Geo Swan

User Talk:Geo Swan/archive/2004
User Talk:Geo Swan/archive/2005
User Talk:Geo Swan/archive/2006-July-to-Oct
User Talk:Geo Swan/archive/2006-January-to-June

H. Candace Gorman

Thanks for the Wikipedia entry!

- Adrian from the Law Office of H. Candace Gorman 11:29 January 22, 2006, Chicago

Abrar Ahmed

• salam once again my "dear" are you pursuing me on arabic pedia or not just waste your time hope to hear from you.

Abrar Ahmed 07:56, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

• Once again thanks for pursuing me and my edits well i have edited it because you have no knowledge of Ahmad Sirhandi thats why you dont have any reason to say why i have edited it i know there are people like you working on this pedia just for destroying of information and which have no other reason to be here.

He was a brother like you an atheist who posted non relevent material to Ahmad Sirhandi's page which i have deleted and by the why you cannot put an eye on me because my posts are on the arabic and urdu version of wikipedia. On english i just correct some mistakes by users like you.

Thanks for pursuing

hope you will pursue me on arabic wikipedia also see you soon bye

• I think you are waisting my time and yours in replying me so dont be a philosopher you are not worthy of it but just a pesedu thats what you are in my opinion from your replies and dont message me again because i dont want to hear your bullshit ok

bye

Its nice to hear from you "my dear" once again. i think you are more angry on the phrase my dear rather then the edits. As for as that you are a female i dont know this and come to konw after your confession that you are a female trying to achieve salvation through these acts.

• The problem with you Americans are that you want to lead the world your way and if any one suggest you that this is not good you'll become personal

Thanks for urgent reply i know you are a bit busy

Abrar Ahmed 09:14, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Mullah Shahzada

Good work Geo. I'm looking into Shahzada's release date from GTMO. You seem to think he was released in 2005, where did you see that? I have seen DoD lists that mark his as released, but I see no dates. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.20.177.219 (talk • contribs) 12:14, 2006 December 13

The Washington Post has a list of 30 of the 38 captives who were determined to be "no longer enemy combatants".[1] And, if I recall correctly, Haji Shahzada's release was referred to during one of Abdullah Khan's proceedings. -- Geo Swan 18:52, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, you figure that was mentioned in Khan's CSRT? We are puzzled by the government's repeated claim that 12, 14 and maybe even 15 GTMO detainees may have "returned to the battlefield" and we suspect that this is bogus talking point.

Also, in your research, have you found any instances of detainees being found "non enemy combatants" only to have a second CSRT reverse this determination? I'm thinking of ISN 654 (Al Ghizzawi)but there may be others who have been subjected to a double CSRT. 10:54 December 15, 2006 (GMT)

I'll go back and check.

I read recently that it was twenty- former detainees who had returned to the battlefield.

Abdullah Mehsud and Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar are the two individual the war-hawks cite by name, as examples of tricky terrorists who lied their way out Guantanamo, and returned to the battlefield. I think they are the only two individuals for whom there is a grain of truth to this claim.

I believe they did return to the battlefield, but not due to an accidental release.

Abdullah Mehsud's name is not listed on the Department of Defense's full official list of all the Guantanamo detainees, released on May 15th, 2006. The DoD's full official list includes an individual named Abdul Ghaffar and another named Abdul Ghafour, but they weren't released to return to return to the battlefield and be KIA in 2003 or 2004. They were both still there in 2005, when their detention was considered by ARB hearings.

There is reason to believe that, prior to the implementation of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the CIA had its own detention facility in Guantanamo. It would explain why these two captives weren't on the DoD's list of captives if they were in CIA custody, not in military custody.

I think the documents and other evidence that have been released so far support another explanation for the release of these two men. If someone in a position of authority had seen two many spy movies, or read too many spy novels, they might have thought that these Taliban leaders could be turned into double agents. It explains why they were missing from the official list. It explains why they were released. I think it even explains why there are so many innocent men in Guantanamo. They were there to provide a cover for the moles the CIA wanted to release If they were releasing lots of simple, innocent villagers, it would enhance the credibility of the CIA's cover story for these two men that they had convinced the Americans that they too were simple, innocent villagers.

After your query I did some more google searching on Taliban and "mullah shahzada". Oliver North was one of hte yellow journalists who wrote about him. He claimed that shahzada was one of the children who were taught English in Camp Iguana, and that he was KIA just weeks after his release.

Have I come across other captives who had multiple CSRTs, where the second over-rode the determination of the first? I don't know. I have come across at least one captive who had multiple CSRT transcripts. The 5th Denbeaux study says they know of three captives whose second tribunal over-rode the first.

But the transcripts don't say what determination the Tribunals made.

I'll see if I made a note of the ID number(s) of those detainees.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 09:18, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Guantanemo

The Current Events Barnstar I'm awarding you this Current Events barnstar owing to the excellent work you have done in creating and maintaining the articles on the now named prisoners in Cuba! Irishpunktom\talk 23:49, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Geo Swan. I just wanted to second this kudos for your work on the Gitmo detainees, and make a suggestion if I could. It might be effective to consolidate the available information on individual detainees into pages with multiple entries. Something like, "Guantanamo detainees who are Egyptian nationals", for example, that will have the info on all those detainees. Just a suggestion. The main thing is getting the information out there, putting names with the numbers! Great work! -Fsotrain09 00:58, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Geo Swan, no where have I been able to find on your userpage describing your objectives/purpose for posting your articles on GITMO detainees by creating individual articles of each detainee. Is there a political means to an end behind your project? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.188.22.40 (talk) 04:13, 1 March 2007 (UTC).

Duplicates

I'd like to point out to you that there are quite a few duplicates in the Category:Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States. I've found five examples:

• Abdul Al Salam Al Hilal and Abdul Al-Salam Al Hilal
• Ali Husayn Abdullah Al Tays and Ali Husayn Abdutlah Al Tays
• Muhammad Abd Allah Mansur Al Futuri and Muhammad Abdallah Mansur Al Rimi
• Abdalaziz Kareem Salim Al Noofayaee and Abdelaziz Kareem Salim al-Noofayee
• Usama Hassan Ahmend Abu Kabir and Usama Hassan Ahmed Abu Kabir

There are probably more... Anyway, these should be merged; I've already tagged them with {{merge}}. Transliteration from Arabic can be tricky, but redirects to a single article are better than duplicates. GregorB 21:18, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

And you will have to forgive me... Your work on this category is tremendous. As I said, transliteration is tricky, not only for us, mere mortals, but obviously also for the US Army "experts". (Detainee ID is there for a reason.) Anyway: some cases are rather clear-cut, e.g. Abdutlah is wrong while Abdullah is correct; same with Ahmend/Ahmed.

All that aside, I now see that there is another issue... "We're looking for a person named XY. Your name is YX. Well, close enough, we're putting you in the slammer. When journalists ask, we'll say you're XY." Now, when one writes an article on a detainee in such a case, who is it about, XY or YX? I see your point there. GregorB 08:54, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Image descriptions

I left my reasoning on the page you requested. I don't know whether it is supported by the manual of style, but it does seem to be supported by the thousands of picutre desc's I have seen on the wiki. By the way, how do you consider someone who has been editing almost a year and a half a newbie?!? Zotel - the Stub Maker 13:07, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

So do you agree, disagree, hate my guts, or what? It has been a few days now... I just want to know whether you would like a compromise solution (like a link in the pic desc), move the text OR a link to trailer use desc, etc. Or if you're fine with the edits as is. Gracias. Zotel - the Stub Maker 13:23, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Notability

Could you please explain your placement of the {notability} tag on Fadil Husayn Salih Hintif and Mehrabanb Fazrollah more fully?

I am not familiar with this particular tag. Is it a new one?

I spent my first year on the wikipedia writing mainly on non-controversial topics. And I didn't find that involved me in any serious disputes. I spent my second year on the wikipedia writing mainly on topics related to the "war on terror". Controversial topics.

At first I found that I was triggering other contributors to challenge my contributions - on the grounds that I was showing a bias. Infrequently they were correct. I aim for an NPOV, but I don't think anyone succeeds 100% of the time. And I welcome when a civil correspondent helps me fix the occasional lapse. But most of the time it was due to a simple misunderstanding, or my correspondents were, innocently, mounting a challenge that illustrated their bias.

I responded with a civil inquiry every time someone said they thought something I had written showed bias, or when they put an {npov} tag on it. I found that, generally, most people who said something felt biased to them, or put an {npov} tag, could not be specific about which passages they thought showed bias. So, I felt it was safe for me to assume that they either found whatever explanation I offered was sufficient. Or they found they could not point to a specific passage.

I am afraid that a minor fraction of the challenges I received were from contributors who were not interested in improving the wikipedia, merely to censoring instances of material that they thought made the USA look bad. One contributor, an administrator no less, expressed the view, in an {afd}, that ANY article about a Guantanamo detainee was inherently anti-American. In other words, the topic itself was inherently biased.

Well, anyhow, either I have learned to avoid innocently leaving triggers that give readers the false impression my writing is biased, or I am being more careful. I rarely get challenges over bias. And I don't think I have had a serious one in at least six months.

What I am getting is challenges over notability. And what I am afraid is that I am left with the impression that some of those challenges are coming from people who just don't want to see material that they think reflects poorly on the USA covered on the wikipedia, and I have done such a good job in referencing my contributions from authoritative, verifiable sources, without straying from a neutral point of view, that they have to fall back to challenges over notability.

I strongly disagree with using notability as a criteria for deletion. Notability is far too subjective. It is inherently vulnerable to systematic bias. It is not an official wikipedia policy. It is merely a guideline that reflects some people's opinion. I regard WP:BIO as a tool that helps some people decide whether an article deserves closer scrutiny to see whether it violates WP:VER, WP:NPOV or WP:NOR. WP:VER, WP:NPOV and WP:NOR are official policies.

Americans are disproportionately represented on the wikipedia. And this exerts an unconscious systematic bias on the wikipedia, that we are all supposed to be keeping in mind, and doing our best to combat. Please conduct a thought experiment. Please imagine that there was another country that had rounded up some American citizens, and was holding them without laying any charges against them, claiming they could hold them indefinitely, claiming the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to them. Imagine there was strong circumstantial evidence that this other nation was humiliating, abusing, and, in some cases, torturing those American prisoners. Can you imagine that anyone would consider, for one second, challenging the notability of those prisoners?

If you played any role in the drafting of the notability tag I would encourage you to scale back its official sounding tone. Notability is not an official wikipedia policy. And, IMO, it is too subjective for it to become a useful policy. Your tag should not imply that it is official policy to remove articles based on notability when it is not an official policy.

For the record I think these two individuals are notable for a number of reasons:

• They are both victims of serious violations of the Geneva Conventions. Article five of the Third Geneva Convention obliges a captor to extend all the protections of the Geneva Conventions to all captives, unless a "competent tribunal" has determined they don't qualify for those protections. AR-190 lays out how the US military is supposed to conduct those competent tribunals. They have held most of those guys for almost five years, and they still haven't convened a single competent tribunal.
• How close a look did you take at the allegations against these two men? The Bush administration routinely described the Guantanamo detainees as "The worst of the worst". Up until the release of the transcripts this March the public didn't have any good ways to come to an informed opinion as to the credibility of this claim. Now that the documents have been been released we can come to an informed opinion. When examined, in detail, the allegations bear out the conclusions of the Denbeaux study. When examined in detail the allegations against the detainees do not substantiate the claims of Bush administration. Admiral Harry Harris, the current camp commandant, claims there are no innocent men held in Guantanamo. My personal conclusion is that far less than half the detainees who went through their Combatant Status Review Tribunals should have been stripped of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, following a proper "competent tribunal". The US military did convene competent tribunals following the first Gulf War. They considered the cases of something like 1200 captives. 70% were classified as innocent civilians. The other 30% were classified as POWs. None of them were stripped of the protections of the Geneva Convention.
• Did you see that one of the justifications for continuing to detain Fadil Husayn Salih Hintif was he was captured wearing a Casio digital watch? A number of newspaper articles have been published about the men who were being held, at least in part, because they were wearing a casio digital watch. It is a highly controversial justification. IMO it is controversial enough it should be reported in detail. The allegations state that the detainees were wearing a particular model of casio, the Casio F91W. But, clearly, at least four of those guys were wearing different models. At least two of them were wearing the much more expensive Casio Prayer Watch. At least another two were captured wearing models that incorporated a calculator.

My guess is that those who do not regard articles about the Guantanamo detainees as notable don't recognize that there are any controversies surrounding the prison's conditions, the failure of the Bush administration to comply with the Geneva Conventions, the nature of their interrogation, force-feeding, detention without a chance to learn or refute the evidence against them. IMO that shows their bias, not mine. Without regard to whether one subscribes to the Bush administration's interpretation, or one subscribes to another interpretation, that there are controversies is undeniable. I wouldn't work on these articles if there were no controversies.

But there are controversies. And the public deserves a chance to use the wikipedia to learn the details for themselves.

I see from your user page, you are a lawyer. How much time have you spent looking into the legal aspects of the cases of the Guantanamo detainees? So, are you a Clarence Darrow kind of lawyer, or a Johnny Cochrane kind of lawyer? That is a personal question, you don't have to answer that. But I urge you to read some of the transcripts for yourself. You might try starting with Fouad Al Rabia's

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 16:38, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I'll start with a quick personal note: it may be accurate to call me a lawyer based on technical distinctions some place between the terms lawyer and attorney, but I am not an attorney. I am awaiting bar examination results and am not licensed to practice in any jurisdiction. I do have a JD. I believe in full disclosure.

I think it's fair to characterize me as a deletionist, but I'm not an extreme deletionist. I believe that notability is the only way possible to stem some of the systemic problems with the encyclopedia such as the insane amount of Pokemon coverage. It hasn't been effective on that issue in particular, but it may be one day. It is useful in making sure that every person, Church, fraternity chapter, and garage band isn't covered.

Though you did not mention it in the message to me, my concern that prompted the cleanup template is that there is a lot of general Gitmo/detainee text that is included in the articles on the individuals that should be in other articles linked to the biographies. Once this information is removed, I'm not convinced that there is really much of anything to discuss in individual biographies. I don't think that these articles would be likely to satisfy WP:BIO. It seems to me that your objective would be best served by an article that covers all the detainees with redirects when the individual names are searched. I don't think anyone can argue that there should be coverage on the subject matter -- it's simply the form that I question in this case. The substance should be somewhere. You mentioned POV, and I think it is true that these articles in their present form could be considered POV forks. Erechtheus 17:04, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I am going to respond here, so our discussion is in one place. I have indented your text, and transplanted my note on your page here.

At the risk of repeating myself, WP:BIO is not an official policy. WP:VER, WP:NPOV and WP:NOR are the official policies from which WP:BIO draws whatever legitimacy it has. I believe these two articles, and all the rest of the articles related to Guantanamo, strictly conform with those three policies.

At the risk of repeating myself, my experience with notability is that this is far, far too subjective a criteria to be useful. The judgement that something is not notable is a secondary judgement, that depends on a person's judgement of the importance of the overall topic. I am not a regular patroller of {afd}. But when an article that I started, or that I was a big contributor to, gets nominated for deletion, I take a look at the other articles that have been nominated for deletion. I am afraid I find other contributors who experiencing the same kind of brutal introduction to the procedure I went through, with rude, bullying regulars, who use opaque language, which they won't explain or even discuss. And some of those regulars demonstrate appalling bigotry. I remember several {afd}s where a fan of astronomy was trying to defend some stubs he had created about some stars he felt merited mention in the wikipedia. Some of those arguing to delete these files not only felt entitled to make heavy use of mockery, but they seemed to be saying that they would only accept articles about the stars they had heard about That is the worst example. It seemed so narrow-minded and bigoted. Some of the regular patrollers felt entitled to argue in favor of the deletion of any article that they weren't personally interested in.

I am not aware of the Pokemon problem you mentioned, or any other topics whose coverage is growing out of control. Is there an FAQ on these systemic problems?

You call yourself a deletionist. Forgive me, but I don't see Pokemon coverage as one of the biggest weaknesses of the wikipedia. My experience, once I started writing on controversial topics, has been its lack of obvious fora to discuss important meta-issues, like whether the wikipedia should follow a "deletionist" direction, or otherwise. In practice, in my experience, this is battled out in the trenches, such as {afd}. I found that when articles I started, or was a big contributor to, were suddenly nominated for deletion, most of those who voted weren't judging the article on its merits, but on how it filtered through their chosen design philosophy -- and they weren't interested in discussing their philosophy, or having their misconceptions corrected.

I will await you filling me in on the nature of this pokemon problem. If the nature of the problem is merely that immature contributors are creating low, or essentially zero quality articles on pokemon characters, rules, storylines, I question whether making notability an official policy is the solution. If the problem is that the articles are of low quality, then that is the issue that should be addressed. Just as I dispute what some contributors have told me -- that the entire topic of Guantanamo is "inherently anti-American" and "inherently POV" I question whether the topic of pokemon is inherently low-quality. With enough work to conform to WP:VER, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV I am sure a body of articles on Pokemon could be created. Maybe it is easier to use "notability" as a yard-stick. But it is terribly subjective yard-stick. And if we were to give it official status it would further empower those narrow-minded regular patrollers who are prepared to delete any topic they don't already know about, or which conflicts with their prejudices and misconceptions.

So, let me thank you for replying, unlike those other guys.

When there is no discussion between those with different philosophies, or those discussions occur informally, on personal talk pages, rather than in more widely read fora, the competing weaknesses and strengths of the competing philosophers never get properly talked out.

You aren't the first person to suggest that the articles should be merged into one huge omnibus article. In my opinion this is unworkable:

1. I find myself very frustrated by those who consider themselves "mergists". One of the real strengths of a branching hypertext system, like the wikipedia, is its potential to empower readers. Paper documents are inherently linear -- the reader starts at the beginning, and reads to the end. The order in which ideas are encountered is largely in the hands of the author, not the reader. Excessive merging strips that empowerment from the reader, and hands it back to the author.
2. There is an underlying weakness in merging and redirecting. While merging has its place it seems to me that those who keep suggesting it to me are oblivious to its weakness.
   • When you take a small, focussed article, and merge it into a larger article to which you think it is related, you can be doing a grave disservice to your eventual reader.
     • People propose merges that are guaranteed to mystify readers. "How the hell did I end up here? This wikipedia sure sucks." Let me offer an example. I started an article on the famous aphorism, "There's a sucker born every minute". About six months later someone nominated the article for deletion. Many, many people kept repeating the proposal that it be merged and redirected to P.T. Barnum, because they knew he coined the phrase. The phrase is frequently attributed to Barnum, but he almost certainly didn't coin it, or use it. One of the main reasons to have an article explaining the background of this phrase is for those who are not native speakers of English, who won't know the context, and won't know the connection between Barnum and the phrase. Google told me that half the references to the phrase didn't mention Barnum at all. Our ESL reader clicks on a link to TASBEM, and ends up at the page of a 19th century circus guy. WTF? Maybe they think to search for the phrase. Well, that is a big hit to the wikipedia's useability. And there is no guarantee they will find anything. Someone may decided to cut the section that addresses the phrase. If the person who does the merge uses links like [[P.T. Barnum#There's a sucker born every minute]] they open up another weakness. Someone can innocently break that link by changing the spelling of the subhead.
3. Both mergists, and you deletionists, if I can allow myself to guess at the meaning of those terms, because I have never seen anyone attempt to spell them out, at heart, want to wrestle control from the reader, and force them to follow their paths through the universe of human knowledge. Well, why should the rest of us agree to be limited by the paths through human knowledge that make sense to you?
4. In the specific instance of the Guantanamo detainees, that merged omnibus article would be dozens or hundreds of pages long. A maintenance nightmare, and a nightmare to the reader who wants to learn the allegations against a specific detainee, like Fadil Hintif.
5. In this specific instance the omnibus article would be multiple times too large for older browswers to handle.
6. I direct your attention to Casio F91W. I haven't added Hintif to the table on that page yet. If we were to follow the proposal of merging and redirecting all the Guantanamo articles to one huge omnibus the reader who went through those links, one at a time would find himself or herself constantly trying to load the same huge, unreadable file, over and over again. Casio F91W is just one of the articles that links to, and, in turn, is linked to, by numerous individual Guantanamo articles. There is al Farouq training camp, Khalden training camp, and articles about a dozen other training camps Template:TrainingCamp. I started an article about the Jelazee Refugee Camp. I started charities accused of ties to terrorism. I was planning to start articles about every training camp, every refugee camp, every charity, that has lead to any of the Guantanamo detainees being held in extrajudicial custody, I've started a couple of dozen articles about significant Afghan leaders who were mentioned in the Guantanamo trainscripts. All of this work would be much more difficult for me, and much less useful for readers, if we decided to put your proposal into action.
7. Many of the Guantanamo detainees are held, in part, because their name, or "known alias", was found on some kind of list. After reading over half of the transcripts my personal feeling is that the intelligence analysts at Guantanamo have done an absolutely appallingly incompetent job. One of the sources I have used when writing about the Guantanamo detainees is cageprisoners.com. There are detainees whose continued justification is justified because their name was found on an internet website which has the avowed purpose of trying to put pressure on foreign governments to put pressure on the USA to shut down Guantanamo. I encouraged you to go and read Fouad Al Rabia's transcript. Al Rabia is an intelligent, westernized guy. I liked his response to the allegation that his name was found on the computers of captured al Qaeda members. He pointed out that other detainees, who were captured after he was, told him his capture had been covered in Saudi press. The allegation that his name was found on a computer belonging to a member of al Qaeda meant only that the al Qaeda member had done a google search on Guantanamo, and had downloaded some of the articles published in the mainstream press. He called into question whether the presence of his name on a computer belonging to a suspected al Qaeda member.
8. Maybe you are thinking that surely the intelligence analysts wouldn't be such boneheads as to see an article in the mainstream press, about someone detained in Guantanamo, confirmed that detainee's guilt -- even if a copy of that article was found on an al Qaeda suspect's hard drive. Well, look at how many guys they hold, in part, because they were captured wearing a casio watch.
9. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had "a list of 324 Arabic names" on his computer. About half a dozen of the allegations against Guantanamo detainees specifically mention this list of KSM's "324 Arabic names". Other detainees have more ambiguous allegations. Their name, or alias, was found on a computer of a "senior al Qaida lieutenant". I'd like to form a better judgement as to the credibility of these allegations.
10. Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari, a Kuwaiti who was one of those detained, in part, for being caught wearing a Casio prayer watch that American intelligence analysts incorrectly identified as a Casio F91W, had just two other allegations against him. One was that his name or one of his known aliases was found on a list. Well, the guy said he was on the national volleyball team. I don't find it unreasonable to imagine even a possibly fanatical suspected al Qaeda member could be a sports fan, and might have the name of his favorite sports hero on his computer. Personally I found it pretty shocking that the American intelligence analysts couldn't manage to spell his name consistently. If you are going to hold a guy because you claim his name matches that on a list, I think you have a responsibility to make sure you spell his name right.
11. Or consider Faruq Ali Ahmed. One of the allegations against him was that another unnamed detainee told his interrogators he had once heard an al Qaeda or Talibn member utter the name "Faruq" over the radio. As a mainstream newspaper article commented, Faruq is a very common name in the Arabic world. It didn't point out that Farouq is the name of one of al Qaeda's most important training camps.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 23:36, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

P.S. For the sake of completeness, let me return to the topic of the astronomy articles that bullies were trying to delete. I left a message on the talk page of the guy fighting to keep them that I would come and help him or her in future discussion for any of the 2,000 stars that are visible to the naked eye. Ancient people named each one. I told them I would also return to voice my support for every astronomical object that was the lead object of its class, or was cited as one of the examples of its class, or an anomalous outlier. Plus, I was willing to return to voice my support for every real astronomical object that played a role in a science fiction story. -- Geo Swan 23:36, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

The legitimacy of the notability guidelines comes from the consensus they represent. It's certainly possible to make arguments that will change that consensus over time. I'm not suggesting that there should be a gigantic article -- I'm suggesting that the present format isn't acceptable because it repeats large amounts of information that is not specific to the subject. That information should be in an article on that subject matter. That might mean it is a part of a larger article, or it might mean that it is a separate article that is summarized and linked to in an article. Take a look at the featured articles on larger subjects to see how they are treated, and try to mirror that format. You're right that this is not paper and that the difference in format demands different treatment of the material. If we're writing an article on a king of England, we don't have to describe England in the article -- we can link to a document that describes England. Those who need to read that information have it at hand. Those who do not need it don't have to click. The final point I will make is that it's extremely difficult to respond to what you wrote above due to the sheer length of your response. Try to limit the points made to the most necessary ones when you attempt to engage people in discussion. I believe that will improve your success rate. Erechtheus 20:52, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

My replies

Huh, first of all, I'm not quite sure this is the right place for my response, so please "assume good faith". I commented on the annotations You made to my edits to Khalid El-Masri. Furthermore, You're right when asking to comment on the changes I make — I'll try better in the future.

Greetings, Ingo Pruefer 00:21, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

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FYI

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mustafa Shalabi - CrazyRussian talk/email 05:21, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Mustafa Shalabi

looks great! Yes, I am an administrator once again. - CrazyRussian talk/email 14:49, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Executive Order 12392

I added the reason on the talk page; thanks for that bit of advice! SunStar Net 22:11, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Irfan Khan

Howdy! He was described as "a Unani", and the unani article said the word meant Greek. I wasn't sure whether it meant he was Greek or that he practiced the type of medicine described in the unani article, so I took it at face value. By all means change it back if you are more sure than I am. Cheers, Pegship 04:01, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Majid Khan (Guantanamo detainee)

Wasn't sure if you saw the update on Majid Khan or not, the gas station attendant from Baltimore. CNN article

As I summarized to the IRC channel I was on at the time...

