Talk:Central Intelligence Agency

Possible nomination of article for FA status in appreciation of Howard C. Berkowitz's work

I confess that I miss User:Hcberkowitz now that he has moved on to Citizendium, where his contributions are as eclectic as they are prolific:[1] Another editor, User:Morethan3words apparently broached the subject of nominating this article for Featured Article status, and Howard replied non-commitally on his talk page: [2]. This article (and the entire set of sub-articles it wikilinks to is so vastly better than it was last Decemeber before Howard took it upon himself to overhaul them that I think it would be a nice tribute to his Wikipedia scholarship if it became an FA. That said, I would not take it upon myself to try to shepherd it through the FA process; I just don't personally want to get involved in the deliberative process of the Wikipedia community. And in his reply to User:Morethan3words, Howard points out a valid downside to the FA review process, i.e., we might have to re-fight all sorts of previously resolved conflicts about content when a new group of editors descend on the article. Still, I think it's worth doing if some activisit editor wants to take it on. I don't even maintain a watchlist, so I couldn't keep up with vandals, trolls and other assorted mischief-makers. Any takers to the idea? Plausible to deny (talk) 17:32, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree totally, I would love to see this in FA status, but there are some things that should be done before any nomination, and unfortunately some of these things I just don't have the time for right now. I asked for a peer review, which has since been archived, that you can find at the top of this page. One of the main issues that I think we need to find some concensus on, is size. One of the peer reviewers still says that this article is too massive, and I can go either way on this argument. It is massive, there's no doubt about that, but I'm not sure how much of it we can really cut down further without angering too many people, most of whom want to continue adding to this article (see above two discussions). (Morethan3words (talk) 11:41, 30 June

2008 (UTC))

I truly appreciate the sentiment, but it's really not important to me if the article becomes FA. One of the things that made me reduce my involvement in Wikipedia was a peer review of a largely unrelated article, which I had put up for peer review, hoping to get some help clarifying some hard-to-explain content. It would have been nice to have gotten some additional content, inline or linked.

No review comment addressed any of the things the article needed, in my opinion, to become better. Every comment seemed to address "pillars of Wikipedia", or Manual of Style issues. For the first, I find I really don't agree with some of the pillars, and I simply don't care about compliance with a MOS unless it improves readability.

One of the reasons I don't agree with the pillars is the inability to use experts and the bans against not only original research, but original synthesis. The structural improvements I was able to make in the CIA article, to me, were appropriate synthesis.

I do not believe an article, or series of articles, like this, can have real quality without some agreed-to structure and stability. There needs to be a commitment, for example, that the main page is essentially an index. When people are suggesting putting South Africa-specific unsourced material in the main page, there's a more fundamental problem than the relativey easy problem of spinning off organizational detail article. Ignoring the sourcing is one thing, but when the anon didn't read sufficiently to know there were regional and country-specific articles where that point would belong is a fundamental failure of the process.

I am not willing to participate in a process where one individual, without extensive discussion, splits up a hierarchy of regions into individual articles I consider non-maintainable and also ignoring a very real regional organization of the CIA.

As you put it, it would be likely people might become angry if their pet issues aren't on the front page, whether the issue is UFOs or the Worldwide Terror Matrix or Nelson Mandela. As long as that is happening, it's fruitless to try to have a rational hierarchical structure.

So, I may continue to watch, and, frankly, this note was against my better judgment. Citizendium isn't perfect, and I don't know if it's going to be a viable alternative. At this point, I'm not burning any bridges, but don't expect to see contributions to me under the present structure or (lack of) commitment to organization. For you who like the Wikipedia style of anything-goes, enjoy yourselves. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:49, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Having made the initial suggestion, I have to conclude that I agree with Howard, and thank him for briefly chiming into this discussion, despite his better instincts not to. As I said, I don't maintain a watchlist, so I hadn't even noticed the addition of a new sub-heading for Operation Cannonball until I glanced over the entrire article again for length considerations, and to see whether I wanted to try to write a summary of the investigations/commissions main heading and then work on a separate article on that subject in the sandbox to see how much shorter it made the main article. But it really is a somewhat hopeless proposition so long as Wikipedia remains "the encyclopedia that anybody can edit." I didn't really want to put the Operation Cannoball text into a Pakistan-specific article any more than I wanted to add text to an Iran-specific article, but now that the old regional structure is a thing of the past, there was no practical choice. I predict UFOs will re-appear in the main article soon. CIA once employed psychics to predict such things. Plausible to deny (talk) 19:49, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

