Wikipedia:WikiProject Terrorism/Guantanamo/What to do with Afghan training camps?/Merge less well referenced articles to Afghan training camp... or to a new article...

Merge less well referenced articles to Afghan training camp... or to a new article...[edit]

The Felter study listed 38 camps by name. The Felter study does not list all the camps named in OARDEC allegation memos. It doesn't even list all the camps named in the CSRT allegation memos, just the first 516 memos to be published. So far 572 CSRT allegation memos have been published. In addition the allegation memos published from the annual Administrative Review Board hearings were more detailed. Over one thousand ARB memos have been published, some of which list previously unnamed camps.

An alternate target for the merge could be named something like: Training facilities allegedly attended by Guantanamo captives.

Not all the camps were in Afghanistan. Some seemed to be in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The FATA are Pashtun territory, so it is not that much of a stretch to list them in the article on Afghan training camps. But other camps were near disputed Kashmir, near the Indian border. Still other camps were alleged to be Chechnya, Bosnia, the Phillipines and Indonesia.
Not all of the camps were fly-by-night jihadist camps. A few of the captives had, listed as allegations that justified their continued detention, attendance at training camps back in their home countries, in their youths, when they were undergoing compulsory military service. One guy had listed what sounded not like a military training camp, but a mundane summer camp, for kids, that included a rifle range.
Some camps seem to have been official Taliban camps, not camps run by al Qaeda, or the Hezbi Islami Gulbuddin, or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. And I wonder whether there are grounds to treat the official Taliban camps differently. Geo Swan (talk) 13:22, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Joseph Felter, Jarret Brachman (2007-07-25). "CTC Report: An Assessment of 516 Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) Unclassified Summaries". Combating Terrorism Center. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-08-30.

It has always been my position that the OARDEC allegation memos are themselves secondary sources, because the authors of those memos were charged with the responsibility to go through the reports from half a dozen or more other agencies.

It was their responsibility to detect duplicative material, and strip them out.
It was their responsibility to detect contradictions, and reconcile them, or assess which version was the most credible, or, at least, make clear there were contradictions.
it was their responsibility to assess whether material in the reports they reviewed was no longer credible, and had been superceded by newer information.

I believe that by all reasonable definitions of the distinction between a primary source, and a secondary source, the responsibilities on the authors of the OARDEC memos clearly make them secondary sources. So camps that are named in an OARDEC memo, but aren't named in a press report, or a scholarly article, like the Felter articles, are, nevertheless, named in an WP:RS.

Therefore I think it would be appropriate to list all the alleged training facilities listed in the OARDEC memos, without regard to whether they were also listed in the Felter memo, or any other non-OARDEC source. If there is no WP:RS that describes them as an "al Qaeda camp", we should not describe the camp as an al Qaeda camp. Similarly we need to be careful not to list them as a "militant" camp, or a "military" camp, or a "terrorist" camp, if the WP:RS don't say that. However, I believe it is not original research to characterize these as camps allegedly attended by Guantanamo captives, because that is exactly what the WP:RS say. I do not believe it would be original research to say that alleged attendance at one of these camps was offered as a justification, in part, for continued detention in Guantanamo. Geo Swan (talk) 13:22, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]