• [18:29] <Sherurcij> Let's play a game
• [18:30] <Sherurcij> It's called, "On a scale of 1-10, how transparent is this?"
• [18:30] <Sherurcij> http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/04/terrorism.detainees.ap/index.html
• [18:30] <Sherurcij> "A suspected terrorist who spent years in a secret CIA prison should not be allowed to speak to a civilian attorney, the Bush administration argues, because he could reveal the agency's closely guarded interrogation techniques."
• [18:30] <Sherurcij> "closely guarded interrogation techniques"

Anyways, thought you might be interested in the update - I tagged a small sentence into his article about it. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 23:40, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Mystery

Your map was deleted by user:Dmcdevit 10 july 2006, because it was also at the commons. I gave the image a category, so it shows as being restored, but is is still only at commons. Electionworld Talk? 22:13, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

AWB fixes

AWB is doing this as an automatic fix. Can you give me an example so I can get AWB fixed. Also, I would really, really like to understand why you want wikilink to the title of the article in a ref in an article. Can you please explain that? Thanks --- Skapur 04:35, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I am still waiting for your response --- Skapur 13:41, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

There are about 400 articles about individual Guantanamo detainees.

There were about 100 articles prior to the release of the transcripts from detainees Combatant Status Review Tribunals and Administrative Review Board hearings. The Bush administration had fought to keep this information secret. But it exhausted all legal avenues to resist complying with Freedom of Information Act requests. Most of the transcripts were made public on March 3 2006.

The Bush administration’s compliance with Jed Rakoff’s court order wasn’t actually useful. Frankly, I don’t understand why Rumsfeld wasn’t charged with contempt of court. The court order directed the DoD to release the identities of the detainees by 6pm, March 3rd. The DoD delivered a CDROM with a bunch of large .pdf files on it, to the Associated Press on the evening of Friday March 3rd. They missed the deadline by about half an hour. If I had worked for the AP I would have had someone there to make an immediate copy of whatever the DoD had delivered. Because later on the evening of March 3rd the DoD came back, took back the original disk they had delivered, and replaced it with another one with a smaller selection of files. Apparently, a last minute internal debate had occurred. The 5,000 pages of transcripts weren’t really that useful, because they lacked a key - didn’t really comply with the court order.

The 5,000 pages of transcripts didn’t specify the names of the detainees, except by accident. Every page of the transcripts was stamped with a Guantanamo detainee ID number. Five to ten percent of the detainees names were spelled out in the body of their transcripts. Approximately 1,000 newspaper articles were published about the individual transcripts, focussing on those whose names were spelled out.

On April 20 2006 the DoD released some revised versions of some of the pdf files, together with an index, a file that listed the Guantanamo detainee ID number, name, nationality of every detainee whose classification as an “enemy combatant” was reconsidered by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

The release of this list made it possible to look up the transcript of individual detainees. But doing so required doing a visual scan of all 6,000 pages of transcripts. The .pdf were the kind the Bush administration likes to release - the kind where the text is not machine readable. That visual scan takes hours.

I decided to do the work of correlating each transcripts with the name of the detainee from that official list. This took a substantial amount of time.

Once I had done this I started reading through the transcripts, and expanding the existing articles about Guantanamo detainees, and creating new articles about detainees who hadn’t already had articles.

I don’t know how many I updated, before I decided to write some Python scripts on my computer to generate stubs, on my computer, to use as a guide when expanding the existing articles, or to expand, when creating a new article. And I started working doing that.

During the summer I decided to upload all the remaining stubs. At the risk of blowing my own horn, I decided that the stubs themselves, were an unique resource, in and of themselves, because they correlated the detainees name with the position within the 6000 pages of transcripts of that particular detainee’s transcripts. I don’t believe there is any other public place on the internet where an interested reader can look up the location of the transcripts. I figured it would take me until christmas to expand the stubs I created, and that it was better to put my stubs up, so interested readers could start looking up transcripts right away.

Half a dozen of those stubs have been nominated for deletion by people who argued the articles weren’t notable enough. Thank goodness I am almost done expanding them. I have just a couple of dozen left.

I thought expanding the stubs was just the first step in making these articles useful. To be really useful they should be cross-linked. See:

• Al Farouq training camp#References
• Casio F91W#References
• Uyghur detainees in Guantanamo#References

You might think just putting a wikilink to the article about the individual was sufficient, when the articles themselves were sourced. But, when I did so I kept having people tag those passages as being unsourced.

What is most convenient is to cut the reference to the place within the 6000 pages of transcripts where the individual's transcript was found, and paste it in the new article. When doing so, it is most convenient if the contributor can count on the wikilink to the article being in the reference. It should be there, in the other articles it gets pasted into.

So, is it a breach of policy to have a wikilink, in a reference, to the article itself. When I have discussed this with other users of the robot editors it was suggested that it might have been. I am not satisfied that it is a breach of policy.

I don't need to be reminded of WP:OWN. That I have done a lot of work on these articles doesn't entitle me to insist that those articles be written "my way". But I think I can advance a strong argument for not fixing wikilinks within <ref></ref> pairs.

You said that the "correction" of wikilinks was automatic. One of the first people to start to use robot editing that "corrected" wikilinks unlinked wikilinks to Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Administrative Review Board. Othere contributors who have swept over those articles with robot editing have left the wikilinks between <ref></ref> pairs alone. I guess that means leaving them alone is possible. I hope you will forgive some skepticism that doing so is automatic you couldn't comply with my request to quit doing so?

That article about the alumni of the al Farouq training camp is not complete. I have come across a bunch more detainees who American intelligence analysts assert attended al Farouq. There are over a dozen lesser camps. The second most popular camp, so far, is the Khalden training camp. It needs work too. Some of the transcripts contained discussion of this camp that asserted that it was not an al Qaeda camp, and that al Qaeda was pressuring the Taliban to have the camps that competed with theirs, like the Khalden camp, shut down.

Many of the detainees were held, in part, because they had some affiliation with an Islamica missionary group with a wikipedia article entitled Tablighi Jamaat. American intelligence analysts can't spell the name of this group consistently, but all of its spelling is something like Jama'at al Tabligh. If you look at the Talk:Tablighi Jamaat you can see that many of the other wikipedia contributors who contribute to this article have been quite resistant to that article having a section devoted to the claims of American intelligence analysts that the group is tied to terrorism. Every month or so someone deletes that section. The other contributors have argued that the American claims shouldn't be repeated because they are unsubstantiated and lack creibility, because it is well known that one of the group's principles is that it should be apolitical.

When I first made my contribution to that article I wasn't aware of how many detainees were detained because they were alleged to have been associated with this group.

I suggested, on Talk:Tablighi Jamaat that the main article have only a brief discussion on the claims of American intelligence analysts that the missionary group was tied to al Qaeda, but that it have a link to a new article that spelled out the allegations, and the rebuttals, in more detail. The dossier prepared for Murat Kurnaz's Administrative Review Board was over 150 pages long. Most of it was classified. But the unclassified portion was included in the documents the DoD released. It contained three letters from American professors of religion, who were experts on the Tablighi Jamaat, who spelled out, in detail, the group's history of steering clear of involvement in politics.

I have also come across, in the transcripts, some clues to why association with the Tablighi Jamaat made the checklist of items that triggered suspicion. There was a guy whose transcript I read through, and summarized, earlier this week. He said he had traveled to Pakistan, months prior to September 11, 2001, for medical treatment. He said he sought out treatment in Pakistan, rather than stay in Saudi Arabia, because it was so much cheaper in Pakistan. However, not long after the attacks on 9-11 he heard that Pakistani security officers were rounding up every Arab they could lay their hands on. FWIW, what he heard is completely correct, Pakistani security officials were rounding up every Arab they could lay their hands on. Mushareff was under pressure from the USA to show it was making serious efforts to help track down al Qaeda. So, "round up the usual suspects", made sense for him. And it made sense for Pakistani security officials, especially corrupt ones, because the Anericans were paying a bounty for every suspect handed over to them. The most serious allegation against this detainee was that he was captured in a guest house -- basically what we would call a bed and breakfast, where some al Qaeda suspects had also been found. He told the Americans -- I didn't know any of my fellow guests. I had only been there a couple of days. When I heard that all Arabs were being rounded up I contacted this charity that helped missionaries, travelers, and pilgrims, and asked them to recommend a safe place to stay. He didn't realize that admitting an association with Tablighi Jamaat would be regarded as a black mark against him by American intelligence analysts.

This Tablighi Jamaat missionary organization is unlike Christian missionary organizations. IIUC, it only seeks to work within the greater community of moslems. IIUC, unlike Christian missionary organizations, and unlike fundamentalist moslems, like Osama bin Laden, it doesn't seek to convert people who aren't already members of its religion.

This Tablighi Jamaat organization is, from what I have read, quite large. IIUC, something like 3 million people have traveled on a Tablighi Jamaat missionary trip. Or perhaps the place I read that said that something 3 million people per year travel on a Tablighi Jamaat missionary trip.

What do they do on these trips? They travel, in groups of about a dozen, and go from mosque, to mosque, and talk about Islam. They talk about how to be a good muslim. They talk about how to pray. I gather that part of the value of this is that pilgrims might learn something, that they can go home and add to the community at his home mosque. And, when they are traveling in a backward area, where literacy is low, their more educated practice of Islam can rub off on the locals. And finally, it reinforces muslims' feeling that they are part of a world-wide community.

I think the wikipedia needs a good, comprehensive, NPOV, article about the American claims that the group was tied to terrorism. This article needs to report only the facts, not contributors conclusions or opinions about the group. Fair quotation from those three letters from the American professors of relition I mentioned above would fit well. As would quotation from the few references within the many places where the transcripts connect a Guantanamo detainee to terrorism through an association with Tabligh.

I mentioned Murat Kurnaz. Another important detainee who was held because of an association with Tabligh Jamaat was one of those three guys the Bush administration claims committed suicide on June 10 2006 -- Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi.

Al-Utaybi did not choose to participate in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal or his Administrative Review Board. So, we don't have access to any of the allegations he would have faced, if he had attended. But, following the reports of his suicide, the Bush administration justified his detention because he was associated with an Islamic missionary group that had, in turn, been linked to terrorism. That is the only justification the Bush administration has offered for his detention.

My personal opinion is that participation in a group that has had 3 million participants, is not sufficient justification for holding someone in extrajudicial detention, without laying charges against them, or offereing them a fair chance to challenge the evidence against them. Even if every single member of al Qaeda had used participation on a Tablighi Jamaat pilgrimage as a cover to mask travel to plan or conduct a terrorist project that would leave more than 99.9% of the people who participated in Tablighi Jamaat as completely innocent of any ties to terrorism.

Let me tell you something you probably don't know about those reported suicides. Some weeks after the suicides the DoD sent the bodies back to their families. The families said that they were going to have a team of independent pathologists conduct new autopsies. Initial examination of the bodies when they arrived home, determined that their were organs missing. This upset the families, and triggered accusations that the men didn't really commit suicide, that the USA was covering up their murders.

A widely published French Forensic pathologist -- someone I gathered had a world-wide reputation as one of the leading guys in the field, had agreed to chair the blue-ribbon panel that was going to perform the third-party forensic examination of the bodies. He didn't please some members of the families, because he said that the removal of some organs, like the liver, spleen, etc, was routine. I gather that this was because they were hard to embalm, and taking pictures and samples that future pathologists could use was sufficient.

But he said something else that was not widely reported. He said he was concerned about other evidence the DoD had withheld. He said before his team could offer an informed opinion on the cause of death they needed to have the sheets that the DoD claimed the men used to hang themselves, and gag themselves, as they slowly suffocated. And, most importantly the DoD had dissected the men's throats, and had held this evidence, and not returned the men's throats to the families, when they returned their bodies. The French pathologist said the return of the men's throats was crucial for his team to offer their informed opinion.

I have a google news search alert on the name of that French pathologist. I haven't read anything further on whether he was able to retain the confidence of the families, or was able to get the DoD to return the men's throats.

Al-Utaybi was one of the most committed hunger strikers. According to the DoD he had been on a hunger strike from early August 2005 to late May 2006 -- over nine months. You may not know that in the fall of 2005 there were reports, which the DoD denied, that when the DoD started force-feeding the captives, they did so in a brutal, inhumane and unsanitary manner.

• There were reports that the medical staff used unnecessarily wide feeding tubes, which were unnecessrily painful.
• There were reports that ordinary guards, non-medical personnel, were inserting and removing feeding tubes, that they were putting their boots on the detainees chests, and simply yanking the tubes out by main strength, and then reusing these tubes, which were covered in blood and vomit, by inserting them in the nose of the next detainee, without even wiping them off.

You may not know that in early January the DoD started using a "restraint chair".

• The detainee to be fed were strapped into the chair, with their head, arms and legs strapped immobile,
• Detainees said that they were filled up to the point that their stomach's became painfully distended.
• Detainees reported that they suspected that malicious staff adulterated their food with laxatives and purgatives.
• The DoD acknowledges that they would leave the detainees strapped in the chair for an extended period of time after they were topped up. They justified this by saying they had to strap them in long enough that they wouldn't be able to easily induce vomiting before they absorbed the nutrients from the formula.
• The DoD has acknowledged that they left detainees strapped in the chairs for longer than the manufacturer of the chair recommended as safe.
• The detainees reported that they were left in the chairs so long that their routinely were forces to soil themselves through voiding their bladders and bowels.

The use of the restraint chair almost broke the hunger strike. Then number of hunger strikers dropped from more than eighty to about half a dozen. Al-Utaybi must have been one of the holdouts.

If you read both the transcripts of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals and the Administrative Review Board hearings you can see that, although the Boards had even less authority than the Tribunals they were recorded in a more professional manner, and the allegations against the detainees were more forthcoming and more professionally presented. For me, at least, this gives the appearance of injustice. Allegations that the detainees might easily have refuted, if they had been unclassified, when the unclassified allegations were presented to them during their Tribunals were declassified a year later, when refuting them before their Board could not cause them to be reclassified as civilians, as they deserved.

Among the “factors favoring continued detention”, routinely presented to Administrative Review Boards, was that the detainees had not been compliant with the camp’s rules. IMO, for detainees who were not terrorists, who were entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, either because they were really innocent civilians, or were entitled to POW status, punishing them for not complying with the camp rules is extremely unjust. If they were not terrorists, if they were entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, then their detention was, at best, of questionable legality, and, at worst, completely illegal. Why doesn’t that mean that their resistance to the camp rules was not a crime, but completely legitimate civil disobedience?

You probably heard that Al-Utaybi was one of the 120 or so detainees whose Administrative Review Board had recommended could safely be transferred, or released, because whatever threat he posed to US national security didn’t justify his continued detention. This decision would have been confirmed, by the Secretary of the Navy, over a year earlier. You probably heard that he died without learning that his transfer or release was imminent?

What you probably didn’t hear was that the lawyers who had been working with his family to file a writ of habeas corpus on his behalf had not been allowed to communicate with him. The DoD had been returning all the mail that his lawyers sent him, saying they did not have any detainee with that name.

Maybe that doesn’t sound sinister to you. But, reflect on this. When these three men were reported to have killed themselves I went to my list of detainee’s names, to see whether I had updated their article from stub status. I couldn’t find Al-Utaybi. The name the DoD used when they confirmed his death wasn’t one of the names on the two official lists of names.

How can that have happened? His death was reported only 27 days after the second official list of detainee names was released.

One possibility I am afraid analysts should not dismiss was that the camp authorities were routinely changing the spelling and transliteration of the detainee’s names in order to hide them from the lawyers who were trying to file their writs of habeas corpus. If you take a close look at the two official lists, released 25 days apart, on April 20 2006, and May 15 2006, you will see that approximately 20% of the names are spelled inconsistently.

• Some of the inconsistent spellings are obviously simple typos “ahmend” instead of “ahmed”.
• Some of the inconsistent spellings are due to homophones. The transliterations of “Mohammed”, “Mohammad”, “Muhammed” etc, all map to the same Arabic name. Less obviously, one of the detainees was from a European country, where “Hassan” was transliterated as “Ahcene”. It took me about six months to recognize these two as homophones.
• Some of the inconsistent spellings seem to be a crude attempt by the intelligence analysts with the responsibility of serving as the librarians for the different suspect’s case files to deal with guys who had the same name. There are a couple of dozen of these, so we get two guys named some variation of “Abdul Ghaffar” (or was it three guys?); we get three guys named some variation of “Acktiar Mohammed.
• Some of the inconsistent spellings are, less obviously, the same guy, only with extra phrases added, or subtacted, so one name was a proper subset of a longer name.
• Some of the inconsistent spellings are, even less obviously, the same guy, because they shared an intersection subset, but each name had unique portions.
• Then there were some names which were unrecognizeable as the specifying the same guy.
• One March 3rd, the DoD released three files that didn't contain transcripts. These three files contained the "factors" memos prepared for 121 of the detainee's Administrative Review Board hearings. Instead of having no names, but bearing an ID number, these memos had a transliteration of the detainees name, but the ID number was redacted. When I sat down to cross link these memos to the detainee's ID numbers, I found over a third of the names were spelled incosistently with the names on the official lists. I couldn't match four of the names with any of the names on the "full official list" at all.

Another possibility that I am afraid we cannot dismiss was that the reports that Al-Utaybi committed suicide, by hanging himself, are untrue. Trying to refuse food, as a matter of principle, when one finds oneself imprisoned, with no fair chance to learn why one is imprisoned, and with the prospect that one will be imprisoned, under brutal conditions, for the rest of one's life, could be regarded as a form of suicide. But, IMO, the Bush administration should provide the evidence needed to disprove that he died from a throat hemorrage, because the camp staff had been brutal in the way they inserted feeding tubes 1000 times. Do I believe that the senior members of the Bush administration would hush up something like this? I do not think the possibility should be dismissed. Do I believe that the senior camp staff could be counted on to be complicit in a coverup? Unfortunately the senior camp staff seems to be leavened with dishonorable bullies. I regard Geoffrey Miller as a dishonorable bully. You know he committed perjury when he testified before Congress? You know he pled the fifth amendment after his perjury was exposed? You know that Congress would not allow him to resign his commission until he testified before them? I regard Harry Harris, his most recent replacement as another dishonorable bully. He was the one who called the reported suicides "Acts of asymetrical warfare". And, he later asserted "There are no innocent men in Guantanamo" -- something I regard as patently untrue to any fair-minded people who read a random selection of the detainees transcripts.

Of course none of the personal conclusions I shared with you belong in any of my contributions to wikipedia articles. I think I do a good job of keeping conclusions like those I shared out of my contributions to the articles.

But this is why I want the wikipedia's coverage of these issues to be comprehensive.

If the only justification that the Bush administration can offer for confining Al-Utaybi under conditions so brutal he would rather die than endure them, is that he was associated with the Tablighi Jamaat, then the wikipedia will serve its readers best if its coverage of justifying suspicions that individuals were associated with terrorism because they were associated with Tablighi.

The same holds true for justifying the continued detention of a suspect because he wore a Casio watch. Were there any hints that the intelligence analysts could justify basing suspicion on the ownership of any extremely common watch? One of the transcripts contains the claim that graduates of one of the al Qaeda training camps were given one of those Casio F91W watches when they graduated from a course were they were taught how to make timebombs. And Ahmed Ressam, the "millenium bomber" had bought two new Casio F91W shortly before he started his trip to plant timebombs at LAX. Maybe bomb experts detected the remains of Casio F91W in bombs that had exploded? But, surely, it would be more effective to put possession of a soldering iron and a multi-meter on the suspicion checklist instead of possession of the digital watch. I am sure that whereever one was, anywhere in the world, that it would be easier to go to a dollar store, and buy a cheap digital watch, then it would be to hunt down a place to find a soldering iron and a multi-meter. Your bombmaker could use any cheap digital watch that has a daily alarm, or a countdown timer, or both, to form the timer portion of a timebomb. But they would need a soldering iron to connect it to an amplifying circuit that triggered the detonation. And, I think they would want to test the circuit with a multi-meter. So, it would be more effective to inspect baggage for soldering irons and multi-meters, rather than for very common digital watches.

Another pair of justifications for continuing to detain the captives the USA took in its war on terror has been that they were alleged to have stayed in guesthouses, or safehouses, in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Hundreds of the captive's detention is justified, in part, because they stayed in a safehouse, or guesthouse. Some of the intelligence analysts who wrote the justifications for the captive's detention conflated the terms "safe house" and "guest house", as if they were the same thing. IMO we are less safe if intelligence analysts treat guesthouses, which might be completely innocuous, with real safehouses, which I would regard as legitimate triggers for suspicion. From my reading I gather that the term guest house" could be applied to something as innocuous as what we call a "bed and breakfast" here.

Every time I read an allegation against a Guantanamo captive that alleged that they stayed in a "safe house" in Afghanistan, prior to 9-11, my skepticism alarm bells went off. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, their dorms didn't have to hide from the authorities. They were the authorities. I think it is highly deceptive to describe an official Taliban dorm as a "safe house". It is well-known that the ISI, the Pakistani security service, was a big supporter of the Taliban. Some say that the Taliban would never have taken power if they hadn't been sponsored by the ISI. If this was true, then I question whether it was useful to describe transit houses for Taliban recruits, in Pakistan, pre-9-11 as "safe houses".

There is a small "university" in Faisalabad, Salafi University, that seems to have fallen under suspicion. I put "university" in quotes because this organization seems to have very lax academic standards. The Pakistani city of Faisalabad is named after the Saudi Faisal dynasty. And Salafi is a kind of fundamentalist Islam. From the transcripts some of the students at this organization arrived with lots of piety, but were almost illiterate -- not what we would find at most western seminaries I think. And, if I read what the detainees reported in the transcripts correctly, Saudi sponsors paid for the rent of all the dorms. It sounds like the dorms contained not just pious students, but both pious guys who wanted to be students next term, or were still too illiterate for the current low academic standards, or mere hangers-on who were willing to give the occasional surface appearance of piety, or reform.

As I mentioned above the Pakistanis are under pressure to round up the usual suspects, to give the appearance that they are cooperating in the war on terror. The dorms at Salafi University have been raided, maybe multiple times. It is unclear from the transcripts. But, on at least one occasion they raided the dorm for foreign students, and held everyone they found there. One of the captives taken there had the allegation against him that he was living in a safe house with muslims from Russia, and a list of about half a dozen other countries. He challenged the description that he lived in an international safe house. He lived in the foreign students dormitory. Presumably, if counter-intelligence authorities thought that the institution's administration, or key members of it, were, tied to terrorism, they should have either arrested the leaders, arrested the leaders and shut the institution down, or covertly tailed and wiretapped the whole shooting match (it only had 200 students), to see if that lead them to anyone more important. But simply occasionally rounding up all the students who weren't Pakistanis seems fishy to me.

One of those raids was on September 11 2002. One year following the attacks of 9-11. That raid was just one of a concerted crackdown, held that day.

One of the alarms filtering from the US counter-terrorism establishment was that we should raise our anxiety level, and be more suspicious, on the anniversaries of key events, because terrorists might schedule attacks on dates with symbolic significance. It seems kind of adolescent to me. And unprofessional. So, why would US counter-terrorism officials cooperate in secret raids on a symbolic anniversary, like September 11? It is yet another clue to me that the US counter-terrorism efforts are marred by emotionalism and unprofessionalism.

I have mentioned a bunch of Guantanamo related topics where it would be useful to paste in the references from the articles about the detainees, where it would be useful if contributors didn't have to check to see whether a robot had removed the wikilinks to the article that discussed and summarized the contents of the transcript being linked to.

• Detainees alleged to have owned a Casio F91W, or some other Casio watch.
• Detainees alleged to be ties to Tablighi Jamaat.
• Detainees alleged to have trained at the al Farouq training camp, or the Khalden training camp. Well approximately two dozen training camps are mentioned in the transcripts. I'd like to cover them all.
• Detainees who have been reported to have attempted suicide. The Bush administration has been highly deceitful in its reporting of suicide attempts. The DoD tried to justify denying Juma al Dossari the right to meet with his lawyer because Al Dossary made a suicide attempt when he asked his lawyer to leave his cell so he could go to the bathroom. They claimed that visits from his lawyer triggered suicide attempts. They have acknowledged that he has made over a dozen suicide attempts. At that time they were only acknowledging thirty something suicide attempts, in total. And it became known that there was a mass suicide attempt that was large enough to fill the camp's 48 bed infirmary, so that the overflow was sent to base's Naval hospital.

