Millions of Dollars Wasted, Two Lives Sacrificed

Pravda, July 23, 2008

by John Stanton

According to sources, United States Army brigade commanders privately believe that the US Army's TRADOC Human Terrain System (HTS) program is a "joke" and completely unnecessary. The HTS program is publicly supported by brigade military commanders, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, only because it is a "pet project" of the currently politically popular US Army General David Petraeus.

BAE Systems, the prime contractor on the project, has repeatedly been pressured by the HTS program manager and his staff to hire individuals who are not field-experienced ethnographers/anthropologists, but rather Google-fed political and social scientists. In two cases, pre-security clearance award investigations revealed that one candidate recommended for hire by senior staff was a felon. The other candidate had health problems that would have compromised the functions of a deployed Human Terrain Team (HTT). BAE Systems has been the punching bag for the poor decision-making of HTS program managers and advisors.

The tragic deaths of two HTS members -- HTT IZ3 Nicole Suveges and HTT AF1 Michael Bhatia -- came amidst program management's confusion over roles and missions, ignorance of threat situations, even dress code problems. Key questions remain open. What's the role of a civilian ethnographer/anthropologist working with the military in a combat zone? Is a civilian trained to respond to a threat without threatening the life of the team? Should they carry weapons and wear military gear? Are they there to enhance the kill chain, organize and facilitate sporting events, or examine trash dumps for behavioral patterns? What kind of data do warfighters and negotiators really want? What happens when the HTT leaves the site of success? What's the historical experience of the US military with human geographers? (see David Price, Anthropolgical Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War: Duke University Press, 2008).

Whether all this mattered in the deaths of Suveges and Bhatia is utterly debatable. But according to sources, Suveges was a no-show at many training sessions at Fort Leavenworth and not properly trained for work in a combat zone. She was sent initially to the United Kingdom to recruit there for the HTS program and then afterwards was ultimately deployed to the volatile Sadr City in Iraq where three weeks later she met her end. One insider had predicted prior to her death that "someone was going to get killed."

One of the HTS prime movers, TRADOC HTS Senior Social Scientist, Mrs. Montgomery McFate (Phd, JD), took a seven month sabbatical on the eve of the first deployment of the HTT's to Iraq in 2007. Whatever guidance she had to offer the fledgling HTT's would have to wait months until her sabbatical ended. Not bad for a $200,000 base salary and $200,000 in overtime, according to reports.

Allegations of HTS members plagiarizing Defense Intelligence Agency reports and articles from anthropology-specific blogs have been made. Remotely using search engines/databases and attending conferences to troll for HTS-related data, and passing that off as legitimate field data, are also alleged. HTS program funds may also have been used to allow participants to gain advanced degrees.

At the helm of it all is program manager Steve Fondacaro who has been described as a "great used car salesman" but not interested in programmatic details. One of his current goals is to market the HTS program to the controversial AFRICOM project and keep the funding alive. But his task will be difficult. On his watch the Pentagon/taxpayers lost $15 million on the MAP HT software/hardware effort. The MAP HT software/hardware apparently sits unusable with the blue wiring connections still hanging from shelves where the system was to have been housed and operated.

Sources indicate that sexual dalliances, falsified leave forms, crony no-bid contracts to Fondacaro colleagues (one in which deliverables were not fully provided), and verbal harassment of civilian staff have compromised the US Army's TRADOC program. The hiring of a former Lincoln Group strategic communications specialist to handle public relations is a sure sign of trouble.

Worse still, the reach-back center at Fort Leavenworth remains understaffed. According to a source, the staff is "in a pinch" because Fondacaro is alleged to have used billets meant for reach-back operations to hire non-essential staff. Reach-back staff at Fort Leavenworth and HTT members in the field "do not communicate," according to reports.

It is not clear whether Secretary Gates or General Petraeus are aware of these problems but they should be. Warfighters in the battlespace should not have to spend their time babysitting those who have an itch to play Army or engage in a proof-of-concept program that has, in one form or another, been behind every US attempt to colonize and/or subdue an intransigent population since the nation's founding. While the funding for the HTS program is not large, mere millions, that money could be used to enhance training for Special Operations fighters or even buy better equipment for them. America's uniformed soldiers have been experimented with and on -- whether via faulty national security policy and tactics or recycled physical and social science -- for the last eight years. That's enough!

•••••••

MF: It would be interesting to see the responses, if any, from people at the HTS. As far as I can see, there has been no public response yet, and if none is forthcoming that would suggest that either they have not read the report, or are unable to challenge its contents.

"President Setha Low has not issued any kind of formal statement about the NSF-DoD agreement on Minerva. The call will be an opportunity for media to learn about the AAA's perspectives on ethical standards for social science research, and to provide some background on the issues at stake with Minerva."

So don't bother with the conference call unless you run a blog or work for the media.  I'll make the effort to wake up at 4am for the call and report back here.

--L.L. Wynn

Tom Strong sent me this announcement which annoyingly enough, I haven't gotten myself, even though I'm an AAA member (harumph!). For those of you who are interested in the American Anthropological Association's reaction to the partnering of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to review Minerva Project research, you might want to join this conference call (but unfortunately that translates to 4am Sydney time):

Anthropologists Critique Pentagon's 'Minerva'
Conference Call July 31, 2-3 pm

For Immediate Release:
July 16, 2008

Anthropologists have a long and, at times, troubled history of working with the military during times of conflict—from World War II to the present-day war on terror.

Recent controversies surrounding the Pentagon's Human Terrain System, a $40 million program that embeds cultural advisors in combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, have spilled over into new anxieties surrounding the Pentagon's 'Minerva' program, a Defense Department initiative to fund social science and humanities research in Pentagon-designated national security-related areas, including terrorism, religious fundamentalism and Chinese military and technology.

Following a speech on April 14 by Defense Secretary Robert M Gates announcing his vision for Minerva, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a letter from its president to address some concerns about the program. The letter called for a redirection of program management to external organizations that have extensive experience in peer-review and are familiar with the ethical standards and concerns of the anthropology discipline.

"Rigorous, balanced and objective peer review is the bedrock of successful and productive programs that sponsor academic research. Agencies such as NSF, NIH and NEH have decades of experience in building an infrastructure of respected peer reviewers who referee individual grant proposals and give their time to sit on panels," President Low stated in the letter to key White House and congressional leaders.

On June 30, the National Science Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Defense Department, sealing the deal that the two agencies will cooperate on the management of Minerva for the next three years, with the possibility of an extended contract.

According to the MOU, research proposals will be evaluated by the NSF's standard merit-review panels, but Pentagon officials will have decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels. Research will not be classified and researchers are free to publish their results.

Despite the AAA's enthusiastic support for NSF involvement with Minerva, there remain concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded when it supports the Pentagon's agenda. Other critics of the program, including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the program would discourage research in other important areas and undermine the role of the university as a place for independent discussion and critique of the military.

AAA President Setha Low will be discussing Minerva and the AAA's reaction to the program during a conference call on Thursday, July 31 from 2-3 pm.

Following discussion on Minerva, the July 31 conference call will feature a discussion on the global food crisis with anthropologist Sol Katz, co-chair of the AAA Task Force on World Food Problems.

For more information or to sign up for the call, contact Jennifer Steffensen at 703-528-1902 x 3039 or jsteffensen[@]aaanet.org.

