 In transitional justice context because that's kind of a separate special thing rather than talking about forensics and national contexts now I Started my career so to say in human rights and right about the same time as Patrick Ball did and Pretty much in the same country that Patrick Ball did We got to know of each other a little later but I Started working in Guatemala my background actually from colleges forensic is archaeology and Anthropology From being in Guatemala in the midst of a civil war which at that time was happening I ended up becoming a forensic anthropologist digging up mass graves in Guatemala and then went on Once I realized that I needed a PhD and You know advancement on an academic level. I ended up in the United States and got my master's in criminology and criminal justice But I'm the work with her for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement within their justice system and their forensic laboratory I went through the whole PhD program, but I'm one of those people that because of all the work I never got around to writing my PhD thesis, which is that that's my excuse at least and Later on I took on the Directorship of the International forensics program at Physicians for Human Rights who might basically have been working with since the early 90s in in Guatemala I've been members a member of forensic teams to my first one was actually in Iraq and That one was also one of those missions that kind of showed me and taught me very much about the pragmatism of What human rights work is about because while we were exhuming a mass grave that Saddam Hussein and his troops had been had perpetrated at the same time the Turks were bombing Kurdish villages within our view of Which we of course did little to do any kind of reporting on So that was my first kind of learning curve of you know this work can be extremely cynical and That taught me at the same time that That's why we have to be or in my case I have to be a scientist because I felt that at least with science Science is like mathematics. It's a language that's universally understood and that has universal rules to it so One of the things that I wanted to address also before I continue on is that after working at The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and their forensic laboratory and testifying in US courts Within a justice system that to me as someone who just came out of Guatemala from ten years of living in Guatemala And living under the fear of getting killed or the fear of my family being persecuted To me was like paradise I get to work in a real justice system but one of the things that it really really acutely taught me is that Justice is never about the truth Okay, and that is something that's very important, especially for people who work with victims it's very important to know to be able to express that Justice is about determining whether somebody is guilty of a crime of a specific crime. That's defined by the law and All that the court has to do is to prove that that crime was committed and the court then is responsible for determining the punishment and Oftentimes or most of the times that means the court doesn't have to look at all the different Circumstances of under which a crime occurred and then second opma thing about this is that for money Victims the punishment that the perpetrators get is not just so if you have courts that are Basically governed by the standards of what European thinks pant punishment is That might not be enough for what happened to the victims a good example is for instance the case of Charles Taylor Charles Charles Taylor after many millions of dollars many many many years of Investigations and whatnot. I think he got like 40 or 50 years in prison Whereas his son who was convicted in the United States in a court of law there after three weeks was convicted to 99 years in prison. No parole. He's never getting out So you can see there's different standards of how that influences Punishment and how that will be perceived by victims And I think that's something that is important to say and especially is important to say to those victims Who come forward with the hopes that there will be some sort of justice? In that sense, it's important to say that truth-seeking is a process Okay, of which justice is a small part of and when I say process It's something that happens over decades and sometimes over centuries because if you think about like Germany in Germany There are still things today that are coming out not only in court But other historically coming out that previously nobody ever talked about so the big thing for me is because of what I do is I actually go to crime scenes I actually Examine and document physical evidence and where I have the jurisdiction. I actually collect physical evidence to be examined by experts reported on by experts and introduced into court So a big question is what does crime scene mean? Okay, and by crime scene a crime scene has a Temporal dimension meaning it happened between then and then okay It has a spatial or geographic dimension meaning that it happened at a specific location Okay, and it has a legal context or Nature of the crime right meaning that supposedly it's where a homicide happened Okay, or where a massacre happened now In countries where you have automatic jurisdiction because you're the guy who's in charge of crime scenes or you're the police Officer that has jurisdiction Oftentimes you just have to go to a location to even first determine whether a crime has happened or not Then another very important thing is and this is this again under ideal search of circumstances you have a set of people or you have an Individual who's designated to identify the evidence meaning this cartridge casing is evidence This rock beside it is not evidence