Some other topics that, IMO, should have individual references to the individual transcripts include:

• Detainees alleged to have been affiliated with Hezb-I-Islami Gulbuddin. The allegations say that this group had long-standing ties with Osama bin Laden. They don't say that it was part of the Anti-Taliban resistance, when the Taliban was in power. They don't say that it was part of the all-party anti-Soviet resistance that the CIA backed from 1979 to the early 1990s.
  • Nazrat Khan's detention was justified, in part, because was alleged to have served in this group while it fought foreign invaders to his country. He acknowledged fighting foreign invaders -- during the Soviet invasion, prior to the debilitating stroke that confined him to a walker.
  • Another detainee, the only Christian held in Guantanamo, was a low-level Iranian drug dealer. He told his Tribunal he paid 5000 rupees for a card that said he was an refugee from Afghanistan. He wanted this card so he could cross the border on a drug-smuggling trip. He owed his dealer a lot of money. (He told his Tribunal half a million dollars -- evidence this guy was kind of a moron.) Afghan refugees in Iran had to carry some of ID, saying they were an Afghan refugees. Apparently the place, or the most common place, to get this card that served as a refugee card was the local office of the HIG office. But, when this guy was captured by the Northern Alliance, they said that his card, which he thought was a bogus refugee card, issued by HIG, was a membership card in HIG. I read a second transcript where a guy who was a real Afghan, who had been a refugee for a while in Iran, was held because he had an old ID card issued by the HIG, which the authorities said was an HIG membership card. I don't know whether the HIG had separate cards that said, "the HIG certifies that the bearer is an Afghan refugee", or "the HIG certifies that the bearer is a member of the HIG". It might not matter because, after decades of warfare, most Afghans can't read or write.
  • Some of the detainees are alleged to have been members of both HIG and the Taliban, during the period of time when the HIG was part of the anti-Taliban resistance. These conflicting claims should both be documented.
• An alarming number of the detainees report being officials of Hamid Karzai's government, who were denounced as terrorists by members of rival parties, or underground members of the Taliban. Unfortunately local American intelligence officials were alarmingly credulous.
• At least a dozen Guantanamo detainees were prisoners of the Taliban who passed almost directly from Taliban custody to American custody. The Taliban suspected them because they were foreigners in Afghanistan. And the USA suspected them because they were foreigners in Afghanistan. Some of these guys were accused of participating in terrorist activities when it should have been relatively easy to document that they were (or weren't) sitting safely in a Taliban prison.
• Some American intelligence officers conflate staying in a refugee camp with training at an al Qaeda military training camp.
• There are at least a dozen other charities that American intelligence analysts associate with terrorism that should be covered in more detail, so readers can come to an informed opinion as to the allegations' credibility, like the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, and al Wafa..
• I created an article about the Union Beverage Company, a sponsor of the Shoah Foundation that intelligence analysts accuse of sponsoring Islamic terrorism. No, I am not making this up.

AWB response - In summary

Okay, I have gone on at length. The short version is that all this cross-referencing is made a lot more difficult if users of automated editing robots aren't more careful, and futz around with the wikilinks between <ref></ref> pairs. So, I'd like to repeat my request that you do your best to refrain from allowing the editing robots to make those kind of "corrections". Thanks.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 22:20, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Please read WP:OWN If you object to an editor cleaning up an article and removing self-referencing wikilinks, you are most certainly violating it. Unfortunately, I disagree on the need for a self referencing wikilink. Please modify your program to remove self referencing wikilinks in an article. --- Skapur 22:58, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I am going to add two indents to your comment. On my talk page I like articles to follow the standard convention that replies should always be indented one more indentation thant the comment they are following up on. Of course, on your talk page you are free to follow non-standard conventions.

On your talk page you made the assertion:

"It is the article poster's responsibility to prove notability. I believe that being the unfortunate victim of circumstance does not make a person notable. If you object to an editor cleaning up an article and removing self-referencing wikilinks, you are most certainly violating."

How do you figure that? WP:BIO is quite clear. It is not a wikipedia policy. It is a guideline that some wikipedia contributors regard as useful in finding articles that violate the three real policies the guideline references: WP:VER, WP:NPOV, and WP:OR. I take those policies seriously. I think I do a good job of complying. I doubt whether anyone who posts a lot manages to comply 100% of the time. So I welcome when other civil wikipedia contributors give me a heads-up when they think I fall short of complying with those policies.

The first year I contributed to wikipedia most of my contributions were to non-controversial topics, like nautical history, which it looks like you are also interested in. I hardly ever got challenges on those topics. I didn't experience any heated challenges on those topics. My second year contributing to the wikipedia most of my work has been to controversial topics. And, at first, I got challenges, from contributors who thought I was writing from a biased POV. Some of those challenges were quite heated.

Quite a few of these challenges were from sincere contributors who were willing to engage in civil dialogue. In general I either reached a compromise with them, or I convinced them that their perception that my POV was biased was incorrect. I also found I got quite a few challenges from people who did my best to make a civil request for them to be specific about what they thought was biased were unwilling or unable give a serious reply. I feel free to discount vague challenges from people who can't or won't reply to a civil request to be more specific. My request to you to name a Guantanamo article that doesn't belong on the wikipedia is an example of that.

Anyhow, to return to notability, by engaging in dialogues with the people who were willing to be civil and serious about their concerns I started to figure out how to change how to write my contributions so they didn't trigger perceptions that they were POV, when they weren't NPOV. I can't remember the last time I got a challenge over my POV that was from someone willing to engage in a civil, serious dialog.

Unfortunately, the downside of this seems to be that I still get challenges to my contributions, but they are on notability, not POV. And it has lead me to the conclusion that notability is not a useful tool for evaluating whether articles, or contributions, on controversial topics belong on the wikipedia. It is too subjective a tool. It violates the policy of combatting hidden systematic bias.

Consider this part of your comment: "I believe that being the unfortunate victim of circumstance does not make a person notable."

This is not a "fact". This is a conclusion. Forgive me for being blunt, but this is a subjective value judgement based on your POV. Another POV is that the Guantanamo detainees were the victims of a conscious policy decision. If I thought that they were just unlucky there is no way I would devote anywhere near the amount of energy I have spent on this topic.

So, if two sincere people can have wildly differing interpretations as to whether an article on a controversial topic is "notable", then we have to fall back and evaluate whether the article complies with the three real policies -- WP:NPOV, WP:OR, WP:VER.

I worked hard to turn those raw .pdf files into resources that can meaningfully be consulted. I believe my Guantanamo contributions fully comply with WP:VER. Because of the quite large effort I put into correlating the names with the transcripts, the transcripts can be read and verified.

I shared some of my private conclusions with you above. But, I like to think I am disciplined enough to keep my own conclusions out of my article contributions. If a civil person finds a place where I fall short, I'll thank them. But I haven't had a civil serious challenge to my POV in a long time. So I think my contributions comply with WP:NPOV too.

Some of the private conclusions I shared with you, above, would violate WP:OR, if I put them in an article. But, just like with WP:NPOV, I think I have been disciplined enough to keep them out. I think I fully comply with WP:OR too.

And, FWIW, I still think I comply with WP:OWN.

I know many people are confused and think notability is a wikipedia policy. It isn't. I know there are some people who like to treat it like it is a real wikipedia policy, who know full well it is not a real wikipedia policy. If those people aren't challenged, they will succeed into steamrolling the rest of us into turning it into a real policy, by simple inertia. My personal feeling is that this would be damaging to the wikipedia.

In my experience one of the weaknesses of the wikipedia is that there is no obvious place for civil discussions for high level design decisions to be discussed. So there are battles, in the trenches. In my experience one of those trenches are the {afd} fora. Many of the regular patrollers of that fora don't seem to see anything wrong with casting a "vote" based solely on a reading the one or two sentence justification of the nominator. They don't seem willing to read all the comments, or to check back later. You get discussions where those who identify themselves with a label, like "mergists" or "deletionists" congratulate one another over their diligence in stamping out articles that don't comply with the vague criteria of their group. It can be like a lynch mob.

Note: I think I am giving you an honest, serious, civil reply. If you don't agree, I hope you will say so, explain what you think falls short of civility, and let me make a second try. FWIW, your stating of opinions, without accompanying them with explanations, gives an appearance of a slight civility deficit. Sorry.

I was serious about being willing to listen if you can name one or more Guantanamo articles that you think falls short of what belongs on the wikipedia.

And I was serious about being willing to consider your explanations, if you care to offer them, for the opinions you offered without explanation.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 00:50, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the references that you cite in the articles that you expanded mostly refer to US DOD documents, hardly an unbiased source on such a controversial topic! I am sorry but your long polemics above make it clear that you are yourself not a NPOV editor but are trying to make the articles look NPOV by following the letter of the NPOV policy without the spirit of the policy. In the wierd world of wikipedia, the more a persons knows and is qualified in a topic, the worse the person is as a wikipedia editor because rather than relying on reliable sources (which in this case DOD is not), the person inevitibly injects their own biases in. The very phrase "extrajudicial detention" that begins almost every article is filled with POV! As an individual I agree that detaining people in GITMO is just plain wrong from a Human rights POV and stupid as US policy but as a wikipedia editor I do notice that the articles are simply all POV (if not in letter, certainly in spirit). I do not see the US POV anywhere in the articles nor the reason that the US gives for detaining them stated anywhere in a non-POV manner. Yet I see the phrase "extrajudicial detention" repeated in every article and the bare nature of the prisoners circumstances repeated in every article. --- Skapur 13:58, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

1. To be an editor whose contribution to articles are NPOV does not mean that one has to be without a POV in one's personal life. It merely means that one has to keep that POV from clouding one's contribution.
2. I dispute that describing the captive's detention as "extrajudicial detention" shows bias. It is merely being accurate.
   • Tell me, have the captives been sentenced in a court of law? No.
   • Tell me, have the captives been charged in a court of law? No.
   • Tell me, have the captives had a fair chance to challenge whatever evidence there might be against them in a court of law? No.
   • That is what -extrajudicial- means. It means outside of the authorization of a court of law. Calling it extrajudicial detention is not being biased. It is merely being accurate.
3. You say that I have not put the US POV anywhere in the articles? What aspect of the US POV do you think is missing?
   • Almost all the articles say: "Initially the Bush administration asserted that they could withhold all the protections of the Geneva Conventions to captives from the war on terror."
     • Do you think this statement is inaccurate?
     • Do you think this statement uses inflammatory language?
     • Do you think this statement has left out some important justification of the Bush detainee policy?
   • Feel free to suggest a rewording or expansion.
   • Can you tell me how the rest of this paragraph, or the next paragraph, that describes the history and authority of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals shows bias? Leaves out an important justification of the Bush detainee policy?

Let me propose a thought experiment to you. Let's suppose we lived in a world, and were contributors to the wikipedia in a world, where slavery, real slavery, continued to be practiced, openly, and widely, in a modern industrialized, otherwise democratic society.

Let me suggest that the human bondage industry would be like the Tobacco industry, with an army of PR flacks to defend the reputation of their industry, and another army of lawyers, told to sue anyone who besmirched the good name of the human bondage industry.

Those PR flacks would invent a new, friendly sounding phrase to describe being a slave. They might call them something like, "beneficiaries of guaranteed lifetime employment". And their lawyers might try to sue you if you called them anything else. Some of the anti-slavery types would probably want to call the bosses and owners something inflammatory, like "flesh-rippers".

So, what would wikipedia contributors try to do in that situation? Use the fuzzy phrases, like "beneficiaries of life-time employment", that the PR flacks argued was the only fair description? Be afraid that a candid description of the human bondage industry would offend the wikipedia contributors and wikipedia readers of the country that still practiced slavery? Or would we try to figure out how to describe the human bondage industry in a manner that was both accurate, and avoided inflammatory language?

If you can suggest specific improvements, to those passage shared within these articles, by all means go ahead and suggest them. Similarly, if there is any specific passages that only occur in a single article, that you feel is inaccurate, uses inflammatory language, or shows a bias, please don't hesitate to draw it to my attention.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 16:25, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

response

The indentation was too much so I am starting a new heading. As I stated, you are following the letter of NPOV policy without the spirit of the NPOV policy. English is interesting that way. Stubborn and Resolute both describe the same thing but one is negative and one is positive. The same is true of Inflexible and Firm or Flexible and Flip-Flop. whereas Inflexible is bad, firm is good. Flexible is good, flip-flop is bad. Although the term "extrajudicial" may be accurate, it is also prejudicial, especially when used in the first sentence of an article. I have made some changes to Bessam Muhammed Saleh Al Dubaikey article. --- Skapur 06:42, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Which is NPOV? "Bush administration" or "US Government"

I believe that "Bush administration" is the accurate term.

I believe that the use of "US government", in instances like this, does not restore NPOV, but injects a hidden bias.

The US government has three branches. Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. President Bush is the head of the Executive branch.

The three branches have overlapping powers, duties and responsibilities. I am trying my best to be clear here, without leaving you with the impression I am talking down to you. The theory behind giving the three branches overlapping powers and responsibilities is to provide a system of "checks and balances".

Aspects of the Bush detainee policy have been over-ridden by both the Judicial branch and the Legislative branch.

Applying the phrase "US Government" to a policy implies that all three branches are in agreement.

Can we agree that this is not true in this case of the detainee policy? I believe it is a mistake to replace "Bush administration" with "US Government". It leaves a false impression. Now, if this is convincing to you, but you still have an objection to "Bush administration", can you suggest a compromise phrase that does not imply unanimity?

The US Supreme Court moves slowly. Other aspects of the detainee policy face challenge, and they too may be over-ridden.

I know "wikipedia is not a crystal ball". I shouldn't be implying that further aspects of the policy will be over-ridden. I am pretty sure I haven't done so. If I find I have, or someone convinces me I have made this mistake, I'll own up, and say so, and fix it. And if I realize or someone convinces me I made that error in a whole bunch of articles, I will step forward to start fix all the instances ASAP. I don't know how to use robot editing. If you end up convincing me that I made the same error in whole bunch of articles maybe you will tell me how to start using robot editing to fix all the instances.

But, if "wikipedia is not a crystal ball", then wouldn't it be just as much of a mistake to imply that the US Supreme Court will endorse the other aspects of the detainee policy that will be coming up for its consideration?

But I am not convinced that US Government is less POV than Bush administration. -- Geo Swan 07:14, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The soldier who captured the detainee and the one gaurding the detainee are part of the US Government, not the Bush administration. I have studied the US government structure in detail for the last thirty years and can say with quite some confidence that using the term "Bush administration" is very biased and completely inaccurate portrayal of the US governmental structure. I can not agree with you on this. All the branches of government are responsible and the legislative and judicial branches can not escape responsibility for allowing the detentions to continue. Both have shown an ability to move with lightning speed when it suits them to. Here they have not. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 was passed by the legistlative branch and by not allowing Habeas Corpus to the detainees, the judicial branch through its inaction has demonstrated its intention. --- Skapur 08:07, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

So, just so I am clear.

1. You are saying that "Bush administration" is completely inaccurate.
2. I would appreciate it, because I really want to understand your position, if you would spell out more clearly whether you have agreed or disagreed with my point I was trying to make that US Government is inaccurate.
   1. If you think "Bush administration" is biased, and I think "US government" is biased, then, can you agree that we need a third term everyone can agree to?
   2. Similarly, if you think "Bush administration" is biased, and I convinced you that "US government" is also biased, then we also need a third term everyone can agree to.

I know there are formal procedures for soliciting comments from other contributors. I think I know a couple of other contributors who are interested in articles on the war on terror. With your permission I will ask a couple of them to offer an opinion the "Bush administration" versus "US Government" question.

I don't understand your explanation as to why "Bush administration" is biased.

1. You say tht the soldier who captures, and the soldier who guards are part of the US government. OK. But, if you have been a student of the US Government maybe if you answer some questions you can clarify this for me?
   1. So, a Supreme Court Justice, he is part of the US Government, he is also part of the Judicial branch, agreed? Am I incorrect to think it would be a mistake to say he was part of the Legislative or Executive branches?
   2. Senators, and members of the House or Representatives -- part of the US Government, also part of the Legislative branch, but not part of the Executive or Judicial branch, Correct?
   3. US Cabinet members, head Departments, and Agencies, like Energy, Homeland Security, Labor, Defense. The employees of the four Departments I named, they are all part of the US Government, and all part of the Executive branch, but not the legislative or judicial, correct?
   4. So, the Department of Justice, answers to the Attorney General, correct? In addition to the judges, who else would you consider paart of the Judicial branch? Bailiffs? US Marshalls? The FBI? What about those who answer the Judge's phones, clean his or her office? Judicial branch?

You cited the quickness with which Congress approved the revised Military Commissions as proof that they can move quickly when they need to. I guess the quickness with which the Supreme Court ruled on Gore v. Bush shows they can act quickly, when necessary?

I think you and I may be agreed, that passing the Military Commission Law, in the form originally specifieed by the leaders of the Executive Branch, or in the compromise form that was passed, was a mistake. But wouldn't this be our personal opinion -- something we can discuss here on the Talk pages, but something we should be careful to keep out our contributions in article space?

To my way of thinking putting "US Government" because we think the other two branches are complicit is an opinion -- A point of view. Changing the article injects an interpretation. Now, if you can find verifiable, authoritative sources that drew this conclusion, by all means add this opinion, properly quoted and cited to the article.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 19:38, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

A quick note, it's awkward, but even "US Government's executive branch stated that..." is a little more NPOV. The trouble is that by naming a specific person, in this case George Bush, you get tied in with (whether fairly or unfairly), "bush-bashers". But I do understand what you're saying about the three branches - but traditionally, face it, the executive branch wields the international "go to war" decisions Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 19:54, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. You must be a mind-reader. I was going to seek out your opinion informally, if Skapur agreed.

So, candidate wording so far:

wording	pro	con
"Bush administration policy"	Distinguishes that the policy arises from just one branch.	Triggers defensive emotional response from those who see the identifying President Bush with his policies as "Bush-bashing". (IMO, those defensive emotional responses are misplaced, and should be responded to through reasoning. Not either unilateral reversions, or yielding. See below.)
"US Government policy	Doesn't trigger emotional response from poorly informed patriots, and George W. Bush fans.	Inaccurately implies that the policy is that of the entire US government. Inaccurately implies that the policy is not controversial. Inaccurately implies that the policy is of unquestioned legality.
"US Executive Branch policy"	May not trigger as much defensive response from poorly informed patriots, and George W. Bush fans. May appear more neutral.	Less clear. Requires more brain power to parse. Appearance of unnecessary obfuscation will encourage the replacement of the phrase with something more direct, by contributors who are unlikely to view the talk page to see if there was any controversy.

Some new suggestions

wording	pro	con
"detainee policy"	Less likely to trigger emotionally based defensive response from patriots and George W. Bush fans.	As with "US Executive Branch policy" the lack of specificity over who was responsible for this policy invites casual replacement with something more specific by contributors unlikely to consult the talk page for a discussion of the choice of alternatives.
For the first instance use something like: "...a detainee treatement policy whose key principles were first outlined by President Bush, on mumble mumble, 2001" Then simply use "detainee policy" for subsequent instances...	Undeniably factual? May require a small subsection of its own, that ends in something like {{main|policy regarding the treatment of captives taken during the United States "Global War On Terror"}},	Would require a lot more work and discipline to always place the extended instance consistently, in the right place. Also invites casual "correction" from contributors responding solely to the awkward phrasing.

FrI am going to try using "Bush Presidency" instead of "Bush administration". Geo Swan 10:16, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Lack of Checks and Balances

It is a question of who reports to whom. Here I am using the more mundane meaning of reporting that includes simple acts like who signs periodic time sheets, who does job evaluations, who can hire/fire someone etc. By the term report I do not mean the president's state of the union report or congressional or judicial hearings or impeachments. All government employess that report to members of congress individually or as a whole are members of of the legistlative branch.(e.g. congressional staff, GAO etc.) All government employees that report to the justices directly or indirectly are members of the judicial branch. Judges are given a staff that they hire ("officers of the court", clerks, bailifs etc.) that are members of the judicial branch. The US marshall service executes judicial orders and is therefore a part of the executive branch. The FBI is definitely executive branch. I do not know who hires and pays the cleaning staff in a judge's office but that is an interesting question.

Using the term "Bush administration" personalizes the issue too much. Bush can not act alone. He needs the agreement of the legislative branch (the quick passage of the Military Commisions act is my reference and proof) and judicial branch (despite numerous appeals, the supreme court by not acting has denied justice by delaying it which is my reference and proof). Although Bush appoints senior government officers, the Senate confirms them.

The bias issue is that by using the term "Bush administration", the rest of the US government is absolved and looks better than it should on this issue.

For the record: I am (and always have been) a member of the Democratic party in NY state and think holding prisoners (like at GITMO) without habeas corpus is wrong. I also think Bush is the worst president the United States has ever had.

You have to understand no matter how you feel about this issue, Wikipedia articles that have an overall POV carry much less impact than those that are written from a NPOV. Articles written with a NPOV spirit have much more impact.

--- Skapur 20:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Responding to strongly held, emotionally based, but indefensible arguments over POV and NPOV

I am going to expand my thoughts in a little bit of detail. But let me first clarify, for the record, I am not characterizing any of my recent correspondents as arguing from strongly held, emotionally based, but indefensible arguments. -- Geo Swan 21:24, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Stub tags

When you expand an article, please remove the stub tag from it. You can leave an expand tag if you want but a stub tag is definitely misplaced. --- Skapur 23:10, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I will remove stub tags from the articles, as I edit them.

FWIW, the {{GuantanamoBay-detainee-stub}} stub was not my creation.

Cheers! -- 207.112.59.87 00:44, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Please stop claiming article ownership

Geo Swan: You are again claiming ownership of an article. I suspect you do not even realize you are doing it. Read all the bullets in Wikipedia official policy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:OWN#Events that I am repeating here:

• Minor edits concerning layout, image use, and wording are disputed on a daily basis by one editor. The editor may state or imply that changes must be reviewed by him/her before they can be added to the article. This does not include egregious formatting errors.
• Article changes by different editors are reverted by the same editor for an extended period of time to protect a certain version, stable or not. This does not include vandalism.
• An editor appears on other editors' talk pages for the purpose of discouraging them from making additional contributions. The discussion can take many forms: it may be purely negative, consisting of threats and insults, often avoiding the topic of the revert altogether. At the other extreme, the owner may patronize other editors, claiming that their ideas are interesting but that they lack the deep understanding of the article necessary to edit it.

Your activities are consistent with actions described in all three bullets above.

• You have disputed my changes and other peoples changes concerning layout on a regular basis
• You have reverted the self-referencing wikilink removal
• You have left messages on my talk page to discourage me from making additional contributions

My reasoning is very simple: I strongly believe that there should be no self referencing wikilinks in articles and am cleaning them up as I see them. You even admit above that you will keep on doing it even though other editors disagree with you on that.

You also claim you are using a bot like tool to update articles. Are you a registered bot? --- Skapur 05:51, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for making a fuller attempt to explain yourself.

I'll respond more fully when I have had a chance to take another look at WP:OWN now that you have been clearer about your concern.

But first I am going to mention that I am wondering whether something I said left you with the wrong idea about my efforts. Or maybe there is something I need to know about bot policy.

What is a registered bot? I am not familiar with this policy. I have never run any automated tools on any of the wikipedia servers. Is there something I said that left with you with the impression I do run automated tools on the wikipedia servers? -- Geo Swan 06:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

On second reading, your python tool would not qualify as a bot. A bot is an automatic program running on your computer that updates articles on the wikipedia server. See WP:B --- Skapur 06:39, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Image:CCGS Henry Larsen 1.jpg

Thanks for uploading Image:CCGS Henry Larsen 1.jpg. I notice the 'image' page specifies that the image is being used under fair use, but its use in Wikipedia articles fails our first fair use criterion in that it illustrates a subject for which a freely licensed image could reasonably be found or created. If you believe this image is not replaceable, please:

1. Go to the image description page and edit it to add {{Replaceable fair use disputed}}, without deleting the original Replaceable fair use template.
2. On the image discussion page, write the reason why this image is not replaceable at all.

Alternatively, you can also choose to replace the fair use image by finding a freely licensed image of its subject or by taking a picture of it yourself.

If you have uploaded other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified how these images fully satisfy our fair use criteria. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on this link. Note that any fair use images which are replaceable by free-licensed alternatives will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. ----Robth^Talk 22:12, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up!

For the record I uploaded that image almost two years ago. There have been policy changes since them. IIRC, at that time there was a "noncommercial" tag, to put on images that had been published with a proviso that they could be re-used, in a noncommercial context. IIRC, it was decided to deprecate the images uploaded and tagged with this liscense, because there was no practical way for the wikipedia -- or any other person re-using those images, to verify, and police, whether third parties who got the images from us, really weren't reusing them in for-profit contexts, and were making sure that fourth parties who got the images from them were complying with the original terms.

When the policy change first kicked in, the instantiation of the liscense warned uploaders (1) that images uploaded after May 5 2005, that used that liscense, were subject to speedy deletion, (2) that images uploaded prior to May 5 2005 would be reviewed, and subject to deletion, at some point in the future.

Most of the images I had uploaded under the noncommercial liscenses were of Canadian Coast Guard vessels, or vessels in Canada's Maritime Command. I decided:

1. To leave the existing images, but not fight for their preservation, when it came time for the images uploaded prior to May 5 2005 to be deleted.
2. To search for replacement images that were available under different permissions, that would allow them to remain after all the noncommercial liscensed images were gone. I exhaustively used Google's image search feature, searching solely for images under the .mil and .gov domains. The initial images I found were generally of inferior value to the ones from the Canadian sites. And I didn't find that many. So I searched for each vessel, by name, and doubled the number of images. It was a case of "ten percent of the work takes ninety percent of the time, and the other ninety percent of the work takes the other ninety percent of the time." The search, by the name of the individual vessels took well over a dozen hours.

As you can see, from these notes on Talk:Canadian Coast Guard, most of the CCG images under questionable liscenses have been policed.

I appreciate that you left me the note, as per procedure. I am afraid many of the other wikipedia contributors who worked on the deletion of these images weren't so diligent.

I flagged some bad images myself, which were uploaded by a serious vandal who had been harrassing me. When I looked up the procedure, I saw that, in addition to putting a note on the uploader's talk page, an {{unverifiedimage}} tag was supposed to be put in the caption everywhere the image was used. Is there a convention that a similar tag by put in the captions of images about to be deprecated because their liscenses are no longer valid?

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 01:16, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for being understanding about it, and keep up the good work. --Robth^Talk 14:32, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Arabic names / Extrajudicial detainees

I left a note on User Talk:Yonmei on November 7th.

I wondered why Yonmei didn't reply. And Yonmei was probably wondering why I didn't reply.  :-) This happens sometimes -- busy wikipedia contributors who leave their note on another contributor's User page, not their Talk Page.

I moved their reply here, and I will reply here; Yonmei's November 9th reply, cut and pasted from User:Geo Swan, below:

Hi Geo - thanks for your note about the issue of Arabic names.