Useful Links:

DoD Broad Agency Announcement

Letter from AAA President Setha M Low

Statement by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists

NSF Press Release

AAA President Setha M Low's Web page

Basically, the news, reported in Nature on July 10, is that "on 30 June, the defence department signed a memorandum of understanding that will direct some of its money into social and behavioural science research through the National Science Foundation (NSF)."  Here are a few relevant bits from the article:

"All proposals will be selected for funding through the NSF's standard peer-review process. The research will be unclassified and no restrictions will be placed on researchers' freedom to publish their results — or for that matter, to criticize the defence department...."

"The NSF agreement has been widely acclaimed by university administrators, who welcome the extra research money . But it has aroused the suspicion among some researchers that it will distort social science towards military priorities. Of particular concern is the fact that the defence department will have some say in the choice of the NSF's peer reviewers."

This has also been covered in Science.  Here's an excerpt:

"The program will have two arms of equal size. One will be managed by Defense officials and the other by NSF, with some Pentagon input on the selection of reviewers. "There are several topics of mutual interest" within the Minerva areas, says David Lightfoot, who heads NSF's social sciences directorate. "Securing the national defense was part of our charter in 1950," he adds."

What this seems to mean is that applications for Minerva Project money will go through an academic peer-review process, rather than being vetted by military officials, which was something critiqued when Wired first reported on Minerva when it was announced a few months ago.

The official NSF announcement is available on their website, and has also been covered in the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, which clarifies that there are two tracks for reviewing proposals, and also a mechanism for people to refuse DoD funding for their NSF project applications:

The Pentagon is also accepting Minerva proposals through a separate pathway known as a broad agency announcement. Proposals that are submitted via this second track will reviewed through the Defense Department’s usual processes, not by NSF panels.)

But today’s agreement is broader than Minerva: It also creates a mechanism through which the Department of Defense can help to finance other national-security-related proposals submitted to the NSF. In such cases, scholars will have the option to decline the Pentagon’s money.

Anthropologist David Price has described in counterpunch his concerns about how military funding will transform the kinds of research that social scientists do:

...today, American social science faces new forms of ideologically controlled funding that stand to transform our universities’ production of knowledge in ways reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s ideological control over scientific interpretations.

(Meanwhile, if anyone has anything interesting to say about HTS or the relationship between anthropology and the military that they think would be particularly relevant to a Middle East audience, please get in touch with me at lisa.wynn[at]mq.edu.au.)

--L.L. Wynn

All of the lines that follow that are in italics are from the original document, and the regular text is my writing.

•••••••

HTS is assisting the military in combat operations.

Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) do not provide direct support to combat operations.

This leaves one possibility open: indirect support to combat operations.

The only military training HTTs receive pertains to personal safety rather than tactical operations. HTTs work primarily with units whose function is explicitly non-lethal, such as medical personnel, Provincial Reconstruction Teams, Civil Affairs, etc. When they do work with maneuver units, HTTs improve the units abilities to carry out non-lethal aspects of their roles, such as how to better dialogue with the population, how to read body language and visual cues, what appropriate cultural protocols are for interaction with locals, how to appreciate the history of particular tribes and social groups in their area, etc.

The meaning of "maneuver units" is not specified. How "dialogue" is to be carried out with the population when only a small minority of HTS researchers in Iraq can speak Arabic, is something that is left untouched.

By McFate's own account, of the 38 HTS personnel in Iraq, only 13 speak Arabic, and only two of those are social scientists. Therefore, those who are supposed to be helping the military appreciate the history and culture of the area, by and large do not even speak the language. With such expert advice, one is permitted to question whether room is opened up for further "misunderstandings" and potential conflict. One of these experts is Dr. Marcus Griffin, anthropologist at Christopher Newport University, whose previous research was reportedly in the Philippines, and among "Freegans." He had never been to the Middle East before he arrived in Iraq. According to a report in Newseek, one of the social scientists with the HTS in Iraq, "is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America's goth, punk and rave subcultures."

Matt Tompkins, a former Human Terrain Team member has repeatedly stated that the information provided by such teams has been superficial, and that there is little or no opportunity to become immersed in the local population or to become familiar with existing culture. This has been corroborated by Zenia Helbig, a former HTS member as well. Indeed, Helbig has argued that Human Terrain Teams pose little danger precisely because they are ineffectual: "HTS has become...a joke." Both Tompkins and Helbig have revealed that HTS hires "prior service" civilians (retired military personnel) to serve as Team Leaders, Research Managers or Analysts. One of these,

showed himself to be completely unqualified for the program: demonstrating an inability or unwillingness to distinguish between Sunni, Shia, Arabs, Kurds or Iraqis (all “those people” to him), often expressing a desire to “just kill 'em all,” and demonstrating a complete inability to build a rapport with units supported in training—the key responsibility of a Team Leader.

(See the joint statement by Tompkins and Helbig to the Project on Government Oversight; and, Zenia Helbig's presentation to the AAA.)

•••••••

The US military does nothing but kill people and break things.

A soldier's job is to defend the country through both lethal and non-lethal means.

The first thing to note is that this "misconception" is not ostensibly related to the Human Terrain System, but more broadly to the role of the military. Once more, there is no reference to any sources. What is worthy of note is the resort to an implicit nationalism: "defend the country." This is a seriously contentious statement that skirts the issue of U.S. aggression against Iraq having been unprovoked, that Iraq has never attacked the U.S. and posed no threat. The main argument of this section of the HTS document is to clarify that the military does other things ... besides killing people and breaking things.

Thus, US troops do much more than engage in combat operations. For example, they also engage in providing medical and veterinary care [note: at least one Marine animal abuse video from Iraq has gone "viral" since this document was posted], law enforcement training, reconstruction projects, humanitarian assistance distribution, reconciliation facilitation/negotiation, support for local media and broadcasting development, etc. HTTs play active roles in supporting these types of non-combat functions.

"Support for local media," and the role of Human Terrain Teams raises a controversy that critics of HTS had not previously raised, and it was surprising to see this phrase inserted above. It has been revealed in numerous American mainstream news sources, and in the U.S. Congress, that the U.S. military had planted propaganda in the Iraqi media. Is this what social scientists are contributing to?

For more, see:

Los Angeles Times: Planted Articles May Be Violation
By Mark Mazzetti, January 27, 2006

Los Angeles Times: U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press
By Borzou Daragahi and Mark Mazzetti, November 30, 2005

Washington Post: Military Says It Paid Iraq Papers for News -- Possible 'Improprieties' to Be Investigated
By Josh White and Bradley Graham, Saturday, December 3, 2005; Page A01

New York Times: U.S. is said to plant articles in Iraq Papers
Jeff Gerth and Scott Shane, December 1, 2005

PBS Online Newshour: Planting News in the Iraq Media
December 2, 2005

In terms of the role of the military in committing human rights abuses, this is a subject that the HTS site completely sidesteps, even while purportedly seeking to deal with misconceptions.

Reportedly hundreds of veterans of the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars have gathered to testify about atrocities committed against civilians. See: "Winter Soldier: Hundreds of Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Gather to Testify in Echo of 1971 Vietnam Hearings", March 14, 2008, Democracy Now. Five videos of this testimony have been posted on YouTube, starting at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcr7ROkK7f4.

Also, Evan Wright, an embedded journalist, has written of the U.S. of artillery during the invasion, such as the attack on the city of Nasiriyah:

But the fact is, the Marines rely much more on artillery bombardment than on aircraft dropping precision-guided munitions. During our thirty-six hours outside Nasiriyah they have already lobbed an estimated 2,000 rounds into the city. The impact of this shelling on its 400,000 residents must be devastating.

