The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. I don't see a consensus to move, if you feel I've misread it let me know. I think a separate discussion on moving would yield clearer results. John Reaves (talk) 06:54, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

State terrorism by United States of America

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State terrorism by United States of America (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Delete Clear violation of WP:SYNT. Completely OR. Jtrainor 18:05, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

And Noam Chomsky is cited for more enlightenment. There's a well-respected moral force if ever there was one. If the editors in Fidel's propaganda department want to take a break from their dirty work, they can create articles on allegations against the United States from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan and (this should be a fun one) Idi Amin's Uganda. These would meet the editors' standards of reliability just as well as the ones they're using for this article.
On second thought, let's not delete it at all. Let's use it for our Wikipedia front-page feature article.
On April 1. Noroton 16:11, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(Restoring my post which was deleted by Jakerforever)*Keep: I'm unsure where the nom's concerns are founded. .V. [Talk|Email] 19:26, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry! When I was trying to add my post I think you were editing at the same time...I was cycling through the back-buttons to get back to my post, and I think I may have have saved over this. No ill will intended! Jakerforever 22:18, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A CHALLENGE: A call to put your effort where your mouths are A significant number of the "Keep" proponents here say they don't want to delete the article because the subject deserves mention in the encyclopedia, but they say they think cleaning it of unreliable material is necessary. Despite the best intentions voiced in this discussion, the fact is, it's the FIFTH discussion on deleting this article and after the past four, the article is a mendacious mess and a perversion of Wikipedia principles. In the past (and currently in the case of List of people who went to heaven alive) I and other editors have achieved consensus in keeping articles by working on them to make them better. In the case of this article, doing so would probably involve facing down a number of editors who have made the article what it is today.

So here's a challenge. All of you who said the article should be changed, both among the "Keep" group and the "Delete" group, will you join me, for the seven days following the close of this discussion (if the conclusion is "Keep", and that's the way it looks like it's going for the fifth time) in doing the following:

  1. Support removing as unreliable sources any regimes commonly recognized by international organizations as significant human rights abusers. (parts in italics just added in. Noroton 04:54, 1 April 2007 (UTC) )[reply]
  2. Reviewing with an open mind any deletions or additions to the article and participating in a good number of discussions on the talk page that concern questions of fairness and reliable sourcing (relying your own best judgment, sense of fairness and what you believe to be Wikipedia rules in each case).
  3. Removing material that you agree isn't reliably sourced after three days of having it identified with a [citation needed] tag. I know it's a relatively short period, but editors interested in the article should have it on their watch list and should know the article is under the gun by now, and I'm not going to ask for a pledge of more than a week of attention, so we should act relatively fast.

I'll help out by doing some research, questioning some parts of the article and suggesting rewrites and additions to other parts. Obviously, anybody else who wants to should be working on the article as well. I won't be voicing my disgust in any discussions on the talk page and I'll work toward consensus and a neutral article. If I can do that, can any of you pledge to help, or are your opinions about keeping this malformed article (even if you don't mean them that way), simply supporting a biased article?

A list of those who said, essentially, "Keep" but reform the article in some way (and I'm asking for every other contributor to this discussion to make the same pledge):

