01.29.11 London Demo, Photo by Author

“Move along folks, you’re blocking a cash point.” This pithy synopsis of the neoliberal logic driving the policing of student protest was delivered unironically by one of London Met’s Finest to the milling crowd at a recent demonstration at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, whose inmates gazed down apprehensively from their glass cubicles as the plods herded us a safe distance from the hapless hangmen charged with the execution of the English university. The deployment of some 25 paddywagons for a scraggly gaggle of a hundred-odd protesters seemed like overkill for a comparatively mild demo against the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, after twenty disappointingly riot-free minutes of which even the helicopter got bored and wandered off. Yet it was a potent sign that Britain stands on a knife’s edge between surveillance and reprisal, persuasion and coercion, manipulation and repression – or what some popularly caricature as the counterintuitive tactical distinction between the “strong state,” in which obedience is exacted through hegemonic consent, and the “weak state,” in which sedition is punished with truncheons, tear gas, and terror. Most western nation-states constitute a calculated composite of both, with strong tactics exercised most visibly inward through pseudo democratic participation and weak ones inflicted most visibly outward through violent imperial conquest, but the higher education demos threaten to expose a new generation of middle class white kids to the despotic weak-state methods generally earmarked for Britain’s destitute poor, uppity workers and ethnic minorities on home turf.

Where the fountain pen leads the six-gun follows, and so it is with the unfolding tragicomedy heralding the beginning of the end of the British welfare state. Since last I wrote, the government has concluded that throwing the book (and worse, the inveterate snitches at the Telegraph) at protesters is insufficient to banish the terrifying spectre of student cadres armed with trenchant slogans and reasonable demands, and decided to call in – wait for it – the military. According to a report in the Observer, senior officers have consulted with defence contractors about how best to meet the dire national security threat of spontaneous public redevelopment and extracurricular essay composition in Westminster. Given their track record in Afghanistan, I think we can reasonably expect more glass underfoot. If the prospect of those geniuses from defsec tearing themselves away from the critical job of constructing craftless aircraft carriers to lend a hand in managing our domestic extremists failed to put a jingle in your bells this holiday, just in time for pantomime season we learned that the NUS sent a fake revolutionary to negotiate a fake settlement with the fake coalition, demonstrating definitively that we have learned important lessons, if largely dramaturgical ones, from the war on terror.

The more radical visionaries among the newly-minted Whitehall Maoists, however, are unwilling to wait until students are old enough to vote before crushing their insurrectionary tendencies through the carrot-and-stick combo of seconded military thuggery and leveraged political buyouts. Education Secretary Michael Gove has proposed the militarisation of the primary school classroom by commissioning demobbed soldiers as teachers, part and parcel of what he unabashedly calls a “cultural revolution” for British education. The front line of defence against any potential children’s crusade, however, are way ahead of him. Thames Valley Police, for example, have been keeping a close eye on the homegrown insurgency blossoming mutinously among the fertile fields of the nation’s comprehensives, sending an anti-terrorism squad to pull 12 year-old Nicky Wishart out of his English class at Bartholomew School in Oxfordshire and threaten him with arrest for organising a protest against the closing of his local youth centre at the PM’s constituency office.

Beyond the spectacle of milquetoast Tories cowering obligingly from the wrath of pre-pubescent militants, some veritable pillars of the British establishment have contributed, however inadvertently, to the burgeoning national trove of seasonal slapstick. The royals themselves blundered unwittingly into the fracas when a protestor allegedly poked the future queen with a stick through an open Rolls Royce window (presumably in the manner one might prod an insect of unknown but suspicious intent) as the geriatric Prince and the People’s Divorcée made their way to a Royal Variety show in the midst of a higher education demo, prompting Home Secretary Theresa May to pronounce with ministerial gravity that “there was some contact” and generating no small amount of public speculation over just what counts as an intolerable degree of oik-toff cross-contamination. Not to be outclassed in the dissemination of preposterous inanities, the BBC got in on the act shortly thereafter by accusing activist and cerebral palsy sufferer Jody McIntyre of rolling menacingly toward police in his wheelchair, from which the cops dragged him in retaliation for the grave double offense of protesting while disabled. And lest anyone feared that the political drama of 2010 was a limited run, just as the curtain came up on new year, onto the stage bumbled the incomparable Norman Baker (MP for Lewes and the Liberal Democrats’ very own Benny Hill), who recently compared himself to South African reformer Helen Suzman, and in the doing inadvertently (maybe) likened the coalition’s fearless leader to PW Botha – or perhaps more fittingly, Hendrik Verwoerd, given the uncanny resemblance between neoliberalism billed as the “Big Society” and apartheid proffered as “good neighbourliness.”

