Talk:Hasan Mahsum

Biased

I was reading the source mentioned in this wiki article "Fact and Fiction: A Chinese Documentary on Eastern Turkestan Terrorism". The article is a transcript presentation of a controversial Chinese documentary. The authors of the article acknowledge and stress that the documentary is strongly biased. I do not think therefore that this is an appropriate source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.141.100.212 (talk) 03:00, 31 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Merge

Someone merged Hassan Maksum into this article -- without discussing it first. I think the merge should have been discussed first. And I would have argued against it. If we believe the Uyghur detainees in Guantanamo then what the American intelligence analysts call a training camp wasn't really a training camp. The Uyghurs accounts are consistent. The camp they were constructing only possesses a single AK-47. Abdullah Abdulqadirakhum, and some of the other Uyghurs, described getting a couple of hours of training on that AK-47. Abdulqadirakhum said his trainer was a Hassan Maksum. Most of the other Uyghurs who received training were trained by a guy named Abdul Haq. So, this Hassam Maksum wasn't even the most senior guy in the camp.

Now maybe Abdulqadirakhum and the other Uyghurs were lying. If so, why believe his account of Hassan Maksum?

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 02:30, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, didn't realise the merge would be controversial. But I don't understand how the fact that some guys received training from Abdul Haq and other guys received training from Hassan Maksum proves that Hassan Maksum "wasn't even the most senior guy in the camp". On p32. Abdulqadirakhum states "I did not know if there was another organisation in charge of the camp. I just don't know"; all he asserts definitively is that Abdul Haq was in charge of that particular camp. Anyway, regardless of whether he's lying or not (something none of us can verify), what we can verify is that he claimed to have received training from Mahsum. cab 03:38, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The whole "war on terror" is rife with cases of mistaken identity, due to the conflation of individuals with similar sounding names.

How do we know these two guys are the same individual? Look at Abdul Haq, multiple individuals with his name, who could easily be confused. Same with Shahzada, or Abdul Ghaffar.

If Mahsum, or Maksum, or Maxam, is really the leader of the ETIM, or even just a senior member of its leadership, then what is he doing at this camp?

It is not a real training camp.
The people at the camp aren't support staff, they aren't even members of the ETIM.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 16:07, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think there's a few issues being conflated here. First, whether Abdulqadirakhum is telling the truth about knowing a guy named Hassan Maksum, which breaks down into several cases:

He's telling the truth, and his Hassan Maksum is in fact the head of the ETIM
He's telling the truth, but his Hassan Maksum is just another anti-China Uyghur who happened to be hanging around Afghanistan at the same time as the head of the ETIM
He's lying, and used the name of Hassan Maksum deliberately, knowing he's a famous Uyghur fighter in the region
He's lying, and made the name up out of thin air or used the name of some other guy he'd heard of/met, and, bad luck, that just happened to also be the name of an ETIM leader

Second, whether Abdulqadirakhum was at a training camp or just a refugee camp.

It was just a refugee camp. But even if it was just a refugee camp, terrorists, drug-runners, and other violent types may go there to recruit cannon fodder, since they know refugees are starving and would do pretty much anything for a square meal and a safe place to sleep.
It was really a terrorist training camp.

Either way, whether it was a training camp or just a refugee camp, doesn't have much to do with the issue of whether the leader of the ETIM went there.

Anyway, with the above in mind, I'd suggest instead that Hassan Maksum be merged into Abdullah Abdulqadirakhum, since the existence of Hassan Maksum cannot be verified except through Abdulqadirakhum's testimony, and Maksum is otherwise not notable (no google hits). Then mention both here and there that Hassan Maksum may or may not be the same person as Hasan Mahsum. cab 16:53, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply. I am going to tackle your points in reverse order.

I disagree with merging Hassan Maksum into Abdullah Abdulqadirakhum.