If five of these nine editors (and I'll be adding more to the list as others join the discussion and make the same point) will tell me they'll help to improve it and will participate in helping to form a consensus if there's a dispute, then I'll change my vote to "Keep" and help work on the article for a week after the discussion is closed. If, after attempting to improve the article, it is again overrun within months by egregious non-NPOV and bad-sourcing edits and yet again becomes a mess, I'll be nominating it for deletion discussion Number 6 and contacting each and every optimist on the list above to solicit support for removal. And we'd all have a convincing argument for removal at that point. Is this proposal fair? Is it not in the best traditions of Wikipedia? Is it not an attempt to come to consensus after five deletion nominations? Is it, on its face at least, not a good-faith effort to do the right thing? Noroton 04:31, 1 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"The New York Times in July published a long interview with Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born, CIA-trained terrorist who had been convicted of bombing a Cuban airliner off Barbados in 1976 and had served nine years in a Venezuelan prison. In the interview he admitted to more recent attacks against Cuban property, claiming to have organized the 1997 bombings in Havana hotels and to have had his activities financed by the late Jorge Mas Canosa and other leaders of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF). The Interior Ministry announced that three Guatemalans and two Salvadoreans were to be put on trial for their part in the bombings. Described as mercenaries, they admitted to working under the direction of Carriles and Arnaldo Monzón Plasencia, also of CANF." (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The main difference is that the wiki article is framed as allegations from the Cuban government, due to the theme of the page being "allegations of..". These particular "allegations" are borne out by numerous verifiable sources, (CNN, NYTimes, BBC etc) admitted to by the perpetrators many times and regarded as fact by commentators and experts on the matter. So its difficult to see any problems there, if Britannica can report the claims, than so can we. Some of the later material in the article I'm not keen on, I don't think the quotes are necessary, nor the US's own definition. But other than that, notable allegations have been made in verifiable sources. That's pretty much the end of the issue. -- Zleitzen(talk) 14:14, 1 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I’m afraid, though, that a simple article renaming won’t restore this article to credibility. The reason is because it must rely almost exclusively on biased sources – and biased to a single “side’s” perspective. Frankly, I’m surprised that anyone has voted “Keep” following Leifern’s perfect summary of the reason for his vote to “Delete - not because the alleged crimes, transgressions, and ethical lapses should be hidden or buried, but because the term ‘state terrorism’ is so problematic conceptually and burdened by shrill polemics. Ironically, this article actually discredits the POV it is trying to promote.” Since “state terrorism” has no useful, broadly acceptable definition, it can only be employed as a pejorative. Furthermore, without such a definition, there is no basis upon which to include or exclude any particular accusation. Therefore, this article can only stand to serve as a collection of allegations against which there may be no objective defense — which is "useful" only to those that have an agenda. Askari Mark (Talk) 00:28, 2 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To address what I'm suggesting for this article, let me address Leifern's comment. Liefern is, in my mind, fundamentally correct. But, in this case, the polemic value of the term 'state terrorism' is part of the article. To me, this article is a collection of the scholarship of people like Blum, Chomsky, and Gareau, who use charged language in their discussions of US activities. This is also true of the charged language by leaders such as Castro and Chavez, who use their opposition to America as part of their platform. In both cases, the charged language is linked to how the events are organized. So to discuss their ideas, one must admit the application of non-neutral language on a certain set of events in US foreign policy. In the individual events, there are a great many people interested in understanding what role the US had and why they did what they did. But in collecting these events, the goal is to show a pattern of behavior that establishes the US as a pariah in the minds of some audience (voters in Columbia, readers in Cambridge, etc). So to me, the first task is to rewrite the lead to express that the accusations of state terrorism against the US is not a case of people trying to uncover the truth (this is very important in the individual events), but rather a certain way of collecting a certain set of US activities for certain purposes. Then the article becomes an outline of the events that are collected in this way, who is including them as instances of US state terrorism, and why they are included.
Norton, I'm thinking the first step in improving the article is to get some consensus on the direction (my idea is certainly not the only one) of the article on the talk page, and to start a ((todo)) list there. I'd be happy to help out. Smmurphy(Talk) 04:36, 2 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, Smmurphy, a Solomon amongst us...  :) Jakerforever 18:40, 2 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If I'm Solomon, I have to have the sword ready. Norton is right when he says that he'd be ready to wade into the article, to bring it to NPOV, but it can't be done alone, and it will take some work (its a swordfight, not just a case of a baby cut in half). Certainly Solomon wouldn't have waited until the fifth nomination to act. In any case, I'm blushing at such a suggestion. Smmurphy(Talk) 22:16, 2 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Smmurphy, your rationale above is a great outline of the reasons for having articles on "state terrorism" or "terrorism" or on American foreign policy issues — which no one has a problem with. The problem with this sort of article is twofold: First, it can only be built up from singularly biased sources (and few, if any, "neutral" ones), so it must be an inherently POV article; and second, since there is no consensus definition of what constitutes "state terrorism", and so the article's only purpose can be to list everything anybody who dislikes the "defendent" has ever used the term against the target. Moreover, this is true whether you have a list of accusations of "state terrorism" by the US, USSR, Cuba, Iran, Great Britain, Liechtenstein or whatever. This is true of accusations of "terrorism" as well, and currently usage of the term is deprecated as inherently POV; more neutral, but accurate terms (like "rebel", "insurgent") are employed instead — or one might cite a declaration by an entity to state that "So-and-so has declared that XYZ is a terrorist organization." Yet "terrorist" has a "firmer" definition than "state terrorism". Certainly if we consider a country to be a "living person", this would never get past WP:BLP. Askari Mark (Talk) 22:41, 2 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What sets this article apart from something like the post-WWII discussion of interventionist cases in United States non-interventionism is the use of the term terrorism. The US State Department Counterterrorism Office [1] publishes lists of acts that it calls terrorism [2]. We can thus feel pretty secure calling those events terrorist attacks, and have articles about those, even though many would not call them terrorist attacks. My idea of this article is to show what has been said about US acts of terrorism. This is encyclopedic in my mind because some important people (from Chomsky to Chavez) have used this as a major part of their platform (be it to get elected or to get their message out). If Ross Perot ran for US president again, imagine how long and crazy the article on flat tax would be. I think of this kinda in those terms, this is a major platform for selling a personality. It can be fixed, but it needn't be deleted. Sorry if I've repeated myself, let me know exactly where we aren't connecting, and I'll try again, if you like. Thanks, Smmurphy(Talk) 00:06, 3 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