With adolescents now classified as terrorists and wheelchairs rated as weapons of mass destruction, it seems indisputable that while the recession may have stolen our bread, it’s done wonders for our circuses. However disparate the narrative threads of Britain’s political farce may seem, they can be increasingly woven into a singular chronicle in this theatre of the absurd. When the state dispenses public monies contracting domestic mercenaries to prevent students from protesting the defunding of higher education in order to pay off a national deficit run up in part by the perpetration of a 20 billion-pound, nine-year, torture-ridden, two-front failed war – because the students might get violent – we have officially crossed the line from politics to vaudeville. Still, for those feeling insupportably discombobulated by the revolutionary burlesque sweeping the nation, one British tradition holds fast: even with counterinsurgency tactics coming home to roost, water cannons remain reserved solely for the Irish.

Sir Hugh Orde, Chief Constable and president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, isn’t laughing. Clearly a beneficiary of his free postsecondary degree, Orde has offered the astute analysis that demo policing must not be “played as the cops acting as an arm of the state, delivering the elected government’s will, rather than protecting the rights of the citizen.” His evocation of play is indicative. The distinction between “doing” and “seen to be doing” is an important one in British politics, and Orde seems keenly attuned to the performative PR routine through which responsibility for state violence is refracted back on its recipients, and particularly those who stand up against it. Its most recent target are British youth, and in the wake of Millbank, especially university students, who have been shunted from one end of the vilification spectrum (lazy, entitled, feckless) to the other (violent, riotous, threatening) with masterful speed. While much of the blame for this tediously predictable moral panic rests rightfully at the feet of Fleet Street, the dailies are only tapping the well of a deeper public psychosis.

The casual denigration of students, a longstanding fixture of British cultural politics, is symptomatic of a far larger disease, a chronic and malignant ephebiphobia against which there is no inoculation and no immunity. Its manifestations vary with the vectors of transmission (racism, classism, sexism, nationalism) but they are essentially of an epidemiological piece. While the hoodies are berated as no-account wasters and the students dismissed as overprivileged brats, black youth are slated as gang bangers and Muslim youth are stigmatised as terrorists; poor young women of all ethnicities are typecast as a neoMalthusian demographic threat while the disabled, homeless, immigrant and unemployed are maligned as drains on the public purse. The only passable youth in this country are the ones who knuckle under and do what they’re told: shut your trap, get a McJob. If only they could. With Britain threatening to overtake Spain in the European youth unemployment lottery, their backs are up against the wall. The symbolism of Orde’s hordes kettling student protesters on Westminster Bridge – threatening to tip them over the barriers and into the Thames or crush them, Hillsborough style – not only sends a chilling message to anyone who would take to the streets to contest the gutting of the British public sector, but reflects the cold hard realities of a generation whose only choice is to jump, suffocate, or push back.

Amidst the sea of propaganda alleging student violence (in which the biggest victims thus far have been inert property), the nation seems to have missed the soon-to-be-sold national forest for the trees. British youth have become all-too-routine victims of violence, both structural and overt: the discursive violence of a media which viciously denigrates them at every turn, the military violence of a state which sends them to the front lines of an unwinnable and interminable war, the ecological violence of a privatisation scheme which plans to auction off their natural heritage to the highest bidder, the economic violence of a financial crisis which has thrown them out of work and onto the dole in record numbers, the political violence of revanchist legislation which threatens to simultaneously remove their social safety net and their means of upward mobility, and the physical violence of the cops who beat and kettle them for protesting against these injustices. By the same token, the public have been expertly conned into disregarding the ironic flip side of this same sorry coin: the students among them – that allegedly selfish shower of layabouts who (according to the received wisdom peddled sagaciously in Daily Mail Land) think of little beyond gap year and the next binge session in city centre – are fighting for just about everyone but themselves. Those at university in England now, and indeed those entering the system next year, will be grandfathered in under the old tuition regime, and will only constitute indirect victims of the higher education assault.

