Forensic architecture only the criminal can solve the crime

Radical Philosophy

Volumn , Issue 164, 2010, Pages 9-24

  Weizman, Eyal ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 78650528168     PISSN: 0300211X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Richard Goldstone et al., Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Human Rights Council, 15 September 2009 (hereafter Goldstone Report), http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcoun-cil/ specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC-Report.pdf.
2. HRW reports in whose making Garlasco participated (not including those on Israel, which will be discussed later) are: A Dying Practice: Use of Cluster Munitions by Russian and Georgia in August 2008(2008);
3. Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan (2008);
4. Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006(2006);
5. No Blood no Foul: Soldier's Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq (2006);
6. Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U. S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division (2005);
7. Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq (2003). All are available online at www.hrw.org.
8. See Human Rights Watch, Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip (2004), www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/10/17/razing-rafah;
9. Gaza Beach Investigation Ignores Evidence (2006), www.hrw.org/en/news/ 2006/06/19/israel-gaza-beach-investigation-ignores-evidence. For a contestation of the latter by NGO Monitor
10. see Experts or Ideologues? The Gaza Beach Incident 2006: http://ngo-monitor.org/article. php?viewall=yes&id=2606.
11. The IDF operations killed some 1, 387 Palestinians, at least 762 of whom were civilians, according to a list of names published by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. Thirteen Israelis died during the fighting, three of them civilians. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that 3, 914 buildings were completely destroyed, 21, 000 housing units were destroyed or badly damaged and about 51, 000 people were displaced.
12. See 'Gaza Flash Appeal', February 2009, p. 1, www.ochaopt.org/gazacrisis/ admin/output/files/ocha-opt-gaza-flash-appeal-2009-02-05-english.pdf.
13. Omri Ceren, 'Marc Garlasco: Is HRW's Anti-Israel Investigator A Nazi-Obsessed Collector?', www.mere-rhetoric.com/2009/09/08/marc-garlasco-is- hrws-anti-is-rael-investigator-a-nazi-obsessed-collector/. The blogger wondered if Garlasco's 'obsession with anti-Semitic Nazi genocidal lunatics' was in any way related to his 'apologism for anti-Semitic genocidal Hamas lunatics'.
14. Dremer is quoted in Herb Keinon, 'Diplomacy: Israel vs. Human Rights Watch', Jerusalem Post, 16 July 2009 (updated 18 July 2009), www.contendo.jpost.com/serv-let/Satellite?cid=1246443832672&pagename= JPArticle/ShowFull.
15. Goldstone Report, pp. 6-9.
16. Goldstone's work was to pave the way for the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, a body that he strongly supported. Later allegations embroiled Goldstone in a controversy of his own when an Israeli newspaper revealed that he sent at least twenty-eight black defendants to the gallows as a South African judge under the apartheid regime.
17. See Tehiya Barak, 'Judge Goldstone's Dark Past', Ynet, 5 June 2010.
18. Quintilian, Institute of Oratory, book 9, chapter 2: http://honeyl. public.iastate.edu/quintilian/9/chapter2.html#30. Thanks to Thomas Keenan for this reference.
19. Orators would memorize long speeches, which they were expected to deliver by heart by locating objects or forensic evidence within a mental edifice - most commonly an actual or imaginary building. Walking an imaginary path, they would reconnect objects with the ideas they evoked. This pairing of an object with an idea in rhetoric has also been also understood as part of the 'art of memory' - the mnémotechnique in which things stand for ideas in a speech - so famously unpacked in Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1966.
20. See Fernando Vidal, 'Miracles, Science, and Testimony in Post-Tridentine Saint-Making', Science in Context vol. 20, no. 3, 2007, pp. 481-508. Thanks to Adrian Rifkin for this reference.
21. In the nineteenth century, photographs as courtroom evidence were often understood as pale substitutes for first-hand evidence posing legal challenges, and even referred to as 'the hearsay of the sun'.
22. See Joel Snyder, 'Res Ipsa Loquitur', in Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, Zone Books, New York, 2007.
23. David Stark and Verena Paravel, 'PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration', Theory Culture Society 25, 2008, p. 30.
24. See Steven Byers, Introduction to Forensic Anthropology: A Textbook, Allyn & Bacon, Boston MA, 2002;
25. John Hunter, Charlotte Roberts and Anthony Martin, eds, Studies in Crime: Introduction to Forensic Archaeology, Routledge, London, 1995;
26. Margaret Cox, Human Osteology: In Archaeology and Forensic Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. Confirming the subtitle of this paper, the first large-scale human remains inquiry was conducted by those experts in making mass graves, the Germans, in 1943.