*Keep: As per Wooyi, The article is well referenced, the fact presented may be not proven, the title only says "Allegations", and not state terrorism by /of/in America. ŇëŧΜǒńğëŗPeace Talks 09:36, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This editor has had almost no involvement in WP this entire year[3]. His comments are incivil to an extreme and I see he is a likely sock account. I recommend a NPA block for at least a week.--MONGO 02:22, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Note to closing admin: I agree with this. I have left a notice to the user here about this. JungleCat Shiny!/Oohhh! 02:34, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Note to anyone who wants to read this. I view the actions above as bullying. Thankyou. Cloveoil 05:17, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Civility is important on this project. Stone’s comment above is inflammatory and uncalled for. I take it you think those remarks he made are OK? JungleCat Shiny!/Oohhh! 22:44, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
We do. We have List of acts labelled as state terrorism sorted by state where I believe this article grew from. This has Burma, Cambodia, China, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Colombia, France, United Kingdom, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. We also have Allegations of state terrorism in Sri Lanka, Terrorism in Syria (Formerly State terrorism in Syria). We also have numerous articles taken solely from US State department sources such as U.S. list of state sponsors of international terrorism, U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations etc etc. We also have articles such as Allegations of tourist apartheid in Cuba. None of these articles have faced afd. Yet this U.S. article is repeatedly challenged, despite having copious sources that meet WP:V and WP:RS. Tbeatty and others have a point that any event listed may have its own article anyway, likewise with the Allegations of apartheid articles. However, until there is unilateral deletions of all these articles, American exceptionalism based on en:Wikipedia's demographic should not triumph. The nominator of this article, Jtrainor, also went through the Allegations of apartheid articles and nominated them - or rather, he nominated Allegations of Israeli apartheid and Allegations of apartheid in Australia (which was deleted). Yet he conspicuously avoided nominating Allegations of tourist apartheid in Cuba, Allegations of Islamic apartheid and Allegations of Brazillian apartheid, which illustrates the bias coming from this deletion process. Simply saying that this article is POV, and "a synthesis of nonsense", despite much of it coming from sources that meet WP:V and WP:RS and being no more POV than the encyclopedia britannica (see above), does not make it so. The calls for the deletion of a vast number of sourced statements seems to be based on personal incredulity concerning the well documented events regarding the U.S., rather than any efforts to improve these articles. -- Zleitzen(talk) 08:29, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Just a nitpick; that first link is to the National Security Archive, a private collection at George Washington University in DC, not to the U.S. National Archives. csloat 17:44, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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