Talk:Fawaz Naman Hamoud Abdallah Mahdi

reversed merge direction: from AbdUllah to AbdAllah

i removed {{mergeto|Fawaz Naman Hamoud Abdullah Mahdi}} from this page and put a merge tag on the other page. i chose this simply because this page was more developed. Boud 21:26, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

revert -- see talk

I reverted a bunch of things today.

inappropriate "allegedly"

There are two many instances of "allegedly" in the article. For instance, if there is a transcript of his testimony, I question the appropriateness of placing an "allegedly" prior to the assertion that he chose to attend. -- Geo Swan 20:00, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

i agree that it looks a bit excessive having two many "allegedly"s. On the other hand, citing US military documents as facts rather than as claimed facts also seems a bit excessive and not terribly NPOV. E.g. given the situation of extrajudicial custody, how can we really consider the US military's point of view as fact unless we hear what Fawaz Mahdi's lawyers have to say on his behalf? To take an hypothetical case, would we state what Gilad Shalit's captors say are personal decisions he may have made relative to his extrajudicial imprisonment status as facts rather than alleged facts or facts "according to his captors"? Or similarly, would what the Israeli authorities say that the Muamar brothers, detained two days before Shalit's detention, said, be presented as fact? We don't know the conditions of Fawaz Mahdi's testimony, and given his known mental condition, judging that he consciously "chose" to participate seems to me POV. Boud 19:48, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I am sorry, you are right, and I was wrong, about expressing doubt about whether he chose to attend his CSRT. I was overlooking how fragile his mental health was. You are absolutly correct that someone with mental health that fragile can't really make an informed choice. But, perhaps, rather than saying he "allegedly chose to attend", we could say "According to his Personal Representative, Fawaz chose to attend his CSRT." There are 58 captives for the full unclassified dossier is available, courtesy of the Associated Press — Associated Press library of Guantanamo Bay detainee dossiers... They are only supposed to convene Tribunals for captives are physically and mentally healthy.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 03:37, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

dual citizenship?

The former wording implied that the Amnesty International link stated that he was a dual citizenship. The DoD made many errors about the identity of the detainees, their names, ages, nationalities. Asserting that he was a dual citizenship, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever that he is a dual citizenship, is misleading. -- Geo Swan 20:00, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

In principle you're correct. i emailed the AI research section through their website interface some time ago and a researcher said that the nationality confusion was probably due to dual nationality. i didn't ask if his message was public, so i'm not quite sure if this counts as verifiable. i made that edit after receiving this info. You're welcome to email AI to check yourself - in some sense it's verifiable with a modest amount of work, though life would be a lot easier if AI would update its info or go wiki for all non-confidential information. Boud 19:52, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I've read over half the transcripts. I have seen how many of the captive's names are spelled differently on the two official lists, even though they were released less than a month apart. Personally, I suspect that your AI researcher may have been guessing, not speaking from any real knowledge. Personally, I suspect that it is another instance when lazy, malicious or incompetent American MI types simply got it wrong.

I suspect that your AI researcher's suggestion that it was a case of dual citizenship was a guess, and one that lets the unnecessarily and unfairly lets the Guantanamo intelligence analysts off the hook for another error. My reading of the transcripts leads me to believe that Khalid el-Masri was far from the only captive the USA took in the GWOT who was the victim of mistaken identity. I believe that Guantanamo contains, or contained, dozens of captives who, like el-Masri, were unlucky enough to have namesakes who were terrorist suspects, or to have terrorist suspects use aliases that resembled their real names.

I have been slowly going through the articles, and correcting instances where I made assumptions that two similar names represented the same person. If Guantanamo's record-keeping was well run those captives who requested their passports, notebooks, and other personal possessions their interrogators showed them, and asked them about, during their interrogations, should have been able to call on those documents during their CSRTs. Almost univerally their Tribunals could not find the exculpatory evidence the captives knew was in Guantanamo. Well, I want their articles to record that. I want their articles to record every instance where an element of doubt over the captive's identity is introduced. If there were the normal number of errors, I would ignore them as the reasonable number attributable to ordinary human error. But the number of visible errors is at least an order of magnitude beyond that which can be explained by simple human error. And, since most of the information about the captives remains classified, I believe it represents just the tip of the iceberg.

FWIW, I have doubts as to whether the unpublished opinion of even an AI researcher would count as verfiable, or reliable. But, you have left me with the impression that the researcher didn't offer you their name of credentials. Let me set false modesty aside. Reading through thousands of pages of transcripts, and doing the google searches and other work I have done to make my contributions to the wikipedia's coverage of these guys makes me feel pretty confident in my own judgement about these matters. For all we know your AI researcher could be a college student volunteering half a dozen hours a week, or a month, while holding down a full course load, and might have less background or experience than you or I.

Anyhow, due to the vast number of other identity discrepancies, I would prefer that we make no effort to help explain away instances of apparent discrepancies that are probably due to mistakes for which the Guantanamo intelligence effort would not be able to offer a good explanation..

You know Abu Hamza, the one-eyed Imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque, in London? Well, a year or so ago the USA thought that one of their sneaky decapitation smart-bombs had killed an al Qaeda leader who was also an Abu Hamza. Where the Finsbury Park Imam was Abu Hamza al-Masri the other guy was Abu Hamza Rabia. Anyhow, there was a page about him on http://rewardsforjustice.org CNN and various other US media had the picture from that page on, wall-to-wall. Two seconds looking at that picture, and I thought, "that's funny, this picture looks just like Abu Hamza would look, if he was about fifteen years younger, about 2 stone skinnier, had both his eyes, and his hair hadn't turned grey." Well, sure enough, the picture that "rewardforjustice", which is really a site run by US intelligence, where it might give the impression it is run by an NGO. They spend billions to fight the GWOT and that is the best they can do? Amateur hour.

