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Talk:Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare

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POV Issues

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I have to admit that, when an article's POV slant has seemed self-evident (to me!), I've sometimes slapped a {POV} tag on an article and rushed off to one of the many other articles that needs work, without laying out my specific issues on the talk page. Since someone has now raised the point, here are the problems I perceive:

  • The article is currently sourced to a narrow and biased set of sources. Many have an anti-CIA, anti-contra, and/or anti-Reagan POV, and none are pro. For instance, the intro's claim that the manual instructed the rebels on how to "build political support... through deceit, intimidation, and violence" is sourced to William Leogrande, a critic of the Reagan administration's Central American policies. The debatable characterization of a lefist academic is presented here as simple fact, without opposition. Another example: in "Further reading" there is a Washington Post item, "The CIA's Murder Manual." Based on the title, the lack of an author byline, and the page number, I infer that it's not an article but a Sunday editorial. Why should readers looking for deeper information be directed to one (liberal) newspaper's opinion?
  • As for the narrowness of the sources, the article doesn't even reflect key information available in anti-contra sources like Christopher Dickey's With the Contras, such as the CIA alias of the author of the manual (John Kirkpatrick), or that it was based on previous US Army manuals.
  • There is a lack of historical context. The concept of (and name) "Armed Propaganda Teams" was not something devised by the CIA in the 1980s, but by the Viet Minh (based on Mao's doctrines). The idea entered US thought through studying communist methods.
  • This article, as well as the sensationalist coverage at the time, distorts the main thrust of the manual. The purpose was not to get the contras to use "violence and terror" against "court judges, mesta judges, and police officials," which they were already doing, since those are the sorts of people that all guerrillas target, including the Sandinistas. Rather, the manual arose from a concern that the rebels had been too indiscriminate in their violence, and needed to limit it to such persons. To put a favorable spin on it, it advised the rebels to avoid alienating the people, by refraining from indiscriminate killing and wanton brutality and too much violence or intimidation.
  • For this reason, it was not the most brutal among the rebels who embraced the manual. Edgar Chamorro was a contra official who had expressed qualms about some of the acts committed by FDN troops, yet by his own account he worked with Kirkpatrick in preparing the manual and distributed Kirkpatrick's final version with only two passages removed (one of those being the excerpted quote about getting demonstrators martyred, though other officials dispute that Chamorro was the one who wanted the manual expurgated). Salvador Icaza, portrayed by Dickey as a whistleblower who had spoken out in 1983 against abuses, trained the psychological warfare teams and, Dickey notes, "used the manual happily."
  • As for the manual's effect on human rights, the contras' human rights record did improve, though many critics never let go of bad impressions formed during the war's early years. However, the manual was not the only factor at work, and absent a source explicitly drawing a connection, attributing any of the improvement to the manual would be original research.
  • An unrelated problem that's just cropped up is the transwiki link on "imputable." I'm pretty sure there's a policy recommending against transwiki links that I could dig up. I also really don't see why that word in particular needs to be linked to Wiktionary, as opposed to some of the other vocabulary.

Now that I've outlined my concerns, I'm going to put the tag back up. --Groggy Dice T | C 16:33, 24 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

US Counterinsurgency and rational choice

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This issue is revisited in a recent book called Empire's Workshop by Greg Grandin. It is clear that such manuals were not unique to the Nicaraguan conflict but existed in other contexts. Grandin mentions the US Army 1966 "Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines" which summarized a war game set in Central America (p. 99). Also, the main emphasis of the article is correct. "Psychological Operations" was a manual produced as part of paramilitary operations sponsored by the USA designed to defeat the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. As part of this operation civilians, farmers, medical workers, and teachers were killed. The secondary point that needs to be made is that "Psychological Operations" was written in an attempt to direct violence in its most efficient manner. It was designed to effect a balance of violence to push people into a "rational choice" (this is the term used) of opposition to the Sandinista revolution because the costs in violence and disruption from the US sponsored Contras were too high. In order to achieve this the "correct" level of violence was needed. The manual attempted to correct a situation where indiscriminate violence was being used by Contra paramilitaries. It should be clear that by "rational choice" is meant that people abandon their support for the Sandinista revolution, not because they think it wrong, but because the costs are too high. In other words, the point of "Psychological Operations" was to encourage the correct amount of violence necessary to change the existing political situation. The article does not explain all of this detail, but in my opinion its balance is fair, the basic information is correct, and the tag should be removed. 12 Aug 2007.

POV and historical context

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some of the 'concerns' are comedic but why not put in where the Carter administration withdrew aid to the contras over these demonstrated human rights concerns and that Reagan was very upset about this... one could say livid even.

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