The U.S. has also used cluster bombs in close proximity to civilian populations, with a documented death toll among civilians whenever and wherever these have been used. See:

San Francisco Chronicle: U.S. Under Fire for Use of Cluster Bombs in Iraq
by Jack Epstein, May 15, 2003

U.S. forces have also engaged in siege attacks on civilian population centres, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, with small cities and entire neighbourhoods essentially razed. Other war crimes have been reported by the U.S. media, as compiled here.

The HTS document makes light of these issues by trivializing and oversimplifying in the form of a fabricated and seemingly simplistic statement. By ignoring widespread concerns and condemnations of war crimes, the HTS writers manifest dishonest intent and cast an even darker shadow on their program.

•••••••

HTTs are being used to collect intelligence.

HTTs do not proactively elicit actionable intelligence from the local civilian population.

Once more, readers are presented with a "loophole" statement -- they do not "proactively" gather intelligence, leaving open the possibility that they may gather intelligence by other means. And when such intelligence falls into the laps of HTS researchers, what are they to do with it? No answer is provided.

Team members are legally prohibited from performing active intelligence collection. Only Military Intelligence (MI) Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Collectors can answer specific questions from the brigade's intelligence unit. Furthermore, brigades do not need HTTs to collect intelligence or assist with targeting, since they already have a large intelligence staff that performs this function for them. The role of the HTTs is to help the troops better understand who is NOT their enemy.

In battling a "misconception," the HTS document once more reaffirms a criticism leveled at it by many anthropologists, it does not dispel it. Understanding who not to target is, surely, built in to the process of target selection. Without such selectivity, the HTS would be implying that targeting is otherwise random and sweeping, and keep in mind their objection to such characterizations in the previous section. If the targeting is instead selective, then of course understanding who is not the enemy is a part of the targeting process.

•••••••

Meaningful voluntary informed consent is not possible when the researcher carries a weapon.

This should have been avoided by the HTS writer(s), because it is such a no brainer.

In an environment where most of the population is armed, a blanket assumption that the presence of weapons automatically carries with it the threat of coercive force is simply incorrect.

Blanket? HTS has characterized the majority of Iraqi civilians as armed, an outrageous statement. It is followed by a wholly illogical statement that weapons do not suggest a threat of coercive force -- then why are they even conceived as "weapons"? Such loose writing and shoddy reasoning, for what sells itself as a research program, a very expensive publicly funded one at that, is alarming.

Local nationals who live in a war zone are smart enough to understand the difference between combat troops and personnel who conduct non-combat functions.

According to any journalist who has interviewed Marcus Griffin in Iraq, he is indistinguishable from a soldier. He wears a military uniform and carries a gun. Nicole Suveges, who was a recent HTS fatality, was shown by newspapers wearing a military uniform. Just who are these Iraqi civilians who can distinguish between one American with a gun, in uniform, as "military" as opposed to another American with a gun, in uniform, as "civilian." It is outlandish arguments such as these that have attracted so much, apparently warranted, negative attention to the tenets of HTS.

Local nationals are also smart enough to understand the need for self-defense in an environment full of people who want to kill you.

Local nationals are apparently also smart enough to understand the need for self-defense from an armed occupier, which is precisely what HTS researchers are.

•••••••

HTS is carrying out secret or covert work.

HTS was designed as an open-source, non-classified program.

HTS has published no reports that have been made available publicly. It is not open source. Recently, detailed login instructions have been circulated among a limited number of message recipients, that clearly indicate that whatever data there may be is behind a wall, and in order for non-government persons to gain access, they must request and place a statement to the effect that "you are a partner with HTS and need access to the site."

The willingness of team members and staff to talk to the press, write blogs from the field, and to answer emails and phone calls of our critics is proof positive of the fact that the program is neither secret nor covert.

That is not proof positive of anything other than the fact that much of what has been "released," like the page on the HTS site to which this post refers, is often little more than thinly veiled propaganda and promotional pitches. Moreover, the covert nature of McFate entering a blog discussion under a fake identity, to sell her own program and make promotional statements is, besides reprehensible, an indication of the honesty and openness that is really at play.

•••••••

HTS violates the AAA code of ‘do no harm'.

The goal of HTS is to reduce the harm that the military does through lethal force and enhance the effectiveness of non-lethal alternatives.

The AAA code of ethics does not, at any point, indicate or suggest that the concept of "harm" can be reduced to lethality alone. There are many forms of harm spoken of in that code. HTS is attacking a misconception, by producing a misconception. If this is done willfully, it confirms the worst suspicions. If it is done because they have failed to read, or review, that code, then it shows an unprofessional lack of concern for key principles.

The goal of HTS is the same as that of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) code of ethics: do no harm, or at least help the military to do less harm.

Once again the HTS document provides a meandering logic -- doing no harm is now qualified, but equated to, doing less harm. No harm is a statement of an absolute: none. Less harm is a relative statement: some. It is astounding that the author(s) of such a document feel that they can get such statements past the eyes of critical readers, and insulting to their intelligence.

Each Social Scientist on an HTT has the ultimate responsibility and authority to adhere to his or her own personal and professional ethical standards.

This statement above thus disclaims any HTS liability -- not a resounding endorsement of a principled adherence to ethical research. The language is deceiving, but the intent is realistic: there is little in the way of solid ground on which to build an argument that ethical research can be done by an armed party to a conflict.

The program staff and supported unit cannot compel the Social Scientist to act unethically; he/she always has the right to refuse. The supported units also appreciate the necessity of maintaining the ethical code because violating it compromises the Social Scientist's ability to do their work, thus undermining their mission.

This is plausible, and represents a welcome break from the course of the HTS argument thus far. The reality of exercising refusal may be more complicated than suggested above however.

•••••••

Human Terrain Team members conceal their identities.

Aside from one unique case where a team member concealed her last name as a result of concerns for her personal safety, HTT members can be identified by name and unit patches on their uniform.

One should note the level of relationship and rapport between the researcher and the local that is betrayed by the aloofness built into the statement. An Iraqi civilian would not know the name other than by reading it on the uniform? One can safely say that the "informants" of by far the vast majority of anthropologists learned the anthropologists' names personally and directly, not by reading a name tag.

•••••••

HTT members are armed.

This involves the same "misconception" as the one above titled, "Meaningful voluntary informed consent is not possible when the researcher carries a weapon."

Military members of the HTT carry weapons as required by US government regulations. No civilian member of an HTT is required to carry a weapon. Weapons are distributed at the discretion of the brigade commander depending on the security situation. However, all civilian members of the HTT must be proficient in the use of weapons in order to guarantee their own security should this be necessary. Weapons issued to civilians are for self-defense only.

This statement states some of the legalities of the issue, but sidesteps the more meaningful discussion of what kind of social science is at play when the researcher enters, armed, into a war of occupation.

•••••••

There might be unintended consequences for local nationals as a result of speaking to a team member.

Only an Iraqi or Afghan can answer this -- this is not a question that can honestly be answered by the HTS writers. The following statement is an affirmation of this.

Nobody understands the problem of unintended consequences better than a population that has been living under totalitarian dictatorships or fundamentalist regimes for decades.

Once more, the subterranean appeal to American nationalism by resorting to the favourite propaganda of American political leaders and some media.

Those local people who choose to talk to HTT members (or to the US military more generally) have decided to engage because they believe there is some benefit (political, security, economic, etc.) to them in doing so. Nobody is forcing village elders to discuss their needs for fresh water, veterinary care, or physical security. From the perspective of many local nationals, the consequences of not engaging outweigh the risks of engaging.

Again, the HTS writers are performing ventriloquism. No part of the statement above is valid without substantial evidence from local sources.

