Blurring intelligence crime: a critical forensics

This book explores the conundrum that political fortune is dependent both on social order and big, constitutive crime. An act of outrageous harm depends on rules and protocols of crime scene discovery and forensic recovery, but political authorities review events for a social agenda, so that crime is designated according to the relative absence or presence of politics. In investigating this problem, the book introduces the concepts 'intelligence crime' and 'critical forensics.' It also reviews as an exemplar of this phenomenon 'apex crime, ' a watershed event involving government in the support of a contested political and social order and its primary opponent as the obvious offender, which is then subject to a confirmation bias. Chapters feature case study analysis of a selection of familiar, high profile crimes in which the motives and actions of security or intelligence actors are considered as blurred or smeared depending on their interconnection in transactional political events, or according to friend/enemy status.

Intro -- Dedication -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- 1 Introduction: Blur and a Critical Forensics of Intelligence Crime -- Introduction -- The Uncertainty of Crime -- Critical Forensics: On Making Crime Certain -- From Political Crime to Intelligence Crime -- Apex: Political Crime as Spectacle -- A Critical Forensics of Intelligence Crime -- Working Hypothesis and Bias -- Outline of the Book -- References -- 2 Forensic Certainties -- Introduction -- Discipline (or Truth Claim) Dominion -- Equality of Arms -- Truth from Adversity

The Institutional Setting and the Organisational Condition-Or Whose Event Is This? -- Crime Scene Recovery and Narrative Bias -- Establishing Investigatory Command Authority and Securing Crime Scene Control -- Exploiting the Crime Scene: Retrieving, Processing and Preserving Relevant Information, Materials or Evidence -- Preliminary Review of Materials and Working Hypotheses -- Measures of Identity and Review -- Errors and Bias -- Context Bias or Context Effects -- Confirmation Bias, Corroboration Inflation and Tunnel Vision -- Discussion and Implications for This Study -- Conclusion

Claiming the Crime: Not just a Crime, but an Act of War -- Establish…