User talk:Erxnmedia/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hello Erxnmedia! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. If you decide that you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some recommended guidelines to facilitate your involvement. Happy Editing! —Khoikhoi 01:10, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Please do not add commentary or your own personal analysis to Wikipedia articles. Doing so violates Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy and breaches the formal tone expected in an encyclopedia. If you would like to experiment, use the sandbox. Thank you. Khoikhoi 04:20, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually it takes a significantly non-neutral point of view to edit out all references to a genocide presided over by a historical figure being described in an article.

Yes, but it's controversial to mention it at the top of the article—you're going to need consensus to include it first. Kho7ikhoi 04:31, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Well Hitler gets his genocide near the top of the article and Hitler was an admirer of the Turkish events.

These are all points that you can make at Talk:Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Khoikhoi 04:35, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi, the Armenian Genocide article says that the events occured between 1915 and 1917 during the government of the Young Turks. If you could please check the Atatürk article, or other sources if you like, you can see that Atatürk was just a soldier of the Ottoman army during the time and the events were not "presided over" by him, as you claim. Could you also check the Armenian Genocide article and see that there is no single mention of Atatürk there? I think there would be, if there were any thoughts that he was involved. That article seems to have a very long reference list and is carefully looked after by many Armenian editors. Anyway, I think you cannot add these links to the article as simple as that, without any reference, and without any context within the article. I hope you realize how serious an accusation it is that you are trying to make. We are not here to write history, we are just compiling information from trusted sources into a would-be free encyclopedia. Could you please check a few sources and pay some extra attention to the dates? I shall also ask you to please accept my sincere condolence for the events suffered by the people of the region during the period. I share the grief of both sides and I do not have a bias on these issues that you might expect from a Turkish person. շնորհակալ եմ, Atilim Gunes Baydin 23:07, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Ataturk was the head of state. Dobkin's book and the Wiki article Great Fire of Smyrna convey the impression that killing of Armenians was official military policy. Ataturk was in Smyrna at the time of it's burning. I guess there's enough in Wiki now that people who are interested come to their own conclusion; it clear is a very emotional issue! Erxnmedia 02:16, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Hey

Thanks for your contributions to computational linguistics. "Language identification" is an interesting issue. - Francis Tyers · 13:41, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Edit summary

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Machine translation quality metrics

Hi, I just wrote a page on Evaluation of machine translation, perhaps we could merge these two pages? What do you think? - Francis Tyers · 10:04, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I will see about doing that. Do you think there is anything that could be added to my page? - Francis Tyers · 22:03, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I looked over your page again, and think that perhaps it is better as a separate page at least for now. Do you have any papers which discuss the benefits of round-trip-translation in quality evaluation? I think your points are not about quality evaluation, but about finding out how the software is working.

  1. Well, in round-trip test, you can see if the underlying mechanism is syntactic or semantic, and
    You can see this in a single-trip test. And realistically this is rather more finding out how it works than determining the quality of the translation.
  2. you can see if it translates everything or just portions of the text,
    This is testing vocabulary coverage, which is not quite the same thing as quality. It can aswell be tested in a single-trip test. Equally a wordlist may be used and the OOV items calculated.
  3. you can see if it can report multiple interpretations or a single interpretation,
    Again, this can be done in a single-trip test.
  4. you can see if it is working against an interlingua, and so on.
    Not necessarily, and this would ideally be known and published anyway.

So it's not that dumb.

All of your reasons are good, but for the wrong thing. They don't test the quality of the translation, but rather how the engine works, or how deep/broad the vocabulary coverage is. For testing the quality of the output of the engine/system, I would maintain that RTT is not appropriate, for the rather compelling reasons that Harold points out. - Francis Tyers · 14:46, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Yep! Wow, I couldn't put it better myself. Sorry if I appeared a little arrogant (I just re-read my post). What you said totally makes sense, and yes, RTT could be useful for what you describe. Notably, for the European language pairs, Google, Babelfish and SYSTRAN all use SYSTRAN's engine. Perhaps we do need a different word for what you describe. Something like featurefulness is ok, but a bit heavy on the tongue. I'd say "usability" is one aspect (which is not covered in usual quality evaluations). I'll have a think and see if I can come up with something better. Please let me know if you do too. - Francis Tyers · 21:02, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

You were editing on a misspelled page double

You were editing on a misspelled page double created by the wikiuser who moved all of the material. I was not responsible. Your additions may have been moved to Black sites. See Talk:CIA. Trav (talk) 13:58, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

CIA, Gladio, etc.

Several suggestions, both of formatting and focus. Should the one-line entries that CIA established a cell of Operation Gladio be in the main CIA article, or, as I would suggest, the Operation Gladio article? For many countries, there was a good deal more CIA interaction than Operation Gladio.

Could you help me, and I suspect others, understand the notability of all these Gladio references, rather than a discussion of overall CIA relationships with each country, its military, government, and intelligence service?

One-sentence lines per country also take up a huge amount of white space on a very long article that needs to be split up for readability. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:14, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Howard, you knocked the Gladio wikilinks out and in the process of putting them back in I saw that Gladio covered a lot more than Italy.
Gladio was Europe, so working on other continents shouldn't affect it.

What I am trying to do with the per-country summaries is give a full summary of all publicly known CIA interventions in a given country over time. You should be able to read a single country summary without having to read the whole article and get a full picture for that country. Putting in one line for Gladio is just a start. I am hoping that you and other editors will fill in the country summaries over time. I got started on this by reading Tim Weiner's book. I am only halfway through the book, so my country summaries are only hitting early events. I believe it is appropriate for Wikipedia to present this information. Obviously there is a tremendous amount of detail. Some people tried to branch to a separate page for this but it got shot down. Let's just keep going in this format until there is a Wiki consensus that it can go to separate pages. Erxnmedia (talk) 16:20, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm really not willing to work on it unless the pages are split, for purely logistical reasons.
My feeling is that material should not go under a country unless it has some context. For example, it's a fairly safe assumption that most police and militaries in South American have had US training, but it is definitely not a safe assumption that the CIA did it. Some conventional police training comes from the Agency for International Development. Naval and air training, as well as things like logistics, communications, and mechanized ground operations are likely to come from the regular military, not CIA. It does get blurry between Special Forces and CIA when it gets into special operations training, but you can't assume CIA did it. I recognize some activists believe that CIA does everything, but there have been feuds with the military. Certainly for something a couple of decades ago, there should be an agreement for training in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, or material at the National Security Archive, or even at the CIA or military FOIA reading rooms. There are times when very partisan sources are accurate, but they need cross-checking. Offhand, I can think of several cases where an official of some government accused the CIA of doing something that his own government, or another branch of the US government, or a non-national body actually did it.
In other words, we should not put in "CIA trained XXX" ever without an authoritative reference, which I would see as an intergovernmental agreement, or two news reports from reasonably nonpartisan news media or think tanks. I recognize you like Weiner's book, but, so far, the news articles I've read from him are fairly basic and I don't think he qualifies as a unique reference on everything. If he is, why bother to put anything in Wikipedia other than "see Weiner"? I can fairly safely say I've read dozens of books in the area, plus government documents, and there is no single piece of information I trust absolutely.
What is really achieved by putting in one-line entries for Gladio, especially when some don't even make sense? Two examples: I took out a reference that the US trained and funded the British operation. Historically, the British SAS trained US Delta, and there is a long WWII history of working as equals. I certainly wouldn't tell 22 SAS Regiment that the CIA was going to prepare them. Gladio is defined as NATO, yet there is a report Switzerland is in it. Switzerland was so emphatically neutral that they wouldn't join the UN for many years, and were never in NATO. I really wish you would not put in one-line entries for Gladio or police or military. Either cover it with a few paragraphs and multiple citations, or don't bother. Personally, I am of the opinion Gladio is being fantastically over-hyped, given realities such as 10 Special Forces Group, the regular 22 SAS regiment plus the two territorial regiments, etc.
I'm not saying other things are yours, but I see a lot of conspiratorial entries that don't necessarily make sense. In some cases, I am aware of an action or organization in some country, and it's not what Revolutionary Worker thinks it is. Also, in many cases, editors seem to have bought in to theory that if the US did something, that is equivalent to the CIA doing it. That isn't the case, and the equivalent is true for other countries. The KGB and GRU tended to hate each other as much or more than the West. DGSE and the French Army were not always in harmony. For things like Vietnam, SOG and MACV actually reported to different organizations, neither of which were CIA (although they might have some CIA people) -- and there were separate CIA operations (that might have some military people).
It's getting to be a practical necessity to split pages. The main article is approaching 300K, which is slow to load and is an invitation to edit conflicts. I do need to get the Americas+Africa+Asia deleted in favor of the three split articles, as it was over 160K and slow.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:37, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
Hi Howard, What I did was a search in Wikipedia for every article with a Gladio reference and threw them in the pot. For example, if you read the Switzerland Gladio reference, it is a claim of a fairly extensive Gladio branch in Switzerland -- neutral or not. So if you don't believe that page in Wiki, then please mark it as questionable and add reasons why it is questionable in it's discussion page.
To some extent what I would like to see is Wikipedia being self-consistent and well cross-referenced. Also I am too lazy to search the Web for everything. I am betting that if each Wiki node is checked and correct, then the whole thing will be checked and correct. Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 23:45, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Colombia 1991, and general NPOV issues on death squads

First, my apologies for hitting the wrong key and apparently deleting your material from Frank Smythe about death squads. Also, your link to the CIA Counternarcotics Center is broken.

Don't worry about the apparent large deletion on Colombia; that was part of the same fumble-fingers above. I realized I had been putting the talk comments on the main page, cut and pasted them, and apparently lost your second paragraph in the process.

May we, in good faith, discuss this further on Talk:CIA Activities by Region: Americas#Neutral POV about "death squads" (Colombia 1991 as example)? I am not trying to whitewash the CIA, but I also want to see balanced, unemotional text that splashes whoever needs to be splashed. POV journalists, without other sources, may not be enough. Bagley's paper, which I cited, details things that are wrong with US policy, but in a balanced and not quite so extreme manner.

Thanks! Howard (I'm going out for an errand of an hour or two)

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:52, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for taking underconstruction off Africa

You're right. It is my fond hope that, some day, Africa itself will stabilize out of the "under construction" category. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:22, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Dates on CIA events

Please avoid putting in dates as a range of decades. If the source can't be specific as to the year that something started, I tend not to put that claim in until and unless I find independent sources that strongly indicate the action was over a period of time. Even then, if neither source can figure out a date within a year and preferably more precisely than that, I tend to think recycled rumors, or someone with a POV really wanting something to have happened -- but don't have specifics.

Things like police training programs will almost always have a verifiable Congressional appropriation, and/or a mention in Foreign Relations of the United States or documents at places such as the National Security Archive, CIA FOIA reading room, etc.

Are there alternative sources than Ganser or reworking of Ganser's claims? At least two things bother me about him:

  • Acceptance as "FM31-21B" as truth. The US Army just doesn't have use top secret for Field Manuals. There was a FM31-21A, which was classified secret and I've read--obviously, I have to stop there as far as contents. There are Army things that are TS; they aren't administratively part of the FM program. If the operation, for example, was a TS European Command operations plan (EUCOM OPPLAN) or possibly operations order, that wouldn't have the same smell. I'd invite finding any TS FM, although there are other series of documents that do have such a classification
  • A suggestion that Switzerland had a stay-behind force arranged through NATO. Two problems with that:
  • Swiss doctrine of fighting from the Alps goes well before WWII
  • They were so neutral as to be quite slow to join the UN. I can't conceive of them paying attention to NATO.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 03:37, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikilinks

It would make it more readable, I think, if there were some text around the reason for taking a wikilink, rather than just saying "see operation GOLD". In that particular matter, a fair discussion would also give both SILVER and the subsequent Soviet disinformation. There happens to have been considerable declassification of the Clandestine Services history of GOLD, with much more coming out after a challenge by the Federation of American Scientists. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 03:46, 2 January 2008 (UTC)


Hi Howard, On the theory that Wikipedia should be self-consistent, I am trying to link all of the operations that have been tagged with category "CIA Operations" to appropriate places in the CIA article. If the article says "70s-80s" then I have been using that as the date range.
I disagree with your theory that linking all operations, without explanation, is desirable. While I don't "own" the article, I have been trying very hard to put information about activities, not restricted to "operations", in an accurate year. National Intelligence Estimates are as significant as "operations", and they certainly can be associated with a specific year.
"Operations" normally had a specific date when they were approved by the 303 Committee, Special Group, 54/12 committee, or other covert action approval body. These authorizations are often available in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Revocations of authorization may be there, or in/as a result of Congressional action as for MINARET and SHAMROCK. If there was an actual "action", it took place at a particular time. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:12, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
I hope that by wikilinking these articles they will receive the same cleanup attention from you and other editors that the main article has been getting, in particular the application of more of the kind of rigor that you are recommending above.
I'm sorry, but I am not going to clean up articles simply because you wikilink them. I would be more willing to do so if the articles being linked did not appear to be under a POV that the CIA is only a covert action agency. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:12, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
As far as the Swiss and Gladio goes: Honestly, I haven't even read the Gladio articles in detail, it's news that's too old for me to care about.
I hope I never try to write about something I don't care about. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:05, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
I don't care that much about 1950's mind control experiments either, but I do care about the articles in Wikipedia being consistent and properly cross-referenced.
If there's anything in there that I've typed in that's totally wrong, just delete it, I won't get offended.
However, just between you and me: In WW2, the Swiss were not neutral, and they still aren't neutral.
Original research and opinion. Find one authoritative reference that Switzerland, in WWII, was a member of the Western Allies or the Tripartite Pact. Neutrality does not mean taking no actions relevant to a situation, but has a meaning in international law. Sweden, for example, was neutral, but it was a hotbed of economic warfare, where the Allies outbid the Nazis for ball bearings, not because the Allies needed them but it was cheaper to buy Swiss product than to bomb Schweinfurt. Sweden also accepted the Danish Jewish refugees, and that was legally acceptable for a neutral. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:05, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Oh, please. I once sat in the boardroom of a major Swiss bank and leafed through the company history, a nicely printed book, which included a number of photos of bank officers hobnobbing with guys in Nazi uniforms. There are a number of books available which plow this ground, for example:
Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, And The Pursuit Of Justice, by Isabel Vincent
Hitler's Secret Bankers: The Myth Of Swiss Neutrality During The Holocaust, by Adam Lebor
Hitler's Banker, by John Weitz

> They were key financers of the Nazi war effort and are still hanging onto ill-gotten gains, see World Jewish Congress lawsuit against Swiss Banks for details.

