Of all the Srebrenica revisionists haunting the comments section of this blog, you are the dumbest and the easiest to refute.  At least the others have a semblance of logic to their arguments! After my last post you claimed that there was no evidence of hand grenades being used at the Kravica warehouse.  After I refuted that claim by citing the evidence, you shut up.  Now you are using linguistic analysis to suggest that I am "Reklam" becuase he used an Anglicism "different to" in his comment.  If you read my post again, you will see that it was the investigator Dean Manning that used that terminology.  For the record, he is an Australian.  

Me no shut up. The world owes you its undying gratitude for showing the quality of your case. You refute only yourself. Have another drink.

Mr Dobbs. Give us the exact text in "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" and English about "grenades" at the warehouse. I watched and heard Shattuck saying "grenades". What did Shattuck mean? What did his interocutor and interpreters say. Do you know the difference between"rucna bomba" (English [hand] grenade" and "granata" English "shell", out of a tube? Have another drink

Mr D. Somehow I missed your "refutation". Dumb of me. Plese repeat myour refutation What was the ordnace? You may use English.

Frankly the idea that some anonymous (or semi-anonymous) poster on an online discussion can cough up exculpatory evidence which is not being considered by the tribunal by either the prosecution or defense is laughable.

If such evidence existed, it would already he gathered by either side in support of their cases. All it comes down to is armchair CSI bullcrap by people who have no actual knowledge of events, of what evidence has been presented nor the skills and knowledge worthy of being taken seriously on such subjects.

Of course once they stop arguing their unsupported theories and phony factual assertions you get inundated with the goofy crap:

-The moral equivalence arguments
-The conspiracy theories
-The phony claims of media bias
-The ad hominem insults

Mr. Dobbs, you are handling these goofballs with tact, dignity and grace. The fact of the matter is, the tribunal speaks for itself and you have done a good in pointing this out.

This phrase ("Srebrenica revisionists") reminds me of the communist times. What arguments you have to corroborate your thesis that all "revisionists" are dumb, dumber and, eventually, dumbest?
I doubt that you can prove anything by labeling people as "deniers", "revisionists", and so on.

Anonymous SPOOD wrote: "Mr. Dobbs, you are handling these goofballs with tact, dignity... " Then "some anonymous (or semi-anonymous) poster on an online discussion can cough up exculpatory evidence which is not being considered by the tribunal by either the prosecution or defense is laughable." -- Teehee

I am not employing ad hominem because I am criticizing the inherently dishonest nature of your comments, not your person.

Tribunals are set up to present evidence and legal arguments. They are in the best position to make evaluations as to the availability and credibility of evidence of the subject matter.

This is opposed to the blathering of a bunch of revisionists/deniers who are clearly taking obvious cues from the tactics of Holocaust deniers. The major difference being, unlike David Irving & co, the Balkan variants are too impatient to wait a generation or two for the principle actors involved to be long dead.

It still doesn't excuse the lame rhetorical arguments being made as well.

-The moral equivalence garbage (one person even used the same exact example used by Holocaust deniers!)
-Claims of some media borne conspiracy (which you would have the burden to demonstrate)
-Conspiracy theories against Yugoslavia (again, you have to demonstrate that one too)

Mr D, are you pisseD? USA- that means angrY.-- UK. That means drunk. Have another.

Could you possible be trying sarcasm?

"Dean Manning, an Australian police officer and forensic scientist responsible for investigating many of the crime scenes."

It means he is an expert in this sort of thing. A person with specialized training and education on the subject. Someone whose opinion in such situations carry the weight of testimonial facts in a court of law.

Manning wasn't there, Danny Boy

"Still waiting to see conclusive evidence that a figure of near or greater than 7,000 Muslim males were summarily executed at Srebrenica - while noting how other Bosnian Civil War related casualties have been acknowledged as false."

Then wait for the judgment of the tribunal.

Of course other Bosnian Civil War related casualties have no bearing on this matter because there is no such thing as a moral equivalence argument for genocide.

As of now, you are in no position to give credible evaluations of the facts presented or evidence examined. So there is no reason to take anything you say in this regard at face value.