I do think that I probably made some errors piping the names of Guantanamo Bay detainees. And in some instances, we know that we are uncertain about the right name of the detainee - transliteration errors and incompetence and deliberate obfustication have been allowed to confuse the issue.

But I also think that it's important to recognize that the prisoners do have family names. (See Arabic family names on wikipedia.) The page on Arabic names is extremely useful, and I think should be linked to as a resource to identify the family names (where known) of the prisoners.

I will continue to pipe the names of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, where a family name is identifiable. I would like, in place of the current note about not piping the names, to have a link to the article on Arabic names, and a request that when editors pipe the names, they check the resource and make an effort to identify the prisoner's family name. Only when the family name is not known should the prisoner's name not be piped.

Does this make sense to you? I don't want to start making changes without your agreement.

I have begun on what I anticipate being a fairly long project - diffusing the extrajudicial prisoners by nationality and by other useful categories. I hope we can come to an agreement about this that we can put up on the appropriate pages as a guideline for other editors. Yonmei 12:43, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Greeting again Yonmei!

Arabic names sure are tricky. And I keep having reminders that make me kick myself for not documenting more thoroughly how versions of the Guantanamo detainee's names differed on the DoD's two official lists.

I still think it is a mistake to sort these names as if they had European style surnames. But maybe you have looked into this more thoroughly than I have, and I'll come around to thinking some of their names can, usefully, be sorted on something other than their first character.

I didn't find the explanation you cited helpful. Am I mistaken, that you are from Scotland, or have looked into Scottish history? My understanding of the Scottish highland clans is that many of the main Scottish clans, like MacDonald, have a number of surnames associated with them. My impression of what the Arabic names article calls "family names" -- or at least some of them -- bear a closer resemblance to the topmost name of a Scottish clan, than they do to a regular European style surname.

And then there is the transliteration issue -- which wouldn't be so much of a problem, if the different transliterations more closely resembled one another. But, if "ibn" and "bin" are two different transliterations for the same Arabic phrase -- or when what the Arabic names article calls a "family name" might be transliterated as "al Banna" or "el Banna", we are just as well off leaving the names sorted on their first character.

The advantages to this approach are:

• It is a lot less work. It significantly reduces the cognitive effort of maintaining these articles.
• It, arguably, makes it easier to correct transcription and typographical errors that creep in when someone, somewhere in the process of documenting these individuals, made a mistake through unfamiliarity with the Arabic naming conventions.
• We can learn from the embarrassing failure of the US intelligence analysts inability to keep track of the identity of the Guantanamo detainees because they were unable to establish a consistent standards for recording their names.
• I think there are some other advantages, which I will remember later, and fill in.  :-)

I know you meant to wait a reasonable period for my reply. And when you saw me apparently ignoring you, you then went and did a considerable amount changing the sort order on several hundred, or possibly more than a thousand categorizations. I wouldn't want you to think that work won't prove worthwhile. I could turn out to be wrong, or unconvincing, on this issue. I am going to ask a busy wikipedia contributor, who has studied Arabic, and related languages, if he has time to offer an opinion here.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 20:36, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

P.S. In the interests of completeness, I am going to record that sometime in the last nine months or so there was another wikipedia contributor who changed the sort order on half a dozen or Guantanamo detainees, who had been sorted on the "al" portion of what Arabic names calls the Family name, to the actual last portion of their name. And when I questioned him on it, IIRC, he dug in his heels, became increasingly uncivil, and promised to revert any attempt I made to restore the sort order to the "al" portion.

I had another guy who insisted that it was impossible that "Muhamad Naji Subhi Al Juhani" and "Khalid Ibn Muhammad Al-Juhani" might refer to a single individual, or that, if they referred to two individuals, that the general public might confuse those two men even though the Saudi embassy issued press releases where they referred to the terrorist "Muhammed Al Juhani".

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 20:36, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Geo - sorry for my mistake in initially responding on your User page.

I actually didn't go to work on all those categorisations - most of that was done by another wiki editor who saw the "Cat diffuse" tag I'd placed and wanted to be helpful. Done's done, and I do take responsibility for the editor in question responding to the cat diffuse tag (and I didn't ask them not to, because I thought I hadn't heard from you...)

If we can agree on what needs to be done, I would like to help out editing the categorisations as they should be.

Yonmei 23:42, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

No need to apologize.

I am encouraged to see other contributors taking a positive interest in the Guantanamo articles.

I think I remain cognizant that, although I started 90 percent of the articles on Guantanamo detainees, I don't own them. If other people have energy to work on these articles, I think I need to figure out how to lay out the conventions I followed during the work I have done so far. Not to try to insist that other people follow them -- but rather to lay them out, so other contributors people who are interested in working on these articles can think about them, and decide whether they agree with me, and think the articles should continue to follow those conventions, or whether they think those conventions should be modified, abandoned, or replaced.

Do you have any experience in creating wikiprojects?

About changing the sort order of Arabic names in the new categories I started in the last couple of weeks... I am going to continue to leave those entries in the default sort order. I asked that Arabic scholar I mentioned to weigh in, and give their opinion on how the rest of us cope with the sort order of these names. I won't change the sort order on the categorization of any names until we get some more input. But I am not going to worry if someone changes the sort order.

So, if you or I see anyone else doing work on the categorizations, shall we invite them to join a discussion? If so where? Any suggestions?

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 00:20, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Alaska highway map

Thank you for the compliment on my talk page. I made that map the hard way, first tracing it from The Milepost many years ago, then scanning the tracing and using a bitmap editor to clean it up. There is one error in it, Dawson Creek should be closer to the Alberta border. Also, the fonts needs to be consistent and the water should be coloured blue. Plus, a number of missing roads need to be added (such as the Canol Road. Stay tuned for a new improved version which I am slowly working on.

If you want to use it on the Haines Junction article, go ahead. The current one, I understand, was developed using Canada 2001 Census data. On the northern airports, Yes I live in the Yukon and I have flown into or out of most of them over the years (as a passenger!). The only ones I have not are the Beaver Creek Airport, the Carmacks Airport, the Teslin Airport and Whitehorse/Cousins Airport which is about five kilometres from my house. Also in and out of numerous airstrips as well as many lakes on float planes. Luigizanasi 06:52, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Proposal to Delete Duplicate Image

I am proposing that this image be deleted. It turns out that I uploaded the same image to the commons at roughly the same time to [[Image:Guantanamo Bay David Hicks Cell, Reading Room Inset.jpg|thumb]]. On the basis that the image I uploaded has a more descriptive filename, I have copied your well written metadata across to the image I have uploaded, changed links and have proposed that [[Image:Hickscell wideweb 470x311,0.jpg]] be deleted. John Dalton 23:10, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Double Redirects

I've left you a response here. - (Nuggetboy) (talk) (contribs) 15:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Iraq Study Group Report

As I've edited Wikipedia I've encountered your edits on Guantanamo Bay detainees several times. If you are not too busy at the moment, the article on the Iraq Study Group Report could really use editing from someone with knowledge of the American government or American policies. Regards, KazakhPol 03:55, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Ref conv

Sorry for the downtime. References converter is now back up and running. About a week ago the hard drive in my server crashed. Luckily it stayed together long enough to allow me to pull all the data off onto a new hard drive, but I still had to go through the process of installing Linux on the new hard drive, installing all the necessary programs, and loading in all of the old data from the server. I got all of my essential services up within two days (CVS, Apache, Wiki), but I kind of forgot about web scripts, which I finally got around to fixing today. Everything should be fully functional again. If you see any bugs, just send me a message. You are receiving this message because you are on the spamlist. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, simply remove your name. --Cyde Weys 19:14, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Tar sands again

It's probably been a while since you've been on the Tar sands page. Once again, a proposal to change the name to Oil Sands have been raised. Although you had been vocal about your opinion, you are the only one to come out in favor of retaining the old name. I agree that you have a good point in how the article was originally created. Unfortunately, that can't be a major basis, since many pages are renamed. I wanted to give you a chance to respond. I also propose a compromise. If you can provide verifiable data as to the historicity of the term tar sands, feel free to expand the article with more history, but I believe the most common current name should be used. See also WP:NCON. JeremyBicha 06:19, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Minors in GWOT

I think you misunderstood me. It's not the article itself that I perceive to be biased, it's the way of looking at GWOT prisoners all together. Grouping them as minors to me seems pov because if we list them that way, we might as well list them using other criteria too. KazakhPol 16:42, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, I guess I still misunderstand you. As I don't see what is wrong with listing them using other criteria, like whether their ownership of a Casio F91W digital watch plays a role in their continued detention, or whether they were reported to have attended the al Farouq training camp, or whether they were captured in an al qaida guest house in Faisalabad.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 17:41, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

RE: Daniel Coburn

As you requested, I have given an explanation for the removal of information at the Daniel Coburn article. Simões (^talk/_contribs) 19:51, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Allegations that Tablighi Jamaat has ties to terrorism

The article is now restored and I'm readying it for AfD. I won't post the discussion until later today, so I recommend you add to the article. ~ trialsanderrors 21:31, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

New article

Thought I'd toss you a nod towards Khalid al Zahrani in case you had any further information on the Gitmo detainee. I created it out of my interest in "failed 9/11 hijackers", but since Gitmo detainees are your specialty, I figure you may have information other than what I mostly gleaned from the Commission. By the way, sent you an eMail to your WP-registered address. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 17:54, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

He's listed at [[2]], and the 9/11 Commission referred to his interrogations without saying where he was being held. Since he participated in the hunger strike at Guantanamo, everything certainly seems to him still being held there - but yes, several lists clearly don't mention him. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 03:35, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Deletion review, Memset Ltd

You are one of three editors that asked to see the deleted history of the article for the deletion review, which is on the 28th of December. It is now available. GRBerry 03:59, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Copyright problems with Image:RV John P. Tully.gif

An image that you uploaded, Image:RV John P. Tully.gif, has been listed at Wikipedia:Copyright problems because it is a suspected copyright violation. Please look there if you know that the image is legally usable on Wikipedia (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), and then provide the necessary information there and on its page, if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you.

MECU≈talk 18:55, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Allegations of Tablighi Jamaat ties to terrorism

My mistake, I did not mean to remove the links. I have re-added them. KazakhPol 07:52, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

unexplained excisions

Hi Geo Swan, how are you doing?

I left a note on Abrar's talk page to prevent a reverting war. But I also believed that the part he deleted without explaining should in fact be deleted. That part has a distinct point of view, unlike other parts of the article. It's translation in parts is biased, as I have read the Works of Ahmad Sirhindi, I know a thing or two about his writing. If I may so, I'd like to revert your last action on the page. I'm asking this from you as a person who is kind of proficient in the subject, out of courtesy. Courtesy which wikipedia I believe needs badly. Even though it was trivial I believe we can work together rather well. So shall I go on with the revert?

Cheers. --Suleyman Habeeb 18:15, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Of course I can leave an explanation on the talk page, I was intending to do so. I am aware of your exchange with him for some time. I don't think he means ill but he's just a new user who didn't read policy and guidelines at all. take care!. --Suleyman Habeeb 09:20, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Abrar Ahmed

I have exchanged notes with another wikipedian User:Abrar47.

I have found the exchange disturbing. I think Abrar should be making greater efforts to be civil, conform to wikipedia policies and procedures, and cooperate with other wikipedians.

Abrar	Geo	Notes
2006 December 1	.	Abrar edits private working pages in my User space.
.	2006 December 1	I left what I thought was a courteous note on Abrar's talk page, asking for an explanation.
2006 December 2	.	Abrar sent this email to me: "Thanks for your response about my editing of yours own user page actually if you abuse some one what he will do can you imagine it he will definately slap you if he has power or authority and you are spreading hatred in your own page thats why i edited it thats not the place of spreading hatred my dear. this encyclopedia is for peace not for hatred." But I didn't see it right away, because it was caught by my spam filter.
.	2006 December 20	My reply to Abrar's note. Still civil I believe -- containing my best advice.
2006 December 26	.	Abrar violates wikipedia standards with comments that includes a personal reflection on his idea of my gender. Abrar violates wikipedia standards with comments that includes a personal reflection on his idea of my nationality.
.	2006 December 26	I believe my reply to Abrar remains civil, and continues to contain my best advice.
.	2006 December 26	I left a brief note on my talk page, pointing to my comments on User Talk:Abrar47, in case Abrar removed my comments.
2006 December 27	.	Abrar deletes my comments from his talk page.
2006 December 27	.	Abrar leaves me a brief note, that I feel shows a lack of effort to conform to wikipedia standards of civility.
.	2007 January 5	I leave Abrar a note about a big unexplained edit he made, reminding him he expressed some sentiments about peace and cooperation in his first note, and suggesting that to put those sentiments into practice he should explain an edit as large as the one he made on the talk page.
2007 January 9	.	Abrar removes material from my talk page. Abrar leaves another uncivil message, which seems to indicate he feels no obligation to other wikipedia contributors to offer a civil explanation for his actions.
.	2007 January 9	I revert his big unexplained edit.
.	2007 January 9	I explain my edit on the talk page.
.	2007 January 9	I replace the notes Abrar erased from my talk page with this table.

Daftar Al-Taliban

I have added a "{{prod}}" template to the article Daftar Al-Taliban, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, or, if you disagree with the notice, discuss the issues at its talk page. Removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, but the article may still be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached, or if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria. FirefoxMan 22:34, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I strongly disagee.

Did you look the articles listed following Daftar Al-Taliban#See also?

In my opinion any Afghan guest house that American intelligence analysts use to justify holding suspects for years, without charge, is notable. Even if, for the sake of argument, you and I were to agree that the judgement call the American intelligence analysts made when they used that justification to argue that a suspect should be imprisoned, without charge, then the location is notable.

So, I am removing your {prod}, which I believe is the proper procedure for challenging its placement.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 22:43, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Re:I am confused

I don't see a reference to what you are saying anywhere in the policy. Can you point it out to me? FirefoxMan 00:26, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Also, with a {{prod}} tag you have 5 days to prepare a response or to remove it with a rational in your edit summary. FirefoxMan 00:32, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Re: rm unexplained tag as per talk page...

No problem, I fully understand where you are coming from.

I placed the stubsensor line in my edit summary, and I normally believe that suffices for the edits I make for the project, as you should be able to tell from this, that as part of the stubsensor project, I have deleted or replaced a stub as I feel neccassery.

At the time I removed the stub from the article in questions, I must have felt that, in general, the article was no longer a stub, but could probably do with some expansion.

Despite this, feel free to disagree with my changes, and revert them, as I must admit, no large amounts of time are spent deciding if the changes are fully justified.

Maybe, In the future, I should leave more detailed explanations on talk pages, and will keep your veiw in mind. But for now, I think I will stick to my current system, as I believe it is probably the most efficient.

Regards, Gnj^{Talk|Contribs} 16:16, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Re: why did you delete...

Geo Swan wrote

Why did you delete the User:Ariele page?

I learned it was deleted when I was writing a reply to someone in which I was going to list the various sockpuppets who have harrassed me.

Ariele was the first sockpuppet vandal to stalk me. I made a big mistake to allow her to stalk me for so long. I did so because she seemed to be, well, mentally unbalanced, and did not seem to be aware that her actions were so contrary to the rules. I'd like to be able to return to her list of User contributions, to see where I went wrong, and cite her behavior in examples.

Now I don't know how to document that abuse. What do you suggest I do now? Was this deletion in conformance to some policy?

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 19:00, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi. As an indefinitely blocked account, User:Ariele has no need for a userpage; deleting such pages is done fairly regularly now, unless they contain useful information that isn't recorded elsewhere. The userpage contained only {{indefblockeduser}} – information that can be seen in the block log and on the talk page.

The correct place for discussion of a user, including any misconduct, past or present, is always that user's talk page – which is still there (User talk:Ariele), and serves as a record of the incidents you mention (unfortunately they're now buried in a load of messages from OrphanBot, which can probably be removed or at least archived). If you wish to add information related to the block and the circumstances in which it was made, feel free to do so.

Similarly, lack of a userpage doesn't stop you from accessing a user's contributions; either click on the red link and then find "User contributions" in the sidebar, or just go to Special:Contributions/Ariele. Hope this helps – Gurch 19:32, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Codename "Mark"

Trial transcripts are not reliable sources. It's just what the original disputant claims. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:20, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

You hve not provided any sources for the claims other than the testimony of a person who was trying to use the claims in order to get a not guilty verdict. This is not a reliable source. If you can provide other, neutral, sources, then please do so. You can always appeal at WP:DRV, but original research is a speedyable candidate, and I did nothing wrong in my deletion. User:Zoe|(talk) 20:43, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Please read WP:CSD. I followed proper procedures according to that policy. User:Zoe|(talk) 21:11, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

I am not going to undelete it. Either take it DRV or drop it. User:Zoe|(talk) 21:32, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Yuldeshev

My mistake, I was thinking this was the IMU page. KazakhPol 06:38, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Hazrat Ali

This was an error. The second edit after yours was a page blanking, and this was followed by a CSD "no context" tag by an editor who had missed the vandalism. When I came across the blank tagged page, I should have checked the history (I normally do), but for some reason I also failed to so. I would not have deleted the original text.

My apologies, but it's stupidity rather than bad faith. I'll restore the last unvandalised text (one edit after your last) here. jimfbleak 08:38, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, the "here" link above now points to the requested page. I know it's possible to merge histories, but I personally don't know how to do it, you need someone with more technical knowledge. Why not try the help desk? If an admin is deleting articles because she doesn't like them or for political reasons, that should be reported. As I am sure you are aware, the articles should be NPOV, but even if they are not, they should be tagged as such, and not speedied. jimfbleak 10:52, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

I saw your edit at User talk:198.53.156.42, and I've added a friendly caution. I haven't taken any other action, since that was the only edit of any kind by this person, but let me know of any repetition. jimfbleak 17:03, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

RfC?

"Trial transcripts are not reliable sources" is a rather POV way of looking at an issue, and that she says "he only invented Mark as an excuse so he could avoid prison" (pp) is even more POV - Wikipedia is not here to judge the validity of such claims, we are here to provide information about them. I haven't been able to read your original article on "Mark" to decide fairly whether or not you were clear that "Mark was the name of an alleged CIA agent.." or not, but assuming that such copyediting was made - I think the article is perfectly legitimate and would strongly support the idea of opening an RfC on the article. In fact, it might even be simpler to re-create the article and pre-emptively stick an AfD tag on it, and simply create its own AfD page stating that while you are the author, you know there is debate about the subject and welcome opinions. This way interested parties can actually read the article, which would help them make an objective decision on its validity. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 23:17, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Sr13

I apologize for putting the csd tag on the page. I was patrolling the Special:Shortpages page, and I remember this article. I added the tag because I didn't think the person was notable, or maybe I was just rushing. Sorry for the frustration and thanks for reminding me! Sr13 (T|C) ^{Editor review} 01:44, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Tajiks released from Guantanamo

Hi, You may be interested in the release of ten Tajiks from Guantanamo Bay.[3] Regards, KazakhPol 18:50, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Moroccans too[4]. KazakhPol 19:47, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Ijaz Ahmed

Would you mind if I reverse the move of Ijaz Ahmed to Ijaz Ahmed (cricket player born 1968). The one who was born in 1968 is far more significant than the other two. The ideal way to do this would be to allot the Ijaz Ahmed page to the 1968 cricketer, and have a link in to Ijaz Ahmed (disambiguation, which will contain links to all three. Tintin 05:58, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Tajik

Really should only be Tajik, but recently people seem to be using Tajikistani. I try to stick with Tajik, KazakhPol 06:30, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Move af Administrative Review Board

Whoops, sorry. I, um, forgot to discuss it first. I was trying to fulfill a request by another user (I can't recall his name right now). Sorry about that. What should I do at this point? I'm open to anything. —W. Flake (talk) 19:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

automated editing

You used the AWB automated editing tool recently.

Can I ask why you moved a bunch of categories? I've created some new categories, that consist, almost entirely, of articles about people with Arabic names. You can see I put a comment, explaining how it is unwise for naive Engligh speakers to shoehorn those names into the European style of "Lastname, Firstname". But I am not suggesting that previously existing categories be modified to the more sensible style. -- You moved all the rest of the categories after my comment. -- No offense, but I think that was a mistake. Is there some guideline you were following? If so I think I need you to tell me about it right away, so I can figure out what to do.

I notice that the edit summary you used doesn't say anything about the other edits you made. Do you think there is any value to restricting the edits you make to those you list in the edit summary?

Cheers1 — Geo Swan 23:39, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for contacting me, Geo Swan. Not sure how familiar you are with AWB, but it is a tool that allows a user to do a "search and replace" through a selected list of articles, and over the past few days I've been checking all instances of "more then" to change some of them to "more than". For each article, AWB suggests the changes it's going to make, and doesn't do them unless I click Save. So in that sense it's not "automated" - any mistakes are my fault!

While it's doing what I asked, it also suggests changes to articles in accordance with WP standards - it sorts the interwiki links into alphabetical order, changes "See Also" to "See also", collects together Category links to the end of the article, adds an Uncategorized tag if necessary, removes links on a page to itself, etc. That process is normally pretty uncontroversial, so I just cast an eye over it to make sure nothing is terribly awry. I obviously didn't spot the fact that AWB had moved the Categories without the associated comment - and I apologise unreservedly for that. I have repaired the damage, and have also reworded the comment slightly so that it's still clear what it means if someone inserts a new category at the start of the list, or rearranges them in some way.

BTW, AWB writes the edit summary and doesn't catalogue all the little tidying changes individually.

Thanks for your help. - Euchiasmus 06:54, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Guantanamo detainees articles

Just a courtesy note to let you know I will be stubbing all of these articles as I did with Yakub Abahanov that do not meet WP:BLP and that seem based upon WP:OR. Hear me clearly: This is nothing personal against you or the articles. Personally, I do find this sort of research interesting and valuable, but WP is not really the place for it. Frankly, I think you should consider buying a domain like www.guantanamodetainess.com or something like that where you can rightly showcase this sort of material. Who knows, maybe after the Press cites the website you can get an article of your own.  :-) CyberAnth 05:24, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Another idea

Another idea I thought of...you can instead make an article about the FOIA document released, 507 memorandum, assuming the release was subject to multiple non-trivial published reports. Then you can include a section about its contents, the detainees. And you don't have to re-iterate the following over and over:

Initially the Bush administration asserted that they could withhold all the protections of the Geneva Conventions to captives from the war on terror. This policy was challenged before the Judicial branch. Critics argued that the USA could not evade its obligation to conduct competent tribunals to determine whether captives are, or are not, entitled to the protections of prisoner of war status.
Subsequently the Department of Defense instituted the Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The Tribunals, however, were not authorized to determine whether the captives were lawful combatants -- rather they were merely empowered to make a recommendation as to whether the captive had previously been correctly determined to match the Bush administration's definition of an enemy combatant.
To comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, during the winter and spring of 2005, the Department of Defense released 507 memoranda. Those 507 memoranda each contained the allegations against a single detainee, prepared for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The detainee's name and ID numbers were redacted from all but one of the memoranda. However 169 of the memoranda had the detainee's ID hand-written on the top right hand of the first page corner. When the Department of Defense complied with a court order, and released official lists of the detainee's names and ID numbers it was possible to identify who those 169 were written about.

Then you just place #REDIRECT [[507 memorandum]] at the pages like Yakub Abahanov.

This would be a great article and easily in confines of WP policies. But these articles like just Yakub Abahanov just do not.

So how about this? I would just ignore the articles I talked about for a while, to give you time to work.

CyberAnth 05:57, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate the offer of time to work on your suggested compromise -- a courtesy some other wikipedians have not been prepared to consider. Will you let me finish my reply to user:bainer, and then make you a counter-offer? Thanks. -- Geo Swan 21:58, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi Geo Swan; I don't want to seem to be piling on here, but having looked briefly at Guantanamo detainees missing from the official list I see problems with original research by synthesis. I don't say it's wrong, or bad research. It looks very through and careful, to the extent that I can evaluate it. But my understanding of original research is that there must be sources for the thesis, not just for the raw data. I put a fact tag on that page, but don't anticipate doing more any time soon, unless BLP issues come into it. Even if material about living people has to be deleted until sources are provided, everything will still be in the history, and I suppose you have copies of your work on your own computer. I understand that this involves quite a few pages and a lot of work on your part, and I'm not eager to see it removed, but we will need to come to some conclusion about this. Tom Harrison ^Talk 21:15, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Geo, please notify me on my talk page when you have written this. Note, however, that no compromise can be acceptable that is not argued from WP content policies. Also, you should lodge a WP:RFC ASAP. Let me re-iterate that my concerns here have nothing to do with the legitimacy of your research, and I do applaud you for it and for your apparent humanitarian concern over this matter and respect the level of articulation you seem to exhibit. My concern is just that WP is not the place for it, especially as concerns WP:BLP. And again, you may find better exposure, and even press interest, by creating something like http://www.missingguantanamodetainees.org where you can showcase this material without constraint, and solicit the assistance and networking of varied humanitarian organizations worldwide in your cause. If you are well-qualified, or enlist others who are, there is grant-funding available for this sort of thing. Just as a personal from-me-to-you thing, I encourage you to think about it. CyberAnth 07:52, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: clarification please

I replied to your warning.

I'd appreciated clarification over your interpretation of "original research".

I looked at your User Page, and your history of contributions, because I found the tone of your message accusatory and domineering.

So I saw that you are an administrator.

Now, your warning — did you mean for me to interpret it as a specific warning that you are about ready to apply a block. or other sanction, against me?

If so, I think I am going to need you to spell out, in greater detail, what kinds of edits are going to trigger this sanction. Should I be concerned that your use of bold, and scornful terms, like "blatantly innappropriate", and "woefully lacking", signals your plan to apply a sanction, without any further warning, or discussion?