I am doing a quick first pass to put the links to category items in appropriate places, so I haven't added any descriptive text, I've thought it enough as a first pass to put the link in the right context.Erxnmedia (talk) 03:51, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
I disagree strongly that a quick first pass is a good idea. It simply reads like a laundry list of accusations, for which there is no context, other than a vague implication of bad things done by the CIA.
Since there is a great deal of information available on most of these topics, what is the value of a quick pass? I've actually taken to doing much more article/section writing first in a word processor, than a sandbox to check wikilinks, and in the main articles mostly to be sure the footnotes work correctly. Sometimes footnote problems don't show up until the main merge is done. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:00, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
There is a CIA Operations category. Should Wikipedia have 2 articles on the same topic, one of which is junk? You are taking an approach which ignores the existing body of articles. I would prefer to have the existing related articles knitted into the whole, and edited for wiki-ness and consistency if necessary.
Also it is not a laundry list of accusations. I am just chasing the pointers on articles that other editors have marked as CIA operations. Also what good is a discussion of Rendition without linking to any of the extensive articles on particular Renditions?
I'll back off if you want but I'm trying to do the right thing by tying things together. It may look a little sketchy to start, but if you don't build the skeleton, you can't add the rest.
Also speaking of skeletons, patches of articles have been moved back and forth in particular Afghanistan ended up in two different articles with people adding edits in both. Also one genius changed CIA Operations: Asia-Pacific into CIA Operations in Asia and Pacific and did a redirect, without similarly prettying up the other 8 articles, for no particular reason, and that just adds complexity.
All of which is to say that editing in Wikipedia is a bit like editing in quicksand. It can be a fun hobby but don't expect anything to last very long.Erxnmedia (talk) 04:22, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
In addition, Project SHAMROCK and Project MINARET, which you deleted from Americas list, both have CIA participation listed in their articles. If you agree with consistency goal, then you should delete the CIA Ops category for each of these articles and delete the language in the articles which state that they are CIA joint ops. Erxnmedia (talk) 14:27, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
I have corrected those articles. While several government agencies, including the CIA, FBI, BNDD/DEA, Secret Service, and military intelligence received intercepts, and indeed provided names for the watch lists, the Senate testimony of the NSA director at the time, Lew Allen, made it clear that the programs were created by NSA (and its predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency), and stopped by his decision alone.
Was it appropriate for those other agencies have participated? No. More to the point, especially under the USSID 18 guidance that was respected before George H.W. Bush, NSA recognized it had no legal authority to intercept and disseminate this information.
If the article had been about activities of the US intelligence community, or even activities authorized by the Director of Central Intelligence under his non-CIA authority, I would have no problem with the references. As a strong civil libertarian, I believe that there must be accountability for improprieties. In this case, the illegalities began in AFSA/NSA. I agree that other agencies did not raise red flags.
Nevertheless, if every suspicion is blamed on the Central Intelligence Agency, or a generic "the government", it becomes much harder to fix the situation. I hold a number of key Members of Congress violated their oaths by not acting earlier, since they had been briefed on these and other operations. If this was properly reported as an NSA activity, the military, as well as the intelligence, oversight committees might have seen it and had members with the courage to deal with the problem.
Again, my intention is to increase accountability for violations of civil rights and privacy. To do that, irregularities need to be described accurately and responsibility assigned. Regarding the CIA as the source of all that is bad can protect other agencies from being responsible for their improper acts. If every possible allegation is thrown at the CIA, the FBI, NSA, DEA, and other organizations can do the equivalent of saying "it wasn't our fault. The CIA did it."
There should be no way for an agency to shift blame for a constitutional rights violation. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:40, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard, You didn't delete the Category:CIA Operations tag at the bottom of the Project SHAMROCK article. Please remember to delete these tags for the article which aren't really CIA Ops. Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 15:46, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Again, I am not willing to do cleanup for you. If you wikilinked an article that was shown to be inappropriately wikilinked, I believe it is your responsibility, not mine, to remove the category. I am acting in good faith and assume you are doing so as well, and not trying to "assign" work. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:12, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Operation JACK

I'll discuss this further on the CIA activities in Asia and the Pacific talk page, but please see what is now reference 6:

[1]

The Operation JACK page, which is a stub, is not completely accurate, as it mixes military and CIA missions. Speaking of CIA field operations before 1952 is marginal or incorrect, as those capabilities were not fully part of part of the CIA.

Cut-and-paste from talk pages, and lists of wikilinks with no context

When an editor raises issues on a talk page, the usual intention is to discuss the issue on the talk page, and form some consensus before changing the article itself. I understand you are trying to add to the article, but you have taken talk page text, in different articles, from another user and myself, and put it into the main article without consensus being reached in talk.

Speaking at least for myself, please do not take material from what I put on a talk page and paste it into a main article. If I had felt the material was ready to go into the main article, I would have put it there myself. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing on content, but I thought it only fair to give you a chance to discuss your suggestion, with which I did not agree, on changing two pages.

There is a stated Wikipedia policy that it is not to be meant to be a list of external links. Based on that principle, unless a page is specifically a "list of", Wikilinks without additional context should not go into articles. It's certainly fair to mention a subject with sourced references, and then to Wikilink to additional content beyond the scope of the first article. If you wanted to put in Wikilinks without context, another choice would be to put them under "See Also" at the end of the article. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:03, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard, Your agenda for these articles was stated by you as follows, in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/CIA Activities by Transnational Topic: Arms Control, WMD, and Proliferation:
It is a work in progress to document what actual activities have taken place, in support of policies that have been ordered by Congress and the White House, as opposed to the model of an organization dedicated to nothing but regime change.
The "as opposed to" means to me that you will be inclined to delete edits that don't further your agenda.
You are misinterpreting. CIA does a number of things that have nothing to do with regime change. It is less that I want to suppress true, or likely, regime change and more that I want to see sourcing of both the covert actions and the other activities. I myself have put in extensively sourced discussions of things that were regime change or, at best, covert action that got wildly out of control, as in Indonesia 1965. I have made an attempt to deal with the quite complex issues, especially in Latin America, if countries were already violating human rights before they ever encountered CIA, or if they were doing so because they learned to violate them purely from CIA guidance, or if it is a world that is not black and white: the CIA role was to moderate a bad tendency. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:19, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
I disagree. If someone edits in valuable information, I applaud that. When someone puts in what appears to be WP:COAT and may expect me to do the detailed work, I do disagree with that. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
My agenda is simply to make the set of Wiki articles on CIA consistent.
I'd like to seek a larger consensus on this, because I don't think it's possible. There are too many POVs around; there is a reason, I believe, why MILHIST agreed to set up an Intelligence Project. That reason, in part, is that a certain number of people, often with a broad view of the subject, are frustrated with the "fruity stuff" and are not willing to get into edit wars over it. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

People have many entry points to Wikipedia. They can Google or Search CIA and get articles tagged as CIA Operations. They can go to CIA Main Page and press on CIA Operations Link. Or they can go through the articles that you have created. The CIA Operations category contains some fruity stuff and some good stuff. The fruity stuff will hang around saying 2+2=7 as long as (a) it is not referenced in context (which raises it's visibility) and (b) no one either edits it to make it correct or nominates it for deletion. Every time I put a link in it was in context of CIA -> Topic -> Country -> Time Period. That is plenty of context.

I strongly disagree, especially when those links turn out, on following them, to have no reliable references and are either simply lists of allegations, or only source POV articles. I have tried as hard as I can to present objective articles on both sides of an issue, but they must be reasonably authoritative. This is not whitewashing the CIA, as I've put in quotes from, or links to documents, that show striking impropriety and abuse of civil liberties.

You chose to delete many of those links without doing anything further. That, to me, is counterproductive. I wasn't trying to assign you work when I suggested you add more context or revise the linked articles. I was simply saying that if you are going to delete something which is work on my part to put something into context, then take the extra effort to put it into the context you think it should have -- unless, of course, it is against your stated agenda to have it there in the first place.

When you say that you hoped I'd clean something up, I don't see how to interpret that other than assigning work to me, or, alternatively, requiring me to accept, without protest, your standard of context -- which differs radically from mine. This subject has much potential POV, and I believe keeping a high standard of sourcing is the best way to ensure NPOV. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
As I have said, my agenda is to have decently sourced material in one place. Your agenda is apparently to have every topic, with different levels of sourcing, consistent in all places. Do we need to put this to RfC? Is there a way to agree that there may be more tan one
I apologize for putting in your and the other guy's discussion comments as facts in the article. However, neither of you has gone the extra step from criticism and fact-stating in discussion to fact-putting or fact-sorting-out in the article in the two instances where I added your discussion comments. Both of you got irritated but neither of you went forward from criticism to contribution.
Could it be that we were still thinking through our "criticism and fact-stating in discussion", and trying to establish a consensus before we changed the article?Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Your input to these articles has been viewed as "somebody's personal essay", "lacks context", "structure is confusing", "Wikipedia is not a directory of the CIA", "WP:COAT". By consistently attempting to exclude references to articles that you don't like which may contain valid information not elsewhere stated (e.g. Project MKDELTA, Project MKNAOMI, Edgewood Arsenal experiments), you will end up promoting the impression that you have a strong agenda. More likely than not, this agenda will end up being melted down by the next year's worth of random Wikipedia edits -- also a lot of good content contributed by you may be lost, as in the case of the recent attempt to delete an entire sub-article.Erxnmedia (talk) 13:53, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
My life will not be shattered if I don't do further Wikipedia edits. If good content is buried under a torrent of unsourced or POV edits, it means Wikipedia is not the venue to which I should be contributing. My agenda is accuracy. It is my impression that you have an agenda to be sure every allegation made about CIA is represented, and not bother with describing either its true intelligence role or the detailed reasons improprieties were committed. If, for example, some of your wikilinks had pointed to analysis or estimates as well as covert action, or to the proper role of CIA inside a government, or what level of government was actually responsible for an attempt to change a regime, I would feel much more comfortable that you do not have an agenda. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi howard, If you look at my list of edits in time order, you will see that I opened up page Category:Central Intelligence Agency operations and went down the list in alphabetical order, and for those pages which did describe actual operations (some like Church Committee and Kidnapping do not), I simply tried to fit it into framework CIA -> Activity -> Country -> Date. That's all. I didn't care whether it was about space aliens, innocent Swiss bankers, mind control, acoustic kittens or whatever. Strictly alphabetical. No agenda other than to wire the pages together. If you'd rather they just sit there unedited and completely or partially false, that's fine with me, I don't want to get into edit wars with you. Similarly, when I chased down topics in Weiner's book by country, I just went down the index, in alphabetical order, by country, and put in entries where there was something not already discussed. Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 16:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

CIA and such

If you really put in and cross-referenced all of the valid information in books on CIA etc. much as the mice voted to bell the cat, the question here is how to determine what is valid. I see a number of allegations, as, for example, with chemical and biological agents, that simply don't make scientific sense. I see allegations that the CIA did something before the organization existed.

Speaking personally, I have very little interest in proving what the CIA did or didn't do with respect to flying saucers. I find a good deal of the Nazi allegations not to hold together -- the more clear cases, such as Barbie, aren't hard to establish, but I have never seen serious information indicating Gehlen was an ideological Nazi. A fanatic anti-Communist, certainly.

Perhaps I misread you, but I still get a sense of your suggesting the CIA is operating far more autonomously than I know it to be -- this isn't speaking as a CIA employee, but as someone that has spent a great deal of time looking at declassified documents, talking to people who had direct access, etc. I did have a reasonable amount of direct access to Army Special Forces material and people, and some of the things being mentioned under the umbrella of Gladio simply do not make sense. Ganser makes much of "FM31-21B", which is nothing new; the thing has been around for years, and, if one is familiar with what is in the Army series of Field Manuals, it drips "wrongness". Although there are certainly top secret Army documents, FM's are never TS. I have read FM31-21A, at the secret level, and I would find it very surprising if there were

  1. as different a format as is in the forgery
  2. that kind of information in a Field Manual. If someone had put the same claims in a document identified as a European Command Operations Plan, that would be the right kind of document and where a TS or TS codeword classification would be routine.

Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt, but I don't worry about the CIA doing bad things to me. Years back, it happened that their computer network manager was chair of the Comten communications computer user group. I'd visit him at CIA, and he'd visit me at the Library of Congress. It happens I have a good internal sense of direction, and he doesn't. Almost every time I visited him, he'd try a new shortcut in the basement, and I would have to lead my escort back to his office. He could get lost in a small bathroom.