As someone brought up in Ireland I really wondered at the EU's new found zeal on this matter (let's not even bring Italy or Spain into it). To my knowledge there has never been an EU report on the question of Irish corruption yet a judicial inquiry, in Dublin took more than five years just to follow the criminal affairs of just one Irish property company.

And in the last fortnight, of course, we have all seen how uncorrupt the UK police, politicians and press are. I would suggest rather than barring people from joining our 'club' for alleged corruption we first sort out our own affairs and then help those in the country in question who are seeking to expose corrupt practices.

"America has the best judges money can buy", the old saying goes. The issue of corruption should always be examined in important cases. There are several reasons to believe venality less likely here. First, the judges are from different countries than the defendant & the victims. Second, there are multiple judges. Third, the alleged crime is not a property or drug crime, which is usually what produces a successful bribe.

Likely, there are available documents that detail specific precautions against corruption by the Hague. Such definitely should be prominently displayed & frequently discussed. Corrupt courts are among the most important reasons that third world countries do not develop; key to making a country a good place to do business are fair courts that ensure contracts are enforced. Had a chat with an American jurist who works in Central America. One little pointer, if memory serves: put all money in question in the courtroom as cash in a box controlled by an entity separate from the judge before the trial begins in cases in which the amount in question is not huge; sort of like the devices used in America to keep the store clerks safe from robbers & the stores safe from the store clerks!

Let's do our arithmetic and parsing here: "...But what about the other 6,000-7,000 people whose remains were discovered at Kozluk and other such crime scenes...]...
Calculator ready? -- "6k-7k + other (6k-7k + _________ x how many "other such crime scenes"). Fill in the blank. And, then, what of the 8k + number on the cenotaph next to which Hadji Dobbs posed?

When do you hypthosize that this terrain cleanup operation was conducted?  At the primary graves or at the secondary graves?

Second, if there was such an operation, on the scale you are suggesting, how come the defense in the various Srebrenica trials has not been able to find any reference to it in the records or produce witnesses who participated in it?

If Manning didn't qualify as an expert witness, his testimony would not have been admitted. The defense counsel would have picked up on that immediately and stricken his contributions to the tribunal quickly. There are rules set in to exclude expert testimony based on qualifications or issues with the reports themselves. There was no such objection by the defense.

I would trust the discretion of the legal experts here over your evaluations.

In fact that was not even what the defense counsel objected to in his testimony. It was whether expert testimony even should be admitted at all.
http://sim.law.uu.nl/sim/caselaw/tribunalen.nsf/ae4b0f7b22afa1cdc12571b500329d5e/8c298d4550392dc3c12571fe004be433?OpenDocument

You are either completely misrepresenting the facts here or you have this quixotic notion that you are capable of evaluating the facts and procedures of the case from your desk.

@ Spood - I didn't say he wasn't any kind of an expert at all. He just wasn't an expert on the particular topic he was discussing in the testimony quoted by Mr. Dobbs, and he even said so right there in the transcript which I quoted chapter and verse with the page numbers and everything.

Manning was the team leader overseeing the forensic investigation between 1996 and 2001. He didn't do the soil analysis, there was a guy working for him who did that. Here is how Manning explained things in the Popovic trial on 10 December 2007: He said, "The ICTY engaged Professor Tony Brown from the University of Exeter, who collected soil and pollen samples from the mass grave and surrounding the mass grave. On occasions, when he wasn't able to attend, the archaeology team collected samples for him from various parts of the grave, and he then examined those soil and pollen samples. And based on his work, I was able to provide a definitive link between the soil type that was in the primary grave and the soil type that was in the secondary graves, indicating that the soil type in the secondary grave was foreign to that area but was the same as the primary gravesite."

Professor Brown, who hasn't testified, is the expert and Manning's work is based on his work. Brown provided the Tribunal with two reports in 1998 and 1999 (avaliable as Blagojevic et al. trial Exhibits P744a and P743a) . Brown's reports aren't terribly specific, he doesn't say this body came from here, and that body came from there. It isn't as precise as that at all. The only thing he's saying is that soils were found in some of the graves that were inconsistant with the grave site, but that were consistant with soils found at other locations. The only thing you can conclude based on his reports is that a link exists between location A and location B. That doesn't exclude the possibility that a combat victim could have been brought to location A for burial and reburried at location B, or that a combat victim was already burried at location B when victims from location A arrived.