A discussion that might have "meta-content" issues actually going beyond Wikipedia itself

Peer reviewers still think we're too big. I think present size is open for defense, but one tangible suggestion was "Could the whole 'Internal/presidential studies, external investigations and document releases' section be a sub-article?" What do we think? Any other ways to make it smaller? Should we at all? (Morethan3words (talk) 11:46, 30 June 2008 (UTC))

That could work -- as long as the rule of moving specifics to subpages is observed for all things. If presidential investigations move to a subarticle, and people fill the new space with a UFO carrying Nelson Mandela on a mission against terrorists, nothing is accomplished. Unfortunately, from my perspective, there are individual contributors who have, over a long period of time, kept increasing the amount of main page content about their pet interest no matter how much detail is in a subpage. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:03, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia needs to get on the stick and implement the features previewed in this article:

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19526226.200-wikipedia-20-%C3%A2-now-with-added-trust.html

Of course, they might deem you a "trusted editor," but not me. Ruling elites are a bear. Plausible to deny (talk) 20:17, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, that trust score thing seems off (i.e., if you're edits stay, then you get a high score, if they don't, you don't), that seems like it will encourage people to edit in uncontroversial and/or little-known areas of Wikipedia, to get their trust score up (i.e., if I make a whole bunch of edits to pages that nobody's interested in, no matter how inaccurate or proposterous, my trust score goes up because nobody bothers to revert them). Too easily manipulated, if you ask me, and can be too easily used in an argument (my trust score is 35, while yours is 20, therefore I'm right).

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Well, I certainly understand that protecting this page from POV edits is not going to be easy, or ever end, for that matter, but that doesn't really answer the question of what we should do with it now. I'm happy to work with Plausible, and Howard if he wants, to move some sections into new subpages to try and reduce this thing a little more. Another possible avenue is just to make some simple edits to make sentences more direct and concise (I haven't read the article carefully enough to really know how necessary this is, but in my experience it's always possible. Hemingway once said "if I'd had more time, I would have made it shorter", I figure the same can apply here), that might help some. If Plausible is up for it, let's start looking at sections that might be more appropriate as new articles, and maybe play with some text to see if we can be more concise without losing content. Any objections? (Morethan3words (talk) 06:59, 1 July 2008 (UTC))

I'm not sure whether I'd call one serious problem "POV edits". Some contributions on CIA-related matters are perfectly relevant to the CIA, but, if there is a rational subpage structure, they belong on a subpage, not the main article. Over time, I've observed that some contributors, who have been asked to put their contribution on the appropriate subpage, or had their text moved there, perhaps with a brief and appropriate link to the subpage, continue to put their pet issues on the main page.

Creating subpages is great if people use them. The reality, however, is that some contributors refuse to do so. Also, for a subpage structure to be useful, it has to be well known. The navigation box can be of some help, but I do not believe that new-topic subpages should be created or put into the navigation box, unless there is discussion and consensus either on the main CIA page, or on the subpage that would be the parent of the new "sub-sub-page".

Oh, there are times when spawning a subpage, within a strictly hierarchical context (e.g., an Iraq or Iran subpage of the Middle East/South&Southwest Asia regional subpage, or Vietnam under the Asia-Pacific subpage), is not unreasonable, as long as it is clearly linked from the regional level — the regional level gives important information about transborder issues in an area. When an overnight change creates over 100 new country articles, without consensus that is a good thing, I found that unmaintainable. The day after that happened, I was about to post some information about cross-border issues in the Horn of Africa, but the new structure made it necessary to put the same information into several country articles. I find that unmaintainable and will not contribute within such a structure, certainly when there was no broad-based discussion of the potential problems that creates.

