Recently I have been reading a number of regurgitated historical facts about early Portuguese history in Goa. In interest of full disclosure, I have myself reproduced some of these statistics in my writing. But here is a very short list of recent Goanet posts with 'accurately' regurgitated facts and figures of Goa. Adv. (former MLA) Uday Bhembre Fr. Ivo De Souza Benedito Ferrao So how accurate is reported historical data? Below is an analysis of data from 'very recent history' from our impeccable Wikipedia! Does quoting the same old facts without counter-checking the data and using intuition and logic
do justice to early colonial history in 21st century? Reading the Wiki article below and many similar historical accounts, and specially medieval and Early Modern history (14th -19th century) would suggest the facts do not often fit together and the conclusions may be often flawed. My analysis of putting the pieces of the puzzle, of early Portuguese history in Goa hopefully will show that the various facts do not add-up and regurgitating the same old ... old same ... really reflects the "limitations of our inquiring mind" Part 2 to follow: Regards, GL From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_count Iraq War: In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military adopted an official policy of not counting deaths. General Tommy Franks' statement that "we don't do body counts" was widely reported. Critics claimed that Franks was only attempting to evade bad publicity, while supporters pointed to the failure of body counts to give an accurate impression of the state of the war in Vietnam. Various conflicting reports of the number of civilian deaths have surfaced. Iraq itself claims that around 12,000 deaths occurred in 2006 [1] and perhaps ~16,000 since the invasion. The United Nations has also kept track, and they report 26,782 deaths in the first ten months of 2006.[2] Several independent groups of researchers have also attempted to gather accounts of civilian deaths, with the most widely circulated project based on Google rank being the Iraq Body Count project. As of the beginning of 2008, they estimate between 80,671 and 88,095 civilian deaths since the occupation. The highest estimate at this time comes from a survey by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which has estimated 600,000 Iraqi deaths due to the war. At the end of October 2005 it became public that the US military had been counting Iraqi fatalitites since January 2004, though only those killed by insurgents and not those killed by the US forces [3] [4].