So why do they fight? There are two possibilities. One is that Cameron’s Big Society is materialising before his very eyes, a disquieting reminder that he may get more than he bargained for in the demand for a new era of civic engagement in Britain. The other is that the students have made a deeper structural analysis, rightly pegging the retrenchment of higher education as one tick in a privatisation time bomb that will land on their own doorsteps sooner or later. Either way, the coalition government is banking – as evidenced by Nick Clegg’s urgent move to shove through the fees vote before the embers at Millbank had even cooled – that the student movement boils down to a fiery but fleeting voluntarism which, with few immediate structural ramifications at stake, will burn brightly but briefly. Yet a spark might be enough to set Britain’s political tinderbox ablaze.

The moment which epitomises the zeitgeist of these days comes courtesy of an affable boy named Jack Jordon, who organised a walkout among his schoolmates last term. Outshining even the venerable Tony Benn at an anti-cuts rally at Goldsmiths this past November, Jack took the podium before 500 people and made a pronouncement that brought the room to its feet: we saw the college students stand up and defend us, so we figured we’d better stand up and defend ourselves. Therein lies the danger for the coalition. The students may have lost the fees battle – at least for the moment – but they’ve accomplished a far more astonishing feat. They’ve demonstrated that the British public, against all rational predictions to the contrary, have not been X-Factored into sleepy submission by the stupefying drone of consumer complacency. The Facebook generation, long written off by many of its elders as a post-political sacrifice on the altar of the iPod, have thus far proven the squeakiest wheel on the creaking radical wagon – all the more remarkably in the face of an official student leadership which seems intent on selling them out – and there are encouraging signs that the unions will throw some industrial muscle behind them in the coming year. The fervour with which the British student movement exploded has taken many by surprise (word from across the Channel has it that even the French are raising a well-groomed eyebrow), and with good reason for concern. Anyone who underestimates the power of youth-led protest through a gratuitous conflation of ephemerality with ineffectuality would do well to heed the unexpected but undeniable lessons of Tunisia.

10.11.10 London Demo, Photo by Author

The evangelical neoliberalism which erupted in the US House of Representatives in 2008 and spread like the mange to the UK House of Commons is coming soon to an English university near you. The free market rapture comes courtesy of a man so dreadfully incompetent he couldn’t even be trusted to run BP: Edmund John Philip Browne, or as he is properly titled in our droll little fiefdom, Baron Browne of Madingley, who has decided that higher education is really no different from petrol or plastic and should be manufactured according to the same industrial standards that govern oil companies. Yes, this was the man replaced by crackerjack Tony Hayward. Deepwater Uni is on our horizon.

Evangelical neoliberalism is a commitment to privatisation so devoutly ideological that it will court capitalistic suicide for the sake of free market purity. It burst like a boil in the lower congressional house during the early days of the financial crisis, forcing Minority Leader John Boehner to strong-arm several apostates within his own party into backing a Wall Street bailout which they deemed dangerously “socialist,” and has been suppurating outward from Washington ever since. Its scripture reads something like this: be fruitful and multiply the market until it covers the world; above all protect its sanctity from the corruption of the profane state – at any and all cost, including the utter collapse of capitalism itself. This isn’t about economics so much as faith. It’s a bastard child of laissez-faire dogma and puritanical Bible-bashing, with all the requisite self-flagellation painfully savoured by its own acolytes, and in that sense it is a singular denomination within the broader neoliberal church. If it’s ringing any fascist bells, you’re in the right pew.

Browne’s holy writ, the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, was commissioned by the last Labour government, which first introduced tuition fees for undergraduates under Tony Blair in the late 1990s. Doomsday fell with its long-awaited publication on October 12, 2010, whereupon the government seized with ecclesiastical fervour a proselytising opportunity which the opposition could hardly contest with any credibility, having themselves initiated the conversion.

There are four horsemen in this apocalypse and they share a broad Parliamentary stable: David Cameron, Conservative Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister, George Osborne, Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for Business, Innovations and Skills (a British cognate of what is usually called the Department of Higher Education in more civilised countries). This ministry of Oxbridgers, whose collective personal wealth could buy my college and everyone in it several times over, comprise the pastorate of what is euphemistically called the “coalition government,” otherwise known as the biggest democratic scam since Watergate.

