VII Figure 1 is a diagram of witnessing. The success of the witness is contingent upon his speech establishing a link between his presence and the event in question, to be evaluated by a forum (a courtroom, the fourth estate), in the face of an interrogation. Forensics, Figure 2, works differently. The object of forensics doesn’t exist outside of a particular forum: dust is just dust until it is evidence of the blast pattern of an Israeli missile. The interpreter’s aim is to establish a link between the object and the event, and deliver a compelling interpretation, again to be evaluated by a forum, in the face of an interrogation. One can, in this diagram, either conclude that the object is fake, or the interpretation erroneous. Unlike the witness taking the stand, the object’s significance is already largely determined: the object-interpreter couplet can speak within a framework, but cannot challenge the very framework that creates the existence of the object. VIII Forensics comes to prominence in international law and politics during investigations of the Argentinian dictatorship in the 1980s. Clyde Snow, who trained many of the people involved in these investigations, became a celebrity, identifying remains from Josef Mengele to Tutankhamen. He said: ‘bones make good witnesses…they never lie and they never forget’. We could also say: they don’t tell the truth either. Bones don’t say anything, and forensics deals in probabilities, not in truth claims. Experts might make truth claims about probabilities, but these are very different to the words of a witness. IX The rise of forensics is not limited to bone science. Forensic architecture, as Eyal Weizman defines it, ‘refers to the presentation of spatial analysis within contemporary legal and political forums’. Its capacity, as he sees it, is not to fetishise the object, but to demystify it. Any building, Weizman says in an interview, ‘is an archive of power relations. In a sense the path of the [Israeli] wall is like a film strip exposed to politics…its message is its path, its materiality’. One of the stories he tells in his most recent book, The Least of All Possible Evils , is of the pyramids in Gaza. No, not those left by the ancient Egyptians, but those created through the encounter of a three-storey residential building and a D9 armoured bulldozer which cannot reach the central pillars of the buildings, creating ruins that resemble pyramids. Weizman tracks, through the shapes made by the wreckage, the particular types of military decisions that leave such forms in the landscape. Forensic architecture, for Weizman, is a critical practice that exposes the constellation of politics forces that construct (and destruct) the landscape. X Weizman writes that much of the Goldstone Report was indebted to precise forensic work done by a Human Rights Watch analyst, Marc Garlasco. In one Human Rights Watch report, Precisely Wrong: Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone- Launched Missiles , the language is militaristic: ‘The drone- launched missiles detonate above the ground, which creates a narrow, relatively shallow crater from missile parts not involved in fragmentation hitting the ground’. This technical analysis is accompanied by an assessment of whether — given
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Witnessing takes the stand:The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is in session. Courtesy of the ICTY.
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