Perjury stands as a compelling counternarrative to explain the testimonial problems heretofore identified. I have described already the ways in which a witness might feign ignorance or lack of understanding in order to make his accounts more plausible, more incriminating, and less likely to contradict the accounts of other witnesses or that same witness's previous account. Long, drawn-out exchanges in which the witness fails to answer the questions directly can similarly buy the witness time to consider which answers he wishes to provide and can even frustrate the interrogating counsel to such a degree that the counsel just abandons the line of questioning entirely. Finally, the potential of perjury to explain the inconsistencies just described is even more straightforward. Successive witness accounts may vary because the witness has forgotten the perjured details he earlier provided to investigators. Or a witness may not know the identity of the defendant at the time he provides his statement, so it is only later that he inserts the defendant into his account. Or the converse may be true. The witness may accurately inculpate the defendant during his pretrial interview but later find it in his interest to exculpate the defendant at trial.

As earlier noted, there is little way of ascertaining whether any given testimonial deficiency does in fact result from perjury, but what we can explore is whether other indications suggest that perjury is a considerable problem for the international tribunals.