Okay, so you have somebody who identifies the evidence So then the question of course is what actually constitutes evidence Okay, and there the word evidence is very loosely used primarily in the press So if you read a journalist's article, they'll they'll say well we collected evidence on x y and z and this is why This means that But in a court of law Evidence is decided by the court meaning that you can collect anything you want But it's going to be the court that's going to decide whether this particular piece of information or this particular piece of Physical evidence is actually evidence. Okay, they're going to be the ones who are going to decide. Yes, this was Collected correctly. This was documented correctly. This is credible and therefore it can be entered into a court of law Okay, then We have chain of custody Chain of custody again is one of those things where most people think chain of custody is just a whole bundle of receipts Meaning that you know somebody picks something up and then hands it over to the next one and they kind of write the receipt that they Received this that and the other and it just goes down the line that way Truth again is that a chain of custody when we're talking about Forensics and forensics meaning applying science within to answer a legal question or within the legal framework Okay, the chain of custody Also means that the people inside the chain of custody are people that fall within the jurisdiction meaning that that people that fall So it starts off with the crime scene Technician who collects the evidence. Okay, he's designated Then it goes on to the laboratory within the laboratory. It's handed to the different analysts and outcomes a report So there is a legal custodian Okay, and it's verifiable and credible meaning that it's verifiable in the sense Does this evidence technician actually exist? Can I bring somebody into court to say I picked? Yes, I picked this up as such and such a crime scene. Okay, and and Is the person who did this credible meaning do do they do they have the education and the training necessary to be able to handle this? So I'm going to start off with a series of examples, and I'm going to start off with Guatemala Where I started a group of forensic anthropologists that started documenting mass graves that had happened in Guatemala Then I'm going to go and talk a little about the work that we did in ICTR Which is the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and then in Afghanistan, which I call the forgotten war because in Afghanistan There is really no legal space whatsoever to Even address past human rights violations And then into Libya where Libya really exists There is no existing jurisdiction because one of the problems in Libya is is you don't even have a recognized government There's a UN recognized government, but there's no real de facto Recognized government, so it's pretty much the state and complete comes to that And then I'm going to talk a little about locating graves What the method and technology behind that is and I'll follow it up with a example of what satellite imagery can do as far as Analysis of some of these contexts are so Guatemala um The the the time that we were looking at was basically Designated as the time of violence in Guatemala, which was an increase in counter insurgency campaigns Something that was supported by the US government a lot of the military in Guatemala was trained and a lot of the training happened on the basis of the experience that the US had had in Vietnam, which the idea was that insurgencies Basically draw their power through being in rural inaccessible areas where they get fed and where they can store their weapons and where they can recruit Their people or their soldiers so to say For the insurgency and therefore counter insurgency meant quite literally in order to get to the fish you needed to drain Drain the lake so the idea behind that was you had to depopulate the rural areas either through migrating people into areas that you could control and You did this through force and most of the time through campaigns of terror which meant that Large parts of Guatemala and lots of villages people were massacred and buried in mass graves So The result was and the numbers here incorrect The result was and this is actually something which is really interesting because Patrick Ball was the one who came up with the numbers for Guatemala the number that Patrick Ball Floated initially was a total of two hundred thousand Dead in Guatemala 50,000 of which were disappeared meaning a hundred and fifty thousand killed and buried and 50,000 that had been kidnapped abducted and most likely were dead, but you didn't really know they were disappeared Okay, and this was again built on a statistical model and this is really interesting because now Patrick and I have now several times talked several times about his method now and what we know then is That those numbers very obviously need to be adjusted meaning that they're higher than What was suspected initially and it's really interesting because it also shows you the kind of political relevance here because the number 200,000 he just told me this Became 250,000 because they took the number of 200,000 dead and then added the 50,000 that are actually part of the 200,000 group on top of that so the number that for many years was used by the international community and You know politicians on the left in Guatemala was a number of 250,000 Okay, so it kind of shows you again what the political relevance is and another example of Why even though I work for the justice system and I collect evidence so that it can be collected in court And I teach NGOs how to collect evidence or doc do documentation in such a way that it can be entered into court One of the things that I am