Let's not make excuses for them. Some people who regard themselves as American patriots, or reasonable equivalent, have criticized me, saying my coverage of Guantanamo is too lenient towards the "terrorists" (their wording), and makes us all less safe. I point out that they are not terrorists, that some of them, maybe the majority of them, face questionable allegations. And I put forward the point of view that, first, we are all safer from real terrorists, when our decisions about how to allocate our anti-terrorist resources are made in a sober, professional, methodical, intelligent, and above all unemotional manner. I further suggest that those decisions can't be made in a sober, professional, methodical, intelligent and unemotional manner, unless it is based on truly reliable information. And for that information to be reliable it has to be gathered, and analyzed in a sober, professional, methodical, intelligent and unemotional manner. When the transcripts, and other evidence, from Guantanamo, Bagram, the other US military detention and interrogation sites, and the CIA's black sites, is examined, in detail, it shows the exact opposite. Geoffrey Miller told the Guantanamo staff to "treat the detainees like dogs", and the hysterical atmosphere of fear, vengeance, and distrust he engendered guaranteed that essentiall no reliable intelligence would flow from Guantanamo.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 02:42, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

"favor"

"Favor" has been put in quotes, the edit summary says the editor who made the change didn't think "favor" was proper legal usage.

1. Well if you check the reference, it is a direct quote.
2. As the Presidents of the Tribunals, and Presiding Officers of the Boards kept asserting, the Tribunals and Boards were "Administrative" procedures, not legal procedures, so our personal knowledge of proper legal procedure has no bearing here.

Geo Swan 20:00, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

"Favor" is very much an opinion of these bodies carrying "Administrative", not legal, procedures and claims that X or Y "favors" release is an opinion or political decision of these administrative bodies, not a fact as such. Boud 19:58, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

"Favor" is not an objective fact. We are in complete agreement about that. I suspect you and I may be in pretty close agreement as to how much credibility we attach to these allegations.

However, I want to comply completely with wp:npov. It doesn't say the wikipedia's article space can't have any opinions in it. It just says we can't inject our own opinions, or unreferenced opinions, or the opinions of people who aren't "reputable sources", even if they are referenced. And, even if you and I agree that the allegations are far-fetched, or seem to have dreamed up out of thin air, I think their publication by the DoD does, at least, satisfy the verifiable requirement. I think almost everyone will consider the DoD authoritative — even if all that means in this case is that it is the official line of the World's remaining superpower, not that it is credible, when examined in detail, or if it was possible to examine the classified documentation in details. And NPOV only requires that it be properly referenced, or cited.

As I work on these articles I eventually summarize the captive's testimony, if any, from their transcripts. That give some element of balance. Originally, I was going to put in the allegations, and the summary of their testimony, at the same time. But then I started getting people challenging the "notability" of the articles that originally only described the purpose of the CSRT, the ARB, listed the detainee's name, nationality, and ID number, and provided references to the .pdf, and the page number within the .pdf, of the transcripts. Critics kept (falsely) asserting that those articles were "identical" — ignoring that the pointers to the captive's transcript was an unique resource, not available in any other public place on the internet, and that it had required a couple of dozen hours of work. So I expanded the easiest part of the article's first -- the allegations.

I'm happy to expand the testimony sections, as my time permits. I'd be happy if other people took a role in this expansion. Similarly, I'd be happy to include the specific comments of reputable experts on captive's individual cases, or the comments of captive's lawyers.

But, when we have a captive who is undocumented, other than the documents the DoD has released about him, I think that we have to confine the coverage of that captive to those documents.

This doesn't concern me as much as it might, because, I think, when looked at in detail, the allegation's lack of real credibility is obvious, even without a rebuttal.

I think the allegation portion of the articles should remain a straight quote, rather than a paraphrase. If those of us who think the allegations lack credibility we would be likely to trigger concern about out bias from our critics. And they might even be right. I mean they might even be correct. (lol) No. Better, IMO, to quote them verbatim.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 01:56, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

FWIW, one critic wrote: (paraphrasing) "Why do you keep summarizing their testimony? I mean, basically, all their testimony boils down to some version of 'I didn't do it'!

Identity

There have been so many captives where there is some confusion over their identity that I have added a section "Identity" to those captive's articles. -- Geo Swan 20:00, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Capture, Release and re-Capture

Geo Swan, i'm impressed by all your work on the topic and i appreciate your explaining yourself at such length. i'm not sure i have the same amount of time to invest in this particular issue (there are plenty of others), and even though you've edited away several of my changes, i certainly believe you've done it with the best of intentions. All the same, i haven't checked the full history, but i think either you or someone else did (accidentally) remove at least one rather crucial bit of information: when was Fawaz Mahdi initially detained, and where? The only source i previously found for this was the old AI report, so i shifted the first ref entry for this upwards to the appropriate spot in the intro where i have reverted the info on the initial capture/detention/kidnapping (no, no, let's not open that debate here, this is just the talk page). i've added in his release/re-detention in brief there and below in the reworked release/re-detention paragraph.

Boud 13:11, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

rough work

These links to the page numbers within the OARDEC documents may be useful to other contributors. Geo Swan (talk) 20:42, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

habeas documents

111-126

Another useful source is the The Guantanamo Docket it is an interactive database provided and updated by the New York Times. The database is searchable and has the Pentagon documents (CSRT and ARB) included. Additional documents and reliable New York Times research regarding the detainees at Guantanamo are also provided. This is the link to the documents and research regarding Fawaz Naman Hamoud Abdullah Mahdi. IQinn (talk) 12:07, 7 January 2010 (UTC)