A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day Two, Panel Three: The Scientific Investigation of War Crimes

Moderator: Eric Stover, Director, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, and Vice President, Crimes of War Project Introduction

ERIC STOVER: Our first speaker, Christopher Simpson, is director of the Project on Satellite Imagery and the News Media and associate director of the American University School of Communications and an author of several books on technology and human rights and national security. He is going to talk about satellite remote sensing and war crimes which has become a very important part of investigating war crimes in recent years.

He will be followed by Patrick Ball, who is the deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Patrick is really a leader in the field of using quantitative methods to try and investigate human rights abuses. And it's quite fascinating work that he's begun.

Our final speaker is William Haglund. Bill is a forensic anthropologist and he's the director of the International Forensic Program of Physicians for Human Rights. Bill has really been the leader in probably the most -- and I know because I've done it -- the most grim job possible. And that is going in and exhuming those who have been killed during wars and investigating war crimes.

So a little bit about my background just very briefly. I'm at the University of California at Berkeley. I direct the human rights center there and teach in the public health school. I essentially have spent probably the last 23 years now trying to make the connection between science and medicine and human rights and how can you actually bring these skills and procedures to helping investigate war crimes.

This panel is historical, actually, because when you really think about it the handmaidens of war and war making have always been science and technology all through history. I mean, we weren't wearing lab coats but the wheel was invented and you had the chariot and that changed war-making. You had fortress design and Michelangelo and others were involved in this. And that changed the nature of war as did the introduction of the cross bow and mechanical artillery in the 14th and 15th
centuries.

Simple things like the improvements on the combustion engine changed warfare from WWI to World War II because now you could introduce tanks and you could break the stalemate of trench warfare.

TNT, of course, made a major contribution to the carrying out of war. And also, when you introduced the tank you now had a problem because you had to stop the tank. So you made an anti-tank mine. And a new technology revolved around making mines to just stop the movement of weapons. The machine gun made the conquest of Africa. It was simple. Once you had the machine gun you could move through central Africa until, of course, infectious diseases hit your troops.

Helicopters in Vietnam. Not only did it change the nature of war for Vietnam, it also enabled you to get the wounded out quickly and go within that window of opportunity of getting them in and getting them re-hydrated. Of course, scientists have been involved in nuclear warfare and germ warfare and chemical weapons. Well, our panel today is not going to look at the dark side of science, if you will, but trying to look at what science can contribute to this whole issue of holding perpetrators accountable for war crimes.

And I think if there's one contribution -- and I wouldn't say this is a scientific contribution, but it was an invention. It was Samuel Morse code. It was used during the Crimean War. And the reason this is important in the development of international humanitarian law is that at this point you had journalists -- this is where all these things come together -- is that journalists were now able to send their stories back in real time, or somewhat real time. It was expensive but you didn't have the colonels going back or others who were giving distorted stories about the war and the horribleness of war but also were covering that up. You now had journalists in the field who could send that information back. And I believe that made a big contribution to the way we looked at war.

In the Nuremberg trial, skipping ahead, there really wasn't much forensic evidence produced. In any criminal investigation you have three types of evidence. You have your testimonial evidence, your documentary evidence. It can be radio broadcasts. It can be even satellite imagery and so on. But you also have your physical evidence that is the corpus delicti, the body, the murder victim.

And as you watch the tribunals a lot of what they're going to try to do is to connect -- use all three types of evidence in their presentation of evidence. But in Nuremberg there was hardly a shred of forensic evidence actually presented. And really, after Nuremberg for all intents and purposes accountability went into the deep freeze. But the great torture trials in the 1970s were the next sort of blip where you had some accountability going on. But again, although there were doctors who were investigated there was really little scientific evidence presented.

It really began in Argentina. And my thesis here is that it began in Argentina and has grown in strength. In 1984 I took the first team down to Argentina to do examinations of graves there as well as DNA testing, well then it was RNA testing, for missing children. And I'll tell you at that point it was a very lonely process because there were very few scientists out there who thought this wasn’t too political to get involved.

So at first it began as science and the service of human rights investigations. And gradually as we set up these tribunals we moved into science in the service of international humanitarian law.

From there El Salvador truth commissions in various countries needed to find out; one, what had happened to the disappeared. It's also the nature of what happened that you needed to have scientific skills in order to identify the dead and determine what happened.

And also a very key factor was the families. And often times we think about the tribunals going in and doing these investigations. But the families are there as well and it's important for them to know the identity of the dead so they can give them proper burials.

And as Bill will talk about a little later, there is some friction between the needs of the families and the needs of the legal community.

So on that note I will turn now to Christopher Simpson, who will talk about remote sensing.