself.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 01:47, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Question of good faith

At the beginning of this section, when I questioned the relevance of your quote of a filmmaker to this section, it should be noted that I simply moved the text in question to the talk page, preserving your words, and pointed out why I did not think it belonged in this article. You raised questions about other material that I had placed in this article, and I explained that I believed it

  1. Related to evaluating CIA analytic product on transnational drug flow
  2. May tie to covert operations, possibly directed at Iran

You disagreed that the material had any relevance to the CIA, and I said that if you did not see it, I apparently had not made some of the connections, especially relating to intelligence analysis, clear enough, and I would need to work on them. I did not disagree with your suggestion that a higher-level article dealing with the general issue of US-Afghan relations, not with the CIA alone, would be a fine idea to have.

You apparently did not assume good faith on my part. Assuming good faith would have let you take the material that you thought belonged in a new article and creating that article, as you did. Where I believe you showed bad faith is in moving the material out of this article after I had said I was working on connecting it with other topics, and making some apparently unclear material more clear. By creating a new article, you have presented your view of the topic, which you have every right to do. When you move content on which I was working, after I had said I was doing so, I cannot assume good faith.

I admit that I have been more concerned with both real-world demands on my time, and on other articles, than this specific one. Regretfully, I observe that this is not the first time you have moved content that I had written, but said was not ready for a specific article. In the two such cases, the material in question was not of main article quality, and was under discussion in a talk page.

It bothers me that I needed to revert my own material, and quickly add some CIA-related material that has not been researched to my standards, to indicate that that I had a reason for having material in this article. As I said earlier on this talk page, the UNODOC and other materials were there to validate material about the CIA analytic report on "World Heroin Flows", which has a section on Southwest Asia.

I observe that this is an article about transnational CIA activities related to drugs and crime, and not an article about Afghanistan. You seem to have a personal interest in Afghanistan, and I honestly applaud that. I supported your suggestion of having a general article on US-Afghan relations that included the drug trade, but was quite surprised that you did not simply clone what you called useful information, but you deleted it, against my earlier protest, from this article. That deletion interfered with what I told you was work in progress.

I ask that you allow me to continue to work on this topic here, and accept my good-faith statement that I do see relevance to the topic of this article. Accept my encouragement to have a general article on US-Afghan relations, to which I will not be contributing and from which I will not be deleting, since my interest here is in the details of CIA operations, not Afghanistan per se. There is no reason that we cannot follow our divergent interests in separate articles, and have them both contribute to Wikipedia.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 03:22, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia should be consistent and not terribly redundant. When you have a lot of redundant information repeated in different places, inconsistency will rule. These aren't your personal pages and this isn't your personal book. I am not acting in bad faith. Erxnmedia (talk) 13:56, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Apparently, you believe you can be the judge of redundancy, and, once you have made up your mind, discussion and compromise are irrelevant. One of the basic Wikipedia customs is to try to work out consensus on talk pages. I indicated what I was doing, and yes, there might be redundancy for a time, if you create the article you wanted, while I still was actively working on something. Work in progress is quite different than WP:OWN. Taking material from a talk page, which the participants there were discussing because they did not think it ready for a main page, and putting it into an article, may technically not be WP:OWN, but, again, it is overriding other editors to do what you want to do.
I'd say there is a pattern of bad faith on your part, not massively overbalanced by original contributions. It is not WP:OWN to point out that an article is about the CIA generally, not US policy toward Afghanistan, and mention work is in progress to better tie the content to the CIA. Pointing out that you did not see a connection was constructive criticism, and I said I would make the connection more clear. You were not willing to accept my good faith in saying I was going to clarify the connection. Perhaps you might want to reflect, if you can, if you are yourself taking a WP:OWN view of things to do with Afghanistan.
You said you were surprised how little material there was on US-Afghan relations. Perhaps I'm just being silly, but it would seem reasonable to me that if you felt that way, you might work on it. If some of the CIA-related material helps build out that topic, fine. I simply do not see a good-faith reason why you immediately had to take material out of the CIA transnational article, other than, perhaps, you regard Afghanistan-related matters as your personal bailiwick. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:40, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

Note that:

1. I didn't create the article Opium production in Afghanistan, it already existed. Your stuff fit nicely into that article, though fitting it in involved some merging and reorg.

2. What I moved was not CIA-specific, it was Opium production in Afghanistan-specific, and didn't rely on CIA analytic product.

3. There is no article for Opium production in general or Opium production in Southwest Asia but there probably should be; your lead-in to Southwest Asia would fit nicely in that heading

4. Your stuff has errors which are revealed when merging it into an appropriate article. In particular, you state, without qualification, that

While the Taliban were considered a threat both to the human rights of Afghans, and to other areas of the world by providing a sanctuary for transnational terrorists, they also strictly enforced a moratorium on opium production.

