[Patrick has been a longtime Politech member and contributor. --Declan] --- From: ateichat_private Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 10:31:08 -0800 (PST) To: declanat_private Subject: Doing a Number on Violators From: Al Teich Your readers might be interested in this LA Times story about AAAS human rights staffer Patrick Ball's testimony at the Milosevic trial in The Hague. Al Teich -------------------- Doing a Number on Violators -------------------- Patrick Ball has pioneered the use of databases to expose atrocities. At tribunal, he blames Milosevic for Kosovo 'ethnic cleansing.' By ROBERT LEE HOTZ TIMES STAFF WRITER March 14 2002 BOSTON -- As Patrick Ball scrawled equations across a conference-room white board, his talk was of regression analysis, matching methodologies and capture probabilities. The complete article can be viewed at: http://www.latimes.com/la-000018801mar14.story --- Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 18:59:25 +0000 From: John Eisenschmidt <jweisenat_private> To: declanat_private Subject: AAAS Stastician Testifies Against Milosevic Declan - FYI http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/ballTestify.shtml AAAS Statistician Testifies for Prosecution in Milosevic Trial March 2002 A AAAS statistician testified early this week in the war crimes trial against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. In the face of a combative cross-examination by Milosevic, who is serving as his own attorney, Patrick Ball, deputy director of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program , defended his 67-page analysis of data that suggests that from March through June 1999, Yugoslav forces carried out a systematic campaign of killing and expulsions of Kosovar Albanians that led to the deaths of more than 10,000 people. Ball's testimony seems to rule out other potential causes that had been proposed by Milosevic and his defenders -- that the dead had been killed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) or during NATO air attacks. "The findings of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that action by Yugoslav forces was the cause of the killings and the refugee flow," Ball and his co-authors wrote in their report to the tribunal, Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo: March-June 1999. "Killings were used either to motivate the departures, or the killings were a result of the campaign." Interviews, Exhumation Records Among Data Sources To produce their report, Ball and his co-authors analyzed data on Kosovar refugees from the registries of Albanian border guards in the Albanian village of Morina, and complemented it with the records of other Albanian governent agencies and the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. The data on killings were drawn from exhumation records, and from interviews with refugees conducted by the Human Rights Watch, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative, co-sponsor with AAAS of the Ball report. Ball explains that the data on killings and refugee flows, based on 15,000 interviews and exhumation records, reveal that both seemed to occur in the same place, at the same time, and in distinct surges that suggest "the existence of an external cause." Patterns in Refugee Flow and Killings "When the overall estimates are compared at the regional level, a clear relationship remains between the patterns of refugee flow and killings," according to Ball's report to the tribunal. "The structure of the patterns in both refugee flow and killings over the time period in question is the key component for the findings of the present study...They correlated, nearly simultaneous variations in the social phenomena being measured in time and location strongly suggest a common, systematic cause of which the patterns are a result." Ball and his co-authors, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich and Jana Asher, tested the data against what they knew about patterns of KLA activity and NATO airstrikes, and found that NATO and the KLA increased their activities after clear spikes in the number of killings and level of refugee flows, and not before. In contrast, the study's authors note that the only time there was "a drastic reduction in killings and refugee movement" came during a ceasefire that the Yugoslav government called to coincide with the celebration of the Orthodox Easter. --Coimbra Sirica -- John W. Eisenschmidt <jweisenat_private> Homepage URL | http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen PGP Public Key | http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen/misc/jeisenschmidt.asc PGP Fingerprint | 5F9B F916 5AD1 3295 CF99 BC1E 1F97 E6A3 37E3 BEF2 --- To: declanat_private From: Macki <mackiat_private> Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 03:13:25 -0800 Subject: milosevic and the cDc Hey Declan, Thought you might find this amusing: Patrick Ball was on the cDc's hactivism panel at defcon. "On Wednesday, 13 March, Patrick Ball, deputy director of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program , appeared before the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague to to begin testifying for the prosecution in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic." Slobodan grilled Patrick about the Cult of the Dead Cow and comments he made during his talk. Here is video of the relavent portion: rtsp://hague.bard.edu/autoarchive/icty_env.200203141150.rm? start="01:05:38"&end="01:18:43" Here is the transcript that he appearantly found and was quoting from: http://cultdeadcow.com/panel2001/hacktivism_panel.htm --- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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