NSA was weirder to visit, but there it was just a concern that the Marine guards would shoot you on the spot, rather than concern about assassins in the night. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:23, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
I don't care about Gladio, Nazis, FM31-21A. If I put in incorrect references, or if you think the referred to pages are bogus, then please delete my references or edit the pages.
I get your point about CIA not being all about regime change, but if you went to something like the International Spy Museum, you would think the CIA was all about secret writing, hidden cameras, Russian spies and terrorists, and never about policy implementation by buying votes and mounting paramilitary operations. So to that extent, to balance off the sugar-coated gestalt, I thought it would be good to look at overall CIA influence on/intervention in individual country's internal politics over time.
Yes, the International Spy Museum would give that impression. If you are ever back in the Washington area and have the time, the National Cryptologic Museum, which is just outside the NSA security fence, is a much more serious historical place, admittedly in a highly technical field. The staff are mostly retirees from NSA, and there's an extensive library. I went in there knowing a lot about the subject and still could learn from there; I could easily spend a week looking at something and then going into the library. Still, it was both fun and informative to actually use an Enigma machine.
I actually spent a week on a boat with those guys, not long before the Museum opened. The net result was I don't think I'll ever need to attend an AARP meeting, I already got the full Monty. My invitation to the Museum's opening got lost in the mail, and I never got a chance to see it. Erxnmedia (talk) 01:57, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
If it's any consolation, always careful about puns across languages, a friend of mine had a pet carpet python. Shortly after acquiring him, he shed his skin for the first time, and called to tell me. I mentioned it to an English colleague, who paused for a moment, and then inquired "was that the Full Monty Python?" Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 06:27, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
That being said, I finished Weiner's book, recommend it, it's a good read, and I'm on to the next (Ghost Wars). If I glean anything from Ghost Wars that I can't resist the urge to type in to Wikipedia, I'll do so.
At some point, you might want to look through several online books that I have linked from the Intelligence cycle management, Intelligence analysis management, and some subordinate articles. Intelligence analysis and [[Cognitive traps for intelligence analysis]. Johnston's book that deals with Intelligence analysis as a social science problem and identifies ways the analytical process can get in trouble. I know CIA consider Heuer's book probably the most important in learning to do analysis: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/psych-intel/art5.html will take you to a specific chapter, but you can navigate around from there. Krizan takes a good overall view of the details of "Intelligence Essentials" at http://www.scip.org/2_getinteless.php. CIA's internal set of analytic tradecraft notes is at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cia/tradecraft_notes/contents.htm. Johnston does things in a creative way: he looks at the analytic community as a culture, and then examines it from an enthnographic standpoint: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/analytic-culture-in-the-u-s-intelligence-community/full_title_page.htm
There's an interesting and critical article by Paul Pillar, on how Congress can do a better job of oversight, is at http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85202/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html


Not online, but from the very different view of a senior Soviet officer, is Pavel Sudoplatov's Special Tasks. I rewrote the article on Special reconnaissance, which I think gives a good view, principally military, about clandestine collection in the field, and some about direct action.
I'm early in the book where they're going through CIA, ISI and GIA funding of various Afghani muj contingents, and how ISI duped CIA into funding their agenda, at least to start with. (And maybe still today.) I don't know if I can top the book itself on that topic. References to that book wouldn't pass muster with you because 50% of the references are of form "personal conversation by author with party-to-remain-nameless in agency X Y or Z".
Another book I strongly recommend to you is "The places in between" by Rory Stewart. He did something brilliant -- he walked across Afghanistan. This was very rewarding. He tried the same trick in Iran and, while they let him do it, it was very non-rewarding and he only got a couple short articles out of it. He was Governor of the Marsh province in Iraq (see his book "Prince of the Marshes"), and he really let's us (a/k/a U.S.) have it for our general ignorance of local politics and personalities and our government-by-overflight sensibility. The British are just so much better at governing their possessions.
The French may have left their African colonies in even better shape. They have interesting client relations with places like Chad and Ivory Coast, which may be putting down rebellions. The British were part of what I think is the best peace enforcement effort to date, Sierra Leone, where the British neutralized the worst militias, and maintained security until the West African regional peace enforcers took over. My personal belief is that the UN is too large, general, and politicized for peacekeeping, where regional or continental organizations can do a much better job.
Also for another guy who took the time to walk, see Paul Theroux's "Dark Star Safari", which is an interesting meditation on philanthropy.
Like I said, the exercise that really interests me is to net all the small factoids together to get a crisper picture of who's who around the world and what makes things tick. This can't be done on Wikipedia.
Actually, you are describing what a good intelligence analyst does, especially one working in Open Source Intelligence OSINT. I've done just that, and sometimes you can cross-correlate the anonymous interviews and let them lead you to their commonalities. Of course, an "all-source" analyst has the benefit of NSA intercepts, so some conversations may not be anonymous.
The main CIA page that we worked on is still a shambles after the Frankenstein reconstruction job done by trav*. trav* alias 68.89.131.187 is still trying to delete the branch pages. The facts on Chad are still apparently inconsistent -- are you waiting for your copies of Robert Buijtenhuijs' "Le Frolinat et les guerres civiles au Tchad" and Sam Nolutshungu's "Limits of Anarchy" to come in the mail? Or are you waiting for Aldux, who "really doesn't have time to put hand to this article now" to dangle his hand along it?
When I looked for Buijtenhuijs, I found it, but, unfortunately, don't read French. I'm afraid that I am more waiting, unless I can find other references. My information primarily came from Human Rights Watch, which tends to be very accurate.
In these articles, I sometimes draw a line how much I will try to improve an article, depending on how much I know about the subject. For example, I had a consulting job where I had the opportunity to spend several months studying Sudan, and definitely found interesting things. My knowledge of Chad comes more from the Darfur issue of Sudan, with a little about the French-Chadian fighting against Libya. Sometimes, I have a colleague in an unusual place such as Uganda. East Africa is one of my current reading interests. I did a deep study of South Africa when I was taking my intelligence courses in college (1967), and I now know a lot about incorrect analysis; I never would have believed they had the peaceful transfer of power they did.
You might be interested in the Intelligence Task Force forming at the Military History Project.
I have a lot of friends who are American citizens, that came from Sierra Leone, and that taught me things about West Africa.I do know quite a bit about Southeast Asia and Japan, WWII generally, and a great deal about the workings of the US system, which comes, in part, from being heavily involved in communications networks. With the US, there are sources that I know from memory, but I read them in hard copy and don't think they area online. Some of the material was classified at the time, but I know had been marked for declassification in 3 or 12 years. For example, when it comes to the Korean War claims about biological warfare, I know what the US had at the time, and it's not among what the North Koreans describe. What they do describe is much more similar to things done by Ishii's Unit 731 in WWII, and, since the Soviets captured some of the Unit 731 people, I suspect some of the North Korean claims come from those people. The North Korean evidence is consistent with some of the Japanese techniques. Incidentially, Shiro Ishii was one of the worst criminals of WWII, having done human experiments far beyond what the Nazis did. US Army intelligence kept him from prosecution in exchange for his knowledge; the CIA didn't yet exist. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:06, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
There are other places, but, when dealing with Wikipedia, I can try to put in a reasonable start from what I consider good sources, and then hope a real expert comes along. I will, increasingly, put open questions and research topics onto talk pages.
So as to Chad, I recognize my own limitations, and don't want to put in sourcing things I don't really understand. I can trace Sudanese politics and history much better.
Editing the Wikipedia can be fun but the satisfaction only lasts until the next wave comes to melt the sand castle back into sand.
There are some more database-y things out there, like this one and that one, but they are not publically-editable wikis, and so, are no fun at all.
Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 08:14, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Envy

I've only spent a little more than a weekend in Copenhagen, after a week at the lab in Stockholm, but it's one of the places to which I want to return -- for the place and for the people. Unfortunately, my old friend's email there is no longer working. That's more than people just being pleasant -- Danes, I have found, have a certain modern history of considering what is the right thing to do in some situation, and then do it, whether it's dealing with the Nazis or with an American video store chain.

Some of the things I know about the Danish Resistance were anecdotal, while others I found sadly not true when I went to the Museum of the Resistance, but still were good stories. There are things, especially if true, that might well belong in an intelligence article. For example, a story I have heard several times, but been unable to confirm, is that one of the Resistance units, working with someone painting the Nazi secret police building, or doing some other approved maintenance, ran a wire from the roof to the ground, painted it or somehow made it hard to see, and ran a connector into a sewer. The Resistance folks would connect radios to the sewer link, either for operational use or local broadcasting.

Nazi security people, of course, wanted to find the transmitter, or, more precisely, their antenna. So, they'd send out the direction-finding trucks, and they'd follow their instruments until they found themselves at their own garage. The officers screamed at them as incompetent, but never understood what had been done. If this can be confirmed, it really deserves to be in the Counter-SIGINT section of the Counter-intelligence article. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:24, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
Sorry about that, I was just kidding. You assumed I was overseas because of when I type in entries. You didn't consider the alternate hypothesis: (1) When my eyes glaze over at work I take a break and edit Wikipedia and (2) I have a new baby who's preferred bedtime is 3AM.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 14:52, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
Overseas? The only redeeming thing ever said by Imelda Marcos was when asked, by some idiot, how she liked living in the Far East, she smiled sweetly and responded "far from what"?


Heuer's book

Hi Howard,

I took a look at Heuer's book on the web. I wonder if people taking the Army red team course are taught this book.

I think people in the Army have learned by now that in Middle East deployments they should learn the language and get to know the locals. I think the U.S. is very weak on the issue of language training. But in terms of counterinsurgency doctrine they have learned to get out of their mega-sized forward operating bases and more into what we might as well call Community policing.

Very good points. One of my colleagues' sons was deploying as a Marine reservist to Iraq, and his father was asking for advice on things he should take with him. I asked if he was taking a CD player, and was told he was. "Good," I said. "Give him a set of Arabic language lessons. It may save his life."
The US Defense Language Institute is often considered the best language school in the world, but its basic Arabic course, intended to give minimum professional proficiency, takes 63 weeks. Obviously, this can't be given to everyone. I've been impressed with some of the pocket guides (and phrasebooks) that have been issued to the troops; the Marine one is especially good.
Language is one of the great challenges. I only speak a few phrases of Arabic, but, a while back, I was in a hospital after some intestinal bleeding. One of the hospital doctors, I learned, was Pakistani. He said he thought I was getting better, and I said "Insh'Allah". He looked like he had run into a glass wall, and asked "WHAT did I say?" I repeated it, and, in an odd tone, he said goodbye in Arabic, and I responded properly.
A couple of hours later, two nurses came by, and asked what I had done. Dr. X, they said, hated everybody, but he came out of my room, went to the nursing station, and told them I was to be treated as would want a member of his family treated.
I'm certainly not skilled in languages, and it was a running joke that when I tried to speak the appropriate language, I invariably said it Svensk to the Danes and in Dansk to the Swedes.

Language training is even more important for making friends because one of the most common tactics in Iraq is to kill translators.

I think the average Army guy's thoughts might wander more towards "let's blow up Al Jazeera" than it does towards "do they like me?".

Some units and commanders are aware of that. You might want to look up the Marine xombined action platoons. Special Forces are different, in that language and cultural training are routine for them. Have you read The Ugly American, which is totally different than the image that the phrase invokes? I'd suggest it as required reading.

To that end, if I were teaching Red Team course, I would prescribe a series of books like the ones I have mentioned, plus these:

  • "Behind the Veil: An American Woman's Memoir of the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis" by Debra Johanyak
  • "All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror" by Stephen Kinzer

and a series of Movie Nights including

to be contrasted with films like

You mean anyone treats that as other than a comedy? It's especially funny if you know the Washington DC area, is the dialogue has him saying where he's going, and he takes off in a completely different direction.


This is a short and random list of compare-and-contrast films, I think I would pair up various Hollywood entertainments with their polar opposites from other countries.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 19:39, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Now I see what you are doing with covert ops...

OK. I should make sure that the Africa article does cover the fact that there were large native movements, not only mercenaries. As a general comment, I find that sort of thing -- even though the "private military contractor" term is used rather than the inflammatory "mercenary", failing to mention the Angolans involved gives a Dark Force sort of flavor to the article.

Angola had lots of proxy involvement. Cuba was supporting and training the main opposition to UNITA. South Africa, hated by both sides, got involved. China, at one time or another, supported all three of the Angolan factions. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:13, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the general public appreciates how much China gets involved in things, the latest being Sudan for the oil.
And, for that matter, when one looks at the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company in Sudan, it is roughly one-third China, one-third India, and one-third Malaysia. India and China have some separate technical contracts. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:58, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm not trying to preserve Dark Force interpretation, I'm just trying to get some tree structure back in the tree so it doesn't look so mangy.
Also, I introduced the locution "private military contractor" purely out of sense of humor due to the recent scandal with BlackWater shooting up Iraqis to clear traffic circles. To be perfectly correct I don't know when CIA mounts a paramilitary force whether "paramilitary" means "our military without their patches on" or "Blackwater" or financing other country's soldiers without their patches on or whatever. Using the phrase and wikilink private military contractor in that sense was just me politely pretending to hold my nose. Erxnmedia (talk) 19:18, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
"Paramilitary" really doesn't have a rigorous definition. A number of countries use it for a more heavily armed, but still made up of sworn officers, of their national police. "Mercenary" does have a meaning in the Geneva Conventions, although it can blur with "foreign military volunteer". The difference between those two tends to become part of the regular military chain of command of that country, such the Gurkhas in the British Army or the French Foreign Legion.
"Private military company" also has a rather soft definition. My personal rule is that a true mercenary unit, as those recruited by Mike Hoare or Bob Denard, operate as a unit, sometimes separate from regular militaries of a country, and have no restrictions on armament. Personnel providing security for individuals, convoys or buildings, with personal small arms only, tend not to qualify as mercenaries -- it is possible to give a mercenary unit an offensive mission of its own, which is hardly possible if they are providing security to something specific.
There are conditions under which regular military forces can, as a legal ruse of war, hide their arms and insignia while approaching a combat area, but they must expose their insignia before taking any compat action.
The recent Blackwater incident is very confused. I don't know if the armed helicopters were Blackwater (which would be a violation) or US military. Since they were in an escort role, they weren't on an offensive mission. If they used disproportionate force against noncombatants, it should be possible to charge them with murder. Had they been contracted to the US military, that would have been quite possible, since defense contractors are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the same as for soldiers. Since they were contracted to the Department of State, it is very unclear what legal authority applies. Speaking personally, using them in that role was idiotic, especially to protect diplomats. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:58, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Ultracomputer

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Hey, Erxn!

Just wanted to stop by and say hello, and wish you the best. I envy your new kid -- perhaps before too long i'll get one of my own. At any rate, i have really appreciated your presence on the CIA page and hope you'll keep coming around. In particular, Howard and i've been having a back-and-forth on the sandbox page, but it's just not all that inspiring to know that you're keeping away. Would you stop by and let us know what you're thinking? It'd be great to hear from you -- Stone put to sky (talk) 09:11, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Stone,

Thanks, baby is doing well.

I'm not keeping away! Yesterday I took two entries on CIA main page Covert Ops section that were unquoted straight text-grabs from other website and properly quoted them and source them with Wikilink to their host pages and also did the same in the branch pages. Howard promptly deleted one of them, thinking I was adding new bogus stuff to the main page, and then we had a long dialog etc which I notice you noticed.

I am in the middle of reading Ghost Wars. I have one of the two French Chad books out of the library and the other on order from Amazon. I have Charlie Wilson's War (the book) and 3 Cups of Tea also on my table. So my brain is filtering plenty of new data which will eventually result in more Wikipedia entries.

Howard still doesn't get the utility of what I'm doing on the main page so I will go over to the discussion there and try to explain myself. Basically I'm trying to annotate for Trav* sake prior to delete having proven that nothing was lost in branches, where the delete will restore some order that we had to begin with. Howard is misinterpreting this as adding new stuff which would require him to go over old ground that we went over end of December.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 13:50, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Nice navboxes in the intelligence disciplines series...

Or intelligence techniques? Tradecraft? Never really decided what to call the group, except mercifully as independent as possible of agencies and countries, except in the history and national platforms articles.

If you ever feel like playing with something, TECHINT needs some other eyes. It had been happily sitting there, focused on tactical military TECHINT, until I started working with the Farewell Dossier, which is technically S&TI (strategic-level scientific and technical intelligence). Then, I started looking at the mixture of things where various national intelligence agencies provide other-country information to their industries, which gradually becomes economic intelligence (ECONINT) instead of S&TI.