Your warning to me — this was the first communication between the two of us, wasn't it?

I gave myself 24 hours before I replied, in order to calm down. I am going to allow myself to offer just one piece of advice to you. May I suggest you consider continuing to feel obliged to try to be civil, and assume good faith, even though you have been entrusted with administrator privileges? — Geo Swan 21:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I specifically asked User:Garzo for his opinion — about conflating "Yakub" and "Yakup". I see he has already left a note. In fairness, you should see it as a comment on the "Yakub" == "Yakup" issue alone. I know I still have to address your other concern. Geo Swan 21:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

It was a general comment to whoever would wish to edit the page that unsourced controversial material in biographies of living persons is unacceptable, as is original research in any Wikipedia article. As someone who has been editing for almost exactly as long as I have, you are undoubtedly aware of those policies, but I felt the need to outline them to other readers of the page who seem intent on reverting without considering what they are doing. There are further comments on the article's talk page.

Please also note that I did not say that I would block anyone, and that I have not used administrative tools in a content dispute. --bainer (talk) 13:10, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Bluntness, delivered as requested

Actually this won't be all that blunt. The Zoe threads reminded me of the brush fire that followed my own block warning on JzG: I had anticipated at worst some dry explanations of "why we don't do that" and was willing to strikethrough my post if the explanations were persuasive. When the thread heated up it became nearly impossible to parse. For example, one editor called my action punitive. Well that's an AGF foul in itself: no one can read my mind. In good faith I spelled out how my intentions weren't punitive, yet the other editor repeated that accusation in later posts without addressing the specifics of my reply. Punitive became a buzzword picked up by others in spite of my repeated protests.

I didn't make an emotional engagement in the debate: I looked for reasoned answers that might persuade me to change my approach. Yet I was genuinely puzzled by how to interpret posts that repeated that particular word. There was one identifiable mistake - how much else builds on false premises? Several similar misapprehensions were flying around at the same time. I didn't want to overlook anything valuable the comments had to offer, yet the thread read to me as if one or two posters were attempting to shape the consensus view into a caricature of me as a villain. If their accusations were on target I certainly would have been ashamed, but the points that were easiest to identify missed the mark.

The Zoe threads shared some of those traits when I gave them a close reading. That's a dynamic - not something I'll shake my finger at you in particular. I think admins in particular ought to look out for that dynamic and defuse it when it starts. Same goes for any editor or any dispute, but the repercussions are greater when sysops fall into it. Regards, Durova^Charge! 18:39, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Here's the dynamic in action. I'm the one getting squeezed this time. WP:AN#Improper_blocking_of_user_as_punishment Durova^Charge! 02:49, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Morocco Gitmo story

Story you may find interesting on former Guantanamo Bay detainne[5]. Please create a page on Mohamed Ben Moujane if you get a chance. Regards, KazakhPol 07:42, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up.  :-)

This fellow's age, as reported in the Hindustan Times, is consistent with Muhammad Ben Moujan. So I am going to take the liberty of using the Hindustan article (thanks again) to update that article, and make a redirection.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 01:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Afghan politicians

I have noticed that you have been putting a non-existent cat tag on articles you are creating. the one you need to use is [[:Category: Afghan Politicians]]. Hope that helps. --Tainter 01:58, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

GTMO Arrival Dates

Dear Geo Swan: Do you know what the best avenue would be for determining the arrival date of a particular GTMO detainee (i.e. the day they first arrived at the base)? Knowing this is useful to the project of tracking U.S. government flights that transported the prisoners. 12:36, 6 February 2007, Chicago — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.252.195.9 (talk • contribs)

No, sorry. To the best of my knowledge, this information has not bee made public -- although there are a limited number of captives whose arrival times do seem to be known. If you let me know how to contact you, I will let you lmpw when I come acros one of those dates. My wiki id is set up so people can contact me by email, if you don't want to leave your email here.

Knowing when they arrived would be interesting. The dod is also circumspect about when they are released.

cheers! -- Geo Swan 22:39, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Islamic Movement of Tajikistan

While I always appreciate the work you put into citing Wikipedia articles, please use simpler reference names. I saw your most reference name on Islamic Movement of Tajikistan was something along the lines of 'Cs3ft45Hamiduva'. Use short words like 'HAMIDUVA' or 'REFTHREE' - this way it's easier for other users to cite that reference. Regards, KazakhPol 04:18, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Jabir Jubran Al Fayfi

Which article has the correct spelling? Jabir Jubran Al Fayfi or Jabi Jubran Al Fayfi. Up until September you seem to have been editing both articles simultaneously, but surely the person doesn't need two articles, one should be enough. Please change the one with the incorrect spelling into a redirect for the one with the correct spelling. Thanks! --Bobblehead 19:45, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: Requested move

Hi. You forgot WP:RM#Steps_for_requesting_a_(possibly)_controversial_page_move, steps 2 & 3 (create the place for discussion). The bottom line is, if the proposer doesn't care enough to read the instructions and set up the proper procedure, why should we care? From time to time, I feel kind enough to fix it and relist, but incomplete requests are subject to removal. Duja► 07:58, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Then possibly, someone else moved it from "uncontroversial proposals" section to below, but didn't complete the procedure. However, according to WP:NC and WP:DAB, all those articles should probably be either at unqualified "John Smith" or at "John Smith (detainee)". (Alas, I can't find the exact NC paragraph specifying "use the simples disambiguation qualifier when necessary", though I'd bet it exists somewhere). Duja► 08:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't say "simplest" it says "simpler". Thanks. I had already read those policy pages. If you take a second — closer — look at the Guantanamo captives whose names required disambiguation you will find that 3/4 of them required disambiguation from one another. So, IMO, the simplest disambiguation to use would be to follow a pattern that is consistent among all the captives who require disambiguation.

Abdul Ghani (Guantanamo detainee 934) Abdul Ghani (Guantanamo detainee 943)	Abdul Ghafour (Guantanamo detainee 954) Abdul Ghaffar (Guantanamo detainee 1032) Abdul Ghaffar (Guantanamo detainee - not in the official list)
Abdul Nasir (Guantanamo detainee 874) Abdul Nasir (Guantanamo detainee 874)	Abdul Rahim (Guantanamo detainee 549) Abdul Rahim (Guantanamo detainee 897)
Abdul Raziq (Guantanamo detainee 99) Abdul Razak (Guantanamo detainee 219) Abdul Razaq (Guantanamo detainee 356) Abdul Razak (Guantanamo detainee 942) Abdul Razak (Guantanamo detainee 1043) Abdul Razzaq (Guantanamo detainee 923)	Asad Ullah (Guantanamo detainee 47) Asad Ullah (Guantanamo detainee 912)
Akhtiar Mohammed (Guantanamo detainee 969) Akhtiar Mohammad (Guantanamo detainee 1036) Akhtar Mohammed (Guantanamo detainee 845)	Bismillah (Guantanamo detainee 639) Bismillah (Guantanamo detainee 658) Bismaullah (Guantanamo detainee 960)
Ehsanullah (Guantanamo detainee 350) Ehsanullah (Guantanamo detainee 523)	Hamidullah (Guantanamo detainee 456) Hamidullah (Guantanamo detainee 642) Hamidullah (Guantanamo detainee 1119)
Muhibullah (Guantanamo detainee 546) Muhebullah (Guantanamo detainee 974)	Mohammed Irfan (Guantanamo detainee 101) Mohammed Irfan (Guantanamo detainee 1006)
Mohammad Nasim (Guantanamo detainee 453) Mohammed Nasim (Guantanamo detainee 849) Mohammad Nasim (Guantanamo detainee 958)	Nasrullah (Guantanamo detainee 886) Nasrullah (Guantanamo detainee 886)
Wali Mohammed (Guantanamo detainee 547) Wali Mohammed (Guantanamo detainee 560)

One of the most important secrets of the Guantanamo camp authorities is that, over the last five years those responsible for maintaining the paperwork have been too malicious, too lazy, or too incompetent, to figure out a consistent naming scheme. So, when they realized that there was a name collision, they used different, incompatible and unsatisfactory disambiguation schemes, like Abdul Ghafour and Abdul Ghaffar. They are homonyms, and some clerk dealt with this by choosing two different spellings. The same, I believe, with the half dozen Abdul Razaqs, or the two Mohebullahs. Other homonyms were disambiguated by adding numbers after their names.

If you read the transcripts from the captives' Combatant Status Review Tribunals and Administrative Review Board hearings, you will find captive after captive telling the officers that the allegations against them, from the "Summary of Evidence" memos, were new to them -- that there had never been any hint of these allegations during their interrogations. How could this happen? Well, one really strong possibility, in my opinion, is that the interrogators couldn't tell the captives apart.

Go look at Abdullah Khan's dossier, where he describes his interrogators berating him for lying about his identity. Credulous and incompetent American intelligence officers paid a huge bounty to some personal enemies of his, who falsely denounced him, They told the credulous Americans that he wasn't who he said he was, that he was really the infamous Khirullah Khairkhwa. Khairkhwa was the last Taliban appointed Governor of the province of Herat, and had served as the Taliban's spokesman to the BBC and the VOA for the past six years. The credulous Americans paid out the bounty, without doing the most obvious checking, shipping Khan to Guantanamo shortly thereafter. Khan found that his Guantanamo interrogators, just like his American interrogators in Afghanistan, kept insisting that he was lying, and they knew he was Khirullah Khairkhwa. But the other captives quickly informed him that the Americans had captured the real Khirullah Khairkhwa over a year ago, and that he was just half a kilometre away, in another compound in the detention camp. Khan told his Tribunal that he kept pleading with interrogators to check the prison roster.

Khan told his Tribunal that this went on for a year and a half. A year and a half! Even though I read about this a eight months ago, I still feel shocked when I think about it. I don't care how awful you think your captive is, to fail to take the simple, obvious step of checking the identity of your captive is unforgiveable incompetence.

It cost something like 2 million bucks to detain each captive in Guantanamo. This guy could have been sent home within days of his first interrogation if only someone had taken the initiative to take the simple obvious step of checking the prison roster when he asked -- and saved the USA 2 million bucks.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 10:30, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, I get it now; makes sense. I really don't feel like discussing the issue I know nothing about; I can (and will) move that one back to the original title, and if anyone from the community wants to bring the wider issue into discussion, that's their right to do. Like I said, it was probably someone else who moved it from "uncontroversial" section (and I don't feel like looking through WP:RM history to find out who and when), so I thought you simply forgot to complete those steps. Duja► 10:42, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Guantanamo Bay Saudi detainees released

I think you will find this interesting.[6] KazakhPol 05:09, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Copy & paste for Allegation in all those Guantanamo detainee pages

You spend a lot of work on those articles, but when you copied&pasted the allegations, you made some typos. One is a really annoying because it is everywhere: 'Kalishnikov/Kalishnakov'. The document you quote says Kalashnikov, I don't know of any translation mixing up 'i' and 'a', so... please correct this. I fixed one page of search results, but I feel quite sleepy now. And please, before using copy&paste, check your spelling or use a template. And be warned: Laser Mission offers an antagonist named 'Kalishnakov', so don't use a bot ;-) Tierlieb 01:09, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Please curb your annoyance.

I may very well have made some typos, but the American officers who generated the allegations spelled Kalishnikov about half a dozen different ways. If it is spelled incorrectly in the original it should be spelled incorrectly in the quote.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 07:30, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. -- I am not finding any typos. Geo Swan 07:30, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

You're right, I made a mistake, judging from only the first occurence I encountered (about Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi). And even there I read the wrong document, because in the beginning of the first and third document it is written correctly, so I thought that was a typo on your side. But in the second one, the one you were refering to, it was wrong. And of course, if it is wrong in the quote, it should be quoted that way. So: You're right, I'm wrong. And I wish those documents would mot be scans but text files - for you to copy&paste directly and for me to search with a regular expression. Tierlieb 13:06, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Kuwait court frees Guantanamo detainees

Another link you may be interested in.[7] KazakhPol 02:52, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Zoe's talk page

With respect to messages on Zoe's talk page, before you post the next time, please ask yourself whether you believe you have a very strong case to criticise a well-respected editor, and whether this will benefit the community. You will find that as soon as you start working constructively with others, you will be respected. Best wishes, Samsara (talk • contribs) 19:54, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm BO-105 (CCG)

I have added a "{{prod}}" template to the article Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm BO-105 (CCG), suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest 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. Caerwine Caer’s whines 08:38, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Re:Gene Nygaard

Hi GeoSwan - I'm sorry for the delay in replying. As far as I can see, you have not done anything wrong. In his conversation with you, Gene has also not been incivil. What I see is a spirited discussion over content issues that maintains WP:CIVIL. It was ok for you to warn Gene not to treat WP as a battleground - that's not hostile, just concern.

To resolve your one-on-one disagreement over content and policy, I strongly advise you to follow dispute resolution by filing an WP:RFC for the article/content in question and ask other people who work on this subject or are interested to help resolve the content issue. Basically, get other editors to weigh-in on the issue and come up with a consensus solution. Rama's arrow 16:05, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Response to your question

Per your question on my edits to Combatant Status Review Tribunal, I repointed the links from WikiSource to Wikipedia becasue I think in this case the Geneva Convention article provides more context and background (nothing personal against WS). There is a WS link right at the top of the GC article, so at most the user is one more click away. If you feel strongly it made the article worse, feel free to revert: I'm not wedded to any of my edits. UnitedStatesian 15:37, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

safe houses

No problem. It was speedily changed to Category:Alleged al-Qaeda safe houses, affixing the plural and normalizing the spelling of al-Qaeda, without any objections raised (hence, no discussion). Hope that helps!--Mike Selinker 23:52, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

• Actually, I just checked this category out. It contains only five articles: Al-Qaeda safe house, Al Qaida guest house, Faisalabad, Al Qaida safe house, Karachi, Nibras guest house, and Taliban guest house. Those are all fine, but everything else is a redirect, and should be deleted if there aren't any real articles on those places. Especially, only real articles should have categories. Sound okay?--Mike Selinker 00:30, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Following Rasul v. Bush, the DoD was forced by the SCOTUS to allow the Guantanamo captives to hear the allegations against them, and try to refute. I guess it must have been a bit of a scramble. Among the allegations the Guantanamo analysts used to justify the detention of Guantanamo captives, was that they stayed at suspect guest houses, or suspect safe houses.

• The Guantanamo analysts conflated guest house with safe house, routinely calling guest houses in Taliban era Afghanistan "safe houses", and calling post-Taliban era clandestine safe houses "guest houses". The Al Qaida guest house, Faisalabad being a case in point.
• Maybe I should put aside false modesty. I've done the bulk of the work of expanding and maintaining the wikipedia's coverage of the Guantanamo captives.
• I started, and have most of the work maintaining all five of the articles you see there. When I started creating articles about the most notable safehouses I went through all 400-plus Guantanamo articles. Everywhere where the allegations had said "safe house", or "guest house", I had originally put a simple wiki-link to safe house or guest house. I changed all of those, generally having to use a piped link, to have them point directly an article about that guest house, as you see in the five that I was able to create.
• I am new to using categories. I keep being told that I am mis-using them. I thought that I could have the new articles I created, point to more general titles, which, eventually pointed to Al Qaida safe house. I added the tag to tell people there was a reason for an intermediate redirection. But those redirections ended up being collapsed.
• Well, I don't own the articles or categories I started. I have to be prepared to comply with the rules, even if I didn't know them ahead of time, had put in a lot of work.
• But I thought the category could remain. I think it would be useful as I add articles about the other notable houses.
• For what it is worth, I would have liked to have a say in whether there was a blanket name change from "al Qaida" to "al Qaeda". I know that "al Qaeda" is the preferred spelling on the wikipedia. But "al Qaida" is the spelling used by the US military. And, in the cases where "al Qaida" is part of the name given by the US military, I would have liked to raise the question as to whether that made it make sense for the articles to continue to carry the name assigned by the US military.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 01:16, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

• The category is great, in my opinion. The five articles you've created all belong in there. What doesn't work is all the redirects. At the point the collapse occurred, those "articles" should have been deleted, not turned to redirects. So I would delete all of those, but leave all the real articles and the category intact. That help? (By the way, the military also used "Usama bin Laden" for a long time. They don't get to beat common usage in the media.)--Mike Selinker 01:27, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I think you should delete all the redirects. If there are no articles, the redirects shouldn't be there. But at minimum, you should delete the categories from the redirect pages.--Mike Selinker 01:59, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
    • Well, okay. But you shouldn't leave redirects hanging out there for long. Deletion isn't a death sentence: You can always recreate an article title when you need it.--Mike Selinker 02:11, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

2007 Iranian seizure of Royal Navy personnel

Hi geo could you help me and the above article and the specifically what the status (according to the GC) of the Royal Navy personel. You seem to be the best informed on these subject. Hypnosadist 10:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Prisoner confesses to role in Dar Salaam attack

This may interest you[8]. KazakhPol 02:43, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

CfD of your categories

Did anyone tell you about this? Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_March_27#Category:Guantanamo_Bay_detainees Johnbod 04:03, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I looked at your user page & at some of the categories yesterday (this isn't an area I have a perticular interest in). I still think you should be able to boil down the category information into one, two or three lists, using codes/ticks for the categories. The CfD discussion is not going well so far, let's face it. Parallels between CfD & Guantanamo procedures will not be lost on you I'm sure. Best of luck! Johnbod 11:04, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

categories

Hi I believe you deserve a medal for your meticulus work on Guantanamo. You should not be discouraged in any way. You deserve an expert status for your contributions. Categories are just for organizing information and I think you can somehow reduce them to a reasonable number. That wont in any way make your articles any less useful or practical. Keep the hard work please.cs 16:12, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

BTW if you want to get more attention to the discussion consider listing on watch pages like this Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting/Islam. I dont know how they will react but they sure are interested in Guantanamo. regards. cs 16:23, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

• If you do not like the ways Wikipedia is organized nobody's forcing you to use it. Your WP:POINT only wastes precious time of the other people. Pavel Vozenilek 23:47, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

• Yes, it is about the categories. Pavel Vozenilek 00:49, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

H. Candace Gorman

Hello there. I replied on the article's talk page. In a nutshell, I'm neutral about the material; it's just a matter of scope. But look at what I have written and let me know what you think. --Butseriouslyfolks 19:25, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Guantanomo

Considering I hadn't commented on that debate and am not generally an involved editor in issues related to Gitmo, I don't see what's so inappropriate about it. >Radiant< 08:11, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Barakat

Hi, I have come across al-Barakat before, but never Adbuhalim Pakhrutdinov. Regarding the difference between transliterations of Barakat vs Baraka - in Arabic if two nouns are adjacent, and they are possessive, such as "John's chair," the phrase is an idaafa and the last letter changes from an "H" sound to a "T." I have not heard of Somalis in Uzbekistan, but I suppose it is possible. I am not familiar with Batayev's case, but I will look into it if I get the chance. Regards, KazakhPol 04:37, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Religious conversion and terrorism

POV by itself is not necessarily a reason for deletion (there is nothing that explicitly says that it isn't, however). However, when it is combined with original research, it becomes unacceptable, hence the deletion being due to POV and OR. --Coredesat 06:21, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

What kind of axe are you trying to grind?

Geo Swan, with all due respect may I ask you why you are continuing in this way regarding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Religious conversion and terrorism? I notice that now you are suggesting the closing admin has acted inappropriately in closing the process, and this after you were told that there was nothing inappropriate about my editing the page during the AfD on the incident noticeboard.

1. In regards to my editing how is it any more or less appropriate for ANY of the voting parties to edit the entry during the AfD? Anyone who offers their opinion about the entry (keep or delete), whether nominator or voter, stands on the exact same ground in respect to your ethics criteria.
2. In regards to the closing of the AfD you have conveniently sidestepped the real issue in nitpicking about POV. I can see one delete voter NOT CITING directly WP:OR as the reason for their vote to delete the entry. Are you incapable of seeing this? The POV issue simply accentuates the the OR issue, because it gives the OR a purpose, but either way you slice it OR is OR, whether anyone considers it POV or not. Also, it was never a matter of the entry containing some OR, that could be cleaned up, but the entry itself BEING OR, so please do not misrepresent this fact.
3. In regards to your own behavior you should think about the fact that in voting "keep" you have undermined this self-righteous crusade that you claim has nothing to do with the entry itself but with the deletion process and my supposed misbehavior. If that were your only concern then you should have refrained from offering an opinion about the entry content, because doing so involves you with the content of the entry just as my opinion involves me. I find nothing wrong with doing both but please do not go around claiming that you do not care about the entry but only about the process being flawed because clearly you are on record showing otherwise.
4. In regards to my behavior I've noticed a repeated pattern now, between the discussions on the AfD, the incident notice board, and your recent posts to the closing admin in which you suggest that I should not have been editing because my behavior "could be" seen in X, Y or Z manner. That is you suggest that it might seem that I was deleting references to keep the page from meeting standards. I would like to go on record here saying that this is a very odd line of argument for several reasons. Why no affirmative accusation here? Is it because I never actually deleted any good references? You continue to skirt responding to the actual content that I kept on removing. What made these references worth keeping? Were they reliable sources? Did the actually pertain to the text they were referencing? I have repeatedly argued NO to these questions, and you have repeatedly refrained from commenting on those matters in order to comment instead on how this "might make me look". Increasingly you have made me feel that since the content of the entry cannot be defended you have decided to attack the AfD nominator instead.
5. In regards to my comments here I would like to offer this point. I do not appreciate the fact that you are finding ever more forums to express your opinion that I have behaved unethically. If you really want to just take on an RfC and be done with it. If you are so concerned with process and policy (though I don't agree that you are arguing from any solid ground about either) then engage process THROUGH policy. I wont be offended--that hurdle we've already passed. Cheers.PelleSmith 12:19, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Regarding your zeroth point, that you think the commentators on wp:an/i endorsed your behavior. I think if you go back, and re-read their comments, you will see that they expressed -qualified- endorsement of a nominator making edits to an article on which they had instantiated an {{afd}}. Let me repeat, they offered a -qualified- endorsement. Go back, and re-read their comments.

The qualification was that the nominator's edits had to be edits that were clearly made in good faith, edits meant to improve the article. Edits that were clearly meant to sabotage the article, would obviously be proscribed, because they violated a whole raft of policies and procedures.

Unbelievable. Your question to them was regarding whether or not it was ethical for me to remove references at all given that I nominated the entry for deletion. They responded to you that if the edits were made in good faith then they were fine. Hence, your concern over my editing was misguided, because there was no overarching ethical issue tied to my position as nominator. There is bad faith and there is good faith, the former is always a problem and usually a violation of one or several policies. Did I act in bad faith? I have asked you this several times. Was I removing good references, worthy references, because if I was then, and only then, does your roundabout accusation hold any water, and only then is it even worth mentioning.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

1. You keep asserting that your only edits were to remove what you called "bad" references. But you didn't raise your concerns over what you thought was "bad" first. And your attempts to explain what was bad about them was sufficiently unclear that a reader could interpret your concern as merely, "I think this reference is bad because I don't agree with it."

   • I specified my reasons in the edit summaries, and again I responded to concerns directly on the talk page. If you want to continue this line of argument I'm afraid the burden of proof falls on you. Were they good references? Prove that instead of writing volumes about how I might have been behaving.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   So, even if your edits were made in good faith, your edits weren't -clearly- made in good faith. You didn't do what a good faith editor should do -- discuss your edits on the talk page.

   • I broke no policy or even guideline in how I edited the page. Again, burden of proof. Maybe start by showing me where I have to explain every edit I make on the talk page ... I stand by the fact that I think you are arguing policy from some rather distorted and weak positions.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   As I believe I already said, your approach of discussing controversial edit decisions in the articles edit history as opposed to on the talk page is provocative. It is, in my opinion, a breach of WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a battlefield.

   • I have never "discussed" controversial edit decisions in the article edit history. I have explained my edits, edit by edit, in the edit summaries. When you raised an issue with two of these edits on the talk page I promptly responded. I also find it amusing when the man holding the smoking gun starts blaming others for starting the war.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   I dispute that the references I added to the article were "bad". I found your defense of your deletions of them extremely weak. You argued that one of the guys who killed an abortion doctor wasn't acting on religious faith, because somewhere in the body of one article the author of the article said Christianity proscribed murder? The author of the article is entitled to hold an interpretation of Christianity that they think proscribes murder. You are entitled to hold an interpretation of Christianity that you think proscribes murder. You are entitled to believe that Christians who believe in murdering anti-abortion doctors misunderstand Christianity. You are entitled to believe they aren't really Christians.

   • The article never stated that he killed the doctor because of his faith or because he had converted to Christianity. On top of this a religious leader tied to his form of Christianity denounced the killing. My edit summary was intended to point out the fact that the reference didn't link the killing to religious conversion one iota. And it didn't and I'll gladly retract this statement when you show me how it did.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   Well, what does that have to do with whether those murders belonged on the list of converts who committed terrorist acts?

   • Were they even converts? I asked this point blank in one of the edit summaries. The references were not clear on this.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   Those murders acted on "faith", justified their acts of terrorism through "faith". It doesn't matter if you, or the author of that article, or the Pope in Rome, asserts their actions were a violation of Christian principles. If the murderers thought their faith justified their actions they belong on the list.

   • OK so these examples might be well served in the entry Religious terrorism? Is that what you're trying to prove? I don't get it? Conversion what? The entire debate over this entry huh? Does it have anything to do with religious conversion who? Seriously are so you blinded by this that you continue to overlook the basic problem here?PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   The founders of some extreme sects, that had roots in Christian traditions, don't consider their sects to be Christian sects. Some outsiders don't consider some sects with roots in the Christian traditions to be Christian.