So, sure, there can be size reduction with subpages, but unless the subpage structure is respected, resistance is futile. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:25, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

As usual, I agree with Howard. A "rational" sub-page hierarchy of articles, that is obvious and intuitive to both readers and editors of Wikipedia, is essential. I felt really, really guilty about adding a paragraph of new text to the main article about "outsourcing" after all Howard had done to fight bloat. Plus, it wasn't totally CIA-specific, being more of an IC-wide observation, but after looking over the entire IC set of articles, this really seemed the most logical place to insert it, despite my misgivings about contributing even one new paragraph to overall length. Tim Shorrock has just published an informative new book on the subject, and he has collaborated extensively with R.J. Hillhouse, who was already cited at length in this article, so I worked it in as best I could. Plausible to deny (talk) 22:21, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

You bring up a problem that is much, much worse now that the Director of National Intelligence, not the Director of Central Intelligence, is the Head (censored) What Is In Charge. As it is, various people would say the CIA, for example, made deals with Nazi war criminals -- at a time when CIA didn't exist and Army Intelligence actually did it (yes, sometimes CIA didn't object later).

I literally don't know how best to proceed about U.S. intelligence going forward, as CIA isn't literally central any longer. There are also the persistent reports (Seymour Hersh especially) that the Bush/Cheney Administration is bypassing Congressional oversight rules for CIA covert activities, handing them to the military special operations people and using a loophole for "intelligence preparation of the battlefield."

Nevertheless, someone has to watch out for the Militant Fundamentalist Penguins. We say "Crusades" isn't very popular in the Middle East, but how does the Great Seal of the United States sound if you're seal prey?Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:30, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I know that the 2004 re-organization of the IC causes problems for editors, probably including those individuals who edit Intellipedia. ("You work for who? State your name, and who is your master?") Even as a volunteer - but conscientous - Wikipedia editor, it is very challenging to work against what you recognize as your own systemic biases, as you describe in your excellent article on cognitive traps for intelligence analysis. I have no illusions about Wikipedia, regarding either the people who edit it or the people who read it. Seymour Hersh is frequently criticized for his extensive use of anonymous sources, and in some specific instances, I think that criticism is justified, but you (or anybody) can't use a specific instance(s) of mis-attribution or poor sourcing to discount an individual's entire corpus of lifetime work.

It is decidedly un-egalitarian and a violation of Wikipedia's "political correctness," but all editors are quite obviously not created equal. In editing these articles, it is a distinct help to have read James Mann's "Rise of the Vulcans, Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine," James Risen's "State of War" and Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" and "State of Denial," no matter what your individual critical opinion of those books might be. To edit conscientously, you have to be able to deconstruct elaborate historical timelines of events, sometimes based on nothing more than completely open source information. Washington Post intelligence beat reporter Dana Priest has said in her excellent chats with readers (archived on the Post's website), that she is increasingly dissuaded from a conspiratorial viewpoint she never really subscribed to anyway about pre-election military moves against Iran, for the simple reason that we'd probably be looking at $10/gallon gasoline within two weeks, and I agree with her. The time window between November 5, 2008 and January 20, 2009 is more problematical, particularly since it all depends on what happens on the first date.

The fact that the imminently level-headed Robert Gates is a former DCI, back when it actually was DCI and not DCIA, is somewhat encouraging in countering suspicions that a certain former Defense Secretary who will go unnamed might try some sort of end-run around the laws requiring Conressional notification for covert CIA actions. Read closely the minority report of the 1987 Iran-Contra committee; the unnamed DefSec actually told reporters to read that innovative document when Risen and Eric Lichtblau first broke the warrantless "wiretapping" story. Admiral William Fallon says that his early retirement as Centcom commander was totally voluntary, but his comments in that Esquire interview to the effect that the last thing the over-stretched U.S. military needs is a war in Iran to go with its matching bookends in Afghanistan and Iraq kind of makes you wonder, does't it?