Mr. Dobbs,

I'm hypthosizing that the clean-up operation could have happened any time a grave (regardless of whether it was primary or secondary) was being dug. Anytime you have a grave being dug, that location is the most logical place to bring bodies that have been collected from the battlefield.

And who says witnesses haven't been produced. I haven't looked at what the defense has produced, they may have produced witnesses, but I did stumble upon a prosecution witness in the Popovic trial who described exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about.

As you know the graves at Glogova are linked to Kravica Warehouse, but this witness says bodies were brought there from other places too.

Witness PW161 testified on 28 March 2007 if you want to look the transcript up. He was asked by Defense counsel: "And in these graves in Glogova, all the bodies that were found in Konjevic Polje were buried there too; isn't that correct?"

PW-161: "Yes."

Defense Counsel: "Bodies found, when searching the territory and the area of Radno Buljek [phoen], Kamenica, Pobudje, these bodies were also buried there?"

PW-161: "All those who were killed up there, and even the five or six bodies that I saw by the Vuk Karadzic School, the driver later informed me that there had been more of them. All of them had been taken and -- to those graves and buried in those graves in Glogova."

In re-examination the prosecutor asks: "During the days that we're talking about, around the Kravica murder and afterward, did you or anyone else you know go back into those woods to retrieve Muslim bodies out of those woods?"

PW-161 answered: "Well, the employees of the public utilities company and the civilian protection gathered bodies. There were even lorries that couldn't access certain areas, but as to whether they were in Ravni Buljim, I don't know, but they did bring them in from the woods."

As you well know, the Glogova graves have been linked to the killings at the Kravica warehouse, but here we have testimony from a witness, and a prosecution witness at that, saying that bodies from other places were collected to be burried there too -- which is only natural.

You WERE trying to impugn Manning's qualifications as an expert on what he was testifying about. Jeez the revisionism doesn't stop with you!

You are still playing armchair attorney, second guessing facts already put forth in evidence and being evaluated by the tribunal.

"Professor Brown, who hasn't testified, ....."

If Manning's work is so easily refuted by what amounts to a peer review, why hasn't Dr. Brown or any other potential peer in the field been called in as a rebuttal expert witness?

Why hasn't the defense even disclosed its expert witness or physical evidence to rebut Manning?

The best guess is because to put forth a frivolous claim, or one which can't hold up to close scrutiny, hurts their case.

If your claim, that his expert testimony is so easily attacked, is even remotely supportable the defense would have already done it. It would be the easiest form of defense possible. Attacking the prosecution's prima facie evidence. No need to come up with affirmative defenses or even alibis. It would just have been dismissed.

Frankly, the case speaks for itself. If there was decent evidence to the contrary, the defense team would have already brought it up. These are some of the most skilled, experienced attorneys out there. Again, you seem to underestimate Mladic's defense team.

There is still no reason to take you attacks of the evidence presented seriously. The tribunal can evaluate this sort of thing just fine as it is.

@ Spood - Manning doubted his own expertise on the topic, which is why he prefaced the answers he gave the judges. He wasn't testifying as an expert when he gave those answers, nor was he claiming to speak as one. He was asked a question, and he gave an opinion, but he was up front about the fact that he wasn't speaking as an expert when he gave the answers that he gave.

@ Spood - This isn't about Manning's expert report, this is about the specific passages from Mr. Manning's testimony that Mr. Dobbs quoted in his article. The defense had no need to challenge that testimony because Manning himself disclaimed his answers and said that he wasn't testifying as an expert when he gave them.

The arguments that Mr. Dobbs is advancing here aren't the same ones the prosecution was advancing at trial so why would you have expected the defense to have responded to them? Not even the ICTY chief pathologist or even the Krstic trial chamber excluded the possibility that some of the graves could have combat casulties in them. The only one denying it is Mr. Dobbs and you apparently.