As an aside, I remember a time, in the early seventies, where CIA had some very good economic models of the Soviet bloc, and they were making quite a number of their tools, such as a time series processor, available as open source.

In my first year of college, I learned that I would never be an economist, so I know my limitations when ECONINT starts getting into macroeconomics and trade policy. FININT, on the other hand, is something I do understand to a reasonable extent. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:50, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

Thanks!

However the one I did is very ugly, you can do multi columns and so on, for example Template:War on Terrorism is exceedingly columned up, so please feel free to touch it up.

I've got a lot of reading to do here, it's going to take me a couple of months now to get through it all.

For that matter, I can't decide where TECHINT/S&T, FININT and ECONINT go in the hierarchy of intelligence disciplines, as they tend to blur the lines between collection and analysis. Sometimes, the distinction is very quick: I know the man who was the main boobytrap and explosive safety specialist for the UN inspectors in Iraq. He has a T-shirt, which reads, on the back,

I am a bomb technician. If you see me running, do your best to keep up with me.

As far as cleaning up templates, I'm more focused on a webpage I'm doing with Nvu, which is not the world's greatest freeware -- and I see I have to start learning Javascript. This all relates to learning more about commercial fishing electronics and computing than I probably wanted to know. All in all, I'm more comfortable understanding the tactics of repelling a Soviet attack on a carrier battle group than I am on dredging for shellfish, and on a fisherman's budget.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:44, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:54, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Report you might find interesting

Given you've made some comments that suggest you understand economic theory better than I do, not a terribly difficult thing, you might get more than I did out of:

url = http://www.unodc.org/pdf/afg/publications/afghanistan_drug_industry.pdf
title = Afghanistan's Drug Industry Book: Structure, Functioning, Dynamics and Implications for Counter-Narcotics Policy

This is from a collaboration of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and the World Bank. It gave me a good starting point on the local economics, but when it started getting into the macroeconomics of formal and informal (hawala) money flow, my eyes glazed over. Still, there may be useful things here that I don't understand and you may.

I will see if there are equivalent volumes for other regions. Ironically, the CIA reports on heroin flow are good starting points with good public domain maps.

Unfortunately, my copy of McCoy's book on drug patterns in Southeast Asia is in a book in storage; I'm in temporary housing for a while. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:27, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

I took a look at this and there is some fancy-looking math on page 150 but all it is doing is estimating the correlation between opium prices in Nangarhar and Kandahar. Correlation is one measure of to what extent two observable changing quantities move in the same direction over time. Next page is given over to a fancier concept called cointegration which is also a measure of whether two things move over time. In this case the measure is whether they stay roughly the same distance from each other over time, i.e. if the difference between some measure of the two things (e.g. either price or return which is price yesterday divided by price today) is roughly constant. In re cointegration they said roughly that they can't say it's not cointegrated. Big whoop.

You can imbibe this information a lot more painlessly by renting the original British series Traffik from Netflix. That gives the story 20 years ago. This goes through the whole on-the-ground economics of opium -- it just pays more per acre to grow opium than it does to grow wheat. Also online and very readable is this New Yorker article, which gives the 2007 picture. Exact same picture.

I think the only way to cure the opium problem is to find some way to sell the entire opium production to drug companies to make legal opiate-related drugs e.g. Vicodin etc. out of real opium. I don't know how they do it now, maybe direct chemical synthesis.

Either that or you put the entire country on welfare. My cousin's daughter just got back from a long stay in Denmark and she tells me it's quite nice in that regard, you can stay on the dole for years and the Government gives you free apartments that would cost millions in the city. They've had a little problem with non-blondes coming in and mucking it up with their 4 wives and whatnot, but they're trying to put a lid on it.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 21:33, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

You raise an interesting point. Some therapeutic opioids, such as meperidine/pethidine/Demerol, are completely synthetic. Several countries have banned meperidine, because its supposed superiority, in some ways, over morphine have been proven not to exist, but it has been proven to have a toxic metabolite that builds up over a week or so of therapy. Morphine and codeine are simply extracted from opium. Quite a number are called semisynthetic, often derivatives of an opium alkaloid called thebaine, which is not used therapeutically. Heroin (diacetylmorphine) is a rather simple derivative made by treating morphine with acetic anhydride. The most potent by weight, fentanyl, sufentanil and related drugs, are completely synthetic.
While the poppy is a rather nice flower, I have often wondered if a specific plant disease could be developed and, with thorough study of anything else that might be affected, used against the plant. This would force all opioid production to be in a much more easily controlled synthetic environment. Obviously, something will have to be done for the poppy farmers, but I have a singular lack of sympathy for the higher-ups.
There has been widespread use of defoliants against the coca plant in South America. The locals, especially at the higher altitude, make a coca tea that apparently is not abusable, and, of course, coca is a basic flavoring for Coca-Cola (with the kola nut). Cocaine is interesting from a medical standpoint, in that it has a limited range of clinical applications, primarily ear-nose-and-throat. In that area, the specialists prefer it to more modern local anesthetics such as lidocaine, because it constricts blood vessels and minimizes bleeding. You can get a similar effect, however, by mixing epinephrine with synthetic local anesthetic.
Obviously, there are pros and cons, including the ecological concern of wiping out any species. There are even those that want to preserve the two known cultures of Variola major, the smallpox virus -- the molecular structure of which has been completely decoded, and vaccine produced naturally. I'm really less concerned about the two reference cultures than any that might have gotten out of the Soviet BW program. Still, there are close enough relatives, such as monkeypox and camelpox, which probably could be modified to be dangerous to humans. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:07, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
You're scaring me with your bio-warfare talk because, while you have no sympathy for the higher-ups, by volume it's not the higher-ups that get hurt in an eradication program, it's the dirt farmers. For every one druglord there are 2,000 dirt farmers.
I am now related by marriage to some Middle Eastern dirt farmers, and my own U.S. heritage includes a number of farmers, so perhaps I can empathise a little better.
Imagine for example that someone had decreed that sugar causes obesity, obesity cannot be tolerated, and the tastiest kind of sugar is maple syrup. So get rid of it. So someone goes to Vermont with some scary bug and kills all the maple trees. And in consequence, everything that goes with maple trees gets put out of whack -- squirrels, bears, birds, what have you. (Also Kandahar: do you think there is no ecology around the opium plants but just the opium plants?) The Vermonters are furious. They take up arms. They're all crazy rednecks so they know what they're doing. Is that what you want? Well, that's what we've got. See the movie, Traffik. It's painless and entertaining. Read the New Yorker article. These are people, not statistics. They don't even use heroin. They're flower farmers. They don't care what they're good for, they get a good price. People will do all kinds of things to get a good price -- like work 14 hour days for Arthur Anderson to plaster up all the cracks in a good accounting scam for Enron. Do you think the majority of those Arthur Anderson employees that were involved in that are still out of work? Or the majority of effectively involved former Enron employees? Don't blame people for trying to make a buck. Give them an equally lucrative alternative, if you have a problem with how they make money. The Agent Orange approach just doesn't work. I don't think the Danish welfare state approach can work long-term either.
Also, in practical terms, you probably aren't facing the scale. 2006 production was up 50% over 2005 with active eradication. This year I think the number was 600 square miles of production. That's a lot of crop dusters. And with the locals shooting at you -- both the farmers and the Afghan army and the Taliban and the Pakistani army. Nobody over there wants to stop a revenue stream like heroin addiction. You've got to think harder and find a different solution.
There is the Dutch solution (also I think England) which is to eliminate the street value of the drug by legalizing it. Then you pay the penalty of higher rehab costs. But there may also be a counter-effect which is that if it's not illegal, it's easier to talk about, and easier to get treatment. So honesty and treatment are easier.
Plus look at your population of consumers. Unhappy people. You can't make unhappiness illegal. You can more effectively try to seek out your unhappy people and seek to treat them. Lack of doing so gives you the Virginia Tech shooter and the Columbine kids. I think focussing on mental illness and putting the money into mental health treatment rather than crop dusters over Kandahar will give you a more cost-effective and humane public policy.
Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:49, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
Decriminalization also may be an option, and one that I would prefer. While I don't want to see Brave New World saturated with soma, it is a very real situation that with technological advancement, to say nothing of offshoring, there are going to be fewer meaningful jobs. What do you do with the people that really have no meaningful future? Escape into drugs may be as humane as anything else. It's not completely a mental health problem when the reasons for unhappiness are real and unlikely to change. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 00:33, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Deletion

Not sure if you are aware, one editor has nominated the article Beliefs and ideology of Osama bin Laden for deletion. Otolemur crassicaudatus (talk) 21:23, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Otolemur, I voted keep. Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 21:58, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

ISI and other controversial pages

I wonder if there is some way to get before-the-fact protection, perhaps that would stop deletions without Admin approval. Another thing would be to have a sandbox where controversial material could be posted first and reviewed.

This is a pretty broad question about which, I suspect, Wikipedia is going to have to develop policies. Either the reviewers could be from a part of the world that isn't impacted, reviewers could be paired from both sides, or reviewers might have established a reputation for fairness. Do you have any idea where to bring this up other than the Village Pump, which indeed might be a start?

Would that more people heeded the words of Carl Schurz, an American immigrant that became a senator. Concealing truth does not help, in the long run.

My country, right or wrong.” In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:12, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

I certainly think region/country/date is the only way to attempt getting cause and effect when multiple countries are involved. Not being specific brings things uncomfortably close to spy fiction. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:21, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

template

Very nice job with Template:Israeli Intelligence Community! We've needed something like that for a while. Joshdboz (talk) 19:27, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Josh,
Thanks, it is following pattern of some freshening up done for Inter-Services Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency. In particular I'm seeing agreement on having a more neutral presentation of operations as by region/country/date with more emphasis on sourcing and less on Wins, Losses and Scandals. If you look at Inter-Services Intelligence#Operations History or Central Intelligence Agency#Mission-related issues and controversies and the 10 branches such as CIA activities in Africa you'll get the flavor. Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 20:46, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Thoughts on continuing the "espionage" evolution?

You have a better sense than I at reorganizing existing articles. There is a good deal of historical and fictional information in espionage, although much of it suffers from the confusion between intelligence as a whole and espionage. The Zimmermann Telegram, for example, has nothing to do with espionage.

Can we collaborate on a plan? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:30, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

The Zimmermann Telegram "was intercepted and decoded by the British" so it at least would go in British intel operational history.

Yes, let's collaborate on plan for Espionage. How do you suggest merging the Spy Museum version into the NSA Spooks 101 version?

By NSA Spooks 101, do you mean the HUMINT series? Actually, the Spy Museum isn't bad (I've been there) and they do have excellent guest speakers. As a pure museum and place for serious study, the National Cryptologic Museum, just outside the NSA security fence, is superior. I haven't seen the CIA internal museum, which opened after I had no routine visits there.
Let me start with what is good about "Espionage", with some qualifiers. The section on fiction isn't bad. Beyond that, it starts to get into trouble, although I worked on some of it last night. Essentially, I see "Espionage" as what I might call an augmented disambiguation page.
A significant problem with "espionage" is that it takes the popular (and wrong) idea that intelligence, or at least intelligence collection, is synonymous with espionage. I removed, for example, the Zimmermann Telegram, which was pure COMINT. I think there still might be references to "spy satellites".
One of the reasons that HUMINT is preferred "in the trade" to espionage is that even if Boris is taking zee secret plans, Boris, the asset with access to documents, is rarely working alone. He certainly has a case officer (GRU, at least, calls them operations officers, which is probably more general). He may be part of a HUMINT network, involving a cell structure. He needs to use clandestine communications, which may involve cutouts and couriers. His recruitment may have involved access agents and recruitment specialists (the Clandestine HUMINT asset recruiting still needs work). Support agents may manage safehouses, money, equipment, etc.
I'm not sure what to do about espionage history, which started out as US-centric. That is a huge topic, which I started expanding in Espionage.
All of these supplementary things are in the various parts of the Clandestine HUMINT series, and I would mention the top-level HUMINT to make the point that such things as prisoner interrogation are not espionage.
I don't know if a navbox allows it, but perhaps espionage, below an introduction, might have section links (i.e. with some explanation, and definitions of things that are not espionage, to:
Function Article
General collection and where HUMINT fits Intelligence collection management (maybe needs more on selecting collection)
Espionage and related recruiting and support functions as concepts, including counterintelligence Clandestine HUMINT (and counter-intelligence to deal with doubling, etc.)
Basic operational doctrine, communications, cutouts Clandestine HUMINT operational techniques
HUMINT network organization Clandestine cell system (does this need HUMINT in its name?)
Recruiting Clandestine HUMINT asset recruiting
Anyway, here are some initial thoughts. Let's discuss. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hcberkowitz (talk • contribs) 15:13, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Separately, I am reworking Mossad operational history. I gave them a new navbox and they liked it.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 14:32, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Do you know how to set up redirect pages? I suspect "sleeper cell" and "covert cell" proposals to move into "clandestine cell system" have been up long enough, with no comment, to go ahead redirect. Look at them, but I don't think either have useful content to be preserved or further merged.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:42, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

Detailed instructions on redirect are in [1].

Also when you delete things because they are in wrong context I assume you are re-inserting the refs in the right context if they aren't already in right context.

I just did Sleeper Cell for you. Covert Cell requires more careful text merge which you might want to do.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 17:34, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

OK, I will look carefully at Covert Cell, and I now understand how to do the redirect. A more complex redirection might be of honeypot, to get just the espionage part pointing to clandestine HUMINT asset recruiting. I think the right way, after any content from espionage honeypot, is to make sure the HUMINT article has a heading that includes honeypot, and then change the link from the honeypot disambiguation page. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:40, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

I took a look at your table and tried to figure out where to put it in Espionage page.

The Espionage page has it's own lists and nav box including pages like Tradecraft and List of intelligence gathering disciplines.

To try to merge this into HUMINT while not losing any information would be a good goal, but you would also need map out all of the branches eminating from Espionage and redirect them into corresponding branches in HUMINT and also carry over all of the unique examples or citations from Espionage and it's branches into HUMINT. A lot of work.

All in all I would have to say that Espionage is the Popular Mechanics version and Intelligence cycle management is the industrial-strength version. It's a lot of effort to merge, and has to be done kindly to not piss off people who wrote the Espionage version.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 02:31, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Iran-Iraq war

The infobox there is a curse on the article, and the problem it encounters won't go away with more multipolar wars. I am perfectly willing to say there was belligerency between the US and Iran during much of that period, but that doesn't make the US a cobelligerent of Iraq.

