User:Ultramarine/Sandbox3

WP:OR and WP:SYN

There is no agreement, legal or otherwise, on what terrorism or state terrorism is. Even if there was one it would violate WP:OR and WP:SYN for an anonymous Wikipedia editor to argue that a human rights violation is terrorism if the source does not. WP:SYN: "Material can often be put together in a way that constitutes original research even if its individual elements have been published by reliable sources. Synthesizing material occurs when an editor tries to demonstrate the validity of his or her own conclusions by citing sources that when put together serve to advance the editor's position. If the sources cited do not explicitly reach the same conclusion, or if the sources cited are not directly related to the subject of the article, then the editor is engaged in original research."

But this is one of the main problems with the article. Many anonymous editors have added examples of what they personally think are state terrorism even when the source makes no such claim but only makes some kind of US criticism. This is not a general article for US criticisms but one about "state terrorism". Alternatively, the source does mention terrorism or state terrorism by an US ally but do not accuse the US. Again it violates WP:OR and WP:SYN to argue that the US is responsible for everything that an allied nation does. The article has or have, depending on who edited last, paragraph after paragraph and quote after quote with such material.

One example: "A report of an Amnesty International investigative mission made public in 1984 stated that 'many of the 40,000 people killed in the preceding five years had been murdered by government forces who openly dumped mutilated corpses in an apparent effort to terrorize the population.'" Quote does not mention the US.

Another: "According to the Americas Watch division of Human Rights Watch, 'The Salvadoran conflict stems, to a great extent, from the persistent denial of basic socioeconomic rights to the peasant majority. Throughout the past decade systematic violence has befallen not just peasants protesting the lack of land and the means to a decent existence but, in a steadily widening circle, individuals and institutions who have espoused the cause of the peasants and decried their fate.' " Does not mention the US.

Another: "Critics maintain that the U.S. economic and military aid played an essential role in enabling state terrorism in El Salvador. Specifically that the U.S. government — during the period of the worst abuses — provided El Salvador with billions of dollars, and equipped and trained an army, which kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of the elderly, women, and children.[4]" Given source (BBC) does mention and criticize the US. Does not state that this was terrorism or state terrorism by the US. Again, this is not a general article for U.S. criticisms but one regarding state terrorism. OR to argue that this is state terrorism. Especially since there is no agreed on definition of what state terrorism is.

Could this be included as background material? Possibly but doubtfully, yes. But not as implying that that this is US state terrorism. Which is difficult to achieve. It is implied that this is US state terrorism since it is presented in an article about state terrorism.

Violates WP:SYN to argue that another source accusing the US government of state terrorism in EL Salvador means that Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and the BBC are accusing the US of state terrorism.

If included as background material, then NPOV background material must be also included, like regarding insurgent atrocities.

Unfortunately, there seem to be a double standard. US critical material, or material used to against the US, do not have to mention terrorism, state terrorism, or even the US if an allied nation is criticized. But US supporting material are deleted from the article on the same grounds. See the deleted material section below. So the article mentions peasant poverty as a cause of the civil war in Guatemala. But material regarding the Cuban support and the role of Marxist ideology for excluding democratic options in favor of a violent revolution is systematically deleted.

WP:NPOV and WP:SOAP

Most of the article is US critical material with supporting material systematically excluded. For example the atomic bombings section have only US critical arguments, like "Critics also claim that the attacks were militarily unnecessary and transgressed moral barriers. ", despite that the Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki article have many opposing views regarding just such points.

WP:UNDUE

Some of the sources are given undue weight. In the Philippines section E. San Juan, Jr. is cited seven times ( plus two more outside this section) and given four paragraphs consisting of direct quotes.

WP:REDFLAG

Exceptional claims require exception sources. Allegations of terrorism are exceptional claims. Cuban or Iranian state controlled media are not exceptional sources. Or email transcripts.[5] Or unsourced opinion articles by non-notable persons. (However, in this case probably acceptable with proper attribution since the publication is notable.)[6][7]

Wikipedia:Naming conflict and Wikipedia:Words to avoid

"A descriptive article title should describe the subject without passing judgment, implicitly or explicitly, on the subject.""Example: an article title 'Israeli terrorism' inherently implies that Wikipedia takes a view that Israel's actions are considered terrorism; similarly for 'Islamic terrorism'." As quoted policy directly states, current name suggests that the allegations are a fact. All other state terrorism articles are called "Allegations of state terrorism by..." or "Allegations of state terrorism in..."