For those of you who failed to tune in to the scintillating British election: nobody won. The Tories scraped into pole position with a menial margin over Labour, then slithered into government through a greasy collusion with the third-place Liberal Democrats, a party which presciently painted its political flag the colour of moral cowardice in anticipation of this day. The result was an unholy alliance in which the supine Lib Dems genuflect to every Tory diktat, all the while perversely claiming victories for “fairness.”

Scrapped Lib Dem Tuition Plan

The higher education sellout is a stunning example. In the run-up to the election, the Liberal Democrats made a six-stage strategy for scrapping tuition fees a central plank of their party manifesto; to boot, they signed a pledge drafted by the National Union of Students to oppose any rise in the fee ceiling, currently set at £3,000 per year. Six months down the road, they’re desperately boasting that they’ve managed to hold what they now call an “inevitable” fee hike to a mere 300 percent with the added sop of letting graduates avoid paying off their loans until they’ve reached the lower links of the middle class food chain at £21,000 annual. The Guardian reveals that they had secretly abandoned these pledges months before the election in anticipation of their deal with the Tories, but it’s six of one or half dozen of the other at this point. The craven depth of the act means whatever soul of which they could claim possession must have been sold decades ago, so who cares when the devil came to collect his due? Now, stitched like a decorative third leg to the arse of the Tory trunk, the Lib Dems try to walk backwards and forwards at once and succeed only at flailing. Cable changes his mystical economic prognostications on an hourly basis while Clegg, whose name one columnist predicts will go down in history as a shorthand for “agonised, doe-eyed apologist” smiles through the bullshit and calls it a fair deal.

The Tories, meanwhile, are giving them a run for their money in the faux fairness heat. In a masterful display of the Orwellian two-step that has become all the rage with the Bullingdon set, the Tories have gone from the party of No Society to the party of Big Society (or, as a friend put it upon learning that the fast food industry has just been commissioned to write national health policy: Big Mac Society). This cynical appropriation of hippy communitarian lingo, when subjected to even a casual hermeneutic deconstruction, boils down to the three basic Rs of neoliberalism: Retrenchment, Revanchism and cRiminalisation, especially when it comes to young people. With schools, unemployment benefit, social housing and now universities on the chopping block, the youth of this country have been thrown to the dogs. If they get hung out to dry by the bootstrap system, there’s always the prisons. If they protest against it, well, two birds with one stone.

The dirge that accompanies the death of the English university was composed in the decade which begat neoliberalism in the first place. The trumped-up national debt chorus, through which the ugly spectre of the 1980s has arisen with a vengeance far more sadistic than synth pop or shoulder pads, is once again ringing out from every steeple with tedious regularity. And it’s just as contradictory as it ever was, chapter and verse. The privatisation plan banks on the same logic of risk which recently brought global capitalism to its knees: extend dubious amounts of credit to borrowers (students) on the assumption that they’ll make a killing off their investment (degrees); it’s subprime for sociology majors. Debt is bad for the state but good for the individual, or so goes the refrain, delivered with a large dose of moralising dross about “personal responsibility” and “education as privilege” in a psyops offensive calculated to induce self-regulating Panopticistic guilt. The social benefits of higher education through the creation of an informed and critical democratic citizenry are expertly disregarded; in this credo the student wins so the student pays. The coalition is sweetening the deal for buyers by peddling the old shibboleth of consumer choice. There’s only one lesson in this gospel and that’s free marketeerism; as long as students embrace that, they can pick any degree they like from the Higher Education Stop’n'Shop. When consumer demand fails, then esoteric and expendable disciplines are rightfully weeded out in the brave neoDarwinian educational order.