27. Mass Murder in the Forest of Katyn: A Factual Account is the result of an international team of experts that examined 2, 500 bodies of executed Polish officers exhumed from a mass grave to prove that they did not suffer their fate at the hands of the Third Reich.
28. Clyde Snow, cited in Dario A. Euraque, 'The Science of Forensic Anthropology and Human Rights in the Americas', www.trincoll.edu/orgs/scialnce/ SFR/01-02/Files/Forensic%20Anthropology.doc.
29. This was cited to me by Thomas Keenan, who also mentioned the example of William Haglund, who is heading the forensics unit at Physicians for HR, talking about a dig in Bosnia: 'the dead are speaking to us, we are interpreting for the dead, the dead are telling us the same story that the living are telling the investigators, but this [the ICTY] is the first time on this scale that they have been allowed to speak.' Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weiz-man in conversation, ArteEast/Parson School of Design, 13 February 2010.
30. The first instance of a 'reconstruction' of the narrative of destruction of buildings (and people) in war that I've been able to trace relates to the destruction of the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain in 1914, which became a major propaganda issue, and came to be seen as the beginning of total war, a case of war crimes and war reparation. The original 'reconstruction' was by J. Bledier, who used captured soldiers' diaries to draw up the case.
31. See Alan Kremer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. An even earlier reference for the documentation of destruction, although not of war, is related to the destruction of Lisbon, which circulated throughout Europe in the eighteenth century: 'Accounts offer detailed documentation of the damage wrought upon the city and specifically upon the built environment. Heading this category is an elegant series of copper engravings produced by the French artist Jacques-Philippe Le Bas in 1757. The images are derived from drawings executed in Lisbon by Paris and Pedegache and they offer highly detailed records of the important buildings ruined by the disaster. These pictures represent a kind of forensic reporting of the damage. They would have required patient and careful survey of the wreckage, presumably some time after the immediate danger had passed.'
32. See Sharon Sli-winski, 'The Aesthetics of Human Rights', Theory and Critique, vol. 50, no. 1, 2009, p. 27.
33. Central to this development is the 'Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project' carried out by András Riedlmayer and architect/architectural historian Andrew Herscher after the Kosovo war in 1999. Riedlmayer and Herscher developed a large database of the destruction of architectural heritage in Kosovo and mapped out the patterns of this devastation in order to provide evidence to the ICTY, where their report was presented numerous times.
34. Hito Steyerl, 'A Thing Like You and Me', e-flux, April 2010, www.e-flux.com/journal/view/134.
35. As Alberto Toscano has suggested to me, one should not forget the Nietzschean lesson, from the Genealogy, that conditions of genesis do not necessarily instruct us as to the actual functioning of a given object or phenomenon.
36. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub MD, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Routledge, London, 1991;
37. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark, Cornell University Press, New York, 2006.
38. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Australian National Inquiry into the Separation of Indigenous Children from their Families and Communities, and the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples would be some of these examples.
39. See also Rosanne Kennedy, Lynne Bell and Julia Emberley, eds, 'Decolonising Testimony: on The Possibilities and Limits of Witnessing', Humanities Research, vol. 15, no. 3, 2009.
40. Robert L. Bernstein, 'Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast', New York Times, 19 October 2009.
41. Michal Givoni, 'Witnessing in Action: Ethics and Politics in a World Without Borders', http://roundtable.kein.org/node/1077.
42. See Alain Badiou, Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, Verso, London and New York, 2001;
43. Rony Brauman, 'From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism: Remarks and an Interview', South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, nos 2-3, Spring/Summer 2004;
44. Rony Brauman, 'Learning from Dilemmas', in Michel Feher, ed., Nongovernmental Politics, Zone Books, New York, 2007, pp. 131-47.
45. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone Books, New York, 2007.
46. This relates to the term 'material witness' that was suggested by Susan Schuppli in her account of the analogue materiality of media artefacts.
47. See 'Of Mice Moths and Men Machines', Cosmos and History, vol. 4, no. 1-2, 2008.
48. The pop culture manifestation of this shift is exemplified in the career of the actor William Petersen. The first role for which Petersen is famous is FBI agent Will Graham in Michael Mann's film Manhunter (1986), the first movie version of one of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels, in which he plays an extreme case of the detective as psychologist, driven mad by his empathic capacity to put himself in the mind of a killer. His famous second role, however, is as Dr Gil Grisom, the main character in the initial version of CSI (begun in 2000), where he's a borderline autistic science geek, who hates dealing with people rather than objects. Thanks to David Cunningham for this suggestion.
49. Steve Goose, in HRW promotional video clip, www.youtube.com/user/ HumanRightsWatch#p/u/40/CDtDe XS-iuE.
50. This is what is referred to as 'the day after': the rationale of which is to leave an area sterile by razing it to the ground. 'That way', as one of the Israeli soldiers interviewed in Breaking the Silence explained, 'we have good firing capacity, good visibility for observation, we can see anything, we control a very large part of the area and very effectively.'