At any rate, it's good to have your input back here on the talk pages, although I well understand your desire to stay above the article-editing fray. I am hopeful (in apparent contradiction of all the factual evidence that I have observed about Wikipedia) that what gets said in this discussions might actually have a benificial effect to the articles themselves. I have seen that Larry Sanger has personally helped edit some of the articles you've developed on Citizendium. Think Jimmy Wales might read this disussion, or have one of his trusted admins bring it to his attention? Plausible to deny (talk) 22:13, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Since you are the only other editor active in recent discussions on this page, Morethan3words, I would encourage you to simply fight the aforementioned article "bloat" for the time being. Maintaining no watchlist (simply to avoid the sort of perpetual aggravations that Howard articulates), I am in no position to do so. If you read the article I linked to above closely, you can intuit that the algorithm Luca De Alfaro is developing could easily be tweaked to establish "trust ratings" of editors within specific categories of articles. If someone who had become a "trusted editor" within intelligence-related articles (perhaps you, for instance), simply had the ability to preview the edits made by "non-trusted" editors within this hierarchy of articles, it would be an enormous advance for Wikipedia, and might lure back justifiably disenchanted editors like Howard as well as persuade cynical editors like me to use a watchlist. If someone has built up their "trust rating" by making a number of un-reverted edits to articles about Britney Spears or Tila Tequila, that would not necessarily enable them to make an immediately-visible edit to this article.

It wouldn't solve all the problems, like the overnight spawning of the "CIA Activities in Antarctica" series of articles, or the creeping encroachments of the Bin Laden Issue Station back into the main article, but it would help. Until Wikipedia really does something to improve its basic model, like implement the changes hinted to in that article, maintaining quality truly is a Sisyphean task. I liked Howard's closing reference to the Borg. Plausible to deny (talk) 16:53, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

If anyone cares...

While I've taken a break from active editing, I still periodically look at my watchlist. As many of you know, I and others have tried to keep the size of the main CIA article manageable, without actually losing any date because all relevant content was moved to a hierarchy of subarticles.

I notice that yet again, Frank Freeman has started expanding al-Qaeda related content on the main page, after repeated entreaties to put that material in CIA transnational anti-terrorism activities and region/country-specific articles. None of his content has ever been deleted, just moved to an appropriate subpage. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:08, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I just reclaimed two (or is it four?) bytes in Wikipedia's SQL database by removing a stray carriage return at the EOF marker for that section. Other than that obviously token effort, I can propose no solutions. Plausible to deny (talk) 22:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Today, I notice that his edits completely removed the link to CIA transnational anti-terrorism activities. I did not stop editing because I believed there was only one "party line". I did not stop editing because I thought a hierarchy of articles, on a complex subject, was unworkable.

In large part, I stopped editing because I was very tired of trying to get consensus on a useful structure, and, when consensus seemed to exist, having any of a number of people move content to the appropriate subarticle.

I am grateful to the people that expressed appreciation of what I was trying to do. While I don't know if "revert war" is quite the term for what Mr. Freeman seems to be doing, it is an example of the constant "push one's own issue" approach that I got very tired of maintaining.

If anyone thinks my past ideas have been useful, I'd encourage you to try to resolve this constant creeping of al-Qaida in Brooklyn material onto the main article. If I'm the only person that cares about having a manageable lead article, then, clearly, it is inappropriate for me to impose my views on a community. I'll be curious to see if there really is any community interest here.

Thank you.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:08, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I, for one, do care about the quality of this article that you labored so mightily to improve and maintain, Howard. Welcome back, in however limited a role as a Wikipedia editor you deem prudent. As I previously noted, I maintain no watchlist, and have been 'off the grid' of the Internet for the past fortnight as a covert Company 'NOC' on the Above-Top-Secret CIA Activities in Antarctica project. Wish I could tell you the operation's cryptonym, but it's highly need-to-know information. Ever try to pay off a tribal penguin warlord to perform the bidding of a classified Presidential Finding? It is damned hard work for a civilian volunteer who is a G-8 on the federal employee pay scale. Medical insurance is good, though, and I need it to treat my frostbite. Plausible to deny (talk) 02:45, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Alleged war crimes culpability

Silly me. And I thought there was an entire article, CIA transnational human rights actions, that was intended to discuss concerns in detail, give historical background, and compare and contrast trends. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:58, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, I moved the new information from this section into the article above, with the citation, and deleted it from this main article. if NYCJosh has an issue with the move, please discuss here. (Morethan3words (talk) 07:41, 15 July 2008 (UTC))

Thanks, here is the section I added, which was deleted from the present article:

In 2007, Red Cross investigators concluded in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’’s interrogation methods for high-level al Qaeda prisoners constituted torture which could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a the book ““Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,”” by Jane Mayer a journalist for The New Yorker.

