FC: AAAS' Patrick Ball testifies at Milosevic trial in The Hague

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Patrick has been a longtime Politech member and contributor. --Declan]

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From: ateich () aaas org
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 10:31:08 -0800 (PST)
To: declan () well com
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

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Doing a Number on Violators
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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

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Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 18:59:25 +0000
From: John Eisenschmidt <jweisen () eisenschmidt org>
To: declan () well com
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 <jweisen () eisenschmidt org>
 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

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To: declan () well com
From: Macki <macki () 2600 com>
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

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