Let's take a historic example of how the simple infobox breaks: Italy in WWII. It started out as a founding member of the Tripartite Pact, but, IIRC, in 1943 it became part of the Allies. Under which column does it fit as belligerent? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 23:46, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
I haven't been as active on Wikipedia since I got a promotion at work at year-end review. My Wikipedia activity level generally correlates with my level of anxiety at work: The more I want to get the hell out of there and hate how I have to spend my time, the more Wikipedia edits I generate. A promotion and some cash have the effect of considerably decreasing my interest in recent geopolitics.
That said, this was a 3-day weekend, so I had a chance to plow through most of "Charlie Wilson's War". It is very readable compared to "Ghost Wars", which I got bogged down in. This is because Charlie Wilson's War brings it down to the activities of a few personalities and makes everything look simple. It's a personalized 1000-feet overview. "Ghost Wars" is more like 27,000 feet and that can get a little dry after a while. Also I made it through 10 pages of the French Chad book which is written in a good conversational style but then my wife had to return it to the library. I work a 12-hour day and just don't have much time.
Anyway, this being a 3-day weekend, I got through most of Charlie's War and there is a juicy paragraph in there on Iran-Iraq which I will drop into CIA activities in the Near East, North Africa, South and Southwest Asia#Iraq 1980-1988, let me know what you think.
Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 16:15, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Well, congratulations anyway. As far as Iran-Iraq, yes, there was US support on both sides. I would hesitate to say it was all CIA, because, before the US reached an apparent agreement with Saddam, Army Special Forces teams were attached to Iraqi Kurds.
I've met a couple of those Special Forces people, who were extremely bitter at what they regarded as a sellout by Kissinger. While my sample is small, everyone I know who spent time with the Kurds liked them a great deal. There were rumors that some soldiers may have refused to leave. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:27, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
There was one guy in my Aikido class who went to Iraq in the Army and then spent another year working for a private firm distributing classroom supplies. He went native and married an Iraqi woman and brought her back to the U.S. He was very gung ho about what he did there and tried to continue in the NGO vein but I don't know how it worked out. He was in his 30s/early 40s.
On the other hand, a friend of mine who was a (male) Army nurse, in his 50s, and his wife, also in the Army, who both spent time in Iraq, came away thinking it was somewhat pointless to be there.
The Kurds got a lot of positive press for being neglected after the first Gulf War and more recently some negative press for being too close to the Iranians. They speak a dialect of Farsi and one of their main religions is connected to Zoroastrianism which was a main Iranian religion (and is becoming trendy once again).
The main reason I pulled the quote from Charlie's War about pitting Iraq against Iran is simply that, from 100,000 ft, or 1 million ft, or from a table at the Four Seasons or wherever it is that creatures like Kissinger do their thinking, it may seem like a fun idea to waste 1 million people in a pointless war, in order to drain their energy and keep them out of our hair. Except, if we don't go over there, at least back then, they really weren't in our hair to begin with. I don't think people in power often think about the human consequences of the decisions they make. They make huge, stupid decisions, lots of people suffer, and they still get to finish their dinner.
Take for example the banks and the mortgages. All the major trading houses have been caught with their pants down holding shitty mortgages. Most of the time, the decision to hold those mortgages was made by a very few individuals in each institution who, if they were right, would make a bundle for themselves, and if they were wrong -- would still make a bundle, individually, with negotiated severance packages, while literally hundreds of thousands of people in the chain below them were left to pay for the mistake -- again, literally.
So it behooves those who are on the bottom of the pile and writing the checks to take issue with seemingly clever decisions that have huge consequences for everybody but the decisionmakers.
I'm just rambling on here, but, you know, whatever.
Even Charlie Wilson ended up with issues: He was a big supporter of Israel (and they of he) until he toured the Sabra and Shatila camps right after the massacre. He saw what he saw and it really clouded his thinking. A few people I know are still not forgetful of the USS Liberty incident.
When you don't know what to think and don't trust anybody, you're stuck. I have an old "we support our troops" sticker in the back of my car -- but it's a generic thought. The reality is that even the most enthusiastic supporters of our various wars sometimes come home with confusion and a bad taste in their mouth. Except for Henry, who happily dines on.,
Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:20, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
For political bumper stickers, I still prefer "Vote for Cthulhu. Why settle for the lesser of two evils?"

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:46, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Mohammed Mosaddeq

Why did you revert Mohammed Mosaddeq? If you're neutral, and/or not familiar with the topic, why do you jump in the middle of a dispute and make a blind revert without a rational? The accusation that Mohammed Mosaddeq was a communist or dependent on them, is a false crooked-u charge, and all modern historians agree that Mossadegh was in conflict with communists. Please revert yourself, and don't blindly take sides.--CreazySuit (talk) 21:20, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

You might want to consider taking this, and some of the other issues raised, to Wikipedia talk:Mediation Cabal. That is relatively informal (as opposed to Request for Comment or Request for Arbitration), and seems sometimes to help simply by getting a third opinion from someone who hasn't been involved, or will go through some issues point-by-point.
My early experience has been positive, in that having the mediator restate some of the issues made me react "Odd. I thought that point in question was well sourced." When I looked at the page as it was, rather than in edit mode, I discovered that the particular way I had cited produced a note that, indeed, could have been misinterpreted as coming from an identified biased source, but indeed actually came from a data base of public records.
One of the problems with actions in the fifties (especially) was a tendency, in many Western governments, to decide someone was a Communist- or Communist-linked simply because there were contacts, or even that the government involved was playing the sides against one another. That the US and UK didn't break diplomatic relations with the USSR is obviously irrelevant, just as J.F. Dulles being unable to see Zhou En-Lai offering a hand at a neutral reception. A mediator may be able to help phrase something that Creazy Suit, for example, might understand was the perception at the time, rather than the facts -- as best we can know them. That Fidel Castro didn't start as a Communist -- and Che Guevara did -- is quite believable, after reading Che's rather eloquent discussion while waiting to be shot. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi CreazySuit,

The quote in question that you deleted didn't say that Mossadegh was a communist, it said that he depended on the Communist Party for support. There is a difference. Ralph Nader depended on Democrats and Republicans for support in the 2004 election; that didn't make him either Democrat or Republican.

I find that you are deleting everything that BoogaLouie does and you seem to be pushing an agenda. Both of you need a referee. You should try to talk things out in Talk pages first before hitting delete key on other people because that just invites other people to start hitting delete key on you.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:32, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Bruno Dupire

A tag has been placed on Bruno Dupire requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person or group of people, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not indicate the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, as well as our subject-specific notability guideline for biographies.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Fritzpoll (talk) 00:03, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

please avoid an edit war

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Afghanistan. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions in a content dispute within a 24 hour period. Additionally, users who perform a large number of reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring, even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing. Please do not repeatedly revert edits, but use the talk page to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. If necessary, pursue dispute resolution. Kingturtle (talk) 21:06, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

In this instance it appeared that other users were dumping content legitimately put in by a third party without trying to do something more gracious. Apparently the third party is someone whose edits are in disfavor. So I stopped at 2 reverts, although I am not 100% convinced that the way they were dumping on the third party was 100% gracious or considerate. I suggested that they call for dispute resolution or RfA. Their POV was that Pashtuns of the 17th Century are not Afghanis. The other guy's POV was that they were. The other guy appeared to them to be less educated and pursuing an agenda. I think their agenda unconsciously assumed that country lines drawn by the British at the turn of the 20th century determine what is Afghani.
If you want to block me, go ahead and put me out of my misery! Erxnmedia (talk) 22:41, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

thanks for the correction on Afghanistan

Thanks for removing false information and resisting the removal of real information by some bully editors.

There is one more thing that could use a correction while we do the RFca.

In the Afghanistan#Ethnic_groups section the racist user user: NisarKand put an incorrect map. It was proven that was map was incorrect on the talk page but so far no one has done anything about it.

Previously we had a more updated and detailed map with the numbers below in a nice table. Someone removed it but these other editors did not do anything about it.

So if you could please replace that false map with the following, thanks:


Ethnic groups of Afghanistan (percentages are from Encyclopædia Iranica and CIA World Factbook)      39.4% to 42% Pashtun      27% to 33.7% Tajik      8.0% to 9% Hazara      8.0% to 9% Uzbek       3.2% to 4% Aimak      3% Turkmen      1.6% to 4% Baloch       4% to 9.2% other (Pashai, Nuristani, Brahui, Hindkowans, Hindustani, etc.)
Ethnic groups of Afghanistan (percentages are from Encyclopædia Iranica[2] and CIA World Factbook[3])      39.4% to 42% Pashtun      27% to 33.7% Tajik      8.0% to 9% Hazara      8.0% to 9% Uzbek       3.2% to 4% Aimak      3% Turkmen      1.6% to 4% Baloch       4% to 9.2% other (Pashai, Nuristani, Brahui, Hindkowans, Hindustani, etc.)


DurraniPashtun (talk) 03:09, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

DurraniPashtun is sockpuppet of User:Beh-nam

User:DurraniPashtun is another sockpuppet of the anti-Pashtun banned editor User:Beh-nam, please stop helping him with his controversial edits. This map he displayed here was created by him to purposely show wrong information. When there is an official CIA map available we don't need to use ones made by unexperianced users, especially not one made by a racist person who is willingly falsifying information of ethnic groups.

AIMS

AIMS, with regard to Afghanistan, is usually "Afghanistan Information Management Services", a UN based a joint venture between UNOCHA and UNDP, which acts as an information clearinghouse and coordinator for assistance organizations (NGOs) working in Afghanistan. See Afghanistan Information Management Services website. --Bejnar (talk) 16:26, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

OR (or the perils of forgetting about Americanisms)

Thanks for spotting that, you gave me a little laugh at my own expense! NSH001 (talk) 18:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Your arbitration case

I have to warn you that there is little or no chance that ArbComm will accept your case, since it's a content dispute (and not a very advanced one, either). If you believe that an article was deleted incorrectly, you should take it up at WP:DRV. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 17:30, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Arabic Network for Human Rights Information

The article Arabic Network for Human Rights Information does not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for companies and organizations. Please read through this policy and update the article accordingly. Otherwise, it may soon be deleted. Kaldari (talk) 00:05, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

It is referred to by 4 other Wiki articles and is a functioning news service. It is notable in the sense that it is frequently noted! Erxnmedia (talk) 01:54, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Community article, ObL as Subprime Lender, etc.

Your comments on why he wasn't taken out in 1998, I suspect, goes to the running debate of whether a military or a law enforcement model is more appropriate against terrorism. While each have advantages and disadvantages, I've always preferred a public health model.

Epidemiologists don't just deal with infectious diseases, but all sources of morbidity (non-fatal) and mortality (M&M). The basic model seeks to reduce incidence, or the frequency with which incidents of the source of M&M are minimized, and then to reduce the virulence (i.e., severity of morbidity, rate of death) of the incidents once they do occur. We have a far higher M&M rate from automobile accidents than terrorism, but we accept there will be accidents. With such things as properly banked and divided highways, antilock brakes, etc., we try to reduce incidence. Air bags and seat belts reduce the severity, and one might add the constantly evolving practice of trauma medicine to the latter.

It took a couple of centuries to eradicate (a term of epidemiological art) smallpox. The eradication of polio is probably going to happen in the relatively near term. There are about three tropical diseases, mostly localized, that may be eradicated. That's it. Eradication is not the same as eliminating them from the developed world, but any non-laboratory environment on the planet.

That kind of time perspective is appropriate for terrorism. Maybe Gene Roddenberry's vision of the 23rd or 24th century is the right target. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:28, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
In the subprime lending case, there was a sequence of interactions between individual borrowers, mortgage brokers, investment bankers and institutional investors which is perfectly explained here.
Right. (adjusts tinfoil hat) all planned in South Waziristan .
The mortgage brokers, lending money provided by the Government at 3%, get paid a premium by investment bankers, who repackage the debt and sell it to insitutional investors, knowing that if rates go up and borrowers default, the Government will bail them out, or even if they don't get bailed out, the chain is long enough that they can always point the finger at someone else. In this scenario, individual investment bankers at a high level have a call option on the outcome: If loans are repaid, they win big. If loans default, they still win, just not as big, because they get paid pretty well in either event, well enough that they don't mind losing their jobs if they make the wrong bet. I.e., well enough that the $70K/year that your higher-level CIA executive makes is not even chump change.
I'm wandering a bit here, but the point is this: People at the top of the government, like the Richard A. Clarke's, have an incentive to do whatever makes them personally look good. In Clinton's day, caution made you look good. In Bush's day, incaution makes you look good. By "looking good" in the Government context, this means that the senior executive is compensated by simply being able to keep his job, because the job has a lot of intangible ego perks that don't exist in the private sector.
This looking-good incentive and the layering in Government that accompanies the ego perks lead to 2 results which also occur in private world:
1. Lack of communication between higher and lower GS- grades
2. Decisions are made independently of conditions on the ground (e.g. the entire decision-making process for Hurricane Katrina).
I'm assuming that communications sideways and up and down in the CT world are just wonderful now, but it never hurts to ask.
Let me address aspects of both Katrina and CT. For what it's worth, I have a folder full of certificates from FEMA training, as well as experience in real emergency management. The Incident Command System (ICS), with extensions to take it all the way up to a major disaster requiring national response, is a very good model, standard in North America and in an increasing amount of the world. ICS does such things as make sure that no commander has too many subordinates (preferably 5 or fewer, never more than 7), responsibility is always clearly turned over either at shift/relief or if a more senior commander takes over, everyone always knows to whom they report, etc. It's been pretty well tested, including at simulated very major disasters like the TOPOFF radiological contamination trials.
ICS alone won't make up for not having a reasonable set of contingency plans. For example, the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada have some quite well worked out mutual aid agreements for whoever gets the biggest forest fires. I'm not sure if the US National Guard can cross into Canada, but at least California, Oregon, and Washington have interstate agreements so they can get help without a Federal proclamation. The states tally up costs and reimburse each other afterwards.
During Katrina, New Orleans and Louisiana had few contingency plans for calling for help. Whether they had been trained in the Incident Command System, but they didn't execute well enough to run a major disaster Emergency Operations Center. One of the first FEMA-sponsored groups to arrive was a small team of EOC experts from Arlington County, VA, which ran the 9/11 Pentagon rescue. Rather quickly, they brought down enough EOC teams from the Northern Virginia area to staff a 24/7 EOC.
As I understand it from friends in the California and Oregon National Guard, they were never Federalized, but someone poked the Governor of Louisiana to request help; the units had been mobilizing before the interstate order came through. In the meantime, the California Guard stopped at several beer breweries, who shut down production and filled as many bottles of water as could fit into the trucks, which then drove East.
There's some of the difference of the way a prepared and unprepared system works. I lived in Arlington on 9/11, and they set up Incident Command immediately under an assistant fire chief, with the fire chief recognizing that someone was needed to keep nuisances away from the Commander. They also reinforced the 911 answering center, and then the FBI set up the Joint Command Post nearby, whose job it is to get resources for a larger area, manage investigations without interfering with emergency services, etc.
Have you read my article Swarming (military)? More apropos to CT, swarming doesn't work unless there are peer-to-peer communications and synchronization, as well as up and down the chain of command. One hopes that lesson is being learned by CT.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:43, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 22:52, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

The version of Katrina I heard was

  • Incoming aid supply trucks being halted due to insufficient authorizations.
  • Thousands of local people locked into a stadium being run by a few local criminals.
  • Fleeing refugees being blocked from leaving the city by gun-toting sheriffs on Gretna Bridge
  • Billions spent on mobile homes which then languished in the desert because they were subsequently deemed to be un-hurricane-worthy.
  • Grandstanding and indifferent local politicians refusing federal aid, and a weak-willed President Bush refusing to override them.
  • National Guard eventually rolling in and treating all of the locals like criminals.
  • Weak-willed FEMA officials Michael D. Brown and Michael Chertoff standing by with their thumbs up their asses while all of this went down.