The bold-faced portion of the quote would be highly misleading to a reader uninformed of the actual sequence of events, as they are described in the Opium production in Afghanistan article, namely that

Afghanistan saw a bumper opium crop of 4,600 metric tons in 1999[2], which was the height of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan. According to a Swiss security publication, 'SicherheitsForum' (April 2006, pp:56-57), this resulted in supply exceeding demand and a drop in the high-street price of heroin and morphine in the West, endangering the profitability of European drug smugglers. To stop this trend, Western international drug barons demanded a reduction in supply. It is alleged in the report that, obeying his financiers, Mullah Omar (the Taliban leader) issued a ban on poppy cultivation "on religious grounds".[3]

The virtue of putting the facts where they belong is that they bump up against other, at times contradictory, facts, and get an opportunity to get reconciled. Single-author-owned contributions don't get this opportunity.

5. Once it's there, it's not your stuff; this is Wikipedia, people jam on each other's contributions all the time. If you really want to think of it as yours, there is a new initiative at Google to do something Wikipedia-like but with individual ownership

6. Everybody in Wikipedia is free to judge the redundancy or inappropriateness of anybody else's contribution; that's the way this game was designed. You think you are being more polite by commenting stuff out that you don't like or moving it to the talk page, but you are still effectively hitting the delete key and you are often heavy-handed about stuff which doesn't fit with your point of view. I remember you pushing me for days not to include something and your formula was "put it in the US-Cuba relations page". When the stuff is your own, you don't seem to have any perspective on relevance, i.e. level (is it CIA or is it US) and belonging (is it CIA-related or is it other-related). Also sometimes in your haste to comment stuff out that you don't like, you inadvertently comment out whole swaths of text. For example a section on Uzbekistan in the CIA pages was buried for a month or longer because it was inadvertently commented out when you were comment-deleting something else.

7. Everybody in Wikipedia is also free to reorganize, rename, delete, and merge pages at will, subject to various social mechanisms and the fact that anybody else can do the same. If you think I am abusing your contributions and that what I put in sucks, you can invoke those social mechanisms.

8. A lot of people define their contribution to Wikipedia solely in terms of what they delete (delete patrollers) rather than what they put in. I see my main contributions often as being just to put information in the right place or right form (organization patroller?). Often I do put new stuff in. You see yourself as a superior originator. Wikipedia supports an ecology of people with different self-appointed missions. You have a low opinion of my contributions. This makes me sad.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 04:50, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I suggest mediation for further issues of this type. Without saying who is right or wrong, our opinions about the Wikipedia process, and reasonable courtesies within it, are significantly different and might be clarified by a neutral and respected third party.
Not because of WP:OWN, but other factors including the ability to use personal knowledge that can be validated, anonymous editing, and other factors I see as fundamentally not scalable, I may well move to a different venue than Wikipedia. This is a good example, probably with valid points on each side, of a Wikipedia process that I am sad exists.
Again, I would have been perfectly content with your taking all the material you wanted, and creating a new article, not changing something I repeatedly said was in progress. There is ownership, and there is courtesy, and there is sometimes value in seeing the product of a reasonably accepted contributor who says they are in progress. It is true that I had other priorities higher than this article, some in real life, some, such as the CIA invasions of citizen privacy and CIA influencing domestic and world opinion through clandestine means, that I prioritized as ways to trim the main CIA page while preserving (and extending) content in sub-pages. You may or may not have noticed, but on this talk page, I have requested comment on the draft of one such sub-article (influence) and mentioned that the other article is in rougher form, but I was still open to comment. Both drafts are in my userspace, but wikilinked from this page.
I'm glad I went through that last paragraph, because I think it points out one fundamental difference between us, and I fully agree that I have been learning and refining my style. We both agree in the value, broadly speaking, of multiple minds working on a topic. My approach involves much more talk page discussion than yours, where you boldly edit. Yes, I kow WP:BOLD is a Wiki value, but my concern is that it works well when an article is not actively being worked, but is harmful when several editors are actively trying to coordinate work. I've recently discovered the [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation project, and I am truly impressed with their commitment to internal mediation, working out consensus principally on the talk page, and other factors that I hope will be more widely adopted in Wikipedia.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:02, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Your two main projects where we have intersected are CIA and Intelligence Cycle Management. For CIA, I find that you are so focussed on telling a story about CIA that you can't see the forest for the trees. For example you seem to have no interest in DNI-level which is now taking precedence, or IC-level, so things that might be pushed to DNI level don't get pushed there, and pragmatic realities of DNI/IC-level (like breakout of NCS as a separate entity) don't get explored. Also, in this case, material which really belongs in its own topic (opium production) clutters up a CIA article instead of blooming in its own garden.