51. See testimonies at www.shovrimshtika.org/index-e.asp.
52. Personal interview with Marc Garlasco, New York, 27 September 2009.
53. See a detailed analogous work of classification in Ariella Azoulay, 'The (In) human Spatial Condition: A Visual Essay', in Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi, eds, The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Zone Books, New York, 2009.
54. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
55. See Josh White, 'The Man on Both Sides of Air War Debate', Washington Post, 13 February 2008;
56. Susanne Koelbl, 'The Pentagon Official Who Came in From the Cold', Spiegel, 3 April 2009;
57. and the documentary film by Charles H. Ferguson, No End in Sight (2007). Garlasco also featured in a 60 Minutes story on US military targeting practices that aired 28 October 2007, www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4402000n&tag= related;photovideo.
58. Human Rights Watch, 'Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U. S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division' (2005), www.hrw.org/reports/2005/us0905.
59. Human Rights Watch, 'Precisely Wrong: Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles' (2009), www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/06/30/precisely- wrong-0.
60. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
61. NGO Monitor, 'Expert or Ideologue? HRW's Defense of Marc Garlasco's Nazi Fetish', 2009, www.ngo-monitor.org/article/expert-or-ideologues-hrw-s-defense- of-marc-garlasco-s-nazi-fetish.
62. John H. Richardson, 'Why Is This Good Man Getting Hung Out to Dry?', Esquire, 13 October 2009, www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/marc- garlasco-nazi-controversy-101309xzz0yqLuDcH0.
63. Marc Garlasco, 'Responding to Accusations', Huffing-ton Post, 11 September 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-garlasco/human-rights-watch-invest- b-284075.html.
64. Steyerl, 'A Thing Like You and Me'.
65. We might rather follow here, then, the way in which for Marx objects really do have a 'fantastic form of relation' between them, asking: 'what would the commodity say if it could speak?'
66. See Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London and New York, pp. 56-81.
67. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
68. Aaron T. Wilson, 'Building The Perfect Beast: Proposals to Improve Usaf Targeting Training', Air Command and Staff College Air University, April 2006.
69. Sina Najafi, Eyal Weizman and Eve Hinman, 'The Building is Our Last Line of Defense: An Interview with Eve Hinman', Cabinet 16, 2004/05, www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/16/weizman. php.
70. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
71. Mark Benjamin, 'When is an Accidental Civilian Death Not an Accident?', Salon.com, 30 July 2007, www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/07/30/collateral- damage.
72. Marc Garlasco, cited in ibid.
73. See Adi Ophir, 'Meta Violence and the End of Physics: Derrida reads Levinas', in Lyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming). Asa Kasher, one of the people who drafted the IDF ethical code, states: 'From the standpoint of the state of Israel, the [Palestinian civilian] neighbour [of a 'terrorist'] is much less important. I owe the soldier more. If it's between the soldier and the terrorist's neighbour, the priority is the soldier.'
74. See Amos Harel, 'The philosopher who gave the IDF moral justification in Gaza', Ha'aretz, 6 February 2009.
75. The HRW statement at www.hrw.org/en/node/84956 reads: 'Human Rights Watch maintains a position of neutrality on issues of jus ad bellum', because it believes that it is 'the best way to promote our primary goal of encouraging all sides in armed conflicts to respect international humanitarian law, or jus in bello.' In this way, HRW took upon themselves some of the traditional role played by the International Red Cross as the neutral guardians of the Geneva Convention.
76. Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman in conversation, ArteEast/Parson School of Design, 13 February 2010.
77. See Eyal Weizman, 'Lawfare in Gaza: Legislative Attack', March 2009, www.opendemocracy.net/article/legislative-attack.
78. See Jorella Andrews, 'In-Situ: The Ethics of Standing and Staring' (forthcoming), in which she refers to 'the visual prolongation of a disastrous event'.
79. See Garlasco, 'Off Target', www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usal203/. In this comprehensive 147-page report Human Rights Watch found that US forces could have prevented hundreds of civilian casualties by abandoning two faulty military tactics - the use of cluster munitions and heavy reliance on 'decapitation' strikes designed to kill Iraqi military and political leaders. The latter was the action Garlasco was involved in.
80. Ibid.: 'For the most part, the collateral damage assessment process for the air war in Iraq worked well, especially with respect to pre-planned targets. Human Rights Watch's month-long investigation in Iraq found that, in most cases, aerial bombardment resulted in minimal adverse effects to the civilian population' (p. 20).
81. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
82. White, 'The Man on Both Sides of Air War Debate'.