User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/identity section removed

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While some of the Guantanamo captives have only been identified by a single name, a very considerable fraction of them have been identified inconsistently.

In my opinion this inconsistent identification is extremely significant, and it is important for it to be properly documented. I have been working on covering those Guantanamo captives for which we have meaningful WP:RS since March 2005. For the first 52 months the camps were open the DoD refused to acknowledge who was being held there. The Washington Post had published a list of about 250 names of Guantanamo captives. The NGO cageprisoners.com had published a longer, but less well documented list. The two lists had surprisingly little overlap.

Among the reasons the two lists didn't overlap very much is that some of the names were incomplete, and there may have been many names that were present on both lists, but were not recognizable as such, due to being transliterated differently.

When I first started working in this area we had article about two dozen captives. Over the next six months I added articles about an additional three dozen captives, who made the news for one reason or another, including that their relatives had spoken about receiving mail from them, or that they had been released. In very rare instances the Bush administration provided names when they wanted to use a captive to score a political point.

By April 20th, 2006, we had over articles on over 100 captives. With very few exceptions, barring the original 20 or so, I started them all, using the best names available to me.

On April 20th, 2006 the DoD published the first official list of names to come from Guantanamo. They were forced to do so, following a court ruling over a FOIA request. It listed the names and ID numbers of the 558 captives whose status had been reviewed by a CSR Tribunal during 2004-08-08 and 2005-01-31.

On May 15th, 2006, the DoD published its second official list of Guantanamo captives names. This list included a few more fields of information about each captive. It was published in machine readable form where the early list was not. And, even though the two lists were only published a few weeks apart, there were a surprisingly large number of captives whose names differed on the two lists.

Some of the inconsistent identifications may seem, in retrospect, to be due to mundane typographical errors. Others may seem to be due to to mundane transcription differences.

I do not think it is a good idea to merge articles that merely have similar names. First, it is easy to make a mistake. Second, doing so obfuscates how many errors the DoD made. Doing so would be engaging in a coverup. Doing so would be to engage in a form of POV pushing.