acutely aware of is that justice is also acutely political for instance the case that Patrick showed about the lady. That's no random lady That's Nenette Montenegro de Garcia. She is like the top most Human rights activists in Guatemala and a very prominent politician now and The convictions they got they got during the time there was a left-wing government in Guatemala Okay, so these are not coincidences and and For the great majority of people and my wife is Guatemala For instance her cousin who disappeared their family never went in order to report that to any lists or Are ever gonna try to get any kind of justice for so you so you can see that Justice really has a differential meaning once you put things into context So the civilian population basically suffered massacres tortures and kidnappings 36 years of oppressive justice social cleansing which was Carried out by military and police secret detentions and disappearances and especially extra judicial Executions now one of the models that that States use is that these are terror campaigns were the state deliberately does this in such a way so that everybody knows It's not that it's the secret where the mass graves are so Two important considerations are family and victim witness support and trust obviously without that you can't work Jurisdiction which was important when we started our work in Guatemala We couldn't just go out and start digging up mass graves We had to find judges who are going to allow us to conduct a mass grave exhumation and the way that happened was that We convinced a medical examiner in Guatemala in one of the rural areas of Guatemala who was very upset with the fact that the central government wasn't giving her the correct amount of support said yes I will accept you in as forensic experts and you're gonna work under me and And the judge allowed the exhumation not in order to start a criminal investigation Which would have been of course the ideal case scenario But in order to relocate the remains basically to repatriate the remains So what was used was a loophole in Guatemala in law for the transport of human remains from one place to a cemetery So that's how we started and established our jurisdiction in Guatemala and this was in 1992 So during that time The civil war was still gone going on the people who had committed a vast majority of the massacres in Guatemala President of Congress they were very powerful people they were generals in the military So it was very clear that you know, we were only going to be able to do this if they would Let us live Okay So we made sure that we had jurisdiction in order to be able to carry out this work So with the support from the American Academy for the advancement of sciences their human rights Department and physicians for human rights. We founded the Guatemalan forensic anthropology team and at the time We were all a bunch of archaeology and anthropology students from different universities in Guatemala So the massacre that we're looking at is probably the biggest one or one of the biggest ones Single biggest mass graves that was exhumed I would say in At the time probably even in the world it was a minimum number of a hundred and sixty one people exclusively women and children and This was in an area that Under the auspices of the World Bank Had been flooded so this coincides the massacre coincides with the flooding of the valley in order to build a dam So there were many different levels of interests that were existing here This was the village when we got to it at the time only about five families had returned from the families that had been affected by this massacre and Later on more and more families returned to the area to claim back their lands But at that at this time the area was still so remote that basically if you were native Mayan and As fit as they and you know would have taken you I think a six-hour hike that means for Even when I was younger. I was pretty heavy set in a smoker. It would have taken me probably twice the amount to walk there Or a several hour ride by car to the dam and then a several hour ride on by boat to to this area So very very remote The mass grave again was not that people don't know where mass graves are And I think this is also very important to note for the documentation efforts that you are trying to undertake here in In South Korea with respect to the mass graves in in North Korea is that mass graves are very rarely secret Okay, and the reason behind this is that and I kind of call it the masquerade backyard mass grave syndrome is that if you Have a mass grave of your family and your back grave and you know it But you're not allowed to put any flowers on it or a cross or whatever it is that your religion and culture Requires you in order to honor the dead That means you live with that fear all the time. It's a room. It's a reminder of who's in charge If you can't acknowledge The crimes that have been committed against you and you're reminded of that every day That's a psychological burden you carry carry with yourself and that reminds you again of who's in power So mass graves very rarely are places that are secret Meaning that populations often know where they are They just not allowed to talk about it or they're in fear to talk about it And in this case they actually had a cross on it when we got to it So this is how it started and you can see we have several of our Let's see this thing have a Well, you can see in the foreground the two guys with the blue shirts That was Guatemalan police officers who about as corrupt as they can come but You know, we actually had to force them to come there in order to guard the crime scene We'd wanted to make sure that from a legal perspective There was nothing that anybody could say 20 years down the road when this goes to