Hosted by Justin Podur
[More analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]
I was looking at situations where Enemy Killed in Action was greater than 0, which gave 3729 incidents. I expect that if there are more civilian deaths than are encoded in the database, they are here, as armed people tend to classify those they kill as combatants, sometimes when they are not. But let’s take the data for what it says, and say that who they say were combatants are, for now.
Looking at only incidents where CivilianKIA was greater than 0, I got 1458 events. In OpenOffice Calc (after downloading the convert text-to-numbers extension) I used DataPilot to divide these incidents
by Type:
Air Mission 2
Criminal Event 99
Enemy 1
Enemy Action 716
Explosive Hazard 2650
Friendly Action 162
Friendly Fire 34
Non-Combat Event 309
Other 19
Suspicious Incident 2
Total Result 3994
And by Category:
Accident 120
Ambush 62
ANA-on-ANP 1
ANP Training 12
Arrest 1
Arson 2
ARTY 4
Assassination 38
ATTACK 94
BLUE-GREEN 6
Continue reading “Civilian Deaths in the Afghan War Diary”
[ERROR – THIS MAP SHOWS CF OR COALITION FORCES. A MAP OF CANADIAN FORCES ENGAGEMENTS WILL FOLLOW… APOLOGIES FOR THE FAILURE TO CHECK THE ACRONYMS]
I’ve started to analyze the incredible Afghan War Diary that was published by Wikileaks.
What follows is a bit of nerdiness, in case you want to try this at home.
I’m working over some of the material I wrote and have never published – it’s one of my summer projects. There are quite a few projects that need a bit of work to push them over the edge. One of them has me revisiting my Haiti files. I have a pretty passive research method – stuff comes to me. The Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) for example, is an active community of people, among them very skilled researchers, constantly posting stuff on Haiti politics for years. Looking back at their archives is a pretty amazing exercise.
Continue reading “Is there some standard for evidence that we’ve discarded?”
Written for viewpointonline.net (Pakistan)
What it might have looked like inside the fence
I just read Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People”. It could easily be in my top 20 books. It is really awesome – historically rich, beautifully written, clearly looks at the past, and has a beautiful vision for the future, even though the author is pessimistic (realistic) about the prospects. I might review it – lots of other projects are taking up time right now – but meanwhile I wanted to just put this one long quote down, because it summarizes exactly what I have long thought on the topic. Page 282:
Continue reading “Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People””
Dan discusses the international aspects of the raid. His website is notesonhypocrisy.com
Overnight, Israeli commandos attacked an aid flotilla in the high seas, some 65km from Israel. The commandos killed at least 10 people and injured dozens of others, mostly Turkish nonviolent activists bound for Gaza who were aiming to break Israel’s siege with humanitarian supplies. Israel attacked all of the ships in the flotilla, but the killings seem to have happened on the flagship Mavi Marmari.
From “Identity Politics in Jammu & Kashmir,” ed., Rekha Chowdhary, Vitasta Pub., Delhi,2010;
pUchtE haen voh ke “GaLib kaoN hae”?
kOI batLAO ke ham batLAen kya.
“Ghalib, what are you just who?”
They ask of me today;
Pray help and tell me, after all,
Whatever shall I say. (1)
Introductory Note:
The Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Graduate Student Conference this year took place on April 3, 2010. It had the theme “Contested Spaces: The (Re)Organization of Schooling Under Neoliberalism”. From the conference program: