Category: forensic history

Bestowing Infinite Pains on Discovering What Actually Happened

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

In his much quoted critique of medieval historiography, R.J. Collingwood noted that historians,

… in their anxiety to detect the general plan of history, and their belief that this plan was God’s and not man’s, they tended to look for the essence of history outside history itself, by looking away from man’s actions in order to detect the plan of God; and consequently the actual detail of human actions became for them relatively unimportant, and they neglected that prime duty of the historian, a willingness to bestow infinite pains on discovering what actually happened.*

Set aside for now the more or less obvious irony of selectively pulling eminent quotes on historiography without reference to their own historiographical context. I want to highlight it here for the way that it frames the forensic basis of what historians do. “Telling it like it was” or “showing it the way that it happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist) is a standard refrain of modern historical practice (as a professionalised research discipline). The work is oriented toward sources: who and what those sources are; the information they convey about people, places and events; and their credibility as conveyers of information (and by extension, the credibility of the information they convey).

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*R.J. Collingwood, The Idea of History: With Lectures, 1926-1928 Rev. Ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 55. Originally published in 1944, after Collingwood’s death.

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Missiles of Outrage and Anger

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

In the early pages of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld described boyhood memories of an America struggling to come to grips with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of those recollections was of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reassuring voice, its “formal, almost aristocratic tone” cutting across the airwaves. “Outlining the indictment against the Japanese Empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. That gave him a singular quality as America heard for the first time the words that have now become so familiar to history: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy…’.”*

Rumsfeld’s biographers have noted his preoccupation with Pearl Harbor. As Secretary of Defense, he repeatedly summoned the ghosts of that day in his efforts to promote US defense preparedness and ruthlessly assess the intelligence community’s performance. We don’t have to take Rumsfeld’s word for it, either, or that of his biographers. There’s a thick public record of the things he’s said, written, authorized and championed. His public output makes for a good baseline for understanding what he said, to whom it was said, and what it meant for the policy processes of the time. But the public record is only part of the picture.  Investigative journalism like James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking Penguin 2004), helps to fill in the gaps with much needed detail on closed door discussions and private deliberations.

Researchers take their chances when they look to memoirs for accurate information about historical events. The New Yorker writer George Packer, in a hydrochloric 2010 review of another political memoir, George W. Bush’s Decision Points, made the somewhat obvious but nonetheless key point that “Every memoir is a tissue of omission and evasion; memoirs by public figures are especially unreliable.” The second Bush White House generated what must be a record number of tell-alls and insider accounts. Even speechwriters got in on the act, publicly staking claims to the carefully enunciated syllables and missiles of outrage and anger that are supposed to be exclusively Presidential, not claimable intellectual property.

I’ve been using memoirs to help reconstruct some of the things that were said and done before and after 9/11. I approach most of them with a degree of cynicism and distrust of authorial motive. Two of them, Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown and Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, stand out, for the simple reason that both books enable readers to critically evaluate the claims their authors make.  They do this by providing access to declassified papers and documents – the original source materials that, one assumes, corroborate what Rumsfeld and Feith were trying to convey in their respective accounts. Needless to say these will have been carefully selected, so it’s up to the reader to consider both source and context when reviewing the primary sources.

Both books came equipped with supporting websites stocked with digitized documents. Feith’s, at http://www.waranddecision.com/,  appears to have died of neglect at some point in early 2014. Some of those documents are reproduced in the pages of War and Decision, and readers can still get a sense of what the website contained if they know how to retrieve cached material on the web. Rumsfeld’s sources are in an entirely different category. The “Rumsfeld Papers”, at http://papers.rumsfeld.com/, contain thousands of digitized document spanning his entire career in government service, and more besides. In a video posted on the website, Rumsfeld speaks directly to visitors and encourages them to make up their own minds.

As an exercise in digital history, the Rumsfeld Papers website is superb. As an artefact of Rumsfeld’s time in governement, the collection is remarkably transparent. It’s an ironic oddity that won’t be lost on those who remember Rumsfeld’s caustic style or the level of effort he put into bureaucratic turf wars and “controlling the narrative”.  That irony is recursive, too. I’ve found the Rumsfeld Papers less useful as a window into Rumsfeld’s  thinking or that of the people around him – there’s that cynicism again – but quite good as narrative nuts and bolts. Some of the sources in the Rumsfeld Papers – the infamous “snowflakes” come to mind – are as invidual documents often sparsely detailed, and only provide new insights on an aggregate basis. But there are some real gems that provide a glimpse into the stuff of internal discussions and behind-the-scenes bureaucratic labors, and they make it possible to trace the paths of ideas as they worked their way through the policy process.

*Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, 2011), p. 39.

In Praise of Paper

~ Michael A. Innes

Amid all the preoccupation with Big Data over the last few years, one might be forgiven for missing the telltale signs of a  low-key aesthetic return to (fixation with?) paper. It was there metaphorically, through apps that attempted to digitally capture the sensory aspects of paper-based media. But paper itself maintains its hold on the imagination, in part because of the kinds of communication and practices that it represents.

The Clinton Presidential library, for example, recently released tens of thousands of pages of previously withheld documents. A boon to historians, it recalls an era, according to former Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol, in which officials working in litigious Washington were dissuaded from keeping records, schedules, diaries and the like, lest those records become forensic grist.

That concern – not producing the petards of one’s own (or one’s colleague’s) potential future hoisting  – still exists. But “in their wonky way,” Shesol writes, the Clinton papers “demonstrate the basic human compulsion to write things down—to work out and test ideas on paper, to engage in debates and occasional snits, to record and transcribe and (in my own case) doodle, and, to a surprising degree, to let down one’s guard.”

There are worlds of fact and flavor contained in such materials. Their survival represents a form of historical transparency and accountability that is inherently valuable, not least because it seizes and preserves the essence of, in Shisol’s terms, “government at work”.

I think it’s fair to say that insofar as “paper” and “writing it down” can be understood euphemistically, they evoke an aesthetic and practical compunction that is fundamentally archival. They refer to the accumulation of historically valuable  document collections and preserving them for a variety of purposes.

In this case, “paper” and “writing” might equally be understood through a variety of framing lenses: as metaphor  – one thing understood in terms of another; or as metanym – the whole understood through reference to its parts.

It almost goes without saying that not all records are on paper, and that a good number of datum generated these days begin and end their lives as electrons. But it is interesting that with Big Data comes a sort of Paper Blindness – that if it is not available electronically, then it either doesn’t exist at all or isn’t worth the bother of finding.

That a significant volume of paper-based information never gets seen by ordinary human beings isn’t remarkable. There is simply too much for any one person to consume, or tranches of it are too contentious to touch, or are tainted by their provenance,  or are classified, and so on.

If there’s a concern in this, it’s that enhanced or amplified accessibility in some areas also closes down the space for it in others. One day our expectations of  vast troves of historically relevant material may be confronted with…. a void.

Some of that is accepted and acceptable practice. Some of it isn’t.

Physical documents are regularly winnowed from archival collections, lost to water, fire and termites, abandoned in mouldering heaps, forgotten in attics, set aflame in wartime, or – in the lived vernacular of government at work – too secret, sensitive, or scandalous to ever see the light of day.

This has always been true, and it is as true in places like Quetta or Kandahar as it has been in Washington and Whitehall.

 

Framing Forensics

~ Michael A. Innes

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about how  “forensics”, “forensic research” or “forensic practice” are commonly understood. The interest is driven in part by long familiarity with the uses of historical methods and research to support very contemporary preoccupations, and the somewhat unusual conjoining of “forensic” and “history” as a single discipline. I write “unusual” here only in the sense that “forensic” and “forensics” are usually associated with lab coats, applied science and crime scenes, and much less so with the stereotypical image of historians rifling through boxes of records in musty archives. These are popular images of very specific and limited elements of disciplinary practice, of course. They hardly do justice, so to speak, to the substance that each of those representations draws from.

The association between historical practice and “forensics” is much less unusual  – in the sense that it should resonate quite strongly and intuitively – among postgraduate students and historians indoctrinated into the arcane mysteries of the profession. In their readings on philosophies and approaches to history, they learn that its early development (in the West) was grounded in a legalistic pursuit of evidence and scholarly rigor. It is also much less unusual, in the same sense, for anyone familiar with “public history”, a more recent though now well-established type of professionalisation within the field. So historians have a robust professional understanding of such issues by virtue of their training, and at least in some cases they will sense an affinity between what historians do and the requirements of a more general (or specific) forensic practice. 