All a CIA article about opium production should say is that the CIA analyses it, it came to X conclusions or had Y analyses made public or did Z covert ops which had W effect on opium production, either intentionally or as blowback. A CIA article about opium production which then goes on to a lengthy analysis of opium production based on non-CIA sources is simply a mislabelled article about opium production.

May I ask, are you on a contract from CIA just to buff up CIA articles, and if so are the terms of that contract such that you are limited to CIA and not to going up the chain (DNI, IC) or sideways (opium production)? If you are on a contract, is the purpose of the ICM suite of articles to put material in the public domain to act as a recruitment device for people considering a career as a CIA officer? Just curious, because many of your editing decisions are consistent with working on such a contract.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 17:14, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Accusations of working on contract get well into personal attacks. No, I have never worked for an intelligence agency or had a contract with one. I have, however, had a lifelong interest in the subject, and I am quite aware of the distinction between the DNI and CIA. The articles being cleaned up, however, are about CIA before the ODNI, some going back to accusations even before the CIA was formed.
As you may remember, I have a matrix of the revised intelligence community structure in my userspace, which you commented upon and mentioned it would be useful in the United States Intelligence Community article, which seems to go against your argument that I am ignoring the DNI.
The purpose of the intelligence cycle management series is to add information that tends to be ignored in the mass media and general education, and contributes to the popular impression of intelligence agencies -- not just US -- being principally for covert operations. Given that a fair number of businesses and civilian agencies are using intelligence analysis techniques for competitive analysis and vulnerability identification, there is a valid analytical discipline that has every reason to be in a general encyclopedia.
Are you willing to participate in a mediation of this issue?

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:42, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

Some notes:

1. The working-on-contract question is a fair one. It is not meant as a personal attack. If you were on contract I could care less, it would simply tell me more about your editing goals. You have recounted numerous anecdotes about being on site at CIA, NSA and on military bases which would lead one to believe that much of your career has been as an intelligence contractor. Obviously I drew the wrong implication from those anecdotes. I won't apologize for the question because it is an issue that repeatedly comes up in Wikipedia, for example, a Ford motor company employee buffing the Ford article. We are both in a (very public) forum in this case, so the questions we can ask each other follow the rules for public figures in a public forum more than they do for private figures in a private forum. It's tough to be a Spitzer or a Pateras right now, but as Wikipedia editors we are just as publically exposed as they are. This is not a private email exchange, it is an exchange that anybody in the world (6 billion people) can see if their Government isn't blocking their Internet connection.

2. The CIA article is not a purely historical article, so contemporary material should be placed in the right article, which may make it wander out of CIA into an NCS or IC or DNI article. For whatever reason, you have made almost no contribution to those related articles when the topic wanders out.

3. In mind of that, why do you leave your matrix in user space? I like it. If it were me I would have stuck it in the right live article as soon as I was done with it.

4. I also like the ICM articles but they are very industrial and I personally would be very nervous about doing them if I didn't (a) know the business inside out as a result of being in the business and (b) be on contract from the business so I wouldn't get fried for publishing what might be classified in somebody's book, i.e. so that I was assured of official vetting and approval for release. You may be quite confident that our Government is warm and fuzzy about publishing related to intelligence matters. I am not. You could have an ambitious 30 or 35-year-old officer somewhere in some part of the Government who wants to make his bones by frying somebody, and wind up as a target of that person's ambition if you are not either careful, lucky, or assured in some other way of your immunity. (I'm not talking about laws here, because much is left up to individual interpretation in the current administration, and only the privates and sergeants take the heat when an interpretation gets out of hand.)

5. There's nothing to mediate -- I didn't revert your revert, I left the article alone. What's to mediate? I think it's unfortunate that you don't see the overlap and that you don't want to minimize the overlap and make the CIA stuff more CIA-specific and the opium production stuff more extensive and correct. What else do you want to mediate?

