Talk:Guantanamo captives' documents

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	No "from wikipedia" disclaimer is necessary because I was the sole author of 212823768 this version. George Swan 17:18, 25 June 2008 (CDT)
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Good stuff; some organizational suggestions

I wish we had a whiteboard here, as it seems as if the document is organized as a branching tree, with the introduction going down to sections for the release of documents. The September 10 document section is nicely organized, although perhaps someone, who knows more than I do about Wikimedia table formatting, could suggest a way to break it up so that it doesn't extend over more than one stream. I have the same problem in insurgency.

Could you make it clearer to what the long list of cites in the introduction points? Do they eventually become the block sections further down, or something else? This is the sort of article where a map might well supplement the basic table of contents. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:42, 25 June 2008 (CDT)

Merging semi-duplicate articles

In addition to this article, "...captives' documents", there is another article, "...captive's documents". Clearly, both are not needed.

As a start, I will try to improve the flow of this one, and then merge any new material from the other into it. Problems here, for example, include having a major heading for Combatant Status Review Trial and Administrative Review Board documents, followed by an equal-level heading for CSRT documents, which clearly are a subset.

More fundamental are the problems that documents themselves have little meaning outside the process that uses them. For example, would a CSRT document be of any notability if there were not a CSRT? I suggest, then, that it is more important to have an article on a CSRT, which has subsections on how a CSRT is conducted, what documents pertain, who has been through it, etc.

In turn, the CSRT, ARB, habeas corpus hearing, etc., are all legal proceedings that have to do with Guantanamo prisoners, which means that an overall legal article is really needed. Not all Bush administration terror-related prisoners are in Guantanamo; there probably the most in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, and then in "black" detention sites. There is plenty of opportunity to cross link among articles, but the present situation is chaotic. Let me begin to clean up. Howard C. Berkowitz 07:19, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Tried first pass

Unfortunately, the data here are so inconsistent, separately named, and subject to various categories that I can make no sense of it. I really tried, but this is, I think, hopeless without a total rewrite with source documents and a desire to organize. Howard C. Berkowitz 07:49, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Moved comments from near-duplicate

It seems to me that the title of this article should be Guantanamo captives' documents (with the apostrophe after the 's'), because it is about the documents of all captives, not the documents of just one of them. (Or maybe it should be something else entirely. The current wording suggests that it is about documents belonging to the captives, but the body of the article turns out to be about access to documents containing informaton about the captives.) Bruce M.Tindall 15:32, 7 May 2008 (CDT)

Yes, I agree. The title is misleading: we need something like Guantanamo Bay: access to official documents. When we have a page on Guantanamo Bay or prison camp, we could move this article to be a subpage of that. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 16:16, 7 May 2008 (CDT)

Well, your suggested page hasn't materialized yet, but there is now a more-or-less duplicate version of this page whose title at least has the apostrophe in a different place (merged Howard C. Berkowitz 07:57, 7 December 2008 (UTC)), so I've marked this one as a duplicate and perhaps this one should be deleted. Bruce M.Tindall 18:00, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Before going too far, be aware that there are a large number of articles with confusing, or outright incorrect names, which have many other problems. You may have seen some related commentary on the Forum. I went through several individual prisoner (no legal determination implied by that term) articles and found very major problems in accuracy, neutrality, coverage, and, perhaps above all, linkages and coherent terminology.

You mention that "documents" are mentioned, in a confusing way, in this context. In other articles, standard U.S. military reference materials are described so oddly, and even used as an article title, to the extent that I literally did not find them until I was searching under the author name, or the facility. This is not a minor matter, since I have written very extensive articles on such things as interrogation theory and history in multiple wars, and there is utterly no linkage from these articles.

Over a year ago, the author of these articles wrote an article extrajudicial detention, which Larry moved to the talk page as not yet of article quality. No efforts were made to use it, or to link the facilities and prisoners to it. Meanwhile, an unknown number of individual articles have shown up.

My initial thoughts are that even starting to make sense of all this will begin with some top-level Related Article pages, for which we happen to be developing or revealing some capabilities so they act as good navigation tools. This can't be a strict hierarchy since there's crosslinkage of all sorts, but, conceptually, I've tried to set some of the structure as George W. Bush Administration, pointing to (no good article) an articulation of its war on terror policy; [terrorism]], counterterrorism, and other general articles will also point there to show other world (and U.S. intelligence and military) doctrines.

Under "war on terror" can be extrajudicial detention, and, in turn, such things as extrajudicial detention legislation, extrajudicial detention press analysis, extrajudicial detention legal challenges, etc. The current U.S. process isn't strictly tied to Guantanamo, but to the extrajudicial detention process. There are some policy documents that variously describe it, and, also, standard military documents that proscribe this sort of detention.

From my perspective, a subject matter expert can be neutral simply by documenting the existing U.S. policies, some of which are still in effect, and others, which are unique from this administration. It doesn't need indignant writing or lots of journalistic speculation when proper research can reveal primary documents and expert analysis.

Anyway, it's a mess; Larry authorized me to try to do some cleanup, but I am getting a great deal of pushback from the author. If I were to do real cleanup, I'd probably start from the beginning again (actually, from previous policy and doctrine), and then build things coherently. Since I have higher writing priorities, I'm not sure of the best course of action. Inaccurate and confusing and badly linked articles, however, cannot stay and maintain quality standards. Ideas are welcome. Howard C. Berkowitz 18:33, 2 November 2008 (UTC)