court to say that we tampered with The evidence or something of the sword happened. Okay, so that's why we had those guys there So tents were set up and all the other stuff. I don't really want to go through it too much But this was basically a roof to which the the Civil patrols because that was another mechanism that the United States installed both in Vietnam and in Guatemala now in Afghanistan Where they armed civilians in order to fight the counter insurgency in the rural areas and these guys came around and they basically In a series of massacres this being the biggest one Killed the kill these villagers and they took the women the men had fled They knew the men that these guys were coming and thinking they were coming for them So the men and the older boys all fled didn't expect them to haul all the women and the children up the mountain and They proceeded to rape the women and and and and kill the children Some of which they basically just flung against the tree in order to bash them in tree and threw them into the into the ravine And then covered up the ravine It wasn't until later that the survivors came and they covered it up in order to avoid the rain from carrying it all off So this was a major archaeological Exhumation So we had to determine ages this is a actually a female one of the females and She was pregnant at the time and you can see the little black and white thing down there Each one of those squares is a centimeter so you can imagine how small those are remains of that fetus are And we found several pregnant women and what was very interesting was that When we had gone out to conduct the anti-mortem interviews with the with the witnesses to the massacre to find out who all had died We ended up having more children in our sample than we did in the anti-mortem interviews and a lot of that We assumed had to do with the fact that infant mortality is so high in Guatemala that a lot of them they don't even count until they're about two to three years old People don't really register them as you know until they get a certain age Where they actually survive meaning surviving the childhood disease and those kind of things So here we have another very young child This is an older child right there, but still pre So below 12 years of age and then of course there was a lot of evidence that we really know how to deal with like Documentary evidence, you know all of a sudden you have to think about you know, how do you treat this stuff? so You know that it You know that it doesn't degrade any further and how do you document that? And this is a cartridge casing and these cartridge casings were important also because it also not they document several different things One is how many weapons were used right because of the firing pin indentions into the into the cartridges They're different from firearm to firearm, so you can tell you how many firearms you had Which firearms shot which of those cartridges and Then there is evidence Like this which is and I'll talk about some of this tomorrow during the workshop a little more detail but you know here for instance I Don't know is this oh there we go Here you can see this is part of the skull right here But the important fact right is is what what you're seeing right here and this thing right here And this is a noose and what this documents right here And this is why it's important to document this in place because once you remove it you don't see it And you know you basically destroyed the context is that this woman she was choked to death with a girl with what's called a garote or Garrett okay, basically what it is is that This is the area that her neck was squeezed down to and in this area you had you had this This piece of wood and it was used in order to slowly choke her to death, and then she was kicked into the grave Another example is and this is from an exhumation in Honduras is hands to hide behind their backs Okay, and these are all things that when you document them You have to document them right there in place because as soon as you do the as soon as you assume the remains That context is gone. Okay, and it kind of highlights Why it's important that you know Who did the exhumation? Who took the photographs? When were they taken and that you can prove that this was done in a standard fashion? Okay, that you can cross-reference not not that you don't only have the photographs But you also have documentation and let's say a gravesite sketch and that you have documentation in the notes from the investigator So that you have several levels of documentation that prove that this indeed is the case And this is not some random photograph taken by a no-name NGO foot photographer Okay, you want to know Stefan took this picture So that at any time when it goes to court you can say the judge can say I want Stefan here to confirm that That's actually the photograph he took Okay Alright now another very important thing is that and this is unlike Working in jurisdictions like in the United States where when you're with the police you put a crime scene tape around your crime scene and Everybody gets to stay outside Because inherently in justice systems and I assume that North Korea is the same way or similar people trust generally Trust their police and their judicial system Okay, but in Guatemala and in places where that's not the case Okay, where people? Deeply deeply distrust the judicial system It's important that you leave a space for the victims in order to be able to observe what happens And what was interesting is that at that particular massacre and this became standard Later on the Catholic Church actually in Guatemala Later on declared Guatemala and Mayan priests as Pretty much being equivalent to a Catholic priest So what we had here was we had a mass which was both