(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The Dirty War Index: A Public Health and Human Rights Tool for Examining and Monitoring Armed Conflict Outcomes
Calculating and Using DWIs
A DWI can be easily used and understood, facilitating interdisciplinary communication and research on war’s effects. DWIs can measure rates of undesirable outcomes from accepted methods (e.g., civilian casualties from aerial bombing of military targets). They can also measure rates of using prohibited, illegitimate methods (e.g., torture), and rates of applying illegitimate methods to especially vulnerable populations (e.g., torturing children) to describe rates of exceptional atrocity. However, the mere application of DWI analysis to a combatant group does not indicate that it is “dirty”: a DWI ratio simply identifies how often, if at all, the group is linked with the particular undesirable outcome being measured, facilitating comparisons. To illustrate, we draw on data from B’Tselem
An Unsurprising Confession About Iraqi WMD
When former U.S. Secretary of State presented evidence to justify the American invasion of Iraq one the sources was an Iraqi with the code name of Curve Ball. Following the invasion the U.S. military frantically set-out to find the WMD sites described by Curve Ball. As is widely known all the justifications employed by the Bush administration were just meer fabrications they were out and out lies created because of George Bush’s belief that the first Gulf War didn’t go far enough: Saddam Hussein’s downfall. In today’s Guardian the informant known as Curve Ball Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi admitted in lied.
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