Personally I would prefer an article called "Criticisms of United States foreign policy" or something similar. That would be easy to find many good sources for. By including "state terrorism" one eliminates the more serious sources since the term has not agreed on definition. Those who use it are often sensationalists. Not more serious scholars. Also cannot discuss, for example, the embargo against Cuba, low foreign aid as percentage of GDP, and opposition to various treaties.

WP:NOT, WP:QUOTE, and WP:Summary style

"Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" "On lengthy articles, editors should strive to keep long quotations to a minimum, opting to paraphrase and work smaller portions of quotes into articles." Especially the Guatemala and El Salvador sections consist of many long direct quotes with similar content. Should be summarized. One example: [8].Ultramarine (talk) 09:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style

"The author of a quote of a full sentence or more should be named; this is done in the main text and not in a footnote." Massive deletion of such attributions which gives the impression that the statements are undisputed facts.[9] Should be restored.

Wikipedia:Words to avoid

The article has many words that should be avoided. Words like observed, revealed, document, established has been selectively added to the text when citing US critical allegations. Words like alleged have been deleted giving the impression of undisputed facts.[10]

Disputed tags removed

Disputed tags have been removed despite an ongoing discussion on talk.[11]

Deleted material

Opposing views section

See also: Foreign_relations of the United States#Support

Chomsky claims that the United States is a leading terrorist nation. However, actual empirical studies (see democide which scholars Emizet Kisangani and Wayne Nafziger argue are equivalent to state terrorism) have found that democracies, including the United States, have killed much fewer civilians than dictatorships. Media may be biased against the US regarding reporting human rights violations. Studies have found that New York Times coverage of worldwide human rights violations predominantly focuses on the human rights violations in nations where there is clear U.S. involvement, while having relatively little coverage of the human rights violations in other nations. For example, the bloodiest war in recent time, involving eight nations and killing millions of civilians, was the Second Congo War, which was almost completely ignored by the media. Finally, those nations with military alliances with the US can spend less on the military and have a less active foreign policy since they can count on US protection. This may give a false impression that the US is less peaceful than those nations.

Regarding support for various dictatorships, especially during the Cold War, a response is that they were seen as necessary evil, with the alternatives even worse Communist or fundamentalist dictatorships. David Schmitz challenges the notion that this violation of core American values actually served U.S. interests. Friendly tyrants resisted necessary reforms and destroyed the political center, while the 'realist' policy of coddling dictators brought a backlash among foreign populations with long memories.

Halperin et al writes that there is a widely held view that poor countries need to delay democracy until they develop. The argument went —as presented in the writings of Samuel Huntington and Seymour Martin Lipset— that if a poor country became democratic, because of the pressures in a democracy to respond to the interests of the people, they would borrow too much, they would spend the money in ways that did not advance development. These poor decisions would mean that development would not occur; and because people would then be disappointed, they would return to a dictatorship. Therefore, the prescription was, get yourself a benign dictator—it was never quite explained how you would make sure you had a dictator that spent the money to develop the country rather than ship it off to a Swiss bank account—wait until that produces development, which produces a middle class, and then, inevitably, the middle class will demand freedom, and you will have a democratization and a democratic government. The study argues that this is wrong. Poor democracies perform better, including also on economic growth if excluding East Asia, than poor dictatorships. U.S.-supported dictatorships in the following nations eventually became democratic: Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, and Indonesia. In addition, many communist countries opposed by the U.S. have also become democracies, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Croatia, Albania, Serbia, and Mongolia. U.S.-supported dictatorships that have not become democracies: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco.

Research on the democratic peace theory has generally found that democracies, including the United States, have not made war on one another. There have been U.S. support for coups against some democracies, but for example Spencer R. Weart argues that part of the explanation was the perception, correct or not, that these states were turning into Communist dictatorships. Also important was the role of rarely transparent United States government agencies, who sometimes mislead or did not fully implement the decisions of elected civilian leaders.

That US soldiers have committed war crimes such as rapes and killing POWs is a fact. However, such acts are not approved or supported by the US government or the US military. The same applies even more to acts committed by to foreign groups supported but outside direct US control.

Professor of History Niall Ferguson argues that the US is incorrectly blamed for many human rights violations in nations they have supported. He writes that it is generally agreed that Guatemala was the worst of the US-backed regimes during the Cold War. When the civil war there was finally brought to an end in the 1990s, the total death toll may have been as high as 200,000. But not all these deaths can credibly be blamed on the United States. The US Intelligence Oversight Board writes that military aid was cut for long periods because of such violations, that the US helped stop a coup in 1993, and that efforts were made to improve the conduct of the security services.

Guatemala - Polity

The Polity data series, a widely used ranking of the degree of democracy, see democracy as abruptly worsening after the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, improving in the later half of the 60s to be slightly better than before the coup, gradually worsening in the 70s, reaching its lowest point during the military dictatorship of Efraín Ríos Montt in 1982-83, improving thereafter and reaching a high level after the end of the war.

Guatemala - Cuba

The Guatemalan Government and the Truth Commission accused Cuba of supporting the insurgents.[12][13] The Truth Commission also writes that "for the greater part of the confrontation, the cohesion of the Guatemalan insurgency revolved around the idea of the need for, and the primacy of, armed struggle as the only solution.""the political work of the guerrilla organizations within the different sectors of society was increasingly directed towards strengthening their military capacity, to the detriment of the type of political activity characteristic of democratic sectors. Likewise, attempts by other political forces to take advantage of the limited opportunities for legal participation, were radically dismissed by some sectors of the insurgency as 'reformist' or 'dissident', whilst people who sought to remain distant from the confrontation were treated with profound mistrust and even as potential enemies. These attitudes contributed to political intolerance and polarisation."[14]

Chomsky

The historian Keith Windschuttle has in turn accused Chomsky of hypocrisy and misrepresentation when criticizing the US and the War of Terror. He writes that Chomsky in a response to the 9/11 bombing alleged that a Human Rights Watch report had stated that the US 1998 Sudan bombing probably led to tens of thousands of deaths. Human Rights Watch issued a statement denying it had produced any such figure. Windschuttle criticizes Chomsky for defending terror by groups he has favored: "I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror." He writes that according to Chomsky the U.S. is the most reprehensible of all nations and that US leaders should be brought to trial for their crimes. Windschuttle writes "Yet Chomsky’s moral perspective is completely one-sided. No matter how great the crimes of the regimes he has favored, such as China, Vietnam, and Cambodia under the communists, Chomsky has never demanded their leaders be captured and tried for war crimes. Instead, he has defended these regimes for many years to the best of his ability through the use of evidence he must have realized was selective, deceptive, and in some cases invented."

State terrorism against the US

The Red Army Faction, an organization considered terrorist in Germany and that received support from the Stasi secret police of East Germany, attacked US military personnel and civilians in Germany.

Righ-wing terrorism

Right-wing organizations such as Kach are listed as "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" by the US.

Posada

Venezuela have accused the US of hypocrisy on terrorism since the US "virtually" collaborated with convicted terrorist Luis Posada by failing to contest statements that Posada would be tortured if he were extradited to Venezuela. Some U.S. officials, who declined to speak on the record, also deplored the decision by immigration judge William Abbott not to extradite Posada. The administration stressed that Posada may still be subject to deportation to another country, although their efforts thus far to persuade several Latin American countries have proved fruitless

Changed to incorrect "As a consequence of continued U.S. refusal to extradite convicted terrorist Luis Posada, Venezuela considers the US guilty of hypocrisy on terrorism."

The People's Tribunal

In March 2007, the Permanent People’s Tribunal at The Hague, Belgium, rendered a judgment of guilty for “crimes against humanity” against the Philippine government and its chief backer, the Bush administration. The Dutch ambassador to the Philippines Monday said the Permanent People’s Tribuna that found the Arroyo administration responsible for political killings in the Philippines was not much more than a kangaroo court -- a view shared by Malacañang officials and their allies in Congress. He said the verdict was “not serious” because the accused were not even invited to the sessions. The head of the European Commission in the Philippines, said the European Union would not issue any statement on the PPT’s verdict because the tribunal was a "nonofficial body, nongovernment."[15]

This has been changed to:

In March 2007, the Permanent People’s Tribunal at The Hague, Belgium, rendered a judgment of guilty for “crimes against humanity” against the Philippine government and its chief backer, the Bush administration. The Arroyo government was found responsible for human rights abuses "with the support and full awareness of the government of George Walker Bush." The Dutch ambassador to the Philippines stated that the Netherlands, along with other European nations, was concerned about the human rights situation in the Philippines.

Melo commission

An independent commission was assembled in August 2006 to investigate the killings. Headed by former Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo, the group known as the Melo Commission concluded that most of the killings were instigated by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, but found no proof linking the murder of activists to a "national policy" as claimed by the left-wing groups. On the other hand the report "linked state security forces to the murder of militants and recommended that military officials, notably retired major general Jovito Palparan, be held liable under the principle of command responsibility for killings in their areas of assignment."