I'm not sure how that tallies with your view!

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 02:29, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm addressing the emergency response and cannot speak to the temporary housing. Grandstanding by politicians at all levels, yes. My sources include people that were in the Guard response from other states, public health and emergency medicine mailing lists, conversations with one ER director in Northern LA on the edge of the disaster area, and various people involved in logistics. For Rita, when they were reviewing lessons learned, I was on the list to receive updates every 12 hours from the county director of medical services.

National Guard treating all of the locals like criminals? That would surprise me, also knowing people that were in the Guard response, definitely from California and Oregon. Can't speak to the Louisiana or other guard.

I'm not sure how to interpret "run by criminals" or "locked in". The reality appears to be closer that no government officials did anything there, and criminals terrorized the area inside, and also congregated at the exits. Perhaps that's what you interpreted as "locked in".

Fleeing refugees blocked? Probably. Part of the negligence in local emergency planning, such as assuming that people would mostly drive themselves, that buses did not need to return, and there were no convoys with escorts. Louisiana has some of the most Third World politics in the US, so very little would surprise me. Other problems were that traffic was not controlled such that at least one lane was kept empty of anything except emergency vehicles, and also for broken down vehicles that might need to be bulldozed off the side. Allowing all lanes to fill is a guarantee that the system will go into gridlock -- think queueing theory with no way to abandon stalled attempts. You can use some lanes on both sides of a divided highway, but there must always be an access lane. If there wasn't, it was bad planning -- and if people try to drive into those lanes, the safety of the many requires using whatever force necessary to get people without justification out of them.

Brown and Chertoff followed Bush's example. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:44, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
By "locked in" I mean that the police did not allow them to leave the stadium, that was the news report.
My understanding, from emergency medical people there, is the problem was a shortage of police at the stadium, such that armed gangs controlled the exits and demanded tribute to pass, or simply attacked. There certainly may have been some police blocking, but I'd like to hear specifics. My opinion of the New Orleans Police Department, strongly including its command, is not high, but I prefer sourcing, especially when primary sources I know personally differ with your account.
There were reports National Guard were going in with guns drawn rather than with open arms. (Actually, I may be confusing this with a report that private military contractors from the bear-paw company were hired to go in with guns drawn, I don't know what's worse.)
I find the private group much worse. Unless they are sworn special police officers, there is no real control or accountability for them, other than the courts or possibly local law enforcement. Even non-federalized National Guard have a clear chain of command. While this isn't a warfare situation under international law, I would observe that a clear chain of command is one of the requirements, of the Geneva Conventions, for defining a lawful combatant.
People trying to leave over Gretna Bridge (the only open bridge) were directed there by New Orleans City police who told them buses on the other side of the bridge would take them to safety. Instead, they were threatened with shotguns by police from the town on the other side of the bridge, though the road itself was a federal highway.
Anyway, get ready for the next scandal to hit the Iraq War. This one sounds minor but I guarantee you it's going to have a huge impact on public opinion: G.I.'s killing puppies for fun.
P.S. I get the epidemic view of terrorism but I favor a view that says the cure for the epidemic is to get to know people on their own terms from the ground up, and not to let your trained killers throw puppies over cliffs on YouTube.
I don't understand your metaphor or specific action of knowing people from the ground up, at least in major disasters when it is necessary to bring in out-of-state forces. I consider the term "trained killer" to be loose at best and inflammatory at worst. Most physicians I know, for example, are very highly trained in killing, so they know what not to do. Military personnel are trained in killing, but I don't regard that as the pejorative you seem to consider it. The essence of a military is that violence is controlled, and minimizes harm to noncombatants of two or four legs. Were I in that zone, armed, and spotting a soldier killing puppies unless humanely and for a clear health reason, I might well get violent against that soldier, just as I would if the soldier were killing civilians. Remember that the killing at My Lai was stopped by other American soldiers who landed helicopters and held Calley's out-of-control troops at gunpoint.
Every country can have war criminals. I consider the 2003 invasion of Iraq incredibly ill-advised, without any real plan for stability after the quick defeat of the regular military. In an open-ended, sometimes pointless-seeming war like Iraq 2003 or Vietnam, there will be individuals who commit war crimes, and should be prosecuted vigorously. Investigating and prosecuting violations -- and there certainly have been such by private contractors in inappropriate roles, as well as by soldiers -- is much more specific than hand-waving about "trained killers".
Perhaps I am a trained killer. What of it? It's been years since I routinely used guns, but I was quite proficient. There were techniques in judo and tae kwon do that the instructors made clear could kill. If I was intending to kill, however, I'd be most likely to use knowledge of toxicology or microbiology. Gee, I could even improvise an explosive device.
You'll have to excuse my leaving, as I have to serve breakfast to adult cats, help in the education of the kittens, and socialize with an adolescent squirrel. Clearly, all of these activities must be inconsistent with my training in killing. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 12:49, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 03:16, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

Don't take it so personally! My point was simply that in the war of public opinion, that puppy is going to cost us millions, literally, IMHO, along the lines of Abu Ghraib -- because the puppy clip I sent came along with 4 other kill-the-puppy clips.

But I do take "trained killer" personally when applied, with a broad brush, to US military personnel. Having known professional (including reserve) soldiers pretty much all my life, I can think of few people that are as furious by the "uncontrolled killer" that somehow got into their ranks. When those exceptions are found, they need to be rooted out ruthlessly. I doubt you have any reason that I make gratuitous use of profanity, but "public opinion" comes principally from mainstream media and from "entertainers" of trash political shows. When Abu Ghraib came out, I read the redacted, and then the leaked complete, Taguba Report from cover to cover. I have particular interests in military ethics, in psychology and sociology of soldiers, and a framework of international law that deals poorly with non-national actors including private military companies. Those caveats being made, if "public opinion" is formed from sound bites, I say to you "fuck public opinion", and send the whores that produce those sound bites to the nastiest Dantean hell possible -- or worse, having them listen to themselves for eternity.

My point about getting to know people is quite simple. I am told that, among spooks (and mafioso, coincidentally), the word for other spooks is "friends" (mafia being "friends of ours", emphasizing inclusion, whereas I guess spooks are all-inclusive). This indicates a mindset which is, ideally, more about not thinking about the enemy as "the enemy", but thinking about the enemy as people who know people that you know, who have wives and children and banks and schools and put their pants on one leg at a time. Who may also hang their homosexuals and beat their sisters to death for dating the wrong guy -- but didn't that happen also in West Side Story and Boys Don't Cry?

Actually, I've rarely, if ever, heard intelligence officers call each other "spooks". The term is sometimes used by conventional military personnel, although the people "behind the green door" is just as common with people who deal with them frequently, the "green door" being the entry to the SCIF where codeword material is kept. Among intelligence peronnel, other terms are used, usually specific to the agency in question.
Further, in a US disaster situation where people have to come in on short notice, just how, in the midst of chaos, did the 81st Brigade Combat Team (Oregon National Guard) have the opportunity to "get to know people."

Here are a few links on Katrina points (of course it's all left-wing propaganda which you can instantly discount):

Cheap shot. I despise Bush and the constitution-raping Administration he's created. I expect to campaign and vote for a Democrat -- but I will just as well stand up and call Democrats for lying.
It says "But, the Guard in still under orders to bar exit to those stuck for the second day." No mention of which Guard -- LA or other. It makes no mention of safety immediately outside; at least at some points, gangs were active immediately outside and unarmed citizens probably could not have gotten through them. It makes no mention if emergency operations outside might need access to the area. WRT the latter, laymen will complain about one lane per highway not being made available for refugees -- but that lane is absolutely necessary for purpose ranging from the return of buses for more loads, to vehicle breakdowns, to emergency vehicles. Failure to have that lane may mean hours of delay to clear an accident that otherwise could be cleared in minutes.
Rather oversimplified and invoking the devil-image of military contractors. No, I don't think they had any business being there, but the responsibility is principally with who contracted with them and deputized some. Sorry, I've been getting a load of how Blackwater might keep Bush in office after a new election, and those swaggering bullies would only last a few minutes before even a competent Guard unit.
It's not that these were left-wing sources. It's that they were sensational, sneering sources, no better than sensational, sneering, right-wing sources. If this is the quality of sources you want to justify things to me, don't go to much effort, as I really have no interest in such sources unless they are cross-checked by myself or someone whose objectivity I trust. "Inclusionists", IMHO, rarely are objective, but just keep pouring in unverified data until someone else does the hard work. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:13, 4 March 2008 (UTC)


Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 14:45, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I've been voting for Ralph Nader every election!

I know it's unfair to 999,999 out of every 1,000,000 U.S. soldiers, but that puppy story has legs, trust me.

And I have nothing against trained killers, just trained killers making puppy snuff films. (By the way, it's not clear if that puppy was actually alive when he was tossed, but it won't make any difference to the impact of the story.)

As far as New Orleans...(a) It's the South, seriously and (b) Chertoff, Brown and the woman who was Governor of Lousiana should all be invited to live together in a moldy trailer in a mud flat in 104 degree weather for a couple months. Erxnmedia (talk) 15:36, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Arabic Network for Human Rights Information

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NCS, etc.

IC vs. matrix view

While it isn't as much oriented to organization, it's not uncommon to see, in the more specialized literature, a matrix organization, which includes some interagency teams. Perhaps this should go into the IC article, but it is complex. For example, while NRO satellites and other assets collect IMINT, SIGINT, and MASINT, the initial data reduction takes place in NGA, NRO, and DIA (and military components). The reduced data then goes to the analysts

Source type Collection Processing Analysis
SIGINT NRO, NSA, Special Collection Service NSA, CIA CIA, DIA, INR, others
IMINT NRO NGA CIA, DIA, INR, others
MASINT NRO, NSA/CSS, SCS, Department of Energy DIA CIA, DIA, INR, others
HUMINT CIA/NCS, FBI CIA, FBI, ODNI CIA, DIA, INR, others
OSINT ODNI Open Source Enterprise ODNI CIA, DIA, INR, others

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:36, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

Do you want to put that table into United States Intelligence Community?

Not a bad idea. I could also cross-reference it from the country-agnostic intelligence discipline article, and perhaps allude to the oft-unrecognized fact that CIA does collection that isn't just spies.
It does need a bit more work. IIRC, the official count of intelligence agencies is 16, but with some additional odds and ends, plus interagency collection units like SCS and major subordinate units like NCS. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk)

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 15:12, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

User:Pnoble805 and User:Folic Acid are nibbling away at list in United States Intelligence Community. I think NCS should get a promotion. Also I think listing 16 agencies is out of date if there are more and there's been a re-org since the magic # 16 was arrived at. Erxnmedia (talk) 18:51, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Support slit

Completely inaccurate list, neither Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait ever supported Iran during the war, the only Arab countries who did so were Syria and to some extent Libya and that's it, this is common knowledge to those have studied this conflict. Where are you getting this data from? Also, Kurds (on side of Iran) and Arab fighters (on side of Iraq) did fight alongside Iranian and Iraqi troops during the entire war, they were engaged in the war, so they should be listed in the info-box as belligerents. --CreazySuit (talk) 22:16, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

If you look on the Discussion page, there was a lot of debate about the info box and someone proposed a really long infobox, half joking I think, without actually posting it. So I posted the contents of the infobox as a section. Please feel free to correct the attributions to one side, the other, or both.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:33, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Long list, or category?

Hope you had a good lunch.

May I suggest you create a category for CIA, which will auto-generate a list to which you can point from the main article? That would seem much easier to maintain.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:37, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
You're right, I'll replace that with a category. There are probably 200 CIA pages but there are maybe 300 redirects, it's hard to boil down.
Here are the pages I have to check for category/alias

and I'll leave it at that.

Erxnmedia (talk) 19:33, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Controversial page moves

You need to follow procedure and request a formal request for move, before making controversial page moves. --CreazySuit (talk) 22:28, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Revision of arms to Iran

I changed your Iran 1980 information about arms to Iran to 1984, and explained that under the Boland Amendments, the CIA was forbidden legally to participate in the arms-for-hostages-and-money-to-the-contras deal. It is correct that DCI Casey ran the operation, but as an individual, working with White House staff and retired special operators under contract. AFAIK, the CIA was not directly involved, except possibly in the hostage releases (and intelligence on them). Casey was almost certainly guilty of multiple felonies, but was a dying man before the matter became public.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:44, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
No problem.
Note that my solution of separate page for US support for Iran doesn't solve Tanker War issue which you'll have to pursue if you want, also doesn't separate out Foreign support for Iran or Iraq which I don't have references for.
Note that when adding this page along the path blazed by U.S. support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war page (do "what links here" to see), it's a button in "toolbox" underneath "search" box, I noticed that there were, instead of U.S. support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war a lot of U.S. support for Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war links in Iranian-related pages. The U.S. support for Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war page just redirects to "US support for Iraq". I think that substituting "Saddam" for "Iraq" is an emotional POV switch and it's prevalence among Iranian pages indicates a lot of pressure to sell US/Iraq combo as a long-term enemy of Iran, which I don't think is 100% correct.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 17:04, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
While I'm not sure "blazing" is the most politic term for the Tanker War, if you don't mind, I'd like to see consensus for this set the precedent. It's even more clear-cut. In my userspace, I'm starting pages on support by various other countries, mostly to Iraq, including both regular weapons and components for WMD programs.
Your point about Saddam is well taken. If you haven't done so, I recommend looking at Wikipedia:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation; be sure to look at the discussion page as well, both for ground rules for discussion, and the way they work out POV problems. If the same kind of spirit existed for Iran-Iraq, much more, I suspect, would get done. Iran isn't the only group with a great deal of anger; you find it among the Sri Lankan government supporters and the LTTE supporters -- except the latter two groups are talking to each other in an attempt to get accurate Wikipedia articles, rather than "selling" a concept.
I think some very reasonable proposals are being made for improving Iran-Iraq, although I don't even want to think about the infobox. If the matter has to go to arbitration, I'd cite the Wikipedia:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation example of how to do things. Do you think mentioning that, as a possible model, on the Iran-related pages would help? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:20, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Useful source, I hope

The Mitrokhin Archive is now online at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=va2.browse&sort=Collection&item=The%20Mitrokhin%20Archive.