The privatisation of universities isn’t likely to net the state any money, according to more orthodox financial creeds. The Browne doctrine is predicated upon shifting the cost of higher education onto the backs of students and their families; this, according to the Mad Baron of Madingley, will allow the government to slash the central teaching budget by 40 to 80 percent (for starters) depending on which end of the disciplinary scale an institution falls. But the numbers don’t add up. According to the Higher Education Policy Institute, the state cost of servicing student debt could well offset any savings, and most of the actual producers on this assembly line, from physicists to philosophers, agree that the quality of the commodity in what amounts to a £24 billion per year industry – bigger than advertising, aerospace or pharmaceuticals – will decline, further alienating its ostensible investors. The variables are so legion that prophecy is a losing game no matter how you throw the bones, but the fundamentalists are in all likelihood offering snake oil at best and toxic Kool Aid at worst. That’s precisely what puts the zeal in neoliberal zealotry: it’s not really about the money. The maths don’t add up because the maths never mattered in the first place. The assault is first and foremost political. It is no accident that the coalition is threatening to beggar the arts, humanities and social sciences while ringfencing the STEMs. The key architects of privatisation all have degrees in these disciplines (Cameron in PPE, Clegg in anthropology, Osborne in history, Cable in economics); they know their capacity for imparting creative analysis and they’d be pleased as punch to see them reduced to a whimsical item of conspicuous consumption for north London luvvies like themselves. An informed and critical democratic citizenry is the last thing they want for their waning post-imperial bishopric.

10.11.10 London Demo, Photo by Author

Unfortunately for the market missionaries, forty years of disinvestment under Thatcherism and Thatcherism 2.0 haven’t produced an entirely docile congregation. The government learned that lesson the hard way last week, when thousands of students occupied Tory headquarters, lit a fire in the courtyard and engaged in some minor scuffling with a suspiciously accommodating line of cops (also facing swingeing budget cuts as the public purse strings tighten). The direct action followed a 50,000-strong march through Westminster, a typically shouty but generally orderly affair which filed joyfully down Horse Guards and only really turned serious at the bridge. Predictably, the mainstream papers have dutifully guffed out a stream of platitudes fed to them by the Tory press machine (once they came out from beneath their desks) condemning the “violence” of the impromptu post-Fawkes bonfire night. But calls for further direct action are growing, and not just from students. As one poster put it on the Guardian boards in the wake of the latest Lib Dem side show, “I’m a grandmother and been totally law abiding all my life, but watching the students breaking windows the other day I was tempted to think what alternative is there?” Indeed. It is the dawning realisation of the utter dearth of alternatives which poses the greatest threat to the neoliberal state today, and it’s a rod it has made for its own back, a consequence of the blinding absolutism of another form of zealotry, the military kind. Beneath the chants and slogans, beneath the echo of shattering glass at Millbank, there’s a far more dangerous potential. It comes not in a resounding shout but a gathering storm: you ignored us on Iraq; you won’t ignore us this time. The futility of that largely law-abiding effort has conceived, I suspect, a fury that will not be contained by invoking the sanctity of private property or the threat of incarceration this time around. It could be that the restless students, and maybe even a few aged and biddable ents on the faculty, are about to wake up and find that they are strong. If the neoliberal opiate fails to anesthetise the intellectual masses, the Tories will have to fight to regain control of the universities before they can sell them out from under us.

“These people will scrimp to save dimes when it comes to actually paying employees – but Steve Fondacaro and Montgomery McFate can blow a fortune in Paris attending some software meeting.  Amazing!”

“Some more lunacy from the Human Terrain System Files”

At the end of January 2010 there was another panicked document signing moment that is all too common within HTS. Usually it is because someone is trying “to cover their ass once again,” say sources.  For example, many in the program were apparently given a document titled DD 2356 “DOD CIVILIAN EMPLOYEE OVERSEAS EMERGENCY  ESSENTIAL (EE) POSITION AGREEMENT” forms that had to be signed immediately, scanned, and sent to the program manager forward.

Observers say this came about because of injuries sustained by Scott Wilson. It turns out that his medical treatment was delayed because his status couldn’t be verified.

“Great move!” said sources,“ but Fort Leavenworth [HTS HQ] didn’t catch on to the fact that these forms need to be filled out BEFORE an offer of Federal Employment is made – not afterwards.  This is by statute because being EE also requires Smallpox and Anthrax shots, which some people don’t want to get and would likely seek other employment opportunities instead. This needs to be made clear to prospective personnel before they are made an Offer of Employment – not once they’ve been in the field for six months!”