Catholic priest and a Mayan priest at the same time And after that at most of the grave sites that we went we actually had a Mayan priest Who'd come and give us their blessings before we would go ahead and do the exhumation Another thing that we did because at the time of DNA was just not a possibility This is the early 90s mind you And I know that when I started working at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 1996 You still needed like a tablespoon full of blood in order to get DNA Now you could just swab this and you could get my DNA off of it and Patrick's and anybody else who's touched it All right, so we basically need very very little sample But in those days you needed a lot So what we'd also do is we lay out all the clothing that we would find in the hopes that we would have Witnesses be able to identify pieces articles of clothing as belonging to Whomever that might belong in the end that turned out to be a very unscientific process It never worked correctly, but one thing that was important was that psychologically it was important to the families Okay, because to them it showed that we were doing something You know that there was work that was being done. It was part of the process and they were part of the process Um So yeah at the time we only did one tentative identification something that nowadays you would never do You either have an identification or you don't you don't have a tentative identification But in those days identification just simply weren't weren't possible But what resulted was that when we returned the remains The families got together and they in a big demonstrations carried the caskets past the military base out of you know that was partially responsible for these massacres to Their final resting place which was this monument and this is actually the second monument because the first monument they had was a little smaller and Somebody obviously from the military base, which was just across from the cemetery came around and smashed it all up So the internationals got together spent I don't know this cost like seven thousand dollars and they put so much cement and concrete in it It was impossible and it was never destroyed again, but long story short What's important is that this gave the families a space to put the list of family members that had been killed during this massacre Right and their version of events. I'm not saying that we as scientists validated their version of events Okay, but you know to them it was important that this type of memorialization Happened and to us it was equally important because we realized that justice wasn't going to happen tomorrow Now I must say that several of the people involved in this massacre have consequently been Convicted in court But you know, they're mainly lower tier people Okay, so it never rose to the actual colonels and military personnel for that So What the resources? We're talking about is we had skeletal remains so no flesh remains that makes a big difference Relatively small staff when we started the team we were I think six or seven people when That exhumation happened Few resources and a lot of our alliance on local support We for instance when we'd go out to villages we would rely on the villagers and the human rights groups to serve us lunch You know, so what you know, we oftentimes ended up in a village and you know They would kill their chicken and make a chicken soup and you know We'd live off of them and they'd be the ones who'd help us, you know Dig the trenches and do the heavy lifting and work. I mean in the end all of us were city boys and girls and They were all you know farmers who could move dirt much quicker and efficient and more efficient than we did Victim family involvement obviously and the jurisdiction was evolutionary I call it a evolutionary because like I said we start off with a jurisdiction through the medical examiner and the judge for the transfer of human remains and it eventually evolved to the point where the Forensic team now, which is the foundation for anthropologist for forensic anthropology in Guatemala FafG They are recognized expert witnesses in court Where are we time I got 10 minutes left? So all right, so I must say that we were the first ones to produce a truth commission kind of report because it was very frustrating in Guatemala That that never happened So we actually put some staff together and we ended up writing a book about the massacres in one specific county in Guatemala We also went on to write what we call the popular version Which was like a comic book version for all those people who couldn't read on an academic level So this is kind of what it looks like and then later on we had the different truth commissions that Patrick mentioned now the international approach was totally different in the sense that there was a lot of money Okay, and I know that for the people who started it and who came out of the United States It wasn't a lot of money. We only got only got a million dollars, which was quite a quite a bit of money as far as I was concerned and The approach both for the ICTR and the ICTY was no Identifications meaning they were exclusively interested in just purely the evidence at looking at graves from a perspective of is this widespread or systematic, okay, is this genocide or not And which then was later amended when they all of a sudden realized, okay There's a whole bunch of victims and they're really really unhappy in the former Yugoslavia the ICMP formed Which addressed the identifications of of the remains but What you found in Rwanda was that and Bill Haglin called it the well-meaning and the desperate was the collection of Bones into big piles which Scientifically means that you know, you've really lost the majority of your data and information right there because