Any guy who is alleged to have provided training that justified years of extrajudicial detention merits an effort to document his story.
I have had a lot of people argue with me the notability of people the USA alleges played a role in the "war on terror". They point to passages from WP:BIO, and cite it as if it were an official wikipedia policy. It is not, as the first paragraph makes clear. It is merely a guideline, one the document acknowledges is controversial. It, in turn, cites three real wikipedia policies: WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:VER. It seems to me that many of the criticisms of my efforts to provide coverage of individuals accused of a role in the "war on terror" based on "notability" would be criticisms based on WP:NPOV, WP:NOR or WP:VER -- except I complied with those real policies. I strongly disagree with treating notability as if it were a real wikipedia policy, as it is far, far too subjective, and vulnerable to different interpretations based on the readers personal POV.

Arabic names, Pashtun names, Uyghur names, Uzbek and Tajik names are all unfamiliar to us, and we assume that there is the same multiplicity of names in those cultures as there are in the English speaking world. However, after reading hundreds of those transcripts, I think this is not true. In English we have "John Smith" and "Bob Jones", as examples of names so common that you can expect to run into multiple individuals with the same name. But the names in those cultures are not leavened by centuries of admixture by foreigners, or citizens from colonies. So, we come across many more instances of cases of mistaken identity because people have similar or identical names.

You were willing to lightly discount Abdullah's description of Maksum being killed during the bombing. I think this is a mistake.

In general I am not a fan of merging short articles, that can stand by themselves, into larger omnibus articles. I think it can be confusing, and be a disservice to readers. If a reader clicks on a link to Hassan Maksum it is a disservice to redirect them to an article about Abdullah. By doing so we would be imposing the burden on the reader of reading the entire article to learn why someone thought they should be redirected here. Further, it squanders all the inherent advantages of abandoning the linear form imposed upon paper documents. Paper documents flow from start to end. They can't easily branch. They can't easily allow readers to transit the information they want in a multidimensional manner. None of this has to be true with an digital encyclopedia. However those who favour unnecessary merging want to throw these advantages away.

The situation with Hassam Maksum is just the same as that with articles about individuals named Shahzada, Abdul Ghaffar, Abdul Salaam, Abdul Haq, Hazrat Ali. There are three guys in Guantanamo named some variation of Mohammed al Qahtani: Jabir Hasan Muhamed Al Qahtani, Said Muhammad Husayn Qahtani and Muhammad Mani Ahmded Al Shal Lan Al Qahtani. Only one of these men is the alleged "20th hijacker" who was tortured for two months. We don't want people who come across something notable about an individual who has homonyms, that they want to add to the wikipedia, to assume that they have found information about an individual about whom there is no doubt as to their identity. It is far better to have a brief article about all the individuals who can be covered, while conforming to WP:NPOV, WP:VER and WP:NOR.

I said it wasn't a real training camp. But, I don't think it would be correct to call it a refugee camp either. They got their room and board in return for their labour, doing construction. Some of them got a few hours of informal training on the camp's sole AK-47. Who financed their room and board? The Uyghurs said they had never heard of the Taliban or al Qaida -- not surprising since they didn't speak Pashtun. They said a rich tribe sponsored their work. Not surprising if they came from a tribal society.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 18:31, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the biggest arguement against merger isn't whether there really was a terror connection or not. It is their deaths. One was shot in Pakistan by Pakistani forces while the other was allegedly killed in the American bombing of the camp. That the real terrorist was killed in Pakistan is verifiable. But it requires the Afghan casualty to either a) be a different man, b) be a lie, meaning little if any credence should be given to the rest of the unverifiable story, or c) a mistake, but it was reported that he was killed in the bombing, not that he just didn't meet up with Abdulqadirakhum afterwords, leaving his condition unknown. If he is a different person the articles shouldn't be merged, and if he is the same then Abdulqadirakhum is lying once, so we cannot trust his claims about anything else to do with Maksum/Mahsum, the camp or his time in Afghanistan, which means his story should not be merged into an article otherwise containing the best information available.

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