   You may say that what they were converted to wasn't Christianity. Your favorite religious experts may say that what they were converted to wasn't Christianity. The founder of their group, or the murderers themselves may say that what they were converted to wasn't Christianity.

   Did I call either of the murders a "Christian"? No, I did not. Did I say that they had committed the murders due to their interpretation of Christian principles? No I did not. Under the heading "cause" in that table I put "right to life". Maybe there is a better term to characterize their cause, what they had faith in. If so, the talk page would have been the correct place to discuss that.

   • WOW. I couldn't have said it better. Now its possible that not only do these two individuals have nothing to do with conversion to religion but their terrorist acts might not even relate to religion. Are you aiming at your own foot?PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   So, whether you think their act was a violation of Christian principles has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they merit entries on a list of converts who felt justified to commit acts of terrorism.

   • The entire argument here is over the fact that an entry named "Religious conversion and terrorism" should show a link between the two phenomena and not simply be a list of anecdotes about people who first converted to a religion then engaged in terrorism. Are you still not getting that. This is the WP:OR concern ... that by naming the entry Religious conversion and terrorism and then providing anecdotes we're making it seem like there is a connection there that doesn't exist and can't be verified.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   They got converted to something. And that something, whether they called it a form of Christianity, or a corollary thereto or not doesn't matter. For all I know the right to life movement might include Scientologists, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Muslims.

   • BUT THEN WHAT DOES THE RIGHT TO LIFE MOVEMENT HAVE TO DO WITH RELIGIOUS CONVERSION?PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   But let's leave that aside. What about the other three references I provided? You didn't address them at all.How can you use your interpretation of a comment in one cited reference to justify the excision of both murderers?

   • I would have to see the page history to understand what you are talking about here. You say I deleted 4 references in one edit with a summary aimed at only one? That's not how a roll so I'm not sure what to say until I see the evidence of my evil ways.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   I think these are strong arguments for why those references should have stayed.

   Maybe, if we had had a discussion, on the talk page, you would have convinced me otherwise. But you didn't even try to convince me. You didn't even try to consider that I might have points in favor of the contributions I made, that I spent some time making, that hadn't occured to you.

   • Tell me this is all about the fact that I insulted you or bruised your ego when I deleted your additions and I'll gladly apologize. I responded to your inquire ASAP on the talk page, and you ended any conversation there by not responding yourself. Instead you started slinging around the idea that I may be acting unethically on the talk page. BTW, I'll gladly admit that my reaction to you is quite influenced by your own lack of engaging any dialog with me instead opting for a public forum to call my behavior into question. So touche.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   Instead you acted like wikipedia was a battlefield.

   • Touche once again.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

2. With regard to your second numbered point. I can't, for the life of me, understand what point you are trying to make. The second sentence of this point seems like a complete non sequitor.

   Whether the article was IRREDEEMABLY original research is not a question of fact. This is your interpretation.

   • Maybe that just about sums it up. You cannot for the life you understand what a majority of voters on this AfD could. Please tell me this is why you are carrying on in such a manner and I will forgive you. You may not agree with me, or these others, but we did share an opinion, and that is that the entry cannot be saved within our standards because it does not present a connection between religious conversion and terrorism but anecdotes that create the illusion of such a connection at best. No one is saying that this is 100% fact, but most people seem to believe its probably the case. We're human after all.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   I have had other correspondents tell me that certain topics are "inherently POV". I think that is nonsense. Topics aren't inherently POV, or inherently OR. It is the representation that becomes POV, or NPOV. It is the representation that becomes OR, or a valid, legitimate summary that complies with all the wikipedia's policies. Some topics are harder to write from an NPOV, because they are controversial, or because of the wikipedia's implicit systemic bias. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

   • Whatever.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   I am quite ready to believe that the article contained passages that were so tainted by original research that those passages would have had to be totally rewritten or totally excised. But, frankly I couldn't fairly form a definite opinion on whether that was true because you kept excising everybody's reference, and expecting the rest of us to trust your judgement that they were "bad" references.

   • By the "rest of us" you mean YOU. I didn't excise everybody's reference, and surely someone with your knowledge of Wikipedia is more than able to go back in the edit history and see prior versions of the entry. Did I prevent you from evaluating any of those references? To evaluate my edits? NO. And to this date you have only continued to insinuate that it's possible that I was removing good references provided by another editor but you really don't know. Well its possible that Walk Disney assassinated JFK but you wont see a congressional committee forming anytime soon to look into the matter. This in fact is what I find not only infuriating but PERSONALLY OFFENSIVE--these insinuations that aren't even backed up with any modicum of evidence.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   As I said above, your description of what was "bad" about these references was so lacking that, for all we knew, all that was really wrong with them was that you disagreed with them.

   • Who is this "we"? Quit trying to include others in this lunacy. Let them speak for themselves. I'm fairly certain you wont have much support there. I'm fairly certain that none just took my word for it, but other voters on AfD used their more than adequate mental abilities to make judgments on their own. They don't need you to champion them because of ignorance, trust me.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   Maybe those other guys references really were bogus, made up, didn't support the conclusions they were represented as supporting. But, if so, you failed to offer a convincing explanation. You certainly didn't convince me that the references I added were bad.

   • Didn't convince you. This is what its about isn't it. Has it been worth your time, because its not worth mine. Please if you want to continue at least report me to someone or open an RFC or something that makes be believe there is a foreseeable end.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

3. Which "self-righteous crusade" are you talking about? I am concerned that your choices, WRT to this article, were not compliant with the standards of the wikipedia community. I don't think I owe anyone any apology for holding this view. I don't think I owe you an apology over how I have raised my concern. If you think I owe you an apology please give me a civil, specific head-up over the passages that you are concerned about.

   • Never asked for an apology. I don't know you and your opinion of me doesn't much matter. However, your "self-righteous crusade" is annoying and offensive to the point that I want it to stop.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

4. With regard to your fourth numbered point. Why have I said your choices give the appearance of X, Y or Z, rather than making outright accusations? WP:CIV, and WP:AGF. I thought your choices were ill-considered and were not compliant with the wikipedia's standards. I don't know, had no way of knowing, whether the choices I thought were mistakes were honest mistakes, mistakes made in good faith, or whether you knew better and chose to breach the standards anyway. I think it is appropriate to reserve outright accusation for those rare cases when we can be sure of someone's motives.

   • The problem is that you haven't even shown that they were mistakes. That's the real problem my friend.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

5. With regard to your fifth numbered point. Have you behaved unethically? Have I said you behaved unethically? It was my intention to stop short of saying you had behaved unethically. I think you made bad choices. And I don't think I owe anyone any apologies for saying so.

   • Again with the apologies. That's between you and whoever you confess to at the end of the day, I really don't need one. I just want you to stop discussing my behavior in this ridiculous manner.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   I don't think I owe anyone any apologies for saying that the choices you made leave observers, left me, unable to know whether your bad choices were due to honest, but avoidable mistakes, or were conscious efforts to undermine the wikipedia. I'd hope that even your best friends would give you a heads-up if that is how they saw your choices.

   • What bad choices? Unless I acted in bad faith (so you were advised by the lovely admins you asked) I have made no bad choices. Editing out references is itself not a bad choice for a nominator to make, if it is done in good faith. So, unless you're saying I acted in bad faith, I ask again what bad choices did I make?PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   If there is someplace where I outright said I knew you had unethically and knowingly chosen to subvert the wikipedia you have my full apology for doing so.

   • If you insist: "It is not that I feel that strongly about the article. I didn't come across it until a day or two ago. But I feel very, very strongly about people who subvert the deletion process." Those were your final words to the closing admin on his/her talk page.PelleSmith 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   I am going to point out a couple of things. You implied that you were opposed by a conspiracy of POV-pushers. When I pointed out that you seemed to be implying that, you openly acknowledged that you did think you were opposed by a conspiracy of POV-pushers. But I didn't see you offer a lick of justification for this accusation.

   • No conspiracy. I specifically mentioned that believe in no conspiracy or cabal of any kind. Again I repeat, no conspiracy. A voter, not me, did mention however that the entry creator had canvassed via email. The three keep voters who appeared in close proximity, two of which are well worn names on Islam related entries and part and parcel to the "factionalism" I mentioned (not conspiracy) could have come there as a result of that. I do not know anything about that however. My point is simply that some editors edit aggressively to support a certain view of Islam, and this happens on both sides, and it is disturbing. The editor who de-PROded the entry also edits in that vein. But going into this issue just causes more trouble than it solves which is why I didn't detail it for you nor did I make it a focus of attention ... YOU DID.PelleSmith 19:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   The talk page from the article was, of course, also deleted. I'd like to consult it, to verify my recollection. Nevertheless, my recollection was that the talk page didn't show you making any meaningful effort to try to understand the reasoning of the people you disagreed with. This was long before I arrived on the scene.

   • Cheers I'd love to see this page as well, but don't quote me on that if its part of some scheme to appeal the deletion.PelleSmith 19:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   About your conspiracy accusations. Maybe if I had a chance to look more deeply at the edit history of the article and its talk page, I would come around to your opinion. But what it looked like was a relative newbie started an article, that may have included some unreferenced, unverified material. We should be helping newbies, not landing on them like a ton of bricks.

   • There are no conspiracies, just politicized factions. They may, as the other editor suggested, canvass over email but I never even went that far in my comments. Feel free to look at the entries edited by and the debates engaged in by the entry creator and the dePRODer who never voted but I believe he/she has been absent from Wikipedia during this period altogether. Factionalism.PelleSmith 19:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   So, I find it a bit odd that you raise concern over offending people in your last sentence. I don't remember you showing any concern whatsoever over offending those you implied were part of a conspiracy of POV-pushers.

   • Why would I be concerned about offending people who know where they stand on these issues? Please. That's not to say that they are going to come to my aid here and say ... yes yes indeed I push an anti-Islamic point of view, but there is little attempt to hid these facts in their overall behavior.PelleSmith 19:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   In particular, the lead paragraph contained one of those statements that look, to some people, as if it were obviousely true. My paraphrased recollection is: '"Converts are more likely to turn into a terrorist than people who were brought up in a religion."

   Is this true? I don't know. Is it verifiable? Possibly, to a certain extent. A statistical study of the background of suicide bombers would be interesting and worthwhile. And a wikipedia article that summarized that kind of study in an NPOV way, citing authoritative critics would be useful addition to the wikipedia.

   • Good thinking. These studies exist where and they prove what? Again what's the WP:OP concern?

   If someone thought they had a reference to such a study, but they misread the study, then there should have been a discussion of same on the talk page. That is not what I saw. I saw you making poorly explained excisions — The same kind of poorly explained excisions you were later to make to my contributions. You claimed those excisions were totally justified, just as your excisions of my contributions were totally justified. But, since I dispute whether your excisions of my contributions were justified I have to doubt your judgment that your excisions of other people's contributions was any more justified than your excisions of my contributions.

   • Examples please. One reference was a spreadsheet, literally a spread sheet--that does not meet our criteria in the least. The other reference was untraceable. There was no information on even the author. What I have just explained here was included in my edit summaries--twice. No one attempted to address the issue of the fragment reference that might as well have been made up, and regarding the spreadsheet (and I don't mean a spreadsheet looking table in a journal or some other source but literally an Excell document) an claim was made that a spreadsheet could be a reliable reference to a scientific study!!!! What?PelleSmith 19:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   • I saw this as a promising article that might have had some passages that were unrefenced, and unverifiable. Your style of excision, without making a serious effort to explain yourself, made it hard for me to determine whether the reference you excised back up the assertions. I could have worked hard to trace those original references. But I didn't choose to. Instead I started to expand, and, in my opinion, make the list more useful as a reference. My choice. I like tables. I owe no one any apology for addressing the part of the article I enjoy working on most.

   • In my view you jumped to conclusions about exactly that ... my "style of excision" and this blinded you to the most important aspect here ... the content itself. What's that guideline again about not commenting on the editor but on the content? Its no surprise that you repeatedly addressed my style of editing as possibly being X, Y, or Z because without actually engaging the content you could never make an affirmative comment on what I was doing ... what the content changes I was making actually did to the entry as opposed to what they might be doing.PelleSmith 19:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

   I don't think the OR problem was a very serious one. Once that first suggestion that new converts are morelikely to become terrorists was either substantiated with one or more authoritative, verifiable source, or excised with a civil, exchange of views on the talk page, I think the article would have been okay.

   • OR, OR, OR ... that's why you didn't agree with the rest of the voters on the page. You are welcome to not agree with this but in my book you are not welcome to continue making me look unethical. You can do so of course, at will, but its offensive (in my book). Again I suggest, even welcome at this point, an RfC or some other formal procedure where at least the end result would be a result and not this ridiculous mess. If you would rather not I don't care about any apologies but I would love an assurance that you're finished with this.PelleSmith 19:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Candidly Geo Swan 17:25, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

1. • I put in a response to your comments but now I've self-reverted. I have no idea what the guideline or policy is on this. Feel free to undo this revert or even to refactor it if it is unpleasnt on the eyes (of course if you refactor I respectfully request that all of my text gets put back). The problem is that I don't want to take up any more of my time on this. It's ridiculous. Challenge the deletion, take out an RfC on my "behavior", whatever, but I'm done with this line of communication.

As you wish

You can fix it if you want or you can just leave the whole thing out. I wrote it and posted it originally so if you want to put it in you can but if you don't it wont bother me the least. I don't care to continue the conversation and realized after looking at the ugly looking formatting that I had just created that I'm not sure how I allowed myself to get so far into this. You can likewise leave or remove this comment. Its all up to you. Cheers.

Thanks

Thanks. The discussion I started on WP:AN/I has turned into an argument between four editors, none of whom were involved in the incident, all bad mouthing each other over nothing. WP:AN is unproductive but the matter seems to be resolved. On the page in question, Muhammad al-Durrah, two other editors are already in another, unrelated edit war. KazakhPol 18:33, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

KP

Thanks for your note, Geo. I'm afraid we have very different experiences of that user. The BLP violation I was talking about was where he referred to the mother of a child killed in the Arab-Israeli conflict as a "fake," because he believes the boy wasn't really killed and the whole incident was staged. This is disrespectful, hurtful, and possibly libellous, especially as the mother is named. I removed the comment and he restored it, so admin action was taken by someone else. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 10:07, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Guantanamo

Please don't imply that my edits lack basis. Clearly, the material I removed was unsourced. Thus, I had basis for removing the material and was not acting merely on "impulse." The material with sources you added clearly belongs, and I think it makes a nice addition to the article. · j e r s y k o talk · 12:43, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

My reply here. Geo Swan 18:18, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I haven't had time to read your entire post on my talk page yet (I will, I apologize for not doing so yet), but the reasoning behind my removal of the information was that it was unsourced information relating to living persons (i.e. a statement was attributed to a specific living person without a supporting reference). Nonetheless, clearly, the material was unsourced and was not removed merely on impulse but because it was unsourced. No real harm done; I know your goal is to improve the article, as is mine. · j e r s y k o talk · 18:30, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, I got a minute at work to read through your message fully. While I agree with your sentiment that I should have done a brief search and referenced the material added, I would point out that WP:V places the burden on the editor who adds the material. Again, I would emphasize that I still should have referenced the material (I had heard about it, obviously, and knew it belonged in the article if it wasn't already there). · j e r s y k o talk · 18:47, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

List prod

Please see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Mass_deletion_of_obsolete_lists.-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  16:01, 23 April 2007 (UTC)-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  16:01, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Daily India

I have added a "{{prod}}" template to the article Daily India, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest 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. -- Y not? 17:24, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Notability of Zalmay Shah

A tag has been placed on Zalmay Shah, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done because the article seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in Wikipedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

If you feel that you can assert the notability of the subject, you may contest the deletion. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag) and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm the subject's notability under Wikipedia guidelines.

For guidelines on specific types of articles, you may want to check out our criteria for biographies, for web sites, for bands, or for companies. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. 72.75.73.158 05:14, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Notability of Kevin Sandkuhler

A tag has been placed on Kevin Sandkuhler, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done because the article seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, 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 assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

If you feel that you can assert the notability of the subject, you may contest the deletion. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag) and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm the subject's notability under Wikipedia guidelines.

For guidelines on specific types of articles, you may want to check out our criteria for biographies, for web sites, for bands, or for companies. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. 72.75.73.158 04:17, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Please explain more fully how http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/mora_memo_july_2004.pdf fails to satisfy the requirement for a reliable, authoritative source for Kevin Sandkuhler's position and involvement in early discussions of the legality of the "extended interrogation techniques"? Geo Swan 14:55, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

For the same reason that any PDF document on a website as the sole "published source" about the subject fails to satisfy Notability for why the subject should have an article (see WP:BIO), even if it's from the American Civil Liberties Union website ... would you accept a PDF copy of the Majestic 12 documents as a WP:RS regarding what Harry S. Truman did as a result of the Roswell UFO incident just because it came from the Wikipedia website? —72.75.73.158 18:15, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

72.75.73.158

72.75.73.158 has now been unblocked, after I discussed the block with the blocking administrator. 72.75.73.158 is an anonymous contributor to Wikipedia, and we should respect that right. The user does not wish to discuss the anonymity, yet you kept pestering the user about it after he gave you a sufficient explanation for tagging your article for speedy deletion (albeit, it may be incorrect). In any case, it would be advised to not make potentially incorrect and sometimes slanderous generalizations or evaluations of other users, even if they are anonymous. As for 72.75.73.158's userpage, I must say that this statement is not really a big problem. If an administrator deletes an article, and you know that 72.75.73.158 tagged the article for deletion, why would you go to the IP user? He/she is not an administrator and cannot view or undelete the article and therefore, cannot be of much help in your situation. It would be best to always contact the administrator, since it is their responsibility to evaluate each article for speedy deletion and make their own decision as to whether or not it should be deleted. As for leaving notes on talk pages, I have advised the user to do that more often, since it is both courteous and helps new users understand the circumstances for their page's deletion. To sum up, 72.75.73.158 has not violated civility policy. He's made a few mistakes here and there, but he has also done a great deal of accurate CSD tagging. I think that his activities on Wikipedia are commendable, but in any case, I will keep on eye on the user in the future. Thanks, Nishkid64 (talk) 23:23, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, you might want to see this. Nishkid64 (talk) 23:29, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

72.75.73.158 stated that he did not wish to discuss his decision to not make an account on Wikipedia. That's a stance that Wikipedia has to respect. If he is abusing his anonymity, then he should be rightfully blocked. The point: He wasn't abusing any policy. I said you were "pestering" him because after he provided you with his explanation for the article not being notable, you immediately targeted his status as an anonymous Wikipedian, despite the user's wishes that the issue not be brought up. (FYI, his actual username has been established--he's Dennette) I said you misled people because you purported your own view of 72.75.73.158's actions. Your interpretation was clearly not what 72.75.73.158 had in mind, and by presenting speculation instead of facts at WP:AN/I, you gave an impression to other uninvolved editors that 72.75.73.158 was a bad Wikipedian. As for Sandkuhler, saying "he is notable for xx..." means absolutely nothing. Notability is established by context, not by mere words that say he is notable. 72.75.73.158 felt he wasn't notable, and he might have been wrong. Wikipedians have their own interpretations, and they are allowed to make mistakes. Heck, even I have botched up a few CSDs in my time. Also, what you're implying is that 72.75.73.158 was wrong in his assessment of Sandkuhler. 72.75.73.158 was entitled to his opinion, and if he does not think he's wrong, then he's free to maintain his stance. When he tagged the article for deletion, it probably could have been considered suitable for speedy deletion by a few administrators. There's no right/wrong here and like I said, 72.75.73.158 did not have to admit his mistake to you. I still think that your approach to discuss the matter in civil fashion could have resulted in a more positive manner. Some of the stuff you said yourself was pretty harsh, since he's only made a few mistakes while on CSD patrol, out of hundreds of articles that he has tagged. On a side note, what's with your stance about administrators? I'm getting the impression that you think administrators really don't check speedy deletion carefully, which is not true. All admins have to evaluate each article on a case-by-case basis, and if you have witnessed instances where this is not being done accordingly, then you should bring it up to WP:AN/I. Thanks, Nishkid64 (talk) 23:04, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

User talk:68.239.79.82

Hi ... would you please have a look at my new talk page? I have copied some of the material from the previously blocked User page into a section called Here about a speedy delete? ... one editor was very upset with my apparent disregard for WP:CIVIL with the tone of the previous version of my greeting, so I wanted to run it by someone before my IP address changes again.

I have also created a section called What to do after your speedy delete has been restored ... I hope that I assume enough of the responsibility for Too Speedy deletes while explaining my lack of authority to "make it right".

I guess I'm thinking of a tutorial with Examples, like I've collected on the previously contentious IP talk page ... I even documented a Dirty Dozen Newbies I have warned in a single hour while on Newpage Patrol one day ... maybe I could even work on the wording of some of the templates to avoid the "Please eject yourself from this website" replies to a nn-warn post.

BTW, I figure that the "Please don't say I have to register ..." boilerplate will be my signpost, even if the "What to do about your Too Speedy deletion" greeting becomes an article of its own, like WP:TOOLATE, that could be referenced from the warning templates.

Anywho, I figure you might as well just make any changes directly to the talk page, because I'll want to do a copy&paste to initialize the next one ... if I make another one. :-) Happy Editing! —68.239.79.82 21:16, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Does every Guantanamo detainee rate their own stub?

I happened upon the page for "Sohail Mohammed" as I was looking for the lawyer who represented New Jersey muslims who were detained after 9/11. I soon found that you have written small articles for nearly all of the known Guantanamo prisoners. Are all of these men "notable"? That is to say, do all of them rate being included in an encyclopedia? I am certain that they are important to their families, but so are the prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Many of them are also considered to be innocent. I am of the opinion that the information in these small articles could be included in a list, with only the truly notable (i.e. known for something other than there detention) having seperate articles. 66.192.126.3 05:21, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I have written articles about nearly ever known Guantanamo captive.

Thank you for offering the comparison between the Guantanamo captives with "...the prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary."

You pointed out that some of the Louisiana prisoners are also considered to be innocent. Before I address your comparison, are you suggesting that Louisiana prisoners, who might be innocent, or who might otherwise be held in detention in breach of the law, do not merit coverage in the wikipedia, even if articles could be written about them from a neutral point of view, which cite authoritative, reliable sources?

I am asking because I want to make sure there isn't any confusion on this point. It seems to me that if authoritative sources documented the improper incarceration of a single Louisiana prisoner, he, or she, would merit coverage in the wikipedia. It seems to me that if authoritative souces documentd the improper incarcerations of a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand Louisiana prisoners, they would all, potentially, merit coverage in the wikipedia. You suggested that only the "truly notable" merited separate articles. But you didn't define what you meant by "truly notable". Perhaps you could take a minute and clarify what you mean by "truly notable".