it's been Disassociated and the cost of trying to re-associate these into individuals is impossible Okay so the mass grave that we did in Kibuya was a mass grave that resulted in I think like over a minimum number of like 460 to 470 people in it And we had a backhoe. That's where I learned how to operate one of these machines actually We had autopsy tables and actually if I'm not incorrect. This is Eric Stover right there. I believe We had autopsy tables. We had forensic pathologists who came to conduct the autopsies We had a huge amount of staff in comparison to let's say what we had in available in Guatemala And this is me before I went all gray Working on one of the skeletal remains that we had collected on the hillside because it wasn't only the grave It was also the hillside This is Bill Haglund actually and Bob Kirschner who at the time Bob Kirschner was director of the Physicians for Human Rights and Madeleine Albright so you can see that you know your secretary of state, you know came around in order to inspect it There was a high, you know, there was a high expectancy They were politically was very interesting and there was a lot of funds in order to push these things forward Now Afghanistan One thing that's interesting about Afghanistan is too bad that Patrick isn't here right now But one of the problems that I encountered in Afghanistan is that there was a group of human rights International human rights group that did a lot of data collection in Bosnia and in Kosovo And they came in and said listen You know, it doesn't matter that people lie because it at you know, it evens it statistically it evens itself out But what in Afghanistan what happens is is that Afghanistan is a culture rooted in oral tradition meaning that History has a political function like it does everywhere, but in Afghanistan History is something that also guarantees your survival on a village to village level. Okay, so when you Bear witness in Afghanistan. That's a social responsibility And you bear witness according to what your elders say So what will happen in Afghanistan is you'll have a witness and you will be talking to them And especially if you're coming out of a Western humanist kind of culture It will take you about 20 minutes to figure out that this person is not actually an eye witness They're recounting a story just like out of oral tradition And you will hear that story over and over and over again until you realize You know, this is the greed upon story of this group of victims or this surviving group Because a village will trade hands in power from the Taliban over to the government over to some other group and each one Will negotiate what their story is and The elders will tell everybody else what that story is and it's your responsibility to tell the story as is Therefore, you know mapping in Afghanistan had the additional difficulty that it was very difficult to actually get at eye witnesses Because if somebody tells an eye witness story in Afghanistan, that's almost a taboo Because they're supposed to be representing their community not themselves okay, and That's what makes it extremely difficult in circumstances like that to collect victim Testimonies because it's really hard to get actual individual victims to testify So here's an example of a mass grave that oops That was discovered and unfortunately we didn't get to it in time But what what happened was that you know people were identified on the basis of items that they found and They had been taken out of context from the skeletal remains Because the skeletal remains look like this they were basically shoveled together They weren't treated with any kind of dignity even though you can see in the pictures here that with the tent around these tents around it You know the religious community mullahs. They're definitely try to give it You know the the kind of treatment and respected needed But you know it was entirely dominated because of the lack of understanding on how you can do you know do Exhumations on how to do this that They ended up Doing this kind of exhumation and then reburial of the site with the monument again count Recounting a history that everybody had agreed upon Okay So in Libya and I'm not gonna go through this here because I only got five minutes left But in Libya, I actually looked at warehouse Where one of Libya one of the sons Gaddafi sons he had he had his own military brigade and they Massacred a bunch of people inside of warehouse with the hopes that they were going to be able to blame NATO for it This is the actual compound, but one of the things I was telling you about is the sketches This for instance is one of the sketches about it where I really you know took measurements and this is corroborated in the photographs Okay, and here you can see the see the photographs. Come on Here's the warehouse and they were you know stories like you know that they shot through the through the gates of the warehouse and you can see you know the bullet holes in here and Again the cartridge cases and this is very interesting because I took photographs of these cartridge cases The way they looked what type they were with the headstamps in them And it turns out that it's a specific type of machine gun that this type of ammunition Which is an old type of ammunition coming out of World War two actually a Machine gun which was described by the witnesses. They didn't know what kind of machine gun it was but the way they described it it was made it very clear what type of machine gun it was and This cartridge casing actually Can pretty much only be shot out of that type of weapon which again is evidence that Your witness is telling the truth, which is what you want to get at So another one is right here. I remember you know one of the stories was that One of the