Talk:Bin Laden Issue Station

untitled
I've reverted Ryulong's nonsense, which he should leave out of Wikipedia. If he has anything more intelligent to say, he should feel free. Frank Freeman 13:07, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Question on references
Personally, I find it important to know how many unique sources there are. Classic referencing would indeed go to the page level, but would also have the ibids, op cits, etc. so uniqueness was obvious.

I propose, at least with the 9/11 Report level, to go down to the chapter level, not page within chapter. That I can do; I don't have the cited books to be able to cite there. It is important, I believe, to be able to see how much comes from Coll vs. other sources.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:29, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I would have thought you'd find page references beneficial rather than confusing. They are useful for finding data in the online PDF version (of the 9/11 Report), when there isn't an exact quote to search for. (I placed the HTML versions *after* the page refs for this reason.)

Splitting the references and cross-referencing has resulted in the in-text numbers becoming rather messy and scattershot. Is this easier to follow?

And what has happened to poor John Fulton??

Frank Freeman (talk) 12:18, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Multiple references under one footnote
When a given ref has several distinct bibliographic citations under it, it is rather difficult to see how they source an item in the text. At first glance, they seem to refer to different things. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:12, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree that if I were checking references in conventional books, page numbers are useful. Given an online choice for reading, not printing, between HTML and PDF, I find HTML much more convenient.


 * While it is not the case here, there are articles that become obvious that they are primarily quoting one source, and that is more obvious with the page references deleted. I hope I have them commented out rather than deleted, so if there is a consensus they are useful, it's not hard to restore them.


 * Again, the references here seem legitimate. Perhaps I'm sensitive because I went through another article, which also had distinct POV problems, and found that a lot of the links were quotes of quotes of one non-neutral source.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:19, 24 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Sorry....who is John Fulton?

... He's the feller you accidentally removed during the course of your editing, Howard. Frank Freeman (talk) 12:46, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Still a problem
It is extremely difficult to relate several different citations from the same large document, or multiple documents, to a single point being sourced. If the documents are saying the same thing in different places, then why is more than one citation helpful?

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:34, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

The quote about station Alex being like "the Manson Family" comes from a book written by Steve Coll, Ghost wars. see the following quote from The New York Times, Washington, July 4th 2006, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

In his book "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the agency's efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Coll wrote that some inside the agency likened Alec Station to a cult that became obsessed with Al Qaeda.

I'm working on it
Fixed Ghost Wars and 9/11 Commission report, which were the major issues here. Cleaning up other sources now. Mnnlaxer (talk) 19:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Moving citations for section "New view of al-Qaeda, 1996–1998" here to park
Andrew Marshall, "Terror 'blowback' burns CIA", Independent on Sunday, November 1, 1998

ref name=911report ((rp|pages=58–9;62;109;118;341-2)) ref name=ghostwars ((rp|pages=155;336;367;474))

Jack Cloonan interview, PBS, July 13, 2005

Michael Scheuer interview, PBS, July 21, 2005

Jane Mayer, "Junior: The clandestine life of America's top Al Qaeda source", The New Yorker, September 4, 2006 (issue of September 11, 2006)

Mnnlaxer (talk) 19:16, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Lead section comments
The lead section is terrible, imho. The section paragraph I'm almost sure is from Steve Coll's book, Ghost Wars, maybe even from press materials. I think it is almost a direct quote.

The third paragraph is specific points that belong in the narrative.

I'm going to start writing new material for the lead section on this page below. Keeping the first sentence. Comment on the project in this section and edit away below.

Mnnlaxer (talk) 22:18, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Lead section draft
The Bin Laden Issue Station (1996–2005) was a unit of the Central Intelligence Agency dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates.

No Edits, just a comment
The very last sentence of the article is one of the few which are un-sourced, despite being key for the substance of the article. In fact, this statement is one sided, being alleged by exclusively individuals linked to the U.S. government and never independently verified. In fact, there are numerous sources with relevent information, such as Lt. Col Oliver North, Dr. Ray Griffin, Egyptian Newspapers, and even Fox News, as well as Bin Laden experts, that the former AlQaeda leader was dead not much later than early 2002. Adding support are the discrepancies of the stories written in tell-all books by alleged members of the kill squad involved in the Abbottabad raid. All of this together, even without Wikipedia sourcing guidelines, would require in a real encyclopedia, to source the last statement to its one and only source. 71.2.181.69 (talk) 22:16, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia reflects the mainstream POV on various topics. Views outside the mainstream (i.e. WP:Fringe theories) can be discussed to the extent they are discussed in reliable secondary sources. With that in mind, you probably won't find much support for WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV and WP:IN-TEXT attribution in describing mainstream POVs. Still, I have sourced the last sentence of the article. -Location (talk) 00:05, 2 September 2017 (UTC)