Talk:Lewis Welshofer Jr.

	NOTICE, please do not remove from top of page.
	This article incorporates material previously used on the wikipedia. But I was the sole author of that material there. So no "from wikipedia" tag is necessary. George Swan 16:22, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
	Check the history of edits to see who inserted this notice.

Notability

Surely this is too small an item to be worthy of an entry. Ten years from now, almost nobody is going to have the slightest interest in this stuff. E.g. if you will read the end of "Band of Brothers", by Ambrose, you will discover a description of the summary execution (i.e. murder) of a German official after Germany had surrendered. (I expect there were likely dozens, if not hundreds, of similar cases at the time.) I am hard put to draw much of any legal, or moral, distinction between the two cases. Yet nobody is trying to document all of those - let alone the names of the personnel responsible, which are given in "BoB" - and I doubt there's any interest. The whole Iraq outrage may be a topic that's temporarily popular, for reasons I won't get into, but this seems rather a waste of time and energy. J. Noel Chiappa 20:34, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Greetings! I was going to put all my responses here. But I decided I would like wider feedback, so I started a forum thread entitled: "Addressing a notability concern". I tried to keep that forum thread reasonably stripped of the specific details of this discussion so we could continue to discuss the specific details here, and the general implications there.

I'd like to ask -- if Ambrose referenced to the killing of this German official contained meaningful details, like the names of the perpetrators and the victim, and whether there was a paper trail of an inquiry into the death, or a decision not to conduct an inquity -- why wouldn't that killing merit coverage here?

Following the invasion of Normandy there was an incident where an SS officer was reported to have ordered the summary execution of some captured Canadian soldiers. And, there are reports that Canadian soldiers subsequently (1) would not accept the surrender of any SS soldiers; (2) killed German soldiers -- after they surrendered, when they got close enough to recognize their unit insignia, if they turned out to be SS soldiers. If and when we have good references for these incidents I think they would merit coverage too.

Cheers! George Swan 16:34, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Without checking Ambrose, I am certain there is documentation. As a military historian, I can think of quite a few such events involving people from a variety of countries, which are reasonably well documented.

Long before I considered those notable enough to be included in an encyclopedia, I would want to see some of the unifying principles of violence. I started to look up the website of (LTC ret., Dr.) Dave Grossman, and discovered, with interest, that he's formed a new organization at http://www.warriorsciencegroup.com/. Grossman coined the term "killology", and his book, On Killing was a valuable adjunct to the understanding of soldiers in warfare, including inappropriate violence.

While not strictly military, Phil Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram is relevant to the broader issue here. Not singling out Nazis, but simply because there are some detailed analyses of seemingly inexplicable killing behavior, include and work on inexplicable killings by Nazis who had no compulsion (e.g., Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Goldhagen;'s Hitler's Willing Executioners). A special case, which is now available online, is Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors.

There is a substantial literature in military journals and reports, but key, if a bit dated, studies include Janowitz's The Professional Soldier and Huntington's The Soldier and the State.

I can keep coming up with references, but my point is that an article on how violence and other crimes become uncontrolled in warfare, I believe, is of significant encyclopedic value. I question, however, of the value of listing individual cases, with no unifying principles, and apparently focused on one politician's rule, is notable. Not attempting to protect the U.S., the Golitsyn case is comparable to many of these things under the Bush 43 Administration, and had much broader implications.

Some private email, with different people, reminded me that there are different viewpoints among philosophers, people who are morally outraged, historians, and perhaps sociologists. I would be happy to bring this to a forum discussion. Speaking personally, I believe that policymaking officials in the Bush 43 administration may well have crossed into ordering war crimes. After a few examples of the worker bees, or soldier ants if you will, I can't really see the notability of more individual cases from Bagram or Guantanamo. Sorry, but it feels like agenda-pushing rather than trying to understand the broader problem. Howard C. Berkowitz 18:10, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Trying to make sense of this; articles need to be merged

(copied to Mowhoush article)

My concerns about notability of this article have been noted, but, even more, why is it separate from the article on Abed Hamed Mowhoush? There is very little on Mowhoush's actual military actions; his fate and Welshofer's are inextricably linked.

In both the Welshofer and Mowhoush articles, there is much dependence on journalistic reports. In the Mowhoush article, several consecutive citations have no text explaining the significance of each, yet, from preliminary fact-checking, some do give different information.

I am concerned that there are merely weasel-words about "allegations" of death, when I was able to find the autopsy report within a few minutes. It flatly labels it a homicide caused by asphyxia from chest compression. The lead to this was in an NGO report, much more extensive than the news reports. While I have not followed all links as yet, it appears the trial transcripts and command statements are available; the NGO had observers at the trial. Some of these documents, such as the autopsy report, certainly are primary documents, more authoritative than the news reports. There is a detailed analysis and broader context-setting by the NGO, Human Rights First, which also links to ACLU material.

It may be stopping in midstream, but I am not going to continue fact-checking and completely rewriting this article. I am not going to merge these articles. I do not consider that to be my responsibility as an editor, since I would never have started these as separate articles. There is far more detail available than in some of the weasel words here.

I'd like to see these articles merged promptly, the primary and analytic sources used before news reports, and then flow and copy edited. If not, I'd rather see them deleted, and relevant material used in a broader article dealing with U.S. interrogation practices in Iraq and in other situations authorized by the George W. Bush Administration. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:16, 26 February 2009 (UTC)