To reply to Andy,

I am afraid that the example you cite about Glogova-Kravica bodies does not support your argument. In fact it contradicts it. The experts were able to identify a group of 100 or so individuals buried in a section of the Glogova site who were not killed in the Kravica warehouse. Investigator Dusan Janc filed a corrigendum to his expert report on April 9, 2009 dealing with precisely this matter, which was hashed over by the tribunal in some detail. it is available here.

http://icr.icty.org/frmResultSet.aspx?e=20n4li454b41nf550ajoikiz&StartPage=1&EndPage=10

Janc writes that 12 individuals must be excluded from the kravica count because they were bodies returned from serbia, which may or may not have been srebrenica-related. (I already subtracted these bodies from the kravica count in my post, reflecting the figures used by the tribunal.) also buried at glogova were 80 people murdered in vuk karadzic school in bratunac, 10-15 in konjevic polje, and a truck load from the bratunac-konjevic polje road. The trial chamber concluded that all these people were murdered. nevertheless, to be completely accurate, they should be deducted from the kravica count and added to the "other" count. (I will update my earlier post to that effect.)

Far from confirming your hypothesis that it was possible to dump extraneous bodies in graves without the investigators figuring out where they came from, this in fact demonstrates the opposite.

To sum up, as Dean Manning testified, it is conceivable that one or two "combat-related" bodies could have been dumped in these mass graves without the discrepancy coming to the attention of the investigation, but not any significant number above that.

Mr. Dobbs,

The link you posted does not work, but none the less I was able to find Dusan Janc's corrigendum anyway (it is Popovic exhibit P04492 for anybody else who wants to see it) and it doesn't contradict my point at all. It actually contradicts what you've been saying.

What I've been arguing this entire time is that the evidence we have just isn't good enough to say, with any degree of precision, how many prisoners were executed and how many soldiers were killed in combat. What you've been arguing is that the forensic science is so precise and reliable that soil and pollen analysis would have told the investigators if bodies had been brought to a gravesite from anywhere other than the site of a mass execution. We can clearly see from Janc's corrigendum that you're wrong about that.

Janc didn't exclude the victims you mention based on things like soil and pollen analysis. If you read his corrigendum, you find that he excluded them based on documents and witness testimony that didn't come to light until many years after the fact. His report shows that the experts who exhumed those graves had no idea that bodies were being brought there from anywhere other than Kravica Warehouse.

Bodies got brought to the mass graves in Glogova from all over the place and the investigators never realized it, and they never would have figured it either. As recently as March 13, 2009 (when Janc's initial report was written - it is exhibit P04490) they thought all of the bodies buried at Glogova had come from Kravica Warehouse. Janc didn't exclude those the victims you mention on the basis of soil and pollen samples or any other forensic evidence they found in the graves. He excluded them on the basis of documents accounting for those 12 people turned back from Serbia, and on the basis of testimony from prosecution witnesses who said bodies had been brought to Glogova from other places besides Kravica Warehouse. His corrigendum says the exact number of people connected with Kravica Warehouse "cannot be provided."

There is precious little testimony from people who actually transported bodies and dug these graves, and I think the reason for that is because not many witnesses are going to want to put themselves at the scene of the crime, and I don't think the defense or the prosecution is particularly anxious to hear from them anyway. I think there were probably more combat casualties than the prosecution would care to admit, and I think there were probably more prisoners murdered than the defense would care to admit. Both sides seem to want to draw sweeping conclusions about the numbers based on insufficient evidence.

But I think most of the blame for the situation we find ourselves in falls on the prosecution and on the trial chamber itself. PW-161 was guaranteed immunity so that he would testify, but the prosecutor didn't call him to testify about his knowledge of the Glogova mass graves. He was called to testify because he eye witnessed prisoners being murdered at Kravica warehouse. It was just kind of by chance during the cross-examination by the defense that he said what he knew about the Glogova graves. One thing to bear in mind is that the defense is in no position to guarantee anyone immunity, so their ability to bring witnesses who participated in these events is severely compromised compared to what the prosecutor or the trial chamber could do.

There is so much that we don't know, and so many variables, that it's impossible to say with any degree of certainty how many soldiers died in combat and how many prisoners were murdered. At some point you have to be honest and take stock of what you know, what you don't know, and what you might not know.

Manning is an expert witness for the prosecution.