Now I would like to start to address your comparison with Louisiana prisoners:

Prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary	Guantanamo captives
Prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary are held openly They can receive mail They can receive visitors	Captives in the GWOT are held in secret detention. Up until May 15 2006 the USA would neither confirm or deny the identity of any captives in the GWOT.
We have confidencee that the Louisiana prisoners are who the prosecutions say they are	The true identity of some of Guantanamo captives still remains in doubt.
All the prisoners in Louisiana were protected by the US Justice system All the prisoners in Louisiana started off with the presumption of innocence. They all knew what they were charged with. They all had a fair and meaningful opportunities to refute the evidence against them. If they learned their Prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence this would be grounds for an appeal, a mistrial, a pardon. If new evidence came to light this too would be grounds for an appeal.	Guantanamo captives, and the other captive taken during the GWOT have no meaningful protections. Some of them have been murdered, by American GI, while in American custody, with trivial or nonexistent consequences for the murderers. Some of the known murders have not even been investigated. None of the Guantanamo captives has faced charges before a court of law. (No, the Guantanamo commissions are not courts of law, for a whole list of reasons, like that they lack established rules of evidence. The charged men's lawyers don't know the rules are. Go read David Hick's Australian lawyer's account of why he was barred from attending Hicks commission.) I know Bush administration and DoD spokesmen represent the Combatant Status Review Tribunals as the opportunity the captives had to refute the evidence against them. But the role of the wikipedia is not to repeat the talking points from Bush administration spokesemen press releases, as if they contained unquestioned established fact.
Louisiana prisoners did not have to worry about secret evidence.	The documents that sumarized the basis of the decision to confirm enemy combatants status has been released for 58 of the captives. In every single one of those 58 cases the summary records that the decision was made based on secret evidence.
Louisiana prisoners did not have to worry that evidence that might clear them was being kept from them, and their defense attorneys.	Guantanamo captives didn't have any defense attorneys. Guantanamo captives didn't get to see any evidence whatsoever. What they got to see, what the Tribunal called evidence was merely a summary of compilations of unsupported allegations -- or a compilation of summaries of unsupported allegations. Guantanamo captives could rely on evidence being withheld from them.
Louisiana prisoners did not have to worry that secret evidence was being used to justify their continued detention Civilized nations, that follow the rule of law, allow suspects to cross-examine the testimony against them.	As I noted above of the 58 captives we know about the confirmation that they were enemy combatants was base on secret evidence. In a better world, even if there was some other objection to the secret evidence, we would be able to count on it being leveled at the right captive. As I noted above, that certainly wasn't true for Abdullah Khan
Someone did a sanity check against the charges and evidence against your Louisiana prisoners. In civilized countries the charges against criminal suspects are a matter of public record. Charges that are what we call "patent nonsense" here on the wikipedia don't get laid, because, if they are too ridiculous, someone in the prosecutor's office will loose their job. Similarly, the evidence is a matter of public record. So someone does a sanity check to make sure the Defense can't shoot it down in flames.	Many Guantanamo captives faced allegations that were patently absurd. There was the kid who was alleged to have been one of Abu Qatada's assistants in 1998. Abu Qatada was a political refugee in London England, while, in 1998 the boy was still in Primary School in Saudi Arabia. Half a dozen captives face rafts of absurd allegations for involvement in events when the Taliban had them locked up in their own prisons. Captives faced allegations like "probably carried a weapon, while in Afghanistan".
Your Louisiana prisoners get to call witnesses in their defense.	Guantanamo captives are allowed to call any witnesses they think might help them prove that they were not enemy combatants. But their Tribunal's Presidents had the authority to rule that those witnesses were "not relevant". The transcripts from the Tribunals were so inadequate we can't be sure how many captives called for witnesses. When the Tribunal's Presidents ruled that a witness was relevant, they then went through a charade whereby they determined if the the witness was "reasonably available". I called it a charade because there wasn't a single witness request for an "off-Island" witness which eneded up being ruled "reasonably available". Even witnesses who were also Guantanamo captives were ruled "not reasonably available" -- further proof that those charged with the responsibility to maintain the records ever figured out who that captives were. Even the testimony of witnesses who were in US custody, in other facilities, was deemed "not reasonably available". The process whereby witnesses availability was determined was: For one of the Tribunal to send a request to the US State Department; The request to the State Department asked them to send a request to the Washington embassy of the country where the witness lived. The request to the embassy asked the country's diplomatic staff to request permission from the country's civil service to contact the witness, and to enlist the help of the country's civil service, to locate the witness's contact information. Not even one of these requests netted a reply. Not one. Not even when the country the witness was a citizen of was the United States.
Your Louisiana prisoners get to call for documentary evidence in their defense.	Guantanamo captives are allowed to call for any documentary evidence they think might help them prove that they were not enemy combatants. But their Tribunal's Presidents had the authority to rule that those documents were "not relevant". When the Tribunal's Presidents ruled that a document was relevant, the Tribunal's President then made a determination as to whether the document was "reasonably available". The only documents that I remember being produced at the Tribunal were letters that captives had received while in Guantanamo. Numerous captives asked for highly relevant documents, like their passports, which they knew were in the Guantanamo evidence locker, because their interrogators showed them these documents, their passports, and other travel documents, during their interrogations. Yet the Tribunal staff were routinely unable to access these documents.
No Louisiana Prisoner was held in detention because his name was "on a list".	Hundreds of captives faced the allegation that their name, or "known alias", was found on a suspicious list. Several of the captives were alleged to have had their names, or known aliases, listed on an internet website whose stated goal was to lobby for the captives' release. Sanity check time! From this description this internet web site could have been some completely legitimate site, like Amnesty International! Other captives faced the allegation that they were found on a list of captives known to have spent time in Pakistani custody. Sanity check time! Circular reasoning. "Our proof that you are associated with terrorism is that someone learned you were in our custody, becasuse you were once accused of having a tie to terrorism." If you are going to hold a guy, for five years, based on the allegation that you found his name on a suspicious list, the least you can do is make sure you spell his name consistently. Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari faced the allegation that his name was found on a suspicious list. The documents in his unclassified dossier spelt his name six different ways. So, which spelling matched the name on the suspicious list? Faiz Al Kandari also faced the allegation that his name was found on a suspicious list. Unlike his partial namesake he faced many other serious allegations, including that he was Osama bin Laden's "spiritual advisor". I'll bet you a six pack, that if this list is ever made public, it will turn out that there was only one Kuwaiti named "Al Kandari" on this suspicious list, and that it referred to Faiz Al Kandari, not Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari.
No Louisian Prisoner is in prison because he owned a Casio watch.	At least eighteen of the Guantanamo captive were held, at least in part, because they were alleged to be wearing a Casio F91W digital watch. The transcripts record only one captive's Personal Representative challenged the credibility of holding a captive for ownership of one of the most popular watches ever produced. Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari also faced the allegation that he was captured wearing a Casio F91W. His was one of the first transcripts I read. His was the first transcript I came across where the captive was accused of owning a Casio watch. So, what is the first thing you would do if you read that allegation? Do a google image search on "Casio F91W" right? Thirty seconds later I have several dozen pictures of Casio F91Ws. I realize I used to own one of these watches, about twenty years ago. I recognize that it is one of the cheapest, simplest, digital watches. Then I return to reading the transcript. Al Kandari starts to describe his watch. Guess what, his description is very different from the cheap, simple, no frills, Casio F91W. His watch calculated when to tell the wearer it was the time for prayers. It would calculate this from the user's location. The owner would enter his or her geographic location, by longitude and latitude, or by choosing a nearby city from a list of cities... Not only would the watch ring out the call to prayers. But it would point to mecca. Technically cool. That would be the Casio Prayer Watch. Do a google search on it, and you will find it costs about six times what a F91W costs. And you will find that it looks totally dissimilar to the F91W.

You aren't the first person to suggest an omnibus list for the also-rans. I told that other person I thought the idea was unworkable.

I declined to work on it, when he made the suggestions, because I had doubts as to how useful it would be; I knew it would be a terrific amount of work; I didn't see anyone stepping forward to assist me in this large task; and I had something else on my plate.

But when I had a couple of dozen spare hours I took a crack at changing the form of the list of captives I keep in my rough notes. I didn't finish. When the omnibus list got to be over 400K long it just became too painful to edit on my older computer. dUser:Geo Swan/working/total official names as of May 15 Geo Swan 22:01, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Geo Swan is a tad more "definitive" in his feelings on the matter, but I still agree with him at least 95% - at the end of the day, these are people who the major world power are claiming represent some of the most dangerous people in the world, far beyond the simple "POWs" held during other wars, these are people for whom the war was declared over in 2004, or are being held indefinitely until what...terrorism is extinct? Quite simply, they are being touted as the "ultimate" villains - and if that's the case, then somebody, either Robert Fisk or Geo Swan, should be documenting why exactly that is, for each of them. We certainly have articles on more than 500 Nazis, after all. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 22:50, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate the passion of Geo Swan and the amplification of Sherurcij. I am astounded that we have articles "on more than 500 Nazis." This seems a little much to me. I assumed that biographical articles were limited to historically significant or nationally known or by some other criteria notable. I will do more research, but it seems to me that out of those 500+ Nazis, at least 300 must have had a relatively minor role in history. Anyway, enough about my perceived issues with Wikipedia.

I can see the logic behind Sherurcij statement "these are people who the major world power are claiming represent some of the most dangerous people in the world, far beyond the simple "POWs" held during other wars." If these individuals are that dangerous, to be held by the U.S. governement indefinitely, they are certainly notable. I appreciate your assumption that my question was in godd faith, as it certainly was.

I am not certain that I agree with Geo Swan's assertion that "if authoritative souces documented the improper incarcerations of a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand Louisiana prisoners, they would all, potentially, merit coverage in the Wikipedia." However, I may take a look at the few cases I know about, look for authoritative sources (unfortunately much of the information comes from the prisoners' own stories, which never came out at trial), and make a determination regarding whether to contribute a few articles.

Regardless, thanks again for your passionate yet rational responses. Editors, like the two of you, demonstrate how people of vastly different viewpoints can reach consensus. This should be an example for all Wikipedians. 66.192.126.3 04:52, 10 May 2007 (UTC) Just wanted to drop back by to note that I finally signed up as a user. Ursasapien 07:54, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Global perspectives task force

Hi Geo Swan! Given your interests and experience in the encyclopedic community, I wanted to draw your attention to a task force I'm proposing as part of the CSB group. Basically, we want to make sure that Americanism doesn't inadvertently creep into important issues and that global vantages are effectively represented. Do you have any interest in participating? Or in indicating your support? Any advice/thoughts you have would be appreciated.Benzocane 17:16, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments Geo Swan! Once we get a couple of more interested editors, the next step might be setting up a task force page and then tagging articles we feel are in need of global perspective improvement. Then we can begin work in earnest! Benzocane 18:57, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Geo Swan. We've a rudimentary task force page up. If you'd like to sign up, even if only to indicate your support for the effort, that would be appreciated. Regardless, keep up the fine work. Benzocane 19:53, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Khadr family

Hi, I understand that you are one of the main contributors to articles about Al Qaeda and Guantanamo detainees. I just watched thedocumentary Son of al Qaeda in one of my college classes and was looking at our articles on the Khadr family and its members. I am wondering if you have any information on what has been happening to them since 2005. It would be good to have further updates on them in our articles. Academic Challenger 07:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Image:SolarPort ThurayaCharging 306346.jpg

Hello Geo Swan, an automated process has found an image or media file tagged as nonfree media, such as fair use. The image (Image:SolarPort ThurayaCharging 306346.jpg) was found at the following location: User:Geo Swan/working/Guantanamo articles I started. This image or media will be removed per statement number 9 of our non-free content policy. The image or media will be replaced with Image:NonFreeImageRemoved.svg , so your formatting of your userpage should be fine. The image that was replaced will not be automatically deleted, but it could be deleted at a later date. Articles using the same image should not be affected by my edits. I ask you to please not readd the image to your userpage and could consider finding a replacement image licensed under either the Creative Commons or GFDL license or released to the public domain. Thanks for your attention and cooperation. User:Gnome (Bot)-talk 19:12, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Afghan training camp

I ran across the suggestion you made to change the name of this article - I have done so accordingly as there was no objections to your suggestions. Since you seem to have contributed heavily to the topic, I wanted to run another idea by you. It seems to me most of the individual camp articles are for "minor camps" with very little individual information available about them. I think it would make more sense to merge these camps into a list on the main article rather than splitting each into an individual article. I would have just gone ahead and merged them but given your amount of contribution I wanted to see what you thought, first. Arkyan &#149; ^(talk) 16:21, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the name change.

Thanks for discussing the merge with me first.

First, let me say that I know that I don't wp:own, can't wp:own articles, no matter how much effort I put into them. I made my contributions under the GFDL, and that means the future use of that material is up to the wikipedia's collective.

But I do appreciated you asking for my opinion first. Here goes.

One of my biggest frustrations with the wikipedia is that there are a number of competing underlying design philosophies. Rather than having fora where proponents could have sober rational discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of these underlying design philosophies, proponents generally just fight it out in other fora, like the discussion fora, without making any serious attempt to discuss strengths and weaknesses.

• This virtually guarantees an ongoing deadlock. This virtually guarantees that no compromise will be reached.
• This seems to be working to entrench the proponents of the different competing underlying design philosophies in their positions, without any further examination of the strengths of the alternate philosophies, or the weaknesses of their own

At the risk of name-dropping I worked, as an intern, for Ted Nelson, one of the two guys credited with inventing the concept of a hypertext. Nelson is highly critical of the internet, as it stands today. One of the most attractive features of his vision of the ideal hypertext system was that links would be bidirectional. Links on the internet are unidirectional. There is no equivalent of "what links here".

Excessive merging throws away the power of bidirectional links. When articles are small and focussed the list of "what links here" is more meaningful than with huge, omnibus articles

Merging and redirecting small articles to larger omnibus articles is a disservice to our readers, because

1. it means that readers who click on a link to a specific article will end up at a different article, where it will be more work to find the information they thought they were linking to;
2. excessive merging opens up the possibility that another wikipedian might decide that some of all of the material that got merged in, during the merge and redirection, is redundant, or out of place. Then, when a reader clicks on the link they can search, and search, and not find the information they have a right to expect.
3. Some mergists are so strongly wedded to what they apparently perceive as the aesthetic attractions of merging that they will ignore logic or reason in their pursuit of this goal.

May I direct your attention to the deletion forum for There's a sucker born every minute?

Out of control mergists there kept insisting that the article should be merged and redirected to the article about American showman P.T. Barnum.

• They insisted that the article be merged to P.T. Barnum because poorly informed writers were sure Barnum coined the phrase. Barnum didn't coin the phrase.
• Over half of the links to this very common phrase that a web search turns up don't even mention Barnum. Redirecting to Barnum would have represented a terrific disservice as readers who were unfamiliar with the meaning of the idiom, who looked it up on the wikipedia, would instead find themselves at a biography of a 19 century personality. Sure, they could guess that there was a reason they were redirected Barnum. Some readers might figure that out, and search within the Barnum article for the phrase. This is a lot of extra work -- wasted work. And it might be totally pointless, because someone else might have decided that the material didn't belong in Barnum's article, maybe because he never coined the phrase, and deleted it.

For what it is worth of the half of the links to the phrase turned up by web searches that do mention Barnum some attributed the phrase to Barnum. Others merely wrote that it is often attributed to Barnum, or reasonable equivalent. In my subjective judgement there was a marked difference between the articles that actually attributed the phrase to Barnum, and those that merely stated it was often attributed to him. The quality of the research on other issues addressed in those links seemed much more reliable in the articles whose authors exercised caution in attributing the phrase to Barnum.

This {{afd}} was a near run To my opinion this shows the dangers of not having proper fora where the strengths and weaknesses of the different design philosophies could be discussed.

Returning to the camps for which we have little information, at this time... As I see it we have enought information for them to stand on their own. I don't see any advantages to merging them. They should all link to Afghan training camp. Thanks again for rnaming that article. I'll check now to make sure they do link to Afghan training camp.

Cheers! Geo Swan 22:15, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

AFD

Hi! I thought you should know about Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jabir Hasan Muhamed Al Qahtani. Cheers, Punkmorten 17:36, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

And now Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Walid Said Bin Said Zaid. Punkmorten 09:29, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

"Wikipedians against notability"

I wasn't even aware of that category until you brought it to may attention, It apparently was automatically applied by a user box on my page. The box apparently carried a meaning that I didn't intend. I do believe in notability, which is to say that I believe that not everyone's biography (and by extension companies, bands, organizations, and so forth) belongs in Wikipedia. It's not something about which I plan on posting my policy. It's a bit like pornography: I know it when I see it.

Could you be more specific in your question? I assume it is as a result of an {{nn}} tag I applied to an article in which you are involved somehow. Realkyhick 20:11, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I wrote a short treatise on my views of notability in regard to Guantanamo detainees on Talk:Muhammad Jayid Hadi Al-Subai'i. You may link to this wherever you wish. Realkyhick 03:57, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

It works better when I click on the "Save" button. :-) Realkyhick 06:07, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Jabir Hasan Muhamed Al Qahtani AfD

Hi Geo, thanks for the note re the above AfD. I see it was originally listed on 21 May by User:Tempshill, but I can't find any record of it being formally closed. Perhaps I've missed it somewhere, but this looks more like an ongoing unclosed discussion rather than a relisting. If that is the case then Akradecki's opinion is really no more than a belated addition past the normal 5 day discussion period. It was pretty lightly trafficked and could quite properly have been closed as a no consensus keep. In such cases it's not unreasonable for it to be re-opened for further discussion fairly quickly, but to do so AND weigh in with an opinion is pretty poor form in my opinion, although not prohibited by policy. (I say that after just coming back from a long break - better go and read the policy page again to check it's pretty much as it used to be :-)

I would be inclined to close it after another day or two, but my opinions on the topic are well known, so to avoid COI issues I will not close this personally. I will make comment on the AfD and the relisting / non closure issue in due course though, and drop a line to Akradecki. It's open to any editor of course to open, close or relist AfD's, not just Admins.

Hope things are well with you. Cheers. --Cactus.man ✍ 19:27, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi there

Want to thank you for your comments at MCA. I keep having similar debates regarding policy. Maybe you want to look here and comment since I am trying to get this settled and prevent rehashing on every controversial topic. If you don't want to that's OK. Cheers. Nomen Nescio^{Gnothi seauton} 00:18, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Would you mind taking a look at command responsibility and Military Commissions Act? Mister TDC seems to insist on removing sourced material. Nomen Nescio^{Gnothi seauton} 15:54, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

It would be unadvisable for you to solicit aid for an edit war. I responded to Geo Swan’s comments on the discussion page. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 15:58, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

re: what is up?

Hi. The reasoning for the name change of this category is that many of these politicians do not call themselves Afghan. Latif Pedram for example uses the term Afghanistani for citizens of Afghanistan. The reasoning for this is that the term Afghan is a synonym for Pashtuns and 58% of the country is not Pashtun and many of these politicians are not Pashtuns. So solve this problem Politicians of Afghanistan I think is the best name for that category. And the reason I did not move some of them is because the ones left over are not politicians, many of them are just detainees and/ Taliban. --Behnam 18:38, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Afghan == Pashtun? Really? I didn't know that.

I think I put Category:Afghan politicians on some articles that are about individuals who are alleged to have been Taliban commanders. Also, IIRC, alleged commanders from other militias.

Are you from Afghanistan, or one of the neighboring nations? I have seen that there are nationalists who want to unite the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Paksitan into a single Pashtun nation. Are there nationalists from other areas of Afghanistan, who would like to split off other independent nations.

Cheers! Geo Swan 19:16, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Guantanamo

Not sure I'd take the "leap of logic" and 'assume' that we have the names of everybody in Guantanamo, though at the same time you're right, they have a history of "typos" in detainee's names. By the way, I'd appreciate your help on the (poorly-named) Invasion of Afghanistan prisoner escapes article. Not sure if you saw in the news today, but an "escapee from Bagram" has turned up in an online video. Only trouble is, all news accounts (presumably based on the AP) give his name as Abu Yahi al-Libi...who you'll notice was not listed as one of the four escapees from 2005 in that article.

I get more confused though, when trying to decide if this is a reference to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, which would make his appearance very "interesting". It's interesting to note that Ibn al-Shaykh "the CIA interrogations of Omar al-Faruq [revealed] al-Faruq confessed that he was, in fact, al-Qaeda's senior representative in Southeast Asia. Then came an even more shocking confession: according to the CIA document, al-Faruq said two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to 'plan large-scale attacks against U.S. interests - now Omar al-Faruq *is* on the list of 2005 escapees from Bagram.

So what I'm trying to wrap my head around, if this is the same al-Libi, which circumstantial evidence is suggesting it probably is...the Associated Press has just completely missed the fact that this is the guy whose confession-under-torture led us into the Iraq War in the first place?

Any help you could dig around for, would be greatly appreciated. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 20:14, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

When the fourteen "high-value detainees" were sent to Guantamo last September I was surprised that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi wasn't on the list. I came across a reference a few months ago that said he had been repatriated.

No, I didn't see the reference to the Bagram escapee.

I would like to start a list of Bagram captives. One of the victims of false allegations arising from the same rocket attack that lead to Dilawar being beaten to death requested a witness. The Tribunal determined that the witness was held in Bagram, but the Bagram commandant couldn't be bothered to have someone take a statement from him.

Regarding the interrogations. I am inclined to take Abu Zubaydah's testimony at face value. He said he was the guy who decided whether to accept trainees at the Khalden training camp, and then arrange their travel. He said that Khalden was not associated with either the Taliban or al Qaeda, that it dated back to the battle against the Soviets. He said that his only meeting with Bin Laden came after the Taliban shut down Khalden and some other independent camps down in 2000. He was aware that the Taliban hadn't shut down bin Laden's camp, so he asked bin Laden to use his influence with the Taliban to get them to reopen the camps. He testified that he was very surprised to learn that, not only wouldn't bin Laden use his influence to reverse the decision to shut down the other camps bin Laden was responsible for the decision in the first place.

There to items that independent confirmation for this aspect of Abu Zubaydah's testimony.

Several other Guantanamo captives refer to the controversy over shutting down Khalden. Occam's razor. It is unreaonsble to posit that these captives lied, just to support Abu Zubaydah's story.

I watched Abdurahman Khadr's one and only press conference, the day he arrived back in Canada. He was about 19 years old. He was asked if he was taught to use an AK-47 in Afghanistan. Yes, he answered, of course, a kid learning to use an AK-47 in Afghanistan was as common as a kid learning to play Hockey iin Canada. Then he was asked if he had attended an al Qaeda training camp. "No," he replied, "he did not attend an al Qaeda training camp. He attended an al Qaeda related camp." Well the press went wild. But this confirms Abu Zubaydah's account, because Khadr attended Khalden.

Which is not to say Abu Zubaydah wasn't a criminal. He had asked one of the Canadian residents to get him five Canadian passports. He tried to explain that he wouldn't have been guilty of using false travel documents because these would be legitimate passports, issued by Canada. He didn't regard forging new names on the passports to be using false travel documents.

Quite a few of the captives who spent time in Europe had this same lack of appreciation about forged documents.

One of the other mysteries -- why so few references to drugs. I only came across one captive who acknowledged growing opium. About a dozen captives were foreign drug smugglers. I suspect that the captives were released prior to the start of the CSRT, or who didn't participage contain additional drug smugglers. I suspect there are countries whose citizens think they are better off being suspected a terrorism, in Guantnamo, than back home, as a known drug smuggler. Geo Swan 21:22, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Not sure if you already knew this or not, but Khadr's sister, Zaynab Khadr is fairly quick to respond to eMails about the family. Wouldn't suggest going for the whole "investigative reporting" thing, but if you'd like any details cleared up about any of the Khadrs, that might be a good place to turn. If you don't have her address, I can dig around in my address book (My, what would CSIS say if they seized my computer, filled with half-translated documents captured in Iraq/Afghanistan, details on Guantanamo captives and AQ leaders, phonecalls to people held under security certificates, eMails to the Khadrs...let's hope I'm still allowed on airplanes :P Anyways, al-Libi's been releasing videos for the past year (six, I heard somewhere, in the past year), but this is the first time I've heard him referred to as a Bagram escapee. You'll also note a Libyan, *not* named al-Libi, was originally falsely reported as escaping...only furthering my confusion. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 22:31, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

{{afd}}

Wow, I didn't realize just how many names there were in that list, and it must have been quite the effort to put that all together! I do agree that having every single one displayed on a single list would not be a good solution - such a huge list/article is a bad idea.

Have you considered going with the tabular list, but breaking it up into sections? It's fairly common to see very large lists broken up into more manageable lists, usually with an alphabetical division. For example, a "List of Guantanamo detainees (A-D)" and so on. I'm not sure where you'd put the divisions, but something like that might satisfy both sides of the equation. It's unlikely that people will be willing to support a seperate article for each individual detainee, especially since so little information and "proof of notability" is available for them, and for the fact that much of the information in each article is not about the detainee but about the overall problem of the detaining.

If splitting the large table into smaller, more manageable lists is an agreeable solution to you let me know, I'd be willing to assist as much as I am able. Arkyan &#149; ^(talk) 20:36, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

There are several hundred detainees at the camp, why is Walid Said Bin Said Zaid significant or worth noting? Usually when there is an article on Wiki it gives more indepth info on the said person. All the article is doing is introducing the subject and the arguments for and against his release. I have read the article which is why I'm concerned. Using the format on the article, in theory, you can have an article for the countless thousands of political prisoners or controversial prisoners throughout the world. What has he done or what is his background to make him stand out above every other detainee? I understand why names such as Abdullah Mehsud merit an article but I fail to see why Zaid should merit one given that there is little background on him. ----Ðysepsion † ^{Speak your mind} 22:10, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I already gave a long answer to this in User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/Guantanamo captives aren't felons and aren't POWs. In it I answered someone who compared the Guantamao captives to the felons in the Louisiana State Prison system. He said there were even some innocent men in the Louisiana State Prison system. I asked him:

"You pointed out that some of the Louisiana prisoners are also considered to be innocent. Before I address your comparison, are you suggesting that Louisiana prisoners, who might be innocent, or who might otherwise be held in detention in breach of the law, do not merit coverage in the wikipedia, even if articles could be written about them from a neutral point of view, which cite authoritative, reliable sources? I am asking because I want to make sure there isn't any confusion on this point. It seems to me that if authoritative sources documented the improper incarceration of a single Louisiana prisoner, he, or she, would merit coverage in the wikipedia..."

Let me ask you a similar question before I address your question: Do you really think that if there is a political prisoners, about whom there are authoritative, reliable sources, he or she doesn't merit coverage in the wikipedia? Here in Canada, over the last couple of decades, we have had a couple of dozen well known cases of men who were wrongfully accused of murder. There are plenty of verifiable, authoritative sources to support creating valid wikipedia articles, that conform to WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER. I haven't checked. But I expect that the most well known of them have articles. I would support a wikipedia article about every one of them. I would support a wikipedia article for every one for whom there are verifiable, authoritative source that would support a an article that conforms to WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER.

I believe the article about Said Zaid fully conforms to WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER.

Yes, in answer to your question, I would support articles about thousands, or tens of thousands, of political prisoners, if there were verifiable, authoritative sources that would support an article that fully conforms to WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER.

Why not? Geo Swan 01:49, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

But aren't I violating the WP:BIO policy? I was writing a longer version to this reply. But I have run out of time today. So I clipped my start at a several paragraph answer.

Here is the short answer. While a lot of people refer to WP:BIO as a policy, it is not a policy. It is a guideline. And, if I am reading it properly, whatever authority it has derives from the real policies WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, and WP:VER -- policies I believe I am fully compliant with.

My long answer went into detail about how unreliable a yardstick notability is, and how ripe with hidden assumption, hidden biased POV, it is. No offense. Very briefly, those who accept the conditions and treatment of the Guantanamo captives fully complies with US and international law, as the Bush administration claim, are, in my experience, those who think that the their treatment is not unprecedented, but rather is mundane, unremarkable, and following in a long tradition, think it is obvious that the captives are completely non-notable. That is definitely not a neutral stand, any more than the view that Bush, Cheney, Miller are obvious War Criminals is not a neutral stand.

I refrain from injecting the view that they are obvious war criminals. And I won't let anyone else twist NPOV by inserting that. Similarly, I won't meekly agree to the suppression of material based on the hidden biased POV that they are not notable because their treatment is unremarkable.

What I think is obvious is that there is a spirited controversy over their treatment, and, yes, the allegations against them.

The Bush administration's line remains that the Guantanamo captives are "the worst of the worst". It serves the public to lay out the actual allegations against them, in detail, so readers can make up their own mind as to whether the actual allegations measure up to the description "worst of the worst".

Darn. I said I was going to be brief, and I was long winded again. I saved my unfinished longer explanation of the hidden bias in regarding their treatment as unremarkable, in case you want it.

Cheers! Geo Swan 01:49, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Captured Lists

I just deleted it, along with the redirects: "Captured lists of al qaeda suspect's names" . and "List of al Qaida mujahidin, Pakistan" . There are quite a large number of links-I think I removed them all correctly. I am impressed at your magnificent work here on this topic & I greatly respect your dedication. DGG 23:59, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Question on my RFA

Thank you for the question you posted on my RFA! I hope I articulated my thoughts and feelings on the issue clearly. If there is anything else you want to know, or perhaps I was not entirely clear, please, let me know! --Ozgod 01:02, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Walid Said Bin Said Zaid

• Delete for soapboxing. Notability not established within article. Eddie.willers 03:21, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Please explain which passages of this article you think are soapboxing. -- Geo Swan 13:04, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
    • From 'Walid Said Bin Said Zaid' to 'Afghan people' - the entire article reads as something written by a POV Soapboxer. Eddie.willers 02:01, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
      • No offense, but this is not a serious answer. From the very first word to the last? Over my last 12,000 edits about once every so often someone complains that a contribution of mine violated POV. The last timeI had a serious respondent, who was willing to explain themselves, was last November. See the discussion. User:Geo talk#Which is NPOV? "Bush administration" or "US Government". Trouble is, the most common suggested replacement, "US Government", is highly POV -- it implies an agreement between all three branches of the US government that does not exist. Proof? The US judicial branch struck down various aspects of the executive branch's detainee policy in Rasul v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and elsewhere. And the US Congress imposed limit in the Detainee Treatment Act.
      • You have made a very serious complaint here. I deserve a serious specific answer. Geo Swan 11:59, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi I'm moving the discussion on the above to your talk page as we appear to be straying in to areas that, in my opinion, have no place on an afd discussion page.

OK.

In response to my comment that the above article was 'POV soapboxing' you demanded that you "...deserve a serious specific answer".

All I can really say to that is, 'then go pick it from the bush where you think it grows'. As far as I am concerned, I have given my opinion in good faith, with civility and without a personal attack on the author of the article being discussed. Such opinion may not be to the author's liking - tough, get over it!

I do deserve a serious specific answer. Your answer, (paraphrasing), "from the first word to the last word", is, IMO, an insult. Better to just plain not answer at all than to give an insulting answer like that one. I am very surprised to learn you think you can descibe it as "good faith".

I, too, have had articles deleted that I considered worthy of inclusion in ths project. I respected the opinions of my fellow admins - flippant and serious - and did not seek to disrupt the consensus - even when I didn't like it its outcome. Whilst I wouldn't challenge your right to take the afd process with due seriousness, I do believe that such statements as "I deserve a serious specific answer" are coming close towards displaying an unwarranted emotionalism that offers your case no favours. Eddie.willers 12:38, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

WRT to respecting the opinions of fellow wikipedians -- wikipedians shouldn't take stands, make serious accusation, they won't stand behind. It today is a day when they don't have the time or energy to stand behind their comments, then today is a day they should refrain from participing in {{afd}}, or using their administrator powers. WRT fellow administrators, although I am about the 500th most prolific wikipedia contributor I am not an administrator.

I am very sorry to hear that you have been the victim of thoughtlessness, or worse, in previous {{afd}} discussions. It can be a viper-pit. Anytime you want to file a request for undeletion let me know, and I will take a look and see if I agree.

However, your previous bad experiences of thoughtlessness, or worse, in no way entitle you to make irresponsible accusations of violations of WP:NOT#SOAP. I bend over backwards to keep my POV from trickling into my contributions to article space. See User:Geo talk#Which is NPOV? "Bush administration" or "US Government" to see how seriously I take others concerns about my POV.

I continue to feel I deserve a serious explanation, or retraction, from you.

Cheers! Geo Swan 13:35, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

• • Comment. Thanks for the response you had posted on my User Talk Page. I don't think there's any wrong-footedness afoot (ahem!). You have behaved in a perfectly reasonable manner to my somewhat insouciant curmudgeonliness - living in a country where the mother tongue is not my own means I occasionally suffer a lack of linguistically playful stimulation! Eddie.willers 17:15, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Jabir Hasan Muhamed Al Qahtani again

Hi Geo, I see the article, rather bizarrely, has been deleted. Quite how Gnangarra determined a consensus to delete from the discussion is beyond my ability to comprehend. I suspect you may be putting this up to DRV. If so, could I ask a favour of you? I'm working at present with only half a connection and half a PC due to a fried motherboard on my main PC. So I'm using an old box (Win 98 and dial up connection - my, how we forget how SLOW things were back then!!). If you do put it up for review could you drop a note on my talk page or e-mail me via the Userpage link as I certainly think the deletion is flawed and should be overturned. Thanks. --Cactus.man ✍ 05:10, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

		The Special Barnstar
		For your exceptional and tireless efforts to document Guantanamo Bay related topics. Please keep up the fantastic work. --Cactus.man ✍ 10:29, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. I'm back up and running now at Warp Factor 11 - ( I took the opportunity to add more memory, a new graphics card and extra HD storage :-) I've also added User:Geo Swan/working/Guantanamo related articles which have been nominated for deletion to my watchlist to keep a better eye on this important material. In the meantime, enjoy the barnstar. Hopefully it will lift your spirits. Cheers. --Cactus.man ✍ 10:29, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Response

The reason I nominated the article was not because I took issue with the content, but because it does not constitute as a biography. The article is not about the person, but the circumstances he is in - not his life as a whole or what makes him notable. I can certainly see you turning this into a WikiProject (if you have not already). I apologize if any of my comments came off as particularly callous in regards to the AFD - it was a long stressful week last week and the RFA - poor timing on my part. --Ozgod 03:06, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't understand your reply. You aren't questioning whether the material merits coverage on the wikipedia?

When you nominated the article did you follow the "what links here", to al Qaeda guest house, Karachi, and to al Farouq training camp. When I have time I want to start an article that collates the references to all the suspicious lists the Guantanamo captives are alleged to be listed on.

Said Zaid is alleged to be listed on one of the most interesting, "the list of 324 Arabic names". There are a dozen or more captives alleged to be on this specific list, which, in another captives allegations, is tied to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's laptop. (At the other extreme two guys faced the accusation that their names were found on an internet web-site with the stated goal of lobbying for their release! No, I am not making this up. This web-site could be as innocuous as Amnesty International. Hardly proof of a tie to terrorism.)

There are various competing underlying design philosophies at war in the wikipedia. There is nothing wrong with that. The wikipedia, however, lacks any fora where the strengths and weaknesses of these underlying design philosophies are the subject of civil, reasoned discussion. The closest thing to this essential discussion fora are the deletion fora. But, instead of civil, reasoned discussion, in my experience, {{afd}} discussions are almost always a viper-pit of incivility and close-mindedness. It is very rare to see someone actually change their minds. Take a second look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Walid Said Bin Said Zaid, and see how reluctant most of the regular {{afd}} patrollers are to actually engage in civil dialogue, or to consider, even for a moment, the possibility that they might be mistaken.

Ozgod, what I meant to encourage you to do earlier, was to consider making much more use of {{prod}}, or to put your concerns on the article's talk page, unless you are totally sure the article has zero merit or room for future growth.

In my experience the {{afd}} discussions have been in breach of WP:CIV and WP:BITE for so long that a kind of {{afd}} subculture has grown up, where you are regarded as some kind of sissy if you complain about being subjected to abuse.

Cheers! Geo Swan 15:14, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Do we have articles for every innmate on death row here in the United States? I understand your dedication to this, but you created an article that is supposed to be a biography, but contains little or no biographical information other than his imprisonment. That fails to meet the guidelines for WP:Notability and WP:BIO. If he is a subsection of a larger, more encompassing article about this matter, that would be fine. But as the article stands right now, it does not an encycolpedic biography of a person who has little notability beyond imprisonment. I am sorry if this come off as harsh, I do not mean to be - just following the policy as best as I understand it. --Ozgod 15:43, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

No, the wikipedia does not have articles about every inmate on death row in the United States, or up here in Canada, where I am from.

A couple of points, whatever legitimacy WP:BIO has it derives from WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER. The guideline acknowledges this in its first paragraph. WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER are real policies, and the article is fully compliant with them. WP:BIO on the other hand is highly subjective, and very vulnerable to hidden systemic bias. See User:Resolute's suggestion that I am POV pushing and my reply. My experience is that during the almost two years I have been working on controversial articles that are related to the war on terror I have learned how to avoid wording that triggers the false perception of bias. (See the discussion above about whether "Bush administration" is more biased than "US Government") The result has been that material that might have been challenged over a concern of a biased POV in the past is now challenged over notability. Consider User:Resolute's challenge. It seems crystal clear to me that although he is almost certainly well-meaning and sincere in expressing the concern that my contributions reflect a biased point of view, his own words show that his concerns over "notability" are irredeemably drenched in his own POV -- namely that the treatment of Guantanamo captives, like Said Zaid is mundane, ordinary, business-as-usual.

This is a POV. A highly biased one, IMO. And a perception of his "notability" that is based on the POV that everything is mundane, ordinary, business-as-usual does not, IMO, comply with WP:NPOV.

IMO there is a missing section from WP:NOT -- namely WP:NOT#wikipedia is not a hagiography. It is not the job of the wikipedia to mindlessly echo Bush administration spokesmen, who describe the treatment of Guantanamo captives as humane, ordinary, perfectly legal, business-as-usual, and who describe the captives as the "worst-of-the-worst". When the actual allegations are examined, in detail, an interested reader can form their own opinion as to the extent those allegations, and the captive's testimony support the statements of the Bush administration spokesmen.

I too do not mean to be harsh. I too am stating my understanding of policy.

During World War 2 the Roosevelt and Mackenzie King administrations, in the USA and Canada, told citizens it was essential to their nation's security to intern hundreds of thousands of Americans and Canadians of Japanese descent. With the exception of the most extreme elements of the American right, this is now recognized as a terrible human rights disaster, and as a deeply flawed wasteful policy, because, with a very few exceptions, all the citizens of Japanese descent, and residents of Japanese descent, were completely loyal.

Thought experiment: If the wikipedia had been around in 1942 let me suggest that apologists for the policy of interning citizens of Japanese descent would be using all the same arguments about "notability", as critics of the Guantanamo articles are using. And, forgive me, let me suggest that they would advance the argument you just advanced, that the interned citizens of Japanese descents were just prisoners, not really different from convicted felons. I thought I had already rebutted, in detail, the argument that the Guantanamo captives were just prisoners, like convicted felons.

So, if the wikipedia had been around during World War 2, would you like the record to show that it had adequately balanced coverage of the view that the citizens of Japanese descent were not threats, and did not deserve being rounded up and held without charge? Or would you be happy if the record showed that the wikipedia had caved in to pressure from wikipedians who preferred to have the wikipedia merely parrot the official government line? -- Geo Swan 16:29, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

section break

Seeing as how you involved me in this discussion, I will add a response. I made no claim that the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay is "ordinary" or "mundane." Rather, the fact that you are attempting to assign a POV to me that is opposite to yours, given that you and I are on the opposite sides of this deletion debate only serves to reinforce that the existance of these articles are a means to push your POV. You obviously feel that the treatment of prisonters there is poor, and you almost certantly are right. This is, however, not relevant to this specific deletion debate. The controversy surrounding the treatment of prisoners is already highlighted in articles like Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and very likely others as well. The condition of the camp, and the treatment of the prisoners as a whole is not relevant to the individual biography that we are debating. What sets Walid Said Bin Said Zaid apart from other prisoners at the camp? What has been written about him? Why is he an individual so outstanding that he needs a separate article for himself? This is the primary concern I have here. The idea that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are being mistreated is fair game, and the idea that what happens in the camp as a whole is notable is absolutely correct. There is no evidence that this individual stands out in this regard. As such, there is no reason why he should have an article on Wikipedia. Creating strawman arguments, and villainizing those that disagree with you is not a valid alternative to establishing this individual's notability. Resolute 17:31, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Okay, my apologies. I wrote the above while you were writing on the deletion fora. I thought you were blowing me off -- ignoring valid points I made.

You seem to be arguing that the coverage in Guantanamo Bay detention camp is sufficient. Please explain more fully. There is absolutely no way even a one percent of the notable information the transcripts reveal about the captives could be put into Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

I don't understand why every Guantanamo captive, every political prisoner, or every convect around whom there is a controversy over whether they were wrongfully convicted shouldn't have an article, provided it can be written from a neutral point of view, based on authoritative, verifiable sources. That would emcompass about half the Guantanamo captives. Didn't Jimbo Wales go on record saying he didn't see why every episode of the Simpsons, and ever character who appeared in any Simpson's episode couldn't have an article devoted to them, provided it complied with WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER? Now just because he is the founding director doesn't make his word the final word. But, in this particular case I fully agree with him.

Will we cover every political prisoner, and every convict around whom there is a controversy they were wrongfully accused? We might run out of interested wikipedians to carry that out first. But that is no reason to remove articles we do have, that comply with WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER.

Is Said Zaid more notable than other Guantanamo captives. No. Are you arguing that he shouldn't have an article about him because other Guantanamo captives don't have articles? Well, if the DoD released the transcript from the CSRT, or the transcript from their ARB, or the Summary of Evidence memos prepared for either the CSRT or ARB, or any combination thereof, I already started an article about them. So he isn't getting preferential treatment.

Doesn't it need more organization, list articles that correlate captives whose stories have related elements. Sure it does, and some of those articles, like allegations that Tablighi Jamaat is tied to terrorism, al Qaeda guest house, Faisalabad, al Qaeda guest house, Karachi, Casio F91W exist, and about two dozen other. I am working on additional ones. Geo Swan 18:15, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I am neither arguing that the level of detail in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp is sufficient or is not sufficient. I am stating that the treatment of prisoners as a whole is not relevant to this individual's article. That is a separate discussion for a separate article. The question is whether this individual's history allows him to stand out as being notable. I could not find a single google news result mentioning his name, and the only reliable mentions I can find of him on a general google search are related to the lists you cite in his article. As I have already stated on the AfD, I do not consider those to be sufficient to establish notability per WP:RS, WP:NOT, WP:N and WP:BIO.

Interesting you should mention the Simpsons, and Jimbo's comments. Putting aside the obvious WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument, it should be noted that not every Simpsons character has their own article. The characters that stand out, such as Bart Simpson and Otto Mann have thier own articles. The bit players, however, are confined to articles like List of recurring characters from The Simpsons and List of one-time characters from The Simpsons. To bring this back to the current discussion, all evidence points to Said Zaid being a bit character, not a main character. As such, I do not believe he warrants his own article.

Can you show me any controversy directly related to this prisoner? What has been written about him directly? What makes him standout? The wider ramifications of the Guantanamo Bay dispute are beyond the scope of this individual's article. Resolute 19:20, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: I'd appreciate an acknowledgement.

Yes, I have read your argument, and no, I still do not find it changes my mind. I did not define what type of prisoner Walid Said Bin Said Zaid was, I stated that simply being a prisoner is no sign of notability. Only the lead statement of that article is about Walid, the rest of the article reads like an essay that has questionable relevance in a biography. IMO, there is no assertion of notability for this individual, thus I maintain my delete vote. Regards, Resolute 13:31, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, thanks for the acknowledgement.

I remain perplexed, as I said on the {{afd}} why those who favor deletion do not regard the allegations against him as being "about him".

I asked this question of User:nick Mallory: [9]

"I am not saying this to be sarcastic. I honestly want to know. Are you really saying that if I had inserted the phrase '...is notable because...' somewhere in the article you would not have agreed that it should be deleted? Okay, so what if I had said '...he is notable because he is being held under conditions that many legal scholars and human rights workers have called a violation of the Geneva Conventions?'"

Cheers! Geo Swan 13:54, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

AHMED AND RASUL LIE LAB

This is a response to your question:

"If this can be cited to a verifiable, authoritative source, of course it belong. Do you have a verifiable, authoritative source?

"Cheers! Geo Swan 18:27, 5 June 2007 (UTC)"

Hi

Yes, it is here:

This is a review in the left of centre national British newspaper, the Observer, of the television programme, which reports on its content. Bukhari 04:54, 2007 June 6

Goodness your talk page is busy...

Anyways, I just created Hassan Ghul, who I notice was mentioned on your User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/high value detainees page - and thought I'd point it out simply because it was somewhat amusing/frustrating/disheartening for me to watch the "official story" about him change a dozen times. Assuming you can accept that he's both AAI and al-Qaeda, you're left with conflicting reports whether he was a mail-runner or a "top lieutenant", whether he answered to Osama bin Laden, al-Zarqawi or KSM, whether the "Hassan Ghul documents" were even found on him, or at a safehouse in Baghdad more than 100 miles away in a completely unrelated operation...then you get the fun of him being a "ghost detainee" - or the niggling doubts about if he even ever existed or was another Nurse Nayirah of sorts. In other news, just noticed you were from Toronto - we'll have to meet up for some seditious chatter over coffee some time. Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 12:29, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure who those initials are referring to - but the more the merrier. I'm fairly busy this coming week, but something some time after that (either a Thursday or Friday if you want to meet in the evening, or most other days before 4pm) would work out for me. Heh, on an amusing note, while googling the Arabic form of Hassan's name - I came across this Guardian article which quotes a (presumably different) Hassan Ghul stating Among the hundreds of recruits at a military parade last week stood Hassan Gul, 25, who happily admitted that he had previously fought under the Taliban. "I like to fight for everyone," he said with a smile. "Whichever government comes along, I will serve with it." - gotta love a soldier who just wants to kill and doesn't care who! *smiles* Sherurcij ^{(Speaker for the Dead)} 17:33, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

undeleted-

as requested on Deletion Review page, subject of course to further discussion there. DGG 20:25, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

==Arkan Mohammad Ghafil Al Karim and capitals

You reverted an edit of mine where I removed the capitals from Personal Representative. Redirects seem to work fine with lower case letters. Is there some reason that Personal Representative needs to be capitalised? It is not a proper noun. Thanks. I don't want to revert it back if you are just going to do the same. Mseliw 22:27, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

another question about the above article

If the original transcripts which you used to write the article are legal documents they are going to have many words capitalised that might not be in other contexts. I still am not convinced that those words should be capitalised. Is there someone on Wikipedia that would know more about this? I'm a newbie, so I don't know my way around very well. Thanks for any help. Mseliw 00:02, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

1. Might Personal Representative be uncapitalized in other contexts? Maybe. I am not sure what that has to do with the capitalization here.
2. Is there a capitalization expert to consult? Not that I am aware of.

In general I follow the capitalization in the original document, except for Detainee/detainee -- capitalized inconsistently in the originals -- sometimes rendered inconsistently in a single document. So I decided I would always use "detainee", when I am quoting the originals. I think consistency is important in stylistic decisions, when the initial choice was essentially an arbitrary one. When I am not quoting a DoD document I use "captive", which I believe is less POV. I have never heard anyone use "detainee" to referee to a prisoner prior to Guantanamo. Now you hear it all over the place.

The jury is still out over the seriousness with which to regard the Bush Presidency decision to ignore the USA obligations under the Geneva Conventions. I think detainee gives the process an air of legality that has not been established. When all the dust has settled those guantanamo captives who had no association with terrorism, but who the Bush Presidency's detainee polic denied a "competent tribunal", like the AR 190-8, may be regarded as kidnap victims. Captive could describe a kidnap victim, or a legitimate prisoner.

Cheers! Geo Swan 00:23, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I guess I am not making myself very clear. If you read Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters), maybe you would understand what I am concerned about. Personal Representative would be uncapitalised in any context other than a legal document. An encyclopedic entry is not a legal document and therefore words that are not proper nouns should not be capitalised. Thanks. Mseliw 13:55, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Checking Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)... So, why don't you think Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)#Titles applies? It states: "When making reference to a specific office, generally use uppercase."

Cheers! Geo Swan 20:17, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't apply. That portion (Titles) lists kings, presidents and emperors, not personal representative. And certainly not some nameless entity. You wouldn't write a sentence such as "This book is about a King. But you would write "This book is about King So-and-So. Mseliw 00:20, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

examples used in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)#Titles

examples used	notes
President Nixon	Capitalized, because he is a specific President
"De Gaulle was the French president."	Not capitalized when used in a generic context
The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair	Capitalized — a reference to a specific office

The article isn't talking about a generic personal representative. It is talking about Al Karim's Personal Representative You do realize that Personal R'epresentative is the title of an office, not merely a description of what the officer does?

No offense, but, from your writing, it seems as if you might think that the capitalization is solely due to the importance of the person holding the title. Consider "Principal Skinner", from the TV show "the Simpson's" -- a specific office holder.

Up here in Canada the most junior police officer, generally holds the title "police constable". One of these officers would be addressed as "Constable Smith" -- not "constable Smith". If my car was stolen, or vandalized, I might phone the station, and ask them to "send a constable", following Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)#Titles, because that is a generic use. But, if I was commenting on the specific officer, I would write Constable Smith, or "the Constable who took my statement", because the title referred to a specific office holder. This would be the correct usage even if I hadn't bothered to learn their name -- if they remained for me what you called a "nameless entity".

Cheers~ -- Geo Swan 09:28, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Does this Personal Representative have a name? If so, it should be used. I don't see it in the article, if I am missing it I apologise. Thank you for your clarification regarding personal representative. It used to revert to another article that described a person who acts more as an executor, and in that case personal representative would not be capitalised. I get your point about Principal Skinner, using principal as a title, instead of Mr. However, you would still use a lower case in a sentence like, "Bart went to see the principal. Mseliw 18:30, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

The names of the Personal Representatives, Recorders, Tribunal Presidents, were all redacted. A few of the officers associated with Tribunals were made public.

• James R. Crisfield was the CSRT's main legal advisor. Crisfeid is a Naval JAG officer. Part of his responsibility was to give advice to Tribunal Presidents. See [[Moazzam Begg]'s dossier for an example. Partof his responsiblity was to draft a "legal sufficiency" memo for each CSRT result. A few of the dossier have a legal sufficiency memo drafted by his assistant.
• Colonel David L. Taylor, a personnel officer, now retired, seems to have held a senior position in managing the paper work for the captives. He drafted a memo reminding interrogators that if they were going to subject a captive to a computerized voice stress analysis, they should make sure there were no records of the CVSA were kept. CVSA are officially considered unreliable. Less reliable than ordinary lie detectors. But interrogators were exploiting the captive's fear of of technology. The captive's were told that the CVSA were even more reliable than lie detector's. Taylor told the interrogators to feel free to give the catpives's CVSA, but to lose the paperwork, because he anticipated a day when the captive's might have lawyers who could subpoena the record of the CVSA, which might show they were innocent.
• Admiral James C. McGarrah was the convening authority.
• One of the Tribunal's President's names was left unredacted, in one early transcript. I have her name written down somewhere. If I am not mistaken she later served as one of the captive's defense counsels, before the Guantanamo militaary commissions.
• The official newspaper from Guantanamo has a picture of three of the OARDEC officers on a cleanup day. They are identified by name, as well as the officer who took the picture. http://www.nsgtmo.navy.mil/Gazette%20Online/individual%20pages/070330pg8.pdf

Cheers! Geo Swan 05:16, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Jabir Hasan Muhamed Al Qahtani

Sorry to see the DRV failed, but at least Gnangarra gave a detailed and plausible rationale for his deletion closure. And yes, to your unsanswered question, DRV is supposed to be about the validity of the deletion process, not the original content. Hence my rather abrupt comment to Guy who really should know better. It was encouraging to note that many who supported the closure were not against recreation of the article if there is more information, so if you need a copy of the deleted content to work on, let me know. I'm going to create a protected redirect for the article meantime as many of the commenters at the DRV suggested. If and when you construct an enlarged version, give me a shout and I'll unprotect. At least the Walid Said Bin Said Zaid article made it :) --Cactus.man ✍ 13:57, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

are you sure?

With respect to the ordering of Guantanamo detainees, I have no special knowledge or preferences. Just from strolling through wikipedia though, the Arabic name article suggests that many nations and individuals are adopting Western style naming conventions, while many Pakistani have a family or tribe name. I was merely cleaning up people that were ordered by their first name in the living people category. Most of these result from editors being unaware of any sorting scheme at all or adding a category without adding the sorting scheme. I noticed your plea to leave the sorting untouched for names of Guantanamo detainees, and I left many untouched indeed. However, I added defaultsorts when the person was addressed in the text by something else than the first name and/or some of the categories were already ordered by the apparent surname. To take your own example; this person is twice called Moqbel in the first paragraph and was already sorted by Moqbel in the specific Guantanamo categories and the inconsistency seemed merely due to people adding categories without a sorting scheme. Afasmit 23:59, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Please explain more fully

You added the category Category:Saudi Arabian terrorists to Sultan_Sari_Sayel_Al_Anazi.

Surely he is merely an alleged terrorist? He has, after all, denied the allegations.

Did you create this category?

Cheers! Geo Swan 00:10, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

No, i didnt create this category , but i was sorting the root category because it was a big mess , so i moved each one to his sub-category according to his occupation. Ammar (^Talk - ^{Don't Talk}) 00:34, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, let me repeat, shouldn't he be, at most, an alleged terrorist? -- Geo Swan 01:42, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I donno , according to being in Cuba , then yeh maybe Ammar (^Talk - ^{Don't Talk}) 02:06, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I am moving this discussion to Category talk:Saudi Arabian terrorists -- Geo Swan 07:34, 19 June 2007 (UTC)