Talk:Dan Mitrione

message: I added a reference to the book by A.J. Langguth which seems to be a good reference citing Mitrione's role in South America. The article might need some improvemente but defenetely cannot be discarded as only "a left-wing political screed" as one of the contributors would like to have it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.64.85.116 (talk • contribs) 
:The 'disputed' tag must remain until there is agreement on this page. BlueValour 17:28, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The tag was removed. Was that done because agreement was reached, or just because someone chose to remove it? Nicmart 05:24, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know on what basis BlueValour claimed that the "'disputed' tag should have remained until there is agreement," but there has been no agreement and the tab was removed. Is non-removal a Wikipedia rule? If so, why isn't it being enforced in this case? Nicmart 22:46, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: I think that the dispute refering to neutrality is, at this point, unfounded. The number of sources have been increased.
Please, read thoroughly the article and the links, and after that put across your ideas in the discussion.
:The new "sources" change nothing: the article is still farcical. There are no specific references for most claims made in the article. The new "sources" are in the category of ideologically biased reading suggestions. No scholar could gain any value from this entry as it doesn't meet even the most rudimentary standard of scholarship. However, it does suit the purpose of leftist ideologues, and that is sufficient to meet Wikipedia standards. How do you reconcile the fact that the entry says that Mitrione was in the FBI, while one of the linked articles says, "Daniel A. Mitrione Sr. was never an FBI man; he was a small-town Indiana police chief who helped lead a covert war on leftist groups in Latin America.." Did you "read thoroughly the article and the links"? Do you understand what footnotes are, and that this article does not have any? Nicmart 05:04, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  REMOVE THE NOMINATION FOR DELETION 

message: On CIA memorial wall Book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIA_Book_of_Honor_open_enlarge.jpg is date 1970-but no name...Mitrione?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.83.75.141 (talk) 16:50, 11 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: On Memorial wall?

message: Substituted at 12:45, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: This article has been filled with errors and false attributions since it was created almost 14 years ago, remaining virtually uncorrected until now.  Langguth's book Hidden Terrors (HT), unreliable though it might be, is consistently cited for information that is not in the article; some of this information may have actually come from Pasaporte 11333 : ocho años con la CIA (P1), credited to Manuel Hevia Coscullela, the rest is simply error after error. As a first cut, I am removing information that is either cited as coming from Langguth, but does not, or that is flatly contradicted by Langguth. Specific errors I have deleted are as follows:
*Mitrione was an "American U.S. government advisor for the CIA in Latin America".  Langguth explicitly DENIES Mitrione worked for the CIA on pp. 138-139 of HT. I have deleted this claim. Putting it back it requires multiple reliable sources.
*Mitrione "joined the FBI in 1959." There is no basis for this statement. HT, in its vague and poorly sourced account of Mitrione's career before he moved to Brazil as a U.S. adviser to Brazilian police, states that Mitrione attended an FBI training program when he was police chief in Richmond, Indiana (p. 27).
*"A. J. Langguth, a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon, claimed that Mitrione was among the U.S. advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without killing them." This claim was originally added to the article with NO source at all. A different editor then vaguely associated it with Langguth's book. A third editor then put it in a reference with book formatting but no page number. A fourth editor then added 'p. 40'  All of this is false. There is no such statement on p. 40 of HT. I have read the whole book, and Langguth does not make this claim about Mitrione.
*"Langguth also claimed that older police officers were replaced 'when the CIA and the U.S. police advisers had turned to harsher measures and sterner men'" (HT 286). This quote is actually Langguth infering the state of mind of Alejandro Otero, Montevideo police commissioner, and is not related to Mitrione.
*"under the new head of the U.S. Public Safety program in Uruguay, Dan Mitrione, the United States 'introduced a system of nationwide identification cards, like those in Brazil… [and] torture had become routine at the Montevideo [police] jefatura'". The original quote is "[Brazilian reporter Artur Aymore] had learned that Dan Mitrione had bestowed technical equipment on the security police; that the United States had introduced a system of nationwide identification cards, like those in Brazil; that torture had become routine at the Montevideo jefatura." Whether this is accurate or not, in presenting the claim that this took place "under the new head of the U.S. Public Safety program" is WP:SYNTHESIS, and "U.S. Public Safety program" doesn't seem to make sense.
*"The OPS had been helping the local police since 1965, providing them with weapons and training. It is claimed that torture had already been practised since the 1960s, but Dan Mitrione was reportedly the man who made it routine." This passage cites HT (285-287), but there is no such passage on these pages. Instead, 286-287 discusses Arturo Aymore's claim to have interviewed Otero. There are serious questions about this claim, but regardless of Aymore's veracity, it is WP:SYNTHESIS to twist Langguth's words like this.
*"As the torture allegations grew and the tensions in Uruguay escalated, Mitrione was eventually kidnapped by the Tupamaros on July 31, 1970. They proceeded to interrogate him about his past and the intervention of the U.S. government in Latin American affairs." This is cited to HT (22), which gives no description of the circumstances or context of Mitrione's kidnapping, offering only a description of a note from Mitrione to his wife which his kidnappers provided. Regarding the content of his interrogation, Mitrione wrote "I have been and am still being interrogated deeply about the AID program and the police." This does not match the description in the article. More important, the circumstances and context of the kidnapping are described in only the vaguest term in the article. This brief mention is flatly inaccurate. Rgr09 (talk) 05:17, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Amen. This article has long been propaganda masquerading as information. Nicmart (talk) 14:05, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  An appalling article 

message: The  article now has a one sentence section on "continuing controversy" over Mitrione's murder, which reads as follows:
:The Mitrione case continued to reverberate within U.S.-Uruguayan relations in 2008, with U.S. Ambassador to Uruguay Frank E. Baxter being involved in high level exchanges about Uruguayan investigations into other crimes committed during the country's civilian-military dictatorship from 1973 until 1985, to which linkages were allegedly perceived.(in Spanish) El Muerto, 15 December, 2010
The source is an anonymous post in the Spanish-language blog El Muerto which discusses several U.S.-Uruguayan diplomatic cables published on wikileaks. The reliability of El Muerto is questionable, and the passage itself is incoherent as it stands. An RS source for the cables and their relevance to Mitrione's murder is needed for this section. Otherwise it should be removed. Rgr09 (talk) 23:58, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section on "continuing controversy" 

message: The article originally contained the following paragraph:
 Tom Golden, a career army intelligence operative detailed to the CIA and assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Montevideo, was a personal friend of Mitrione who worked closely with Uruguayan officials to try to secure the release of Mitrione and prevent his execution. After Mitrione's death, Golden disputed the torture-training allegations in closed-door testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
This was sourced to Langguth, p. 256, but in fact no "Tom Golden" is mentioned anywhere in Langguth. Since the paragraph is unsourced, I have removed it. Whoops, forgot to sign. Rgr09 (talk) 09:23, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  paragraph on "Tom Golden" 

message: One source says, "...Mitrione was later found dead in a car, shot twice in the head and with no other visible signs of maltreatment.” Another says, "But poor Mitrione--they tied him up, tortured him and finally killed him.” It is unlikely that both of those can be true. Nicmart (talk) 21:13, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inconsistentcy 

message: The lead was edited to say Mitrione was "captured and executed". This is a wildly POV description that might have been written by the Tupamaros fifty years ago. Revised to "kidnapped and murdered". Rgr09 (talk) 09:23, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  lead language 

message: The lack of citations are noted in the article. It's shameful that important assertions still have no sources. Nicmart (talk) 02:44, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  2022 and still missing important footnotes