•••••••

Bad things happened in the past, so bad things must be happening now.

The use of Social Scientists by the government during WWII and Vietnam certainly casts a shadow over the activities of HTS in the present, despite the fact that HTS is not involved in detention operations, writing interrogation manuals, analyzing the size of Japanese soldier's nostrils, or any other such activities. The belief that the present simply recapitulates the past assumes that the US government, the US military and the social science community have learned nothing from history.

This statement is premised on the idea that people involved with the HTS have the capacity for learning, which is very welcome news. However, it does not indicate what they have learned from history. Indeed, since before recently so very little was written about the role of anthropology in supporting past military efforts, and much of what is now available is there thanks to a staunch critic of HTS, David Price, then it would be important to find out what HTS has learned from a leading authority on this subject.

•••••••

HTS is merely extending the war in Iraq and perpetuating the violence by helping the US military.

By helping brigades better understand the local population's political, economic, social needs, and by identifying non-lethal alternatives for meeting the population's needs, HTS has assisted in stabilizing the country. Stability is the fundamental pre-condition for the withdrawal of troops.

First, a point about sloppiness: the statement above says "stabilizing the country." Which one? Secondly, it is making a claim to final success which, if it were true, would nullify the need for a continued U.S. presence and a role for the HTS, on its own terms. HTS has not assisted in "stabilizing" because there is nothing "stable" about either the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having seen two of its researchers killed, and one wounded, one would hope that HTS could be more sensitive to reality.

•••••••

There is no military solution to the situation in Iraq, and thus Social Scientists shouldn't be involved.

The military is more aware than anyone else that military power alone is not sufficient, but must be complemented by other levers of power (diplomatic, economic, and information). In fact, the recognition that there can never be a military solution is a fundamental tenet of counterinsurgency....[excess verbiage deleted]

The point that is being missed here is that HTS researchers buy into an occupation that involves the assertion and imposition of their country's interests over those of another. Imperialism is a word that simply does not exist in the HTS vocabulary.

•••••••

It's ethically permissible for Social Scientists to advise on policy, but it's not permissible to work with US military forces on the ground.

It is deeply ironic that, according to various critics of HTS, a Social Scientist can brief diplomats and advise on policy, but cannot engage with the soldiers who are in fact an extension of policymakers and diplomats.

Various critics? Which ones?

As one critic, it has been my contention that social scientists should not play a supporting role of any kind, in any sphere, of the military or in the direct and avoidable service of an imperial state. If others have chosen more nuanced approaches, then this is precisely the kind of inconsistency and irony which lays them open to such criticisms back from the HTS.

The military does not make foreign policy, but is Constitutionally required to execute that policy. That the military should have the requisite knowledge to do so efficiently, carefully, and with less loss of life is simple common sense. Are US soldiers less deserving of this critical knowledge than policy makers or diplomats because they execute rather than make policy? Such a view displays the worst sort of ‘cherry picking': one that prioritizes the senior leadership of the US government at the expense of those men and women in uniform whose job it is to defend the country with their lives if necessary.

Shrill.

•••••••

If Social Scientists oppose the war in Iraq, they should eschew any ‘collaboration' with the military.

While some academic Social Scientists may personally oppose the war in Iraq, this political position should not be confused with professional ethics. Maintaining the ethical mandate of doing no harm to the population under study should not be confounded with a blanket opposition to the use of force under any circumstances. Similarly, opposing the war in Iraq should not lead to an automatic condemnation of those Social Scientists who do work with the military: to issue such a blanket condemnation would imply that the military is an illegitimate social institution. While this may be a personal political opinion, it should not be a professional ethical standard.

In some ways, this is correct, and it points to the problems inherent with the very professionalization and disciplining of knowledge production.

Just as a footnote: some of us also oppose the war in Afghanistan. The statement above singles out Iraq alone.

According to an HTT member "War causes tremendous human misery. How can an anthropologist not use their knowledge, skills, and abilities to put an end to the conflict? In my experience, the Iraqi people are wonderful people. If I can help move operations in the direction that fosters reconciliation and reconstruction, then that is good and I am comfortable with my ethics."

I have addressed this elsewhere. The implicit logic is a defeatist one: I cannot change my society, I cannot educate people against war, I can only jump in after a war has started to try to perform some palliative role, my only ambition is to help "soften" a war. The logic is founded on certain political and moral premises that are unacceptable to some of us, especially when stated as if there were no alternative.

•••••••

HTS is a program that uses anthropology to help the military.

Surely, this very document establishes that fact, and supports it? Why is this suddenly a "misconception"? It was McFate herself who asked, "How can I make anthropology useful to the military?" Why is this even an object of debate?

While some staff members of HTS are anthropologists, HTS is not an applied military anthropology program.

What is an "applied military anthropology program"? The document suggests it is playfully entering the field of semantics, and specifically nominalism. What it does not do is to reject the alleged "misconception."

HTS can be better described as a cultural insight and risk mitigation program, designed to aid in military planning and decision making to reduce or eliminate the need for lethal violence.

A better description? It actually reads like something that could pass for an elaboration of something that might be called an applied military anthropology program.

This work draws on a variety of skills, many of which can be found in a well trained anthropologist, but other needed skills and knowledge are not part of the traditional anthropology 'kit bag', including military culture, area studies, COIN theory, decision making, and conflict resolution. The HTS mission is fundamentally multidisciplinary in nature.

So this "proves" that anthropology is not being used to support the military? All this statement says that is even more areas of expertise are needed to support the military -- incidentally, none of the above are actually required, as evidenced by the HTS' own recruitment ads.

•••••••

CONCLUSION

This HTS document leaves standing virtually all of the criticisms leveled against it, while even reinforcing a few, and raising some new ones. Rather than appease the critics, it will leave most totally unmoved. Perhaps the biggest criticism of all is the one that is never mentioned: HTS is a way of using social science so that one state may assert itself over another, that it is a fundamentally colonial enterprise, and it stands completely at odds with anything that might be called a decolonized anthropology. The other criticism that is not mentioned at all is that HTS "anthropology" is not even anthropological. Given the exhaustive and even repetitive nature of the HTS propaganda, one can only assume that if the program's directors are silent on these issues it is because they have no answer.

]]> http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/?p=1186 Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:31:50 +0000 Maximilian Forte http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/?p=1186 Publication announcement:

The U.S. military's quest to weaponize culture
By Hugh Gusterson | 20 June 2008

The Pentagon seems to have decided that anthropology is to the war on terror what physics was to the Cold War. As an anthropologist, this makes me very nervous.

Where former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld believed that the United States would vanquish its enemies through technological superiority, his replacement Robert Gates has said that cultural expertise in counterinsurgency operations will be crucial in the future wars he anticipates.

"When research that could be funded by neutral civilian agencies is instead funded by the military, knowledge is subtly militarized and bent in the way a tree is bent by a prevailing wind."

For those anthropologists who don't judge the vitality of our discipline solely in terms of revenue streams, the Pentagon's new interest in culture is worrying.

...continue reading...

American troop strength in Iraq now stands at about 146,000. That's perhaps 16,000 more than in January 2007 just before the surge began. It's also about 16,000 more than in April 2003 when Baghdad was taken. According to Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press, the latest Pentagon plans are to order about 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in 2009, which would keep troop levels at or above that 140,000 mark.

In addition, a vast force of private contractors, armed and unarmed, is in the country. There is no way to know how many of these hired hands and hired guns are actually there, but it's a reasonable guess that they add up to more -- possibly substantially more -- than the troops on hand.