There's quite a bit of material at the Wilson Project site, as well as a joint project on the Iran-Iraq War at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.item&news_id=90411.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:41, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,

An interesting point in the Wilson Project summary of Iran-Iraq war is:

An Iranian scholar present at the conference said a turning point in Iran's thinking came with the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in July 1988 by the American cruiser USS Vincennes. That incident apparently led Ayatollah Khomeini to conclude that Iran could not risk the possibility of U.S. open combat operations against Iran and he decided it was time to end the conflict.

Do you think anybody could have been cold-hearted enough on our side to pre-authorize this shoot-down in order to get that reaction? Or was it just luck?

As far as shepherding people into consensus: I'm afraid I don't have it in me. I only have enough energy to branch the page, I don't have knowledge or energy to sort out Tanker War or to get everybody to want to lay out the available facts in an un-stacked way.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:07, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

While the US government has, in my opinion, still failed to declassify far too much of Adm. Fogarty's investigation of the incident, a fair amount is available. If one is reasonably familiar with how the AEGIS air battle management system is supposed to work, as well as Navy anti-air doctrine, the confusion and mis-identification of the Airbus would be luck only if Monty Python, Marx Brothers, and Three Stooges comedies could be funny without scripts (or at least a direction) and practice. There were an amazing number of points of evaluation that were done incorrectly, and the right action at any one of them would have stopped the tragedy.
Rather telling is that CAPT Rogers was on the bridge, apparently wanting to see the helicopters and speedboats, not in the Combat Information Center where he would have the proper displays and staff to get awareness of the air situation. If this was deliberate, the scriptwriter and director could get Oscars for any war or science fiction movie. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:16, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Human rights in Iran

I would wait until the discussion complete and a consensus with how to structure the articles before you go ahead and create a new article. Regards -- Jeff3000 (talk) 16:14, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Pahlavi Dynasty was horrendous but barely touched in this article.

I am not altering the main article.

I will just create a root branch and article for Pahlavi.

It's a no-brainer.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 16:16, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Human rights in the Pahlavi Dynasty

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Human rights in the Pahlavi Dynasty, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. If you agree with the deletion of the article, and you are the only person who has made substantial edits to the page, please add {{db-author}} to the top of Human rights in the Pahlavi Dynasty. Redfarmer (talk) 16:20, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Human rights in the Pahlavi Dynasty

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Human rights in the Pahlavi Dynasty, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. If you agree with the deletion of the article, and you are the only person who has made substantial edits to the page, please add {{db-author}} to the top of Human rights in the Pahlavi Dynasty. Redfarmer (talk) 16:21, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

WP:Civility

Please read WP:Civility, and calm down. You're randomly inserting a disputed POV fork's link into articles that have nothing to do with US-Iran dealings or the non-existent imaginary "US-Iran alliance" which has been created on Wikipedia in order to advance a fringe POV, and white-wash USA's extensive support for Iraq during the war. Before re-inserting the link in question, please take look at the topics in question and see that they have absolutely nothing to do with Iran-US dealings. (ie Babylon Project which was a US-Iraqi project and part of US support for Iraq, but unrelated to Iran-US dealings) Just because the article US support for Iraq is linked in such articles, does not mean that automatically US-Iran article is also relevant in that particular article. In articles were both pages were irrelevant, I removed them both (ie Riegle Report‎), and in pages where Iran-US was also relevant (ie Iran History), I did not undo your edit --CreazySuit (talk) 17:54, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi CreazySuit,
I am perfectly calm.
You are pushing a POV in which the U.S. is allied with Iraq rather than promoting it's own interests at arms length from both Iraq and Iran. Creating a branch was the only way to deal with this insistent point of view on your part. You are also replacing "Iraq" with "Saddam" in links to the US-Iraq support article, which also furthers a particular psychological message.
I have not proposed any alliance between US and Iran. I have noted that US supplied assistance to Iran, covertly, in furtherance of it's own arms-length strategic objectives.
Because this interferes with a simpler picture of US-Iraq alliance that you are painting throughout a large number of articles, I feel that it is reasonable to put that other set of facts side-by-side with the facts which you have selected to present.
This has nothing to do with civility or calmness and everything to do with presenting all of the facts available in describing the behavior of various entities towards each other (namely entities US, Iraq under Saddam and Iran under Khomeini).
So please don't give me any finger-wagging lectures about civility because you hit the delete key very aggressively and are very aggressive in pushing your particular POV.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 22:57, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
You're now using automated roll-backs on other editors, this is both rude and against WP:Civility. You need to learn that Wikipedia is not a "one man show" where you can do as you wish, you need to get community consensus before making major changes and you shouldn't be creating POV forks in the middle of RM discussions. You had NO CONSENSUS to create that POV-fork US-Iran page, you had NO CONSENSUS to create a sperate Human Rights page while the RM discussions were ongoing, you have been warned about these unilateral POV-forkings by several users now. All I say is, learn the rules and note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions in a content dispute within a 24 hour period. So do not repeatedly revert edits, and use the talk page to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors.--CreazySuit (talk) 00:41, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

You're the one who's been reverting me, you started the deletes of my entries, not the other way around.

You have a history of getting flagged by other people with your heavy-handed deletes.

I haven't done anything in an automated fashion, I've been undoing your deletes by hand as they occur where we disagree head-to-head.

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 02:30, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

WP:3RR

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions on a single page within a 24 hour period. Additionally, users who perform a large number of reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring, even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing. Please do not repeatedly revert edits, but use the talk page to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. If necessary, pursue dispute resolution. --CreazySuit (talk) 22:26, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Proclamation issued by the person who is deleting other people's contributions right and left in order to present a single narrow POV.

If you want to request mediation and/or other-people review of my reverts of your deletes of other people's contributions, please do so.

Erxnmedia (talk) 22:29, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Blocked

I've blocked you for 31 hours for violating the three-revert rule at U.S. support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Although CreazySuit was edit warring as well, he only reverted three times in 24 hours. Regardless, it is important that both of you discuss more on the talk page as opposed to reverting. I see that some discussion has already taken place -- please stick to this method when you return from your block rather than reverting other people's edits as "vandalism." Khoikhoi 23:57, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Khoikoi,
User:CreazySuit has successfully enlisted your support to help block the publication in Wikipedia of a claim made by Richard Sale, a UPI journalist well-known enough to have a Wikipedia article on him. The claim, by Sale, is that U.S. supplied satellite intelligence to Iran, as part of a U.S. policy to lock Iran and Iraq in conflict. (The policy itself has 2 sources.)
I am pointing out in the U.S. support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war that U.S. policy included some partial support for Iran in that conflict. User:CreazySuit assumes that by merely displaying that fact, I am implying that
  1. There is a US-Iran alliance. I am not implying this at all and I did not claim it in the article
  2. That US support to Iran was equal to US support for Iraq. Nowhere do I make this claim. I am simply listing the documented events of support of US to Iran, nowhere do I assert that the level of support to Iran is in any way equal to the level of support for Iraq.
I agree that Sale's claim is hard to research. By it's nature it is the sort of thing that would tend to remain classified. How about if I just contact Sale as ask him to suggest ways of corroborating this claim? Is it "original research" to ask a source for additional verification of a published report that a Wikipedia editor has gone on an edit war to suppress and discredit?
Also, may I ask, since User:CreazySuit deleted my original lead sentence wording more than 7 times over the last few days in order to suppress the satellite intelligence claim, should he not also be blocked from editing? Or is the rule that the first one to hit the delete key wins?
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 01:52, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
Hi Erxnmedia. I didn't block you at all based on the content that you were adding. I actually didn't look too closely at who was adding what. The reason I blocked you was because of a Wikipedia policy that has been followed here for a very long time (3RR). It is merely a technical barrier to prevent users from edit warring. When Wikipedia first started off people would revert each other hundreds of times on pages. That is why we have the rule that no user can revert another user more than 3 times in 24 hours. You stepped over this invisible fence, while CreazySuit did not.
Aside from that, all of this information that you are telling me would be best off on the talk page. I haven't looked too much into this but if it is indeed mostly one journalist (Sale) who holds this claim, then the sentence should go somewhat like this, "according to journalist Richard Sale..." If other journalists, historians, and/or scholars hold this belief as well, please feel free to cite them as well. What is important is that we maintain a neutral point of view and try to reflect what most mainstream scholars believe, not the minority (see WP:NPOV#Undue weight).
Regards, Khoikhoi 05:03, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Khoikoi,

Fair enough, but User:CreazySuit did in fact initiate the delete war (rather than suggesting a wording change like "according to journalist Richard Sale"). What you are telling me is that the reason he also did not get blocked by you (or the policy) is that, instead of using the "revert" key, he did the following:

  1. Copy preferred version to buffer
  2. Edit
  3. Paste preferred version
  4. Add random new comment to make it look like an edit rather than a revert.

If you look at the character count on the following edits, you will see that this is what took place -- 3 effective reverts, all on the same day:

  1. (cur) (last) 19:23, March 29, 2008 CreazySuit (Talk | contribs) (5,505 bytes) (fringe view) (undo)
  2. (cur) (last) 12:41, March 29, 2008 CreazySuit (Talk | contribs) (5,505 bytes) (It's a fringe view, not suuported by mainstream sources) (undo)
  3. (cur) (last) 01:21, March 29, 2008 CreazySuit (Talk | contribs) (5,505 bytes) (should be mreged with Iran-Contra, there were no dealings or "support" outside the [Iran-Contra]] arms deals) (undo)

User:CreazySuit has been called on by other users for his aggressive deletes and has been blocked in the past:

Is the lesson to be learned, as User:CreazySuit clearly did, that if you want to revert, use effective revert procedure 1-4 above, and then invoke 3RR on the other guy?

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 11:15, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Lets talk

Erxnmedia, I feel we got off on the wrong foot. How about a fresh start and a friendly conversation instead of simply dismissing each other and calling each other POV-puhers? Lets keep it simple and short. For starters, can you please show me some sources that explicitly uses the term "support" in relation to USA's arms-for-hostage deals with Iran, ie "US supported Iran during the war" or something like that? I understand that you think the arms-for-hostage deals constituted "support", but this assertion would also constitute original research on Wikipedia. Just because entity X makes a deal with entity Y in return for something it needs, does not make entity X a supporter of entity Y. For example, Israel has made several such deals with Hizbullah in the past, does that mean that Israel "supported" Hizbullah? I don't think so. The mainstream view is that US and Iran were enemies throughout the war, not friends, and sometimes even enemies make deals when they need to. US did not love Iraq either, but supported Iraq throughout the war because of the logic that "the enemy of my enemy is my best friend" --CreazySuit (talk) 12:51, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi CreazySuit,
When I say "support" I don't mean emotional support or approval, I mean military support. In this case there are two claims of military support: TOW antitank missiles and satellite intelligence. Nobody disputes the TOWs. The satellite support has one reference, from a respected journalist, Richard Sales. There is nothing else easily searchable on the Web for Sales report. The only thing I can do on that is contact Sales. However, if I contact Sales and he provides other corroboration, would you then say that that in itself constitutes "original research"?
You are confusing military support with alliance or friendship. You do not seem to be hearing or thinking about the idea that the US could have decided that it was in it's strategic interest to keep Iran and Iraq locked in conflict, and that to do so it would have to offer help to both sides. There are two external references to support this as a strategic goal of US. Not to mention a common sense one: Iran held US hostages. What better payback than to keep Iran locked in a costly and bloody war?
Also as I have pointed out, there is a third reference to support the idea that US could offer limited support to both sides of a conflict: In Afghanistan in the mid-to-late 1990's, it was US policy to negotiate with and appease the Taliban in the hopes that the Taliban would hand over bin Laden. At the same time, limited military support was offered to Ahmed Shah Massoud, an enemy of the Taliban. The explicit policy for support to Massoud was that it be less than enough for Massoud to win. However, both Taliban and Massoud could claim US support during this period, for different reasons.
By pushing a simple picture of US-Iraq alliance with no shades of gray, you are unable to capture the actual nuances of US foreign policy and the actual way decisions appear to have been made.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 14:11, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
If my comments aren't unwelcome, I would also add that what we generally call the "Tanker War" was a real, although limited, war between the US and Iran, with various other parties such as Kuwait. Treating that conflict as essentially separate from support to Iraq, I believe, is both historically accurate, and also makes for a much easier analysis. There were an assortment of unwise actions, both by the US and Iran, that increased tensions. Documenting them in an appropriate article would help the "big picture". Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:24, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
Make yourself comfortable, this is the only place I'm allowed to communicate for the next 31 hours!
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 15:09, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Re: Edit war