Resonance is a tricky beast, however. Different things resonate in different ways with different people. In frame theory, one way of making sense of resonance is to understand the “cognitive script” or “schema of interpretation” (the raw collection of data and details that makes up  our subconscious) from which we draw various conceptual apparatus (analogies, metaphors, and other devices that function as a kind of shorthand for the complex reality that surrounds us). One of the challenges associated with framing  – particularly for anyone using it to understand human communication – is frame alignment (and by extension, misalignment) between “source” (the cognitive script) and “target” (the thing being framed). Get the alignment right when framing an idea or a policy, and the idea or policy will resonate with an audience, thereby increasing the chance that the idea or policy will be accepted. Get the alignment wrong, misalign the frame, and any hope that it will resonate with its intended audience becomes a much more tenuous proposition.

This is a gross over-simplification of a fairly sophisticated field, but I wanted to push through the essentials quickly in order to get to the idea of “original meaning”. Remember that framing uses devices like metaphors and analogies as conceptual shorthand. The range of framing devices is actually quite broad, but metaphors and analogies are among the most powerful. In order for the putative analyst to map instances and frequency of metaphorical discourse (whether that discourse is purely textual or a more holistic collection of actions, texts, and the like), its component parts have to be identified and understood. This requires knowledge of the “original meaning” of metaphorical terms, and differentiation between original meaning and later meanings that have accrued to those same terms over time. That differentiation allows us to pinpoint when a term is actually being used metaphorically, and when it is being used in its original form.

In some cases, an analogical or metaphorical cascade can be observed, wherein multiple layers of metaphorical meaning accrue to the same term in successive stages over time. The result is a word or an expression or a turn of phrase that carries multiple possible meanings, some of which may be obvious and easily discernible, while others only reveal themselves under certain circumstances, in certain contexts, or through more esoteric and prolonged forms of inquiry. Which brings me back to the idea of “forensic” research, and forensic historical research in particular. The term “forensic” is from the latin forensis, which refers to early Roman legal practice in which victim and accused presented their respective cases to an audience in a forum. In this original meaning, “forensic” meant something that was both “public” and “legal” in its orientation. Over time, it came to denote something more narrowly of a legal nature, acted out in a specifically legal setting like a courtroom or before a judge. More recently, it narrowed again, “forensic” and “forensics” becoming descriptors for the collection and processing of evidence in criminal policing, typically using hard science tools and processes that are highly amenable to fine-grained identification of relevant physical minutiae.

The point I’m trying to make with this dime-store genealogy is that “forensic” has a number of meanings, all of them connected in interesting and relevant ways. That some of those meanings are anchored in historical context makes them even more rather than less relevant to current issues. In a sense, I’m advocating a cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary recovery of the term. No research discipline is more or less inherently “forensic”; research is not inherently “forensic” because it relies on genetic testing or applied chemistry; hard sciences are not more inherently “forensic” than social sciences, and social sciences are not more inherently “forensic” than, say, historical research (or vice versa). Rather, research is inherently “forensic” when it is being conducted for legal purposes, to support legal arguments and processes, to build a criminal case; research is “forensic”,  in the classic sense, when its findings are discussed, presented, or argued openly or publicly.

Research might even be considered “forensic”, in a metaphorical sense, simply for paying attention to the little things, for being “highly amenable to fine-grained identification of relevant minutiae.” Words and phrases can be appropriated and twisted to suit just about any purpose, of course. That’s not what I’m suggesting. What I am arguing for is a sensible return to basics, and a sensible application of those basics to contemporary interests, issues, and sensibilities. I am arguing for an understanding of research as a “forensic” undertaking when it is conducted or presented for purposes that lie somewhere along a continuum of the public and legal elements of its original meaning; when it is the work of public intellectuals engaging policy-relevant issues, for example, or when it is policy-relevant research conducted at the behest of public bodies such as government ministries and the like.

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This is a rough draft of first thoughts on a wide variety of interconnected issues. It is informed in part by my own experiences as an institutionally-embedded analyst, professional research consultant, and academic. It is inspired in part by recent discussion of public intellectuals and alleged academic disengagement from the issues that matter to mainstream life.  It is articulated largely in ignorance of both public history and forensic science, and of what these two important fields have to say on the matter of forensic research. And it is offered here with the promise of more thoughtful and better supported inquiry to follow.