Since February 2007 in the U.S., only one "surge" has been discussed, almost nonstop -- those 30,000 ground troops the President ordered largely into the Baghdad area. A surprising number of other surges have, however, been underway, even if barely noted in the U.S. These add up to a remarkable Bush administration urge to surge that puts American policy in Iraq in quite a different light.

Among these surges, for instance, has been a political surge of U.S. "advisors" and "mentors" to the Iraqi government, police, and military. In another of his superb reports for the New York Review of Books, "Embedded in Iraq," Michael Massing says that the main elements of this "little known political surge… were spelled out in a classified 'Joint Campaign Plan' completed in May 2007." It represented, he writes, a "sharp expansion."

 

"Specialists from Treasury and Justice, Commerce and Agriculture were assigned to government ministries to help draw up budgets and weed out sectarian elements. The Agency for International Development and the Army Corps of Engineers set up projects to boost nutrition and reinforce dams. Provincial Reconstruction Teams were stationed in Baghdad and elsewhere to help repair infrastructure, improve water and electrical systems, and stimulate the economy."

 

We know as well that American advisers are now deeply involved with local government bodies in contested areas; that American advisers, evidently hired from private contractors, are embedded in the key interior, defense, and oil ministries; that advisers, also hired from private contractors, are helping the Iraqi police and that a new multiyear contract with DynCorp International, which already has 700 civilian police advisers in the country, will raise that number above 800. Their mission: "to advise, train and mentor the Iraqi Police Service, Ministry of Interior, and Department of Border Enforcement."

In this period, even academics have surged into Iraq as the military has embedded anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists from the "Human Terrain System" in military units to advise on local customs and "cultural understanding." One of them, a political scientist completing her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, was recently killed in a bombing in Sadr City.

We know that more than 20,000 Iraqis are now in two U.S. prisons, Camp Bucca in the south of the country and state-of-the-art Camp Cropper on the outskirts of Baghdad. Both of these have been continually upgraded. In this period, though, it seems that a surge in prison building (and assumedly prisoners) has also been underway. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports that a new "Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation Center" -- i.e. prison -- is being built near Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad. A "new contract calls for providing food for 'up to 5,000 detainees' [there] and will also cover 150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently will work at the facility." Another "reconciliation center" is to be opened at Ramadi in al-Anbar Province.

There's much more here.  It will be difficult to dismantle this infrastructure infiltration when and if the US finally decides to pull its military out of Iraq.  That, I would think, is part of the plan to institutionalize US presence in Iraq.

But when I went there to show him, the blog was gone!  It's been taken down.  I wish I'd made some copies of the text (fortunately there are a few choice excerpts on Open Anthropology and In Harmonium).

"Never fear!" I proclaimed to the engineer-physicist (let's call him Dave).  "I know a site that archives web pages."  So I went to the Internet Archive to look for it.  Sadly, it appears that it's not available on the Internet Archive, but that doesn't seem to be because of a deliberate block but rather because it's relatively recent.

But then Dave told me that he'd heard an interview on NPR's On the Media with Brewster Kahle, the co-founder of the Internet Archive, describing how he fought back when he received a "National Security Letter" (NSL) from the FBI requesting data on a particular user of the archive.  According to Kahle, some 50,000 of these requests are made every year.  What's alarming about these NSLs, besides the fact that they are outside of judicial review, is that they put a gag order on the recipients, preventing them from discussing the NSL request with anyone except their lawyers.  Of the estimated 200,000 issued over the past several years, only 3 NSL recipients have legally challenged the demand for information.  It reminds me again why I'm glad to have left the U.S.

Anyway, Kahle fought back with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and eventually the FBI settled.  One of the terms of the settlement was that the gag order was lifted and Kahle was allowed to discuss the NSL and his fight against it.  Three cheers for the EFF, the ACLU, and the few people who have had the courage to fight an NSL.   (As a result of a previous challenge to an NSL, a U.S. judge found the whole system of NSLs to be unconstitutional.)

There's a video describing another NSL recipient's fight against this, and the EFF has made publicly available information on how anyone who receives an NSL can fight it.  I know we anthropologists probably aren't on the front line when it comes to NSLs.  But then again, given the gag order, who knows who's getting these things?  Might they include requests to teachers to provide information on a student?  So I thought it might be something that educators should generally be aware of.

--L.L. Wynn

Readers should have a look at the discussion that has taken place at Savage Minds, in part because one can directly witness the content, and noise level, of someone who chooses the name of "Dee" and is most likely Montgomery McFate herself. McFate, or at the very least her "mini me", is apparently outraged at what has appeared on the Open Anthropology blog, and she cannot stop swelling with bitter disdain and fury. In that case, this blog has registered one of its intended effects, and I am grateful for the confirmation. More importantly, we witness more of the personality traits of what can be called the psycho-pathology of imperialism. McFate is otherwise not interesting as a person. But "McFate," as a shorthand abbreviation for this psycho-pathology, points us to a valuable case study.

Finally, a number of empirical issues were raised in that discussion on Savage Minds, including: claims that the Human Terrain System provides open and unclassified reports -- which it does not, and then Dee/McFate says she has personal inside information that these will be released soon, then backs away claiming she has no special inside relationship, not even remotely connected; claims that "glowing reports" have been published about the work of the HTS, which could also not be substantiated; and then Dee, now obviously McFate, claims to know Capt. Matthew Tompkins and Zenia Helbig, two of HTS' "dissidents" (they actually support HTS, but have gone on the record with what they call gross malfeasance, incompetence, and various other travesties). McFate's alter ego here claims to know something about this "pair" but will not say more. She seems to have reserved special rage for these two -- quite interesting for a remotely connected, neutral, "devil's advocate" who has no special inside knowledge.

Nice try McFate, and to be frank, I was prepared to credit you with more maturity and intelligence than what I saw today from you at Savage Minds. You betrayed your identity with the extreme oversensitivity you showed anyone and everyone who had any question about the program, taking things far too personally, and to too much of an extreme to simply be "a third party." You blew your lid, and thereby blew your cover. Who vex, loss.

One has to wonder how McFate manages to evade the fact that she helped to create a research program that has set the conditions for two of her colleagues to be blown to pieces? As outrageous as I can be -- usually deliberately -- neither I nor any colleagues I know could ever claim to have set up a collaborative effort with colleagues that resulted in their deaths. That is quite a load to carry, but McFate manages, cackling and crowing along the way.

For those who want to read more about "glowing reports" of HTS, please see:

NEEWSWEEK's "A Gun in One Hand, a Pen in the Other"

then see Montgomery McFate's hasty rebuttal, which seems to confirm the main points of the criticisms and weaknesses unveiled by Newsweek,

and a fellow blogger's dissection of her response. Newsweek is essentially correct then, apart from a few minor little errors.

For more on the case of Tompkins and Helbig, see Tompkin's own blog, and then see their joint statement to the Project on Government Oversight, on malfeasance in the HTS, and finally see Zenia Helbig's own revelations at the last conference of the American Anthropological Association.

With mounting evidence of a corrupt and incompetent program, not to mention Iraqi hatred for the American occupation and the wide range of human rights violations committed by a series of U.S. regimes against Iraq, one wonders what McFate could be crowing about so imperiously?

When the first press reports of the bombing came out, indicating the deaths of civilians working for the U.S. government, I wondered whether a HTS researcher would be among them. Just today I went back to visit the HTS website, and noticed that the "In Memoriam" menu item is at the top -- had it been at the bottom, the program would have been accused of being cold or callous, and yet placing it at the top should stand as a stark reminder of the real dangers that this program poses for those who join it. BAE Systems, in the meantime, continues to use announcements of these deaths to offer promotional sales pitches of its earnings and activities.