He doesn't testify as an eyewitness, only someone who gives an opinion. As an expert witness, his opinion is to be formed based on his evaluation of physical evidence before him based on his skills and education. His personal opinions mean nothing here. He is a "hired gun" by the prosecutor.

Your claims of bias is rather silly. Its a given his testimony will favor the prosecution. T

To rebut Manning, one has to bring in their own expert to testify as to what he did wrong or why his conclusions lack support.

i do not think you can be absolutely precise about the number of victims. my chart reflected the figures that the investigators came up with. i have now amended these figures to also reflect Janc's corrigendum, which I did not see originally.  when fresh evidence presents itself, I am always ready to incorporate it into my analysis, in contrast to the methodology employed by some of the people on your side of the argument (e.g. jpmaher and his claim that hand grenades were not used at Kravica).   i have stopped referring to "8,000 people executed following Srebenica" because i think the evidence supports only around 7,000.  It could be 7,000 plus a couple of hundred, or 7,000 minus a couple of hundred, difficult to be precise.  However, I am confident it is not "several hundred", as Stephen Karganovic has claimed.  To be fair to you, you have said "many thousands."  I think you can be much more precise than that, based on all the investigative work that has been done.  

bottom line is that it is important to draw conclusions on the basis of the mountain of evidence of various kinds--archeological, forensic, eyewitness--that is out there rather than hypothetical possibilities.  

I appreciate your willingness to change your position when new evidence presents itself. My own views about Srebrenica have changed over time as well, and the biggest reason for that is the fact that the Tribunal made the trial exhibits available online through icr.icty.org. Transparency is the best policy, and I'd like to see more of it -- especially with regard to the aerial reconnaissance photographs and the DNA evidence collected by the ICMP.

I agree, and you are right, it's important to draw conclusions based on the evidence. But if plausible hypothetical possibilities exist, and the evidence doesn't rule them out, then the evidence itself isn't conclusive.

I will repeat what I said earlier. I believe there is conclusive evidence proving that mass executions took place and that thousands of prisoners were systematically murdered. However, I do not believe there is conclusive evidence as to the precise number.

There is also evidence that a lot of people were killed in military combat operations as well. I'm sure you are aware, and I can post references to the trial transcripts if you're not, that some of the surviving members of the column have testified that they encountered fighting, landmines, and numerous Bosnian-Serb ambushes in which hundreds of people were killed. At the Kamenica ambush alone some of the surviving witnesses have testified that up to 1,000 people were killed there. But yet again, I don't see any conclusive evidence that allows me to come up with a precise number of victims. All we have are estimates from military analysts that vary from 1,000 to 3,000 or more.

So instead of changing "8,000 executed" to "7,000 executed" why not just say "nearly 8,000 Muslim men were killed in a series battles, ambushes, and mass executions following the Bosnian-Serb takeover of the Srebrenica enclave." It's accurate and it doesn't leave you out on a limb with the numbers.

What "precision" are you talking about?

Look at this number here engraved on the monument in Potocari http://oi41.tinypic.com/6fz0au.jpg
8372 victims and more... Do you know the exact date when it was engraved?

According to a preliminary list of Muslim missing that the Federal Commission for Missing Persons (FCMP) issued in 2005, there was 8373 missing persons.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81921316/Preliminarni-Spisak-Nestalih-i-Ubijenih-u-Srebrenici-1995

You can find the same list on the official website of the Memorial Center Potocari http://www.potocarimc.ba/_ba/liste/nestali_z.php

I suppose you know that Mirsad Tokaca, president of the Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo (IDC) told in Banjaluka (march 31, 2010) that about 500 people where removed from the list of missing persons, because IDC found them alive. Allegedly it happened in the period of 2005-2007.

Compare the FCMP list from 2005 and the list you can find today and you will see is it truth.

What about the names of the living people engraved on the monument? Are they erased? Of course not! Isn't this fact alone enough to raise a reasonable doubt that something's deeply wrong here... It may be a clear proof of a dishonest intention of the "International Community" and proof of falsehood, is it not?

The "monumental" number of 8372 massacred Muslim defies the facts, logic and a common sense, no matter what the reality is? Is it not a precalculated (prearranged) number, a planned goal that was to be achieved at any cost?