the precision of the Israeli weapons systems — a forensic architectural analysis of the ruins of Gaza is commensurate with a proportional use of force by the Israeli armed forces. While Garlasco was eventually forced to resign from Human Rights Watch following a furore over his collections of Nazi memorabilia, another aspect of Garlasco’s history drew less controversy. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch he worked for the Defence Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon, and was in charge of High-Value targeting during the second Iraq war. The American military wanted to ensure that its airstrikes would be judged proportional. Because proportionality in international law is contextual, there is no absolute number of civilian deaths that is considered excessive. One chooses a magic number. The Pentagon’s was 30. If it were probable that more than 29 civilians would be killed by an airstrike, the final decision over the attack would have to be made by Rumsfeld or Bush. Little comfort for the civilians. Garlasco’s job was to ensure that the strikes killed less than that. Using software similar to that used by architects, he analysed the probable effects of bombs on concrete and steel, and estimated population densities in the areas about to be struck. By altering the angle a bomb would hit a building, the time of day the strike occurred, and hundreds of other variables, he attempted to ensure that the strikes were ‘proportional’. Bombing becomes, in Weizman’s words, ‘the design of ruins’. Increasingly unhappy with the way the war was being run, and facing controversy after a strike intended for ‘Chemical Ali’ – Saddam Hussein’s cousin – didn’t hit its target and left 17 people dead, Garlasco resigned, and soon after joined Human Rights Watch. His first assignment? An analysis of the conduct of the Iraq war. The report that came out was generally critical of the American campaign, though it did note that attempts to reduce civilian casualties in air strikes had generally been successful. XI Garlasco’s story indicates some of the limits of forensics— architectural and otherwise. He employed the same forensic methods to assess American proportionality at the Pentagon (before the strikes) and with Human Rights Watch (after the strikes), and could see his mission equally fulfilled: both organisations wanted to ensure that American military strikes killed no more than 29 people. In an interview with Weizman, Garlasco says: ‘I can no longer say if this destruction was wrong or right. I can only say whether it was legal or illegal’. A question for the expert. The legal and the technical supplant the ethical and the political. The risk for a critical forensic architecture is that just as the forensic analysis of Human Rights Watch is the post-facto double of the Pentagon’s analysis (checking results, improving design), so Weizman’s analysis of forensics threatens to enshrine the importance of the technocrats, even as it unveils the power structures sedimented in buildings. A building is not a witness. A building allows for an analysis within a framework. The freedom of the witness is not just to call into question the very framework in which he speaks, but to speak of two things little mentioned in contemporary forensics. He can speak of truth, and he can speak of justice. c
Flying into proportionality:American, British, and Australian aircraft fly over an undisclosed desert in the Iraqi war theatre.
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