Wikipedia:Peer review/Osama bin Laden/archive2

Osama bin Laden
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because the article is (according to most people I saw reviewing the article) almost there to the Good Article Status, and I want to help take the article to that status. Being one of the most read articles, it would only help if the article gets selected to the GA status.
 * Previous peer review

Since I personally lack the expertise to figure out what is wrong with the article, I would like to ask for the help of other Reviewers so that the article can be bettered.

Thanks, TheOriginalSoni (talk) 18:21, 28 June 2012 (UTC)


 * The lead could use an expansion. There's nothing in there about his early life, for example. I think after the first paragraph it would make sense to put in a second one detailing his activities in Afghanistan, the formation of Al Qaeda, etc. before moving on to the final paragraph. Generally speaking, the lead should be a brief synopsis of the entire article; at the moment, it only covers part of it. ✅
 * Paragraph beginning "Years later, on October 10, 2001" lacks citations entirely.
 * "They hate us for what we do, not who we are." needs inline citation.
 * Resolve full citation needed tag in the 9/11 section.
 * "In June 2006 FBI's chief of investigative publicity" -> "In June 2006, the FBI's chief of investigative publicity" Also, it seems odd that an FBI publicity man would be an authority on whether bin Laden had a hand in 9/11 -- was he trumpeting the FBI view?
 * "Afghanistan in late 2001, and according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge, failure by the United States to commit enough U.S. ground troops to hunt him led to his escape and was the gravest failure by the United States in the war against al-Qaeda." needs citation.
 * "Main article: Allegations of support system in Pakistan for Osama bin Laden" should be moved under "See also" or else you should create a new section.
 * "Pakistani government "baseless speculation"." needs citation.


 * "He was indicted on terrorism charges by law enforcement agencies in Madrid, New York City, and Tripoli." - I don't see why this is relevant to his beliefs and ideology. ❌


 * "bin Laden and others on August 20, 1988, indicate" No comma needed after "1988". ✅
 * "due to increasing pressure on Sudan, from Saudi Arabia" No comma needed here. ✅
 * "Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)" "Pakistani ISI" sufficies. ✅
 * "Khalil al-Deek, was arrested in Jordan" No comma necessary. ✅
 * "the subsequent destruction of those planes and the World Trade Center in New York City" needs to be more precise. We need to say the hijackers flew the planes into the two World Trade Center towers, destroying them. ✅
 * "Osama bin Laden was first indicted by the United States on June 8, 1998, when a grand jury indicted" Redundant "indicted" and later "Osama bin Laden". Rephrase. ✅
 * "prosecutors further charged that bin Laden is the head of" -> "was the head of" ✅
 * "non-Muslim courts lacked standing to try Muslims" needs a period at the end of the sentence. ✅
 * "when he was added to the list on" -> "when he was added on" ("list" is used previously) ✅
 * "the CIA unit composed of their special operations paramilitary forces" -> "the CIA unit composed of special operations paramilitary forces" ✅
 * "Abbottabad, Pakistan" needs wikilink. ✅
 * "President George W. Bush stated, "I want justice. There is an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted dead or alive'" Needs a double-quotation (") at the end. ✅
 * "Author, Rohan Gunaratna," Remove commas. ✅
 * "Afghan president, Hamid Karzai" Remove comma.✅
 * "the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Siyassa" Remove comma.✅
 * This needs to be fixed: " The Australian News,online edition published the claim on June 9.[183] On June 9, The Australian News, online edition repeated the claim." Probably: "On June 9, The Australian News's online edition repeated the claim." ✅
 * "Google Earth maps show that the compound was not present in 2001, but was present on images taken in 2005.[original research?]" This is indeed OR if there's no citation. Find a citation or remove. ✅

