[Commander in Chief of Pacific Command] Admiral Blair advocated the notion that U.S. military officers could reform their foreign counterparts. He pushed countries in his theater to send their officers to American schools and to open their hallways to U.S. planners and trainers. (Priest, Dana. The Mission, p 51. 2003 W.W. Norton & Company)

Can you spot anything in the careers or biographies of military officers that makes them more likely to violate human rights?

What was the big risk for Salvadorean military officers committing huge human rights violations? US training. It's very, very clear. I think US training selects the officers who are the most motivated, and the way that you distinguished yourself in the Salvadorean military in the 1980s was by killing people. So the most motivated officers are also the worst. But what this also says is that US training is useless for restraining human rights abuse. US training also advantages officers relative to other officers, so when they come back they get better jobs and are in a position to commit more violations. (Patrick Ball "has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases." Interviewed in New Scientist)

Every human rights story goes like this: I am a deponent, and I'm here to tell you about things that happened to one or many victims. I myself may or may not be one of those victims. Each of those victims may have suffered one or more violations, and those violations may or may not be what historians call colligated at one or more points in time or space. Each of the violations may have been perpetrated by zero, one, or many identifiable perpetrators, and those perpetrators may be individuals with names and ranks, or they may be institutions. Each of those may be associated with one or more of the violations in this story. That's the complexity of one story. Now we're going to collect 10,000 stories. (Patrick Ball "has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases." Interviewed in New Scientist)