I believe Zero has found a copy of the UN
mediator's report and will
post about it on Monday, so hopefully the issue will be cleared up
then. The thing is, we do have to be able to quote from reliable
scholars and journalists about what they've read in reports, or else
we'd have to spend all our time in archives digging up primary-source
material ourselves.
Absolutely. But we should not ignore clear instances where an attempt to
verify a citation to primary material fails. Scholars do make errors,
indulge in interpretation, and so on, and we should allow for this. The
safest way to cite secondary sources is cite the secondary source (Bard,
in this case) as *our* source for a quote (the scholar himself) and note
*his* claimed source. If the primary material becomes available it may
still be a good idea to list the secondary source, but it is no longer of
great importance. For this reason I have some problems with other
estimates in the UN section which have clearly not been verified against a
cited primary source. I have provided a UN source for one of the figures
and when one of us finds time I hope we will be able to trace the primary
source for all official estimates from UN sources.