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 18:33, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Let me clarify a few things that you couldn't have known about. I certainly had interest in intelligence in high school, and part of the reason I picked American University is that I potentially could major in chemistry and have a minor in international relations with an intelligence concentration. If my original plans to go on to an MD/PhD program didn't work out, technical intelligence -- which I had learned about from my Army Reserve officer mother -- was another interest. Life doesn't necessarily work out as we had planned, but these remained interests.
At American University, I did take some of the intelligence courses, as a special student. I also worked, as an editor and research assistant, in the Center for Research in Social Systems there, which was an Army contract research center, formerly the Special Operations Research Office. A bit later, I did some work on "people sniffers" for the Office of Naval Research. I didn't think of these as intelligence, but operational support, but they certainly used intelligence material, not of an exotically classified level. Occasionally, there were meetings with people from one intelligence agency or another, usually quite unclassified and indeed often having academics present.
Later, when I worked as a contractor in the computer center for the U.S. Department of Labor, one of my projects was putting in a COMTEN 3670 front-end communications processor. At the time, Al Levy, then network manager at CIA, was the chairman of the COMTEN user group. My next job was as network architect for the Library of Congress. One of my projects there was a multi-alphabet workstation, a problem that NSA and CIA also faced, and the intelligence community often worked with the Library of Congress on improving information retrieval and OSINT. I was also the representative to the Federal Telecommunication Standards Committee, which involved emergency restoration of communications, up to and including during nuclear war. NSA, as well as DoD, was the lead on a number of technical problems there.
Quite some years later, I worked for a 501(c)(3) research institution for OSI and ISDN communications standards, and our CEO had just retired as director of NSA. We traveled together to a lot of members, and, while we never discussed anything I would call especially sensitive, we were both interested in history and talked a lot on airplanes. He gave me a good deal of insight in the way a top-level intelligence official approached management and research.
As far as things migrating out of the CIA article, I don't object to that, but I may put more emphasis on getting the history state than you do. It would be wonderful if more people would, for example, go to some of the declassified documents and academic analyses of them, and contribute to the history, dealing with some of the tinfoil hat approaches. As I've mentioned, I have a article on CIA influence on public opinion, not complete as such things are never complete, but for which I asked for comment before putting it in userspace. That being said, I could move it in userspace now, but not remove content from the main article and link to the sub-article. The reason I am keeping it, briefly, in userspace was the suggestion several editors made, in December and January, that a sandbox would be useful. At this point, I'm not sure if a sandbox is the best place for discussion, but I have become much more certain I want to do drafts there, and move an article when it meets my standards of quality. It can be a simple matter of personal style that I tend to want to polish an article longer than you do, and am not as eager to get things immediately into mainspace. In the case of the matrix article, I think there would be a fair bit of copy editing needed to get it to flow into the intelligence community article, a time-consuming thing. I'm also trying, as best as possible from open sources, to resolve some conflicting accounts of who is responsible for what HUMINT.
The matrix didn't move because I haven't devoted the time to figure out some ambiguities. In Wikipedia, I've had other priorities, and I also have time commitments in my own life. It isn't meant to be critical that you and I have different senses of priority about some of the things on which I've worked. For example, I want to focus on cleanup, a good deal of which will be moving to subarticles, of the main CIA page before moving to intelligence community. Now that I have "influence" in reasonably good form, I need to finish the draft of "invasion". I'm also involved with some other military (special ops and air warfare) in MILHIST. In general, I'd like to have a draft out for about a week before putting it in mainspace, but I'm willing to revisit that for what I consider a well-developed draft such as "influence". If there is significant commentary, I'd want to resolve that. I'd like to see it in mainspace for about a quiet week before changing the main CIA article to point to it.
I'm not especially worried about someone getting upset about my intelligence articles. There is a general trend to make this material more open. By definition, I can't say exactly what, but I have chosen not to include certain techniques. I'm more worried about my pacemaker suddenly stopping than the black helicopters coming for me. I simply choose not to be afraid of what the Soviets used to call the "Dark Forces", and am not without resources if there is a problem.
As I've said before, I have intentions of making the material in this article more CIA-specific, part of which involves linking among articles. Hawala is relevant both to financial generation in drugs, conflict diamonds, etc., and to the financing of terrorism operations. I don't want to do original synthesis on anything, but I think there is worthwhile material to put out about possible CIA (and Office of the Vice President, and DoD, but those are separate) involvement at the confluence of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan.
About mediation, it's not necessary if you don't disrupt works stated to be in progress, judge (without discussion) if I am creating more than temporary redundancy, and, when I make a statement of personal approach to an article, you accept that as my good-faith position rather than continuing to complain. In the specific of redundancy, one of my professional specialties is fault-tolerant systems. I'd far rather risk a temporary redundancy than see a capability, or information, fall through the cracks while something is being changed. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:15, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, well good luck with that pacemaker!

Sorry to be overly concerned about the dark helicopters. Elliot Spitzer was a dark helicopter on the issue of hookers until he became the target of an identical dark helicopter in his post-dark helicopter years; he obviously had a lot of confidence that he would never be on the receiving end.

The New Yorker had a fascinating story on the very photogenic Sabrina Harman, one of the GI's who took the fall for the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse policies which our President is still working zealously to defend. The Administration during the Abu Ghraib scandals also worked zealously to push responsibility for violent interrogation practices down to the lowest level, see the New Yorker article for details. It's great when you can have your cake and eat it too.

Not to mention whether torture really "works", as I've heard informed opinion that says it doesn't really work as well as offering a coffee, doughnut and shoulder to cry on.

None of which has to do with ICM but these are the random thoughts floating through my head when I thinking of sitting down to write out a public blueprint for an intelligence agency.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:17, 23 March 2008 (UTC)