Now a few general comments-
 * The article is very good. It should pass GA almost as-is. It's nearly ready for an FA review.
 * You might want to use webcitation.org to archive the links in the references.
 * It would be nice if more of this were sourced to books instead of news articles. If you want to bring it to FA, I imagine reviewers there will want to see more of this coming from books, given that books tend to be a little more reliable than newspaper and magazine articles.--Batard0 (talk) 08:10, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid the article is not GA standard and I would warn you off going to FA until this is achieved. There are plenty of references needed: Sourcing needs a closer look - "Interview with Robert Fisk, 22/3/97, 'The Great War For Civilisation', 2005" is never properly cited with enough information, and the style is messy - if you look at the later one it isn't obvious where to look for the full citations. Similar thing with "A Capitol Idea Donald E. Abelson p. 208." and "Osama: The Making of a Terrorist John Randal I B Tauris & Co Ltd (October 4, 2005)." more information with the latter, but the styles are inconsistent to the point of making them confusing to the reader. I strongly recommend either a liberal use of the shortened format used for some, or proper cite book (etc) templates. You know about the dead links, and things like "Wall street Journal." and " pp. 52" are messy. References like Bin Laden not in Pakistan, PM says. Retrieved May 20, 2010. and "Death of Bin Laden: Live report". Yahoo!. need more information and the latter really replacing because a live report is rather like a primary source.
 * The decapitalization of bin is based on the convention of leaving short prepositions and articles uncapitalized in surnames; however, bin means "son of" and is not, strictly speaking, a preposition or article. The spellings with o and e come from a Persian-influenced pronunciation also used in Afghanistan, where bin Laden spent many years.
 * Osama bin Laden's full name, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of Awad, son of Laden". "Mohammed" refers to bin Laden's father Mohammed bin Laden; "Awad" refers to his grandfather, Awad bin Aboud bin Laden, a Kindite Hadhrami tribesman; "Laden" refers not to bin Laden's great-grandfather, who was named Aboud, but to a more distant ancestor.
 * condensed in the phrase "They hate us for what we do, not who we are."
 * Under Operation Cyclone from 1979 to 1989, the United States provided financial aid and weapons to the mujahideen through Pakistan's ISI. Bin Laden met and built relations with Hamid Gul, who was a three-star general in the Pakistani army and head of the ISI agency. Although the United States provided the money and weapons, the training of militant groups was entirely done by the Pakistani Armed Forces and the ISI.
 * Nosair was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and later admitted guilt for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City on November 5, 1990.
 * By now bin Laden was being linked with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which made up the core of al-Qaeda. In 1995 the EIJ attempted to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The attempt failed, and the EIJ was expelled from Sudan.
 * Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "The Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam. The reference to 'occupation' in the fatwā referred to US forces based in Saudi Arabia for the purpose of controlling air space in Iraq, known as Operation Southern Watch.
 * In the 1990s bin Laden's al-Qaeda assisted jihadis financially and sometimes militarily in Algeria, Egypt and Afghanistan. In 1992 or 1993 bin Laden sent an emissary, Qari el-Said, with $40,000 to Algeria to aid the Islamists and urge war rather than negotiation with the government. Their advice was heeded but the war that followed killed 150,000–200,000 Algerians and ended with Islamist surrender to the government.
 * The 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the major East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the United States public for the first time, and resulted in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placing bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted list.
 * In 1997, Rzeczpospolita, one of the largest Polish daily newspapers, reported that intelligence services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR Brigade suspected that a center for training terrorists from Islamic countries was located in the Bocina Donja village near Maglaj in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992, hundreds of volunteers joined an "all-mujahedeen unit" called El Moujahed in an abandoned hillside factory, a compound with a hospital and prayer hall.
 * In 1998 it was reported that bin Laden was operating his al-Qaeda network out of Albania. The Charleston Gazette quoted Fatos Klosi, the head of the Albanian intelligence service, as saying a network run by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden sent units to fight in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Confirmation of these activities came from Claude Kader, a French national who said he was a member of bin Laden's Albanian network.
 * Identified motivations of the September 11 attacks include the support of Israel by the United States, presence of the U.S. military in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. enforcement of sanctions against Iraq.
 * Years later, on October 10, 2001, bin Laden appeared as well on the initial list of the top 22 FBI Most Wanted Terrorists, which was released to the public by the President of the United States George W. Bush, in direct response to the September 11 attacks, but which was again based on the indictment for the 1998 embassy attack. Bin Laden was among a group of thirteen fugitive terrorists wanted on that latter list for questioning about the 1998 embassy bombings. Bin Laden remains the only fugitive ever to be listed on both FBI fugitive lists.
 * Google Earth maps show that the compound was not present in 2001, but was present on images taken in 2005 (mostly OR)
 * and called any supposed support for bin Laden by the Pakistani government "baseless speculation".

Layout-wise I'm worried by the section Pursuit by the United States – as the article makes clear, it wasn't just the US after this man. Tying the search from him to the US is a bit like tying the timeline of the Second World War to the US. You get a decent picture, but the full one. Of course the US story is likely to feature heavily in the "Pursuit" section, but it isn't pigeonholed. Also I think the bullet points are unnecessary; if the prose seems suited to it it's because, I feel, it comes across a bit like an indiscriminate list of things lacking a narrative or commentary. Finding some sources which look at the pursuit as a whole would help there.

I think the bigger picture can be examined once these issues have been resolved; there's a fair bit to do here. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 21:42, 26 July 2012 (UTC)