Sources say that there are now over 100 U.S. Army Civilians “running around in Iraq and Afghanistan who are designated as EE but not compliant with the regulations.” Program managers forward are apparently not aware of the requirements. “There has been no effort on Fort Leavenworth’s part to address this problem other than to make sure that advertisements running on USAjobs.gov now state the EE requirements for Smallpox and Anthrax shots.”

Time Warps and Sheets

“It would seem that the US Army TRADOC Command has entered a time warp. They have dusted off the files on CORDS and the old FAO program. The new COIN manual and doctrine is the Holy Grail!  The message being sent  is this: Use COIN or else!”

HTS timesheets don’t allow for the inclusion of Sunday Premium and After 6:00pm differential pay because the “proper codes aren’t even on them,” said observers.  “We’ve had four different timesheets in this last year alone and none of them contain all the codes we need to actually use.”

Security Clearances

One of the biggest problems with the Human Terrain Analysts (HTAs) is that they’re of Afghan or Iraqi descent and it is hard to get them cleared, said observers.  Some say much of the difficulty is that candidates lie on their security applications or have so many family ties overseas that “the investigation becomes almost impossible.” Nonetheless,  many receive an Interim SECRET from Fort Leavenworth so they can tool down to Fort Benning  for training and maybe even deployment. When these problems are discovered, sources say, they can’t get a final adjudication and have to be flown back to Fort Leavenworth in order to get them resolved, or in some instances they get dropped from the program entirely.

“So you have a bunch of guys that train for six months in the States. They then arrive in-country [Afghanistan or Iraq] and then  have to be flown home roughly 90 days later because of security issues.  The program is so desperate to fill the classrooms that the system of accepting unqualified candidates appears to be encouraged.  The ‘Money Maker’ for HTS–other than the MAP HT hardware /software and SSRA fiasco)–is the training portion at Fort Leavenworth. Everyone involved in the training portion is making money hand over fist. BAE gets rich, the retired O-5′s and O-6′s get rich during that idiotic Weston Resolve session for  two weeks, K-3 (computer training) gets rich, and the trainers get their cut as long as bodies keep circulating through The Landing.  And all of this at Taxpayer expense!”

MAP HT: Fondacaro’s Boondoggle

It’s official. MAP HT, “The boondoggle of all boondoggles raised its ugly head in a big way.” Sources say “Steve Fondacaro got a weed up his ass about a month ago and mandated that all teams attend MAP HT training.” “That was a great plan,” they say, “except the crap doesn’t work. It consists of a bunch of outdated servers sitting in Pelican Cases that are gathering dust in various corners of Afghanistan and Iraq.”  Not deterred, an MTT (Mobile Training Team) began its MAP HT Road Show starting with HT’Ts  in Kandahar.  Subsequently, when three groups of U.S. Army Civilians failed the week long course, an individual employed as a U.S. Army contractor threatened them all with being fired.” That action is in clear violation of Human Relations procedures covering U.S. Federal Employees.

HTT’s are apparently on the move now in Afghanistan again–at considerable expense–to attend another MAP HT training gig  conducted by Wolf and the two US Army contractors cited above. Sources say one BCT Commander had to delay a major campaign for a week since a “gung-ho HTT Team Leader (who imploded his own team in Bagram previously) mandated that his ENTIRE team attend MAP HT – leaving the BCT Commander without HTT support until they returned.”

We’ll Pay You When We Feel Like it

“The general public does not have any clue how serious an issue it is for us in HTS.”

There is an internal tracking system known as Request For Support (RFS) where compensation matters are tracked. There are “well over 1,000 open requests being tracked.” Sources say, the overwhelming bulk of these are related to pay issues. “An  important point to consider is that each RFS may contain several problems for one HTT member from one pay period, or the RFS may include an entire HTT’s worth of problems. Multiply each pay issue in RFS by four or six times and the extent of this becomes apparent.”

Evidently, some HTT members are owed $15,000 or more for services rendered.

It is all a “big yawn” say observers back at Fort Leavenworth. “The individual person who processes the civilian payroll shows outright animosity towards the U.S. Army Civilians and routinely decides on her own what hours someone actually worked instead of following what was on the timesheet/timecard”.