You can read more about this news at: Wired's Danger Room and a press release from BAE Systems.

Update: Additional Links

A north suburban woman was killed in a bombing in Iraq this week
ABC News local

Former Mundelein woman killed in Iraq
Daily Herald, Russel Lissau, June 25, 2008

American Graduate Student Dies in Iraq, in a 2nd Loss for Army's 'Human Terrain' Program
The Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn, June 25, 2008

In Memoriam: Nicole Suveges
Human Terrain System

[Cross-posted at CTLab]

Pic: The Second Chechen War.

Sorry for that ridiculously simplistic outline of events. But I'm using it to lead to a discussion of Russian strategies involving local identity/ethnicity/loyalty and power. Russia's current "success" in Chechnya has much to do with a very familiar sounding strategy of allying with local traditional elites who had become antagonistic to the Islamists and foreign jihadis. A very well-informed (but not by human rights considerations) decision was made to go with the Kadyrov's extended Beno group of clans.

Pic: Young Kadyrov, arms folded. The T-shirt reads "Kadyrovsky Spetsnaz."

Akhmed Kadyrov became the President of Chechnya and ruled until be was assassinated in 2004. His son Ramzan, picture above, had been a long-time militia commander and, since the age of 30 in 2007, has been president. Again, this is a very simplistic and non-nuanced outline of events in Chechnya. But my point is that Russia made a decision based on the power realities on the ground (however distasteful) and informed by a blunt social science assessment of Chechen society. Don't take this as any sort of endorsement from me. It's just an observation.

Of course, my title references the American Human Terrain System. This system of using social scientists to inform war policy and strategy is not new. It's as old as warfare itself, and used to varying degrees of skill and success. The British colonial efforts, with its scholar-soldiers and ethnographers, is a prime example of this. And it's when the British disregarded the factors 'at play' on the ground that disaster was incurred. The incompetent and arrogant officers of the first Anglo-Afghan war described by Lady Sale are just one example.

Pic: The Ghilzai locals wait to greet the Brits.

I'll now turn to Daniel R. Brower's chapter on Tsarist Russian military and administrative efforts in its newly acquired Muslim territories:

Brower, Daniel R. 1997. 'Islam and Ethnicity: Russian Colonial Policy in Turkestan', in Russia's Orient. Edited by Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

In 1867, having served for 13 years in the Caucasian wars (1843-56), Konstantin von Kaufman was appointed Governor-General of the newly acquired territories of Turkestan. His previous tour of duty was under Prince Vorontsev, but controlled by Nicholas I. Influenced by the Enlightenment and promoted by the previous policies of Catherine II, Prince Vorontsov tried to administer Caucasia in a manner informed by ethnographic inquiry and religious tolerance while encouraging Russians to "respect ethnic differences." But this was ignored by those military leaders commanding von Kaufman, who was an engineer at the time. As he arrived there was underway a full-scale rebellion brought on by

"the Russian authorities' clumsy, brutal efforts to incorporate the people there into the Russian legal and administrative system, in disregard of Muslim law and local customs."

Learning from failure, Konstantin von Kaufman made ethnographic knowledge "the core" of his administrative policies in Turkestan.

von Kaufman took a libertarian approach to Islam in general while at the same time weakening certain Islamic institutions such as the Sheykh-ul-Islam, the chief Muslim judge in Tashkent and the religious police (probably not the winners of the local popularity contest). But beyond religious tolerance, von Kaufman's ethnographic inquiry was being undertaken with the utmost enthusiasm. Geographers, linguists, ethnographers, artists, natural scientists and other social scientists were employed to carry out von Kaufman's project. In addition, Russian officers with advanced education were specifically targeted for service in Turkestan to counter the generally corrupt and drunk officer-administrators already serving there. As Brower noted, "Ethnicity was to become a servant of his colonial rule."

Pic: Russian Turkestan expanding.

Brower goes on to describe the "flood" of scholarly and popular articles and publications on Turkestan that followed. The attempt to classify the peoples of Central Asia met with confusion as people's identities were frequently "multiple and contradictory." But the "real needs of Kaufman's ethnographic project were met." Kaufman's influence was, despite some interruptions, a lasting policy that even influenced the Soviets' policies in Central Asia.

What does this have to do with Afghanistan besides the "ethnic" and cultural ties with Turkestan? There are parallels, though the attempt to make a direct comparison to the US/NATO/ISAF actions in Afghanistan is extremely problematic. What I'll stick to is the issue of "ethnographic" and local knowledge/customs discussed by Brower. Since 1979 very, very little field research has been conducted in Afghanistan, independently or under foreign government auspices. And from what information is publicly available, the Human Terrain System is a mere shadow of British and Russian inquiry (which strangely was mostly ignored by both those two countries when it concerned Afghanistan). Additionally, the amount of (and ability to carry out) field research is minimal. The support for the studies of the languages of Afghanistan and for research programs directed towards that region is pitiful. And even worse, large amounts of pre-1979 original research is mostly ignored by those who should be reading it.

The spirit of inquiry is not dead, but it is quite feeble. We live in the age when many people will not even go beyond the first page of a google search, let alone to a university library.

Eros and thanatos, meeting, in such a loving, lustful embrace. This post will appear to contain echoes of that earlier post, on the romance of anthropology and how to get public attention. It will give the notion of a "surge" a whole new twist.

This post could have been titled, "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad."

The newest revelations of the private side of "military anthropology" tend to reconfirm what a number of us have been thinking about those who would prostitute knowledge in return for recognition and rewards from the towering penile implants of power, such as the Pentagon. And with a mouth swollen with such rewards, and a face dripping with newfound recognition, the only trouble some have is in deciding between savoring or swallowing immediately (spitting is not an option).

She loves a man in uniform (well, of course we already knew that about Montgomery McFate, the Condoleeza Rice of anthropology who has championed the cause of integrating anthropologists in counterinsurgency missions, known as the Human Terrain System). McFate, writing under the name "Pentagon Diva", has been "outed" by Elle, More, and now Wired's Danger Room as the author of a sexually flirtatious blog called "I luv a man in a uniform."

The current post (from June 15, 2008), as I check the blog, is about David Kilcullen, another face in the Rogues Gallery of social scientists who have championed counterinsurgency work for academics. The photo shows a man with his face hidden behind a banner that says "killer" -- no but "killer" in the good sense (?) (Oddly enough, she identifies him as having a PhD in anthropology, which he does not, but that is inconsequential anyway: the two share the same goals.)

Now, when the Diva first met Dave, she wondered naturally, whether he wore his holster on the left or the right... but it quickly became apparent that Dave has so much hoo-0-ah juice that females naturally bend over and expose their back-seamed fishnet stockings for his delectation and approval.

McFate has apparently learned enough from her gender and sexuality courses in anthropology -- and let me stop to thank Yale University once again for unleashing this little darling onto the world -- to know how to turn them inside out. Indeed, I myself often "joke" with students that, "If you want to learn the arts of dictatorship, repression, and control, you can find all the answers in anthropology, especially in the more radical courses."

