It's an old saying in journalism, all governments lie, and lie, and actually catching them in one are two very different things.

So how do you prove a government is lying? Today on

downstream I'm joined by I. L. Whitesman, director of forensic architecture and

professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.

Forensic Architecture at its core sets out to expose crimes committed by the state.

By bringing together a team of architects, artists, designers, botanists, scholars, investigative

journalists and software developers, they're able to reconstruct events as they happened.

Whether it's Assad's torture prison or Israel's assault on Gaza,

forensic architecture brings together open source intelligence,

civilian video, witness testimony and more to build evidence-based

3D models of contested events.

These reconstructions are so diligently put together that they can and have been used in court.

I hope you enjoy the interview.

When I hear the word architecture, I think about columns and I think about cantilevers.

And then I went to the forensic architecture exhibition in 2016 at the ICA.

Yeah. And I realized that what I was seeing was a kind of crime scene investigation except the perpetrator was the government.

How did this method of investigation come out of an art and design discipline?

Yeah, this is a very good question and I'm often wondering myself, but one of the origins of forensic architecture is actually in the anti-colonial movement in Palestine.

And like many things that come out of Palestine, there are moments of invention there. And I think together with colleagues,

we obviously understood something that would be obvious to anyone that travels through any part of

Palestine, whether Gaza, Palestine of 48, Jerusalem or the West Bank, those areas that Israel actually kind of carves it into in different

administrative zones but in all of them you see that the the practice of settler colonization is architectural,

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