officers who had a Glock nine millimeter pistol came up and started shooting through the through the door I found that cartridge casing right there that the indentation that here for instance It's typical of a Glock now. There's several others that have like rectangular hammers firing pins on them But again, this is something that corroborates the witness statement And then of course there's things such as you know writing their names on the walls the perpetrators Because they think they are gonna get away with it Another thing was you know also finding evidence of what you don't know you don't know what it is Okay, I remember finding a whole bunch of weather balloons and you know some sort of electronic gear and I took photographs of it As you can see right here without really knowing what what it meant and wasn't until later that you know One of the witness testimony said they were trying to get you know these weather balloons up into the air because they would broadcast signals In order to get NATO to bomb the warehouse so they could blame NATO for For the deaths of these people and I actually you know looked up what this was so I made sure that I had you Know the manufacturer or serial numbers and stuff like that turns out It's a finished art company that sells weather systems in order to improve the accuracy of your artillery Okay, they had apparently sold Gaddafi some high-tech gear in order to get You know to improve their artillery shooting with it So locating graves Effectively locating graves. I mean this is the first example of a Satellite or actually an aerial photograph Photographs was in Bosnia of one of the mass graves where aerial photography This was released by the State Department at the time You know kind of provided evidence of where the location of the grave was but effectively The only way to really make find out whether you have a mass grave is by digging lots of trenches But you have to look you know Confirm what's under the ground and the way to do that is really by by digging trenches Everything else will give you an indication of what might be there But you're not gonna have confirmation until you dig a trench and here we were looking for a mass grave that the witnesses has said that was there and I needed to make sure that the witnesses at the end of the day Were happy that they felt I really did my job because at this point it became I have to prove that it's isn't there Okay, I knew at some point that what that it most likely wasn't there But I had to make sure that enough trenches were dug in order to make sure that the families agreed with it Eventually we did find it For a little further away from where we had initially dug the trenches, but this basically cost us I don't know four or five days So satellite photography Since I've got a pretty much wrap up right now is this is a mass grave that I documented in Afghanistan in 2002 right after the invasion the US invasion and You know, I did sketches took GPS measurements And documented it through photography There was an exhumation that was done several months later by dr. Bill Haglund and one of our forensic anthropology forensic pathologists Of several bodies, which you can see here, which just partially opened up a grave nothing else Okay, and that was also logged now in 2008 I ended up going back to the place right and it turns out what we have in the desert out there is two large holes One principally in the area where we had our mass grave, right? So the question of course became What happened and What happened to our evidence, right? so I had to a do sketches again and Measurements along with GPS points to find out, you know to be able to look at What do we have now versus? What did we have then and compare that back to the sketches that I did back then so here? You can see this is I use Google Earth. This is what we found into what I found in 2008 and documented okay, and This is my sketch from 2002 all right and this is the exhumation from 2002 Okay effectively And like I said again at this time at this point in time that grave we weren't you know We weren't it wasn't completely ex ex ex excavated so we didn't know what the size of it was But but effectively we know that you know this area must have contained quite a bit and it was entirely removed at the time Then we checked on satellite and this is something that's important for you also because we actually Worked with the triple a s on this But to do a historical mapping also you want to go back in time So you can see this is August 5th 2006 Okay, and one of the pits and Excavation possible excavation vehicles is visible right there You can see it now. This is the this is the pit that is of interest to us October 24th And you know we actually you know did analysis on the excavator and the truck type and those kind of things But what it basically gave us is actually a precise date and time of when these excavations of these areas occurred And here we can see it so by October 24th 2007 this had happened and less than a year later when I showed up You know this became a thing and we definitely put out a press release at the time because what was interesting was that you know The representative for summary executions Phil I Can't can't recall the name right now for the UN He had actually visited the site, but hadn't kind of put two and two together of what it meant so that's why you know documentation Especially careful documentation with sketching and GPS coordinates and Documentation of actual sites is so important because it can correlate and you know put these things into context Otherwise you wouldn't never know See if I wouldn't have been able to do that we would have never known that actually these sites have been Excavated and the evidence has gotten rid of okay so Thank you very much