McFate believes that dogs also share her love of a man in uniform. Now this is really offensive, to dogs, because it's also not true. My dogs, like those of others who report the same, instinctively hate anyone in any kind of uniform -- nature's good sense, always acknowledged by me with a quiet "good boy" and a pat on the head. Of course this has a lot to do with upbringing as well. Unlike certain parents of human children, I don't raise dogs to become whores. And no, I don't mind married women like McFate drooling over the swollen, smelly glands of men in blood stained uniforms -- this is all about showing those Islamo-Fascists what a superior, civilized culture looks like. And what it smells and feels like too, for that matter.

The Pentagon Diva, aka McFate, aka McFellate, asks important questions on her blog too, it's not all silly sexual innuendo. She asks the very reasonable, sober question, "Why is Admiral Eric Olson so freakin' HOT?" She doesn't answer that one clearly, but mentions her love of warhammers, and her love of neo-paganism. Aw, Adolf would have been proud to have spawned such a child from beyond his 1945 bunker:

we’ve had the neo-cons, and now it’s time for the neo-pagans. Some neo-paganism would really liven up the scene at the Pentagon! Just think, we could roast some pigs in a fire pit at Ground Zero, drink psychotropic reindeer urine, raid the State Department in our long boats, and sacrifice some virgins in the E Ring…. And we need a foreign policy to go with our new neo-paganism. I think Conan really summed it up best. When asked the question: what is best in life? Conan replied: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.” Forget all this nonsense about nation-building – I want Thor the Admiral to crush MY enemies!!!

In answering another critical question, "Why is Paul Van Riper so screamingly HOT????", (it's because he looks like a Roman Senator, she says -- for some people debauchery and blood lust really gets the man in the u-boat all wet), she refers to ordinary Americans in these terms: "the glorious, overweight, self-complacent American populace."

At least she still loves the Americans who count, such as General David Petraeus, about whom she writes: "A man with posture like that can do it to me anytime!"

McFate tells Elle she has been accused of "prostituting" the science, and she may be playing up to that deliberately, seeing that her blog is a testament to such "prostitution" allegations. (I did not intend to offend sex trade workers, by the way). A joke about a joke about a joke? I don't think McFate means anything on that blog to be taken seriously. There is definitely something "in your face" of not just her blog persona, but of her multiple self-representations, like someone laughing at you, everybody, employers included, laughing all the way to the bank. Or perhaps she is sick of it all, and wants to get fired. It was her Human Terrain System that exposed a colleague to such danger that he was killed in a bomb blast, and perhaps she is just drowning sorrow in champagne.

Regardless, her character in that blog if not elsewhere brings to mind something that came out of a Stanley Kubrick script, not so much in terms of associations with images of the sex trade, but more in terms of "sucking up" to power and marketing one's skills to the men in uniform:

(link to YouTube)

•••••••

Montgomery McFate's husband (Sean McFate) is also "The Musical Mercenary," the title of his blog. It turns out that, yes, he really is a mercenary, and yes he has a passion for opera.

Both Montgomery and her husband have their blogs linked with and boasted about by a hedonistic, snobbish, putatively anti-corporate blogger known as Cintra Wilson.

Both Montgomery and Sean McFate seem to have also feigned anonymity, as if they want all of us to know who exactly is behind their blogs: Montgomery does not deny that it is her blog when asked by WIRED, and two other magazines report it, not as some secret or scoop, but in a matter of fact manner. Sean takes an "Ooops, I've been outed!" approach when linking to National Public Radio's interview with him -- again, NPR does not indicate it has found out any secret, and clearly they are simply repeating what he told them. How much personal fame can you acquire if you are serious about anonymity? Besides, faking anonymity is much more playful.

Montgomery claims to be a Democrat, and her husband claims to hate war. She mocks the neo-cons who employ her. Ah, c'est la vie, I guess, not all of us can afford to be morally pure and free of contradictions when we are hunting down truck loads of cash. She's patriotic but she sees Americans as fat and complacent, and the narcissistic clique that forms part of the set she belongs to can't stop laughing at the bad dress sense of ordinary Americans, not to mention academics. I recall a promising debate on a discussion board hosted by Small Wars Journal, that began by dissecting reasons why anthropologists rejected a new role as mercenaries, and then amazingly side tracked itself with each of the contributors going on and on and on and on about what academics wear, and how unfashionably silly they look. Watch that discussion unfold for yourself (a Canadian anthropologist and blogger takes part with relish).

And the representations of her, carefully stroked and repeated by her to various magazines, are so varied and layered: beatnik, punk rocking, chain smoking, itinerant Ivy League urchin, fatigue-wearing scholar turned conqueror of the world -- wow, what a rush, of pure and unbridled "grrl" power. Had F. Scott Fitzgerald lived to the present, a revised version of The Great Gatsby might have included these characters.

One cannot help but getting a case of the "creeps" when reading some of their materials online. Speaking of Kubrick, there is something about this pair, and their coterie of fashion-conscious, cocktailing, media limelighting, know-all-the-right-people braggarts, that reminds me of another Kubrick production, A Clockwork Orange. Defacing the world, laughing, rampaging, devil-may-care, catch-me-if-you-can, I'm better than you, the darlings of intrigued journalists from fashion and women's magazines to National Public Radio. Jet-setting hooligans and cosmopolitan vandals. I don't think McFate is actually all that serious, about anything, except herself of course. She has found a way to gain notoriety, and having done so, has found new ways of converting notoriety into fame. The last trick is to cash in on that fame.

This one is for Sean McFate, who surely appreciates his ultraviolence to the strains of old Ludwig Van:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.608777&w=425&h=350&fv=]

and who could forget this one...

Imperialism, it's so "operatic."

Last week the Office of the Director of Intelligence (ODNI) Special Security Center (SSC), which acts as ODNI's personnel security directorate, began soliciting white papers for a new research opportunity called Cyber Behavior and Personnel Security. The theme of this opportunity indicates that ODNI believes an individual's conduct in cyberspace should be a factor in the security clearance adjudication process.

Andrew's comments on this programme are well worth reading, as is his new blog Zero Intelligence Agents, which deals with dynamic networks, spatial modelling, human terrain and terrorism, for starters at least. Straight on the blogroll.

Roberto J. González is perhaps best known for his continued opposition to the involvement of anthropologists in the U.S. military's Human Terrain System. The title of his 2007 article, 'We Must Resist the Militarization of Anthropology' sums up his concerns with the delicate relationship between social science and the military. Who shapes the agenda? Is it ethical to 'enable the kill chain'? Should social science be subordinated to the aims of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency? These are all valid issues, of course, but González's work often seems tinged with a reactionary attitude as uncritical as those he claims to be challenging.

Read the rest here.

"To wage war, become an anthropologist." That's the opening line from a 2007 article in the U.S. Army War College journal "Parameters." The feature, by Oxford educated historian Patrick Porter, says, "from the academy to the Pentagon, fresh attention is being focused on knowing the enemy."

Today anthropologists are busy at work for the CIA and Pentagon.... I agree with the idea that "to wage war, become an anthropologist." The trouble is that it turns out that we are on different sides of the war. "Human Terrain" anthropologists are with imperialism. I'm with Gramsci. ...

McKenna goes on to outline a 10-day curriculum for soldiers. For example:

Day 3: NACIREMA: Discussion Where is this? What is capitalism? Discussion of Marx's labor theory of value.

Day 6: How to keep from Dying: Are you safe? Discussion of April 17, 2008 RAND report which details 101,000 U.S. casualties a year. See "Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery." Other Readings: Grand Theft Pentagon: How they made a Killing on the war on Terrorism.