Hmm, well if the edit warring continues you can always go to WP:RPP. Also I can protect it if you want. As for BoogaLouie and CreazySuit, they don't appear to be the same people. BTW how did you notice this page in the first place? Also, I never replied to your last comment above because I have been very busy lately - are there any unanswered questions? Khoikhoi 00:00, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Khoikoi,
I was checking to see if CreazySuit got blocked as I did for doing 3RR in one day, so I looked at his edits. I didn't see him edit on April 1. I did see him delete User:Xe Cahzytr Ryz's edits of Wahhabism on 31 March, then User:Xe Cahzytr Ryz put his edits back in, then I saw BoogaLouie delete the Salafism guy's edits in a very similar way on April 1. I saw no edits from BoogaLouie on March 31, no edits from CreazySuit on 1 April, both guys hit on User:Xe Cahzytr Ryz in the same way, so I thought they might be the same person. Also, after ostentatiously issuing a "Let's talk" message to me on 31 March, to which I replied, politely, CreazySuit didn't reply to that message on 1 April or thereafter.
If you didn't block CreazySuit, is it OK if I add my 1-4 procedure above for edit warring without getting blocked as a side-note in the Wikipedia help pages for 3RR?
Also today CreazySuit reverted User:Xe Cahzytr Ryz again on Wahhabism, so it's an official edit war. What kind of page protection would be appropriate to get these guys to the table?
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 12:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Again, forgive me if I am intruding in a private discussion, so I'm first confused about the reverts being described here, since some of the users are showing in red.
Khoikoi, is it even technically possible to protect the infobox alone? My feeling is that a large number of disputes in Iran-Iraq War are related to the necessary oversimplifications in an infobox. Personally, I wish it would just go away until there was more consensus, but, if you look at the history of the edits, you will find many over rather trivial things (for an infobox) of what flags and belligerents go where, rough summaries of outcomes, etc.
It is my firm belief that some of these disputes are sufficiently complex that they need to be worked out in the main article, without the length limitation of the infobox. My short-term contribution is mostly on creating articles on the support of many nations for Iraq, Iran, or both, to avoid the appearance that the United States was the only foreign country to have a significant role. Recently, I have been making some sourced technical corrections, in the main article, to military hardware, and sometimes just copyediting. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:08, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
The discussion here is shifted away from Iran-Iraq War to Wahhabism for which I see another edit war. User:Xe Cahzytr Ryz is a red link because he hasn't defined a user page. He is putting in a lot of fundamentalist commentary in the Wahhabism page -- which is not entirely out of character for Wahhabism! CreazySuit is deleting everything he puts in en masse, without rebutting or addressing point-by-point. They revert each other twice a day.
Note that in Iran-Iraq War you currently have a red link for Soviet support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
Thanks,
Lars
Thanks. I know about the red links in Iran-Iraq War; I put them in for articles that should move to mainspace. If you look on my userpage under Iran and Iraq, you'll see purple links to a couple of articles in mainspace, purple links to drafts in userspace, and red links for placeholders in userspace.
I'm open to suggestions on the best way to handle it. As you can see, I've actually extended the article about U.S. support to Iraq. My intention, however, is to give a more NPOV flavor to the main article, by identifying at least the main other supporters/suppliers, and possibly the minor ones when they provided critical materials. The U.S. did much, but to mention the U.S., without, for example, France, Russia, Italy, and Britain as a start, seems POV. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:02, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
What you are doing there is great, we're finally getting to the nuts and bolts of who brought in what on the battlefield.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 15:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Before I got into this, I had no idea of the BNL scandal that might or might not have been known to the Government of Italy. In any case, at least USD $5 billion financed Iraqi purchases, which might well have been in other countries through the Iraqi front companies. The way the Iraqis used Matrix Churchill both in the US and UK is complex; one of the reasons I haven't yet put out UK as well as US, as this all intertwines among Italy, the US, and the UK. The US and UK did not seem to send notable quantities of actual weapons, but rather parts, manufacturing technologies, and perhaps repair parts/services.
Again something I didn't realize, which is important as to who provided the mines into which Iranian martyrs charged, is that they were Italian designs, but, due to Italian embargoes, manufacturing moved from Italy to Singapore, with explosives coming from Swiss Oerlikon. Given the BNL relationship to Italian firms, it's possible, but I have no evidence, that the U.S. might have unknowingly guaranteed the credits that bought the mine, under a agricultural guarantee program.
Comments are very welcome on the userspace talk pages. Unfortunately for the UK article, CAAT is a comprehensive source, but they just don't cite things from the British press well enough to find them on the net; it's mostly newspaper and date, with no more information. It may well be these are 1980s papers that are not online.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:12, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
You can get a lot of BNL documentation from the Congressional Record, in particular THE BANCA NAZIONALE DEL LAVORO SCANDAL: HIGH-LEVEL POLITICS TRY TO HIDE THE EVIDENCE, Henry B. Gonzalez, (TX-20) (House of Representatives - September 14, 1992), see also BNL-Kissinger-Iraq-Atlanta.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 17:31, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
I have two of Gonzales' Congressional Record statements from FAS, including one in which he quotes a CIA report that the DCI claimed released codeword information. Will try the other link
Just tried to trace out a transaction, for maraging steel, and I think I'm going to draw a flowchart. See the complex transactions in the article on French support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war#Maraging steel. The transactions eventually involved organizations in Iraq, France, West Germany, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Dubai, the Jersey Islands, and the United States.
This project could easily become huge, and I certainly can't do it all. I suppose my basic question is when a number of other countries are shown to have supported Iraq in substantial and detailed ways, is it likely to help move the main Iran-Iraq War article to be more NPOV? I'm certainly not trying to whitewash the US -- some of the things I am discovering are appalling--but the idea that the US was essentially the third belligerent in that war, pulled Saddam's strings like a puppeteer, and that no other country would have done anything seems to be the position of some of the editors.
The Sri Lanka Reconciliation Project on Wikipedia is an example of people with admitted strong POV, but that still manage to work toward consensus. Iran-Iraq would do far better if they were to adopt a "reconciliation project" approach. The thing that amazes me is that some of the more Iran-POV editors aren't saying a thing about Iraq; it's all Great Satan US. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:42, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
My sense is that
  • All countries operate in an arms-length fashion with respect to other countries, regardless of apparent "alliances"
  • All countries with automobiles have an interest in the Middle East
  • Not for nothing is there a Paris Air Show, in Paris
  • All countries with a native armaments industry will sell arms wherever their self-interest permits
and so it makes perfect sense to try to identify and quantify all stakeholders (maybe a better term than "material participant"?) in the Iran-Iraq War.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 17:56, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Oh, it makes sense to me. The question is whether other participants in the article are open to seeing just such complex relationships, or are minds made up? On another talk page, I'm having a somewhat surreal conversation with someone that appears to believe that when movies are made -- 300 was cited -- that deprecate ancient Persians, the US is asking for trouble with Iran. By and large, the US has moved away from "The South will Rise Again", so I am not unduly perturbed when a Hollywood film doesn't do justice to the perceptions of one side in the Battle of Thermopylae. Gee, didn't the producers reeeeely watch the videos of the battle?
I'm just questioning how much effort to give to a topic that doesn't enormously interest me. If I started seeing some "it's all the US fault" people helping document, for example, Soviet or Singapore participation, I'd feel like I started a project that needs many participants. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:06, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
If you're bored, then just tidy up what you've got and put it out. How about that intelligence matrix, did you put that out?
This isn't work, so there are no deadlines and just 6 billion people looking over your shoulder.
I switched to Tachisme and ski areas after getting spanked for trying to resist the overwhelming attentions of CreazySuit.
I just got an interesting comment from BoogaLouie, that he and CreazySuit "both edit Iranian and Shia oriented articles and agree on some things" -- in particular for Wahhabism. They are editing a Sunni article and going head-to-head with a Sunni on wording; in Iran-Iraq they are going head-to-head with Americans on interpretation of US relationship to Iraq. On the third hand they both want to focus on human rights in Islamic Republic of Iraq, with less concern for rights under Pahlavi.
So for me it is an opportunity, because I am not fulfilled by my day job and I am concerned with the state of the world, to interact with people across the globe and debate and dispute and learn more about the fine points of what makes things happen. (Kind of like ham radio, when it doesn't veer towards CB radio.)
Also when there are disputes it makes for fun guessing games. Maybe not as fun or disconcerting as figuring out who is in a darkened room at a swinger's club, but still interesting. For example: Boogalouie and CreazySuit, one person or two? US or abroad? Pro-Pahlavi or Pro-Ahmadinejad? Sunni or Shiite? So we see: Two people, not in Iran but probably not in the US (maybe Canada), probably pro-Pahlavi, Shiite; not a lot of patience with Americans or Saudis. Fun to guess, somewhat fun to interact except when people get pushy; definitely educational in an internationalist sense.
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 18:31, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Not knowing where it would take me, I clicked on the edit war that took me to Wahhabism, and then realized I had ammunition for the meeting of the irresistible force by the immovable object. The Wiki article saying that the Wahhabis thought of themselves as Unitarians immediately brought to mind one of the more appalling radical groups at http://whump.com/dropbox/other/ujname.html.
Now that one of my secret identities out, I have to go finish building the question mark that we are going to burn on someone's lawn. The Klan has a much easier job of carpentry. (signed) Sibling Katana of Looking at All Sides of the Question
Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:56, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
I thought that use of Unitarian in the Wahhabism page was pretty funny, too, though I'm not sure what would happen if did a straight wikilink of Unitarian inside the Wahhabbi page, I would then be forced to create a disambiguation page and a new article, and...oh wait, that's why I'm here! I think that makes me a wiki fairy though I'm not sure I resemble the implication.
I happen to be an ex-Unitarian. (See also part 7 of the Woody Allen movie where the girl says "I happen to be a graduate of New York University" and certain implications follow.) I was in the LRY. John Updike's son was in my Sunday school class. They believed in God or something and dancing around the Maypole and smoking weed with the kids and alcoholism (for the kid's Dad who was an airline pilot) and divorce (same Dad) and jewelry-making, if I recall correctly. Or maybe everybody did; this is 1971 we're talking about.
How many secret identities is that?
Erxnmedia (talk) 19:14, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
I am actually a Sunni Kurd from Iran who is neither a fan of the Pahlavi regime nor the Islamic Republic. But hey, don't let reality get in the way of your perceptions! --CreazySuit (talk) 19:35, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi CreazySuit,
Don't worry about it, I have an active imagination: I even thought Howard was a CIA agent until he corrected me! But was I right about Canada? Also, do you want to get Iran to Mossadegh minus the Shah?
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 19:39, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
It's not about what I want, but rather how to get there. Mossadegh was a forward thinking, secular liberal who ran the only true democracy the region has ever seen. (Turkey has always been more of a military oligarchy than a democracy) Now how do we go from the theocratic Islamic Republic to a democratic secular republic envisioned by Mossadegh is the main question. Idealistically, I'd like the Islamic Republic to be overthrown via a revolution, but realistically the cost will outweigh the benefits, as most Iranians have learned from the last revolution. There will be chaos and there is also the danger of "Balkanization" of the country as desired by some foreign circles, so that the country could be "divided and conquered" so to speak. Therefore, the only realistic option is to gradually democratize the current system whose constitution could be eventually amended and reformed to conform with democratic values. The alternative is chaos and war. By the way, don't just assume that anyone with an Iranian point of view is automatically a Persian and a Shiite, amazingly none of the Iranians you've had disagreements with on Iran-Iraq war are Persian. Babakexorramdin is an ethnic Georgian, I am an ethnic Kurd, and Pejman47 an ethnic Azeri. --CreazySuit (talk) 20:28, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
I am insulted. If you're going to believe I work for the CIA, Erxn, at least call me an officer. :-) Now, as far as Unitarian Jihad, that's only one level deeper. Mind, I knew one Episcopal seminarian that was also neodruidic, and called herself (not at the seminary) an Episcopagan. No, I'm more of an eclectic neopagan with an overlay of Jungian and Gestalt psychology, with a dash of cultural anthropology from Hall, Harner, and Campbell.
To be serious, and I'd like your opinion as well, CreazySuit, I'm trying to decide if doing a series of articles on the many nations that supported Iraq, in one way or another, and the lesser number that supported Iran, is going to do anything with the "it's all the USA's fault" mantra. Especially with the benefit of hindsight, the US made huge mistakes, but that's not necessarily a general condemnation. The overthrow of Mossadegh now appears as an incredibly bad idea, but, thinking about US domestic politics and the misinterpretation of Kennan's foreign policy doctrine, I can understand how it happened.
At the moment, in tracking some Iraqi purchases of militarily critical materials, I am drawing flowcharts just to understand them myself -- and am realizing that it may well be worth putting graphics of these into the various articles. The best I can do is put the main description in the country where the transaction started, but I have learned quite a bit about Iraqi front companies, middlemen, questionable banks, etc. In many cases, it's less that one country supported Iraq, and more that Iraq arranged some complex transaction by using organizations in six to ten countries.
This is a sincere effort to pin down some very complex things. If there continue to be arguments that the US is the #3 belligerent in the Iran-Iraq War, however, I see little point to bringing in facts that indicate quite a few other countries -- some of whom I would not have suspected -- played important roles. If there is commentary that the US must be sensitive to Iranian values but not the reverse, researching specifics also seem futile.
For those who have not looked at the Sri Lanka Reconciliation Project, I recommend doing so, just to see how they all seem fairly committed to working out consensus, and verifying facts, while people still have strong POVs.
Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Howard,
I hope CreazySuit will respond. I think what you are doing is exactly when needs to be done. Let me address some questions to CreazySuit though:
  1. I thought Iranian Kurds were Shiites. What percentage of Iranian Kurds are Sunni vs Shiite? (There is room for expansion on this topic in Demographics of Iran#Iranian Kurds.)
  2. What was Mossadegh, Sunni or Shiite? (His denomination is not noted in Mohammed Mosaddeq, maybe you can add some info.)
  3. In terms of moving towards a Mossadegh-style government, what does it buy you to view the US purely as an ally of Iraq and supporter of the Shah, and what does it buy you not to think about the support of other countries to Saddam's Iraq?
Thanks,
Erxnmedia (talk) 22:27, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm ok. Erxnmedia: to respond to your original reply at 12:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC), I wanted to clarify that CreazySuit was not blocked becuase he did not violate WP:3RR. He only reverted 3 times in 24 hours, you reverted 4 times in 24 hours. Also, as much as I appreciate what you're doing in trying to resolve conflicts, it would probably be best if you didn't follow around other people's contributions. Usually this only tends to aggravate the situation rather than help it (I'm referring to Wahhabism). Thanks again Erxnmedia. Khoikhoi 04:36, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Erxnmedia, to answer your questions:
  1. 25% of Iranian Kurds are Shiites, the rest are Hanafi Sunnis.
  2. Mossadegh was probably a Shiite, but his denomination is not really an important detail, as he was a non-practicing Muslim.
  3. Nothing, I am interested in a neutral presentation of facts, I am not dismissing the support of other countries to Saddam's Iraq, but US was not a "supporter" of Iran during the war, it was primarily a supporter of Iraq.
  4. By the way, Wahabis make up a small percentage of Sunnis, there are four schools of thoughts in Sunni Islam (Madhhabs), and most Sunnis are Hanafi.

Thanks. :::--CreazySuit (talk) 16:55, 4 April 2008 (UTC)