It is reported that one team was “shorted”  holiday pay and when they informed the person who processes the payroll, she shot back a reply that the payroll would be adjusted to reflect the hours worked (even though it was a holiday period). It took nearly four months to fix.

HTT’s have reportedly been denied overtime premium pay for working past 6:00pm. This is a requirement mandated by U.S. Federal law. “Attempts by the USFOR Human Resources representative   to get this resolved have been met with stone-walling from HTS HQ. They refuse to return emails sent to them by the  HR representative.”

Indigenous Cosmopolitans

Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century

Reviewers’ comments:

“Timely and original, this volume looks at indigenous peoples from the perspective of cosmopolitan theory and at cosmopolitanism from the perspective of the indigenous world. In doing so, it not only sheds new light on both, but also has something important to say about the complexities of identification in this shrinking, overheated world.Analysing ethnography from around the world, the authors demonstrate the universality of the local – indigeneity – and the particularity of the universal – cosmopolitanism. Anthropology doesn’t get much better than this.”–Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Anthropology, University of Oslo; author of Globalisation.

“This collection takes the anthropological study of indigeneity to an entirely new level. Bringing together an impressive range of case studies, from the Inuit in the north to Aboriginal Australian in the south, the authors fundamentally challenge the assumption that that indigeneity and transnationalism are separate and opposed conditions. They reveal with engaging ethnographic richness and historical depth that contemporary indigeneity is a rooted cosmopolitanism and that this indigeneity of roots and routes is being continually reinvented in ways that challenge conventional understandings, both within anthropology and in the wider public arena. This exploration of re-rooted cosmopolitanisms and remixed cosmopolitan indigeneities is also a major contribution to the anthropology of globalisation….This theoretically sophisticated collection will be essential reading for anyone in the humanities and social sciences seeking to understand the nature of contemporary indigeneity.”–Jeffrey Sissons, Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology, School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Author of First Peoples: Indigenous Cultures and Their Futures.

Book Synopsis:

What happens to indigenous culture and identity when being rooted in a fixed cultural setting is no longer necessary – or even possible? Does cultural displacement mean that indigeneity vanishes? How is being and becoming indigenous (i.e., indigeneity) experienced and practiced along translocal pathways? How are “new” philosophies and politics of indigenous identification (indigenism) constructed in “new,” translocal settings? The essays in this collection develop our understandings of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, and related processes and experiences of social and cultural globalization, showing us that these do not spell the end of ways of being and becoming indigenous. Instead, indigeneity is reengaged in wider fields, finding alternative ways of being established and projected, or bolstering older ways of doing so, while reaching out to other cultures.

Contents:

Maximilian C. Forte: Introduction: Indigeneities and Cosmopolitanisms

Maximilian C. Forte: A Carib Canoe, Circling in the Culture of the Open Sea: Submarine Currents Connecting Multiple Indigenous Shores

Craig Proulx: Aboriginal Hip Hoppers: Representin’ Aboriginality in Cosmopolitan Worlds

Carolyn Butler-Palmer: David Neel’s The Young Chief-Waxwaxam: A Cosmopolitan Treatise

Arthur Mason: Whither the Historicities of Alutiiq Heritage Work Are Drifting

Frans J. Schryer: The Alto Balsas Nahuas: Transnational Indigeneity and Interactions in the World of Arts and Crafts, the Politics of Resistance, and the Global Labor Market

Julie-Ann Tomiak/Donna Patrick: Transnational Migration and Indigeneity in Canada: A Case Study of Urban Inuit

Robin Maria DeLugan: “Same Cat, Different Stripes”: Hemispheric Migrations, New Urban Indian Identities, and the Consolidation of a Cosmopolitan Cosmovision

Linda Scarangella: Indigeneity in Tourism: Transnational Spaces, Pan-Indian Identity, and Cosmopolitanism

Nigel Rapport: Conclusion: From Wandering Jew to Ironic Cosmopolite: A Semi-Utopian Postnationalism

About the Contributors:

Carolyn Butler-Palmer currently occupies the Legacy Chair in Modern and Contemporary Arts of the Pacific Northwest in the History in Art Department at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is interested in the aesthetic relations between various Pacific Northwest people and their cross-cultural reception. Her program of research includes questions about the politics of aesthetics, modernity, mobility, identity, and humanitarianism with respect to the arts and material cultures of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. She is currently working on a book Cosmographic Cosmopolitanism: The Life and Aesthetics of David Neel that locates Neel’s aesthetic praxis within debates about mobility, identity, and the ethics of cross-cultural relations. Professor Butler-Palmer has recently held fellowships at The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center and a University of Pittsburgh Mellon Fellowship.