Day 4 is a fieldtrip to the US Veteran's administration hospital; Day 7 includes discussion of the Geneva Convention. Read the rest at http://www.counterpunch.org/mckenna05282008.html

--L.L. Wynn

In today's Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik reports, "Pentagon officials are talking with the National Science Foundation about the NSF playing a major role in the peer review for a new program to promote social science research on topics that relate to key issues in U.S. foreign policy." Perhaps it is significant that a military agency would actually "submit" to civilian influence, especially when American politics have become seriously militarized, when the military uniform has become fetishized, and where the principle that in a democracy civilians command the military and not vice versa has been seriously eroded. Of course what this report does not tell us is the extent to which the scholars performing the reviews are to be independent-minded, the kinds who can see through "terrorism" research, the kinds who won't be swayed from having been born and raised in the cultural milieu of a nation that has known permanent war for two centuries and where "fear of the Other" is arguably the single most compelling and unifying national ideology.

Given that anthropology has a lengthening history of being deeply imbricated with colonialism, then finding ways to make "terror" research professional, to institutionalize it, and to even seek military funding to carry it out will do more than to just nail shut the coffin of anthropology, for good, among the discipline's prospective new human fodder in other parts of the world. It will heap mounds of dirt on top of it. There have been too many "compromises" for these to be seen as incidental hiccups or momentary lapses of judgment. Instead it is more likely that these continuous "episodes" reflect the deep structure of what has been colonialism's favourite discipline. From consultancies performed for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to counterinsurgency and terrorism research, this discipline risks losing any credibility it might have gained in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of anti-imperialist literature from within its ranks.

The American Anthropological Association worries whether this national security research, as currently housed in the Pentagon, can live up to professional standards of peer review. Absent is any questioning of why there ought to be any "terrorism" research whatsoever -- indeed a letter from AAA President Setha Low to the U.S. Office of Budget and Management states very simply: "We believe that it is of paramount importance for anthropologists to study the roots of terrorism." In the place of critique, the AAA offers a call for, "rigorous, balanced and objective peer review" -- objective, as if there is any objectivity left when discussing colour-coded mass hysteria. The AAA seems to be content with retreating to the ground of peer review, with maintaining the integrity of professional standards. The Pentagon's "Minerva Consortia" otherwise meets with little challenge, apart from the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which recently published its "concerns" about the Department of Defense's "Minerva Project."

Less concerned is the Defense Department, as in the case of the "senior official" who spoke to Scott Jaschik:

when the program is finalized, it will attract strong support from scholars, and predicted that "world class" professors would be involved. But he added that he wasn't certain that the Pentagon would worry about satisfying disciplinary associations. "We certainly need qualified anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, psychologists," he said. "We need recognized experts in these fields. The relevant disciplines need to be involved. Whether professional associations per se should have a role, I'm less sure."

And he or she is right to be "less concerned," given the success of the powers that be in effectively instrumentalizing the American academy as a conduit for national security research. In fact, the AAA and the National Science Foundation promise to routinize it, to add respectability to the process, to encase it in professional standards. This is in part evidenced by other elements of the AAA website that appear at the same time as Setha Low's letter: the announcement of the Director of National Intelligence's "Open Source Conference," and a rather weak statement from the Society for Applied Anthropology expressing its "concern" about the "potential" ethical "implications" of anthropologists becoming involved in the Human Terrain System. For all the funky articles one finds littering gracing the pages of the American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology, it turns out that American anthropologists are not so advanced where critique is concerned after all. Perhaps it is the case that they are better at "critiquing" other cultures and other societies and institutions more than themselves, just as they are better at theorizing change among target populations at the same time as they themselves actively resist changing the system in which they work.

One can expect to see the American Anthropological Association, and many of its members, continue to find ways to "adjust" to these realities, to make pragmatic compromises, and to look for avenues of influence (and not to lose out on any cash windfall, especially at a time when the economy is entering a long-term nose dive that will eventually visit major new funding cuts on universities and anthropology departments). The question that remains for the rest of us, outside of American anthropology, is how we should relate to American anthropology.

I do not maintain high hopes for any position taken by the Canadian Anthropology Society to have a major impact, as it is still a comparatively small organization and has limited public clout, from what I can gather. Its main activities today consist of producing an annual conference, and a biannual journal. It does not have its own code of ethics, for many different reasons, and only recently it has started up a newsletter. I think the onus will lie on anthropologists outside of Europe and North America, and especially the peoples studied by anthropologists, to revise or continue to revise their prospective working relationships with American anthropologists. More people need to be made aware of the kinds of compromises being worked out, and how this could affect them if they should choose to work with anthropologists.

To the extent that one continues to see the American Anthropological Association and many of its members offer continued accommodation with militarization, ranging from outright silence to the search for means of effective collaboration, the rest of us need to rethink our options. On either an individual or collective level we might consider redirecting our publications toward outlets other than American ones. We should also consider the extent, if any, to which the AAA occupies a hegemonic position in worldwide anthropology, and how its decisions could affect anthropology beyond American borders. At the end of the day however, I believe that professional associations can be expected to do very little critical political work, and some like the Canadian Anthropology Society have not been able to do much. A professional association is first of all obligated to defend a profession, and that can be done in myriad ways that cannot easily be aligned with any one political interest.

Perhaps my continued mistake is my assuming that, whatever we might do, that we can shore up the credibility and integrity of anthropology in the eyes of publics in current colonial situations -- after all, many of these discussions have occurred in public and are recorded on the Internet, and I know that our discussions have not remained just among ourselves. The real question then would become not whether institutionalized anthropology will disappear, but rather how quickly some will force its exit.

authorizes $90.6 million to continue to fund Human Terrain Teams to meet CENTCOM’s requirement for 26 teams in Iraq and Afghanistan [via Ares]

And the Society for Applied Anthropology has approved this motion regarding the HTS (via AAA News):

"The board of the SFAA expresses grave concerns about the potential harmful use of social science knowledge and skills in the HTS project. The SFAA believes that social scientists can be helpful to the military by offering training, analysis, and evaluation so long as these activities are compatible with this organization's code of ethics."

The vote on this motion was:

Yes: 13
No: 0
Abstain: 0

The May 9th combat related death of Michael Bhatia (Brown '99) in Afghanistan sheds some light on the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System contracting network. Bhatia was killed along with two Army soldiers, Spc. Jeremy R. Gullett, 22, and Staff Sgt. Kevin C. Roberts, 25, Wednesday by a roadside bomb while traveling in a Humvee in Khost (Source: Hillard, Medway native killed in Afghanistan, MetroWest Daily News, May 9 2008). Like all deaths in war, it is most tragic for his family and friends who knew him and loved him.

Certainly, no one can make fair criticism about his decision to work in this program and more could be said about the difficulties of scholarship in militarized contact zones for the ethnographer and the lives of those he studies.

Writing his dissertation at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, Bhatia seems to have taken a job through BAE Systems with the Army's Human Terrain Systems. Other's have written about this program before Bhatia's death (see these search results), and afterwards (results here). One of BAE Systems's websites states that it is the "3rd largest global defense company," reports a £15.7 billion sales per annum, and employs close to 100, 000 (source). BAE was born from the merger of two British defense contractors in the late 1990s and has a long history of developing weapon, signal, and security system platforms.

Additionally, BAE provides a growing range of service-related products and personnel solutions which range from office management, intelligence analysis, to the type of work that Michael Bhatia was doing in the Human Terrain System (see this BBC article; for an report on the HTS program see: Kipp et al. The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century. Military Review. Sep-Oct. 2006, also online here.) As the BBC article reports, this partnering of scholars, defense contractors, and military is controversial in the U.S. and the unease many in the profession feel dates back at least to Vietnam programs (see