According to the book, the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross found that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure captured by the United States, were ““categorically”” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. A copy of the report was given to the C.I.A. in 2007. For example, the book states that Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box ““so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position”” and was one of several prisoners to be ““slammed against the walls,”” according to the Red Cross report. The C.I.A. has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

The war crimes allegations come from a distinguished source (Int'l Committee of the Red Cross) and are a whopper of a charge. I appreciate its includion on the anncilary article to which it was added. However, I think it would be hard to justify not including such findings on the main article for the CIA. In addition, from an institutional perspective, such findings raise the interesting and important issue of the CIA potentially incriminating the president. The opposite of the "plausible deniability" principle that the CIA works so hard to uphold. This effect of the Geneva Conventions and other laws against war crimes is worth noting for itself and is well illustrated in this case. --NYCJosh (talk) 22:18, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

If these allegations are true, I in no way defend them, although I can think of worse human rights abuses. The issue here is why they must be detailed, rather than clearly linked from, on the main page. If there is a pattern of abuses, it will be more clear when coupled with other events.

Believe me, I thought I had given up completely on editing in this area, and still am not prepared to do anything on the articles, unless there is some consensus that the topic is not manageable unless people will discipline themselves to look at the main page as one of definitions, organizational background, as an index to other issues. You have a human rights issue. Someone else has a UFO issue. Yet another person has an issue with support, in the U.S., to what became al-Qaeda. Where is the line drawn, or is the main page doomed to grow constantly? Is what was done to Abu Zubadayan worse that what was done to Olson or Nosenko? Why? Why not?

As long as there are tightly written but clear links, I honestly do not see the reasons that the ultimate reader is not well served by following liks.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 06:40, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

When there is a new revelation that is important for the topic, the article must be changed or else it soon becomes stale and irrelevant. As to length of the article, I find I have to add detail when I make contributions because deletionists will tend to attack the contribution as unsupported if I just summarize, no matter how accurate the summary. But I would have no problem with a slightly shortened contribution provided the key information was there.--NYCJosh (talk) 17:06, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

With all due caveats that I've stopped active editing because I became too tired of fighting edit wars, I don't know if you'd consider me a deletionist or not. I do believe strongly that the main article of a complex set needs constant maintenance to keep it current, and there is long-term information, such as oversight committees, that I'd happily see move -- but not deleted.

As long as I see people assuming there willl be deletion, and going WTH, I'll put it on the main page, the task, to be, becomes hopeless. Assume that you put a sentence or two on the main page to say there was new material in the human rights sub-article, and you put the details in the subarticle. I'd only support deletion in the latter place if there was no substantial sourcing and the material was questionable. If there was deletion in the subarticle, with no discussion and no specific source challenges, I'd fight it there. But as long as the tendency is to keep putting details on the home page, no, I'm not very sympathetic.

WP isn't CNN, to be accurate to the moment. I wasn't being facetious when I asked what your human rights example did and did not have in common with the Olson and Nosenko cases -- if other, non "WoT" questionable interrogations and detentions aren't integrated with the recent material, I worry about POV pushing.

Nevertheless, that's my discounted two cents, because I'm not even going to try to fix material unless I see a reasonable consensus to keep things non-POV and accurate, for which a community can form and support -- see the Sri Lanka Reconciliation project. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 08:01, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

The piece I added discusses allegations of War Crimes. Thus the CIA may have incriminated senior US officials in War Crimes through its abuses. The term "War Crime" does not currently appear in the CIA article. Thus this issue is "new." It is not just a "human rights" issue.

I don't know your edits well enough to decide whether you are a "deletionist" and that issue would appear to be irrelevant to the present discussion.--NYCJosh (talk) 19:00, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

No problem. There is, for example, an article on U.S. intelligence (not CIA, because some of the things happened before there was a CIA) collaboration with Nazi and Japanese war criminals. That article does, in fact, have material that indicates the U.S. was complicit, at the least, of assisting in getaways.

But, you're right, it's not relevant to the current article. If you had wanted to create a 10-page article on CIA implicating Americans in war crimes, and had a sentence linking to it from the main article page, I might have applauded. If, however, you want to dump more than a link into the oversize main page, that doesn't fit any rational idea I have of editing, and you won't learn more about my edits because I won't be making any. I prefer a real-name contribution environment, but I thought I might at least see if anyone here was interested in improving article quality. Have a nice day. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:51, 17 July 2008 (UTC)