Robin Maria DeLugan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the new University of California, Merced. Among her research interests is the historical and contemporary relations between Indigenous peoples and the nation-state with particular attention to the Americas. In El Salvador she is examining how post-civil war representations of national culture and identity bring the issue of indigeneity to the forefront to challenge ideologies of mestizaje and efforts to erase contemporary Indigenous peoples from national society. Other ongoing research examines how the increased migration of Indigenous people from Latin America to the United States motivates states to forge transnational ties with faraway Indigenous citizens. In Northern California, she is examining how new migrations increase hemispheric connections between Indigenous people of the Americas, build new ethnic communities, and transform collective identity.

Maximilian C. Forte is an associate professor and anthropologist in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His primary area of ethnographic research has focused on the contemporary indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, and specifically the Carib Community in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago. In relation to these areas, Maximilian published Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Constructions of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago (University Press of Florida, 2005), and he edited the volume Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival (Peter Lang, 2006). Maximilian has also published his research in Indigenous World, Indigenous Affairs, and Cultural Survival Quarterly. For 10 years he served as the managing editor for an open access, peer-reviewed journal that he founded, KACIKE: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History & Anthropology, as well as a Web editor for the online database he constructed, the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink. His involvement in supporting indigenous Caribbean transnationalism extended to the creation of the online Indigenous Caribbean Network. Maximilian’s research for this chapter and related projects was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), from 2006 to 2009.

Arthur Mason is an anthropologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University and was the 2006–2007 Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the University of Calgary. Between 2001 and 2003, he served as Associate Director of Energy in the Office of the Alaska Governor. From 1992 to 1993, he served as curator of the Alutiiq Native Cultural Center on Kodiak Island. Arthur’s research is concerned with Alaska’s political and indigenous elite who possess the administrative positions, personal qualities, and utopian vision required for modernizing Alaskan society. In particular, he is interested in the practical aspects of how Alaska leaders aim to translate Alaskan society into the object of their image of the modern, including their increased reliance on the specialized knowledge of non-Alaskan expertise.

Donna Patrick is an associate professor in the School of Canadian Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where she is the Graduate Supervisor in Canadian Studies. Her current research focuses on urban Aboriginal communities, particularly Inuit; indigeneity and language endangerment; the political, social, and cultural aspects of language use, mainly Inuit and Aboriginal. Her research in Northern Quebec is published in a book titled Politics and Social Interaction in an Inuit Community (2003) and Language Rights and Language Survival (2004) (coedited with Jane Freeland), as well as a number of papers on language endangerment and language rights in indigenous communities. Donna teaches courses in Aboriginal and Northern Issues with an interdisciplinary focus on historical, geographical, and social processes concerning language, culture, and nationhood; minority languages and multilingualism; language rights and policy; language, identity, and political economy and other areas in the sociology of language and sociolinguistics.

Craig Proulx is an associate professor in anthropology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Canada, where he is also the Chair of the Department. Craig is interested in Aboriginal experiences in cities along a variety of lines from restorative justice to community building to constructions of identity and processes of cultural production within North American cities. The anthropology of sport is a new area that he is exploring. He has published Reclaiming Aboriginal Justice Community and Identity (2003) and, along with coeditor Heather Howard Bobiwash, he edited Aboriginal Experiences in Canadian Cities, published in 2007. Craig is also an active member on the executive committee of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA).

Nigel Rapport is a social anthropologist at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he directs the program on cosmopolitanism and was appointed Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies in 1996. He previously held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University, Montreal, where he was the founding director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. Nigel has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has undertaken four pieces of participant-observation fieldwork: among farmers and tourists in a rural English village (1980–1981); among the transient population of a Newfoundland city and suburb (1984–1985); among new immigrants in an Israeli development-town (1988–1989); and among health-care professionals and patients in a Scottish hospital (2000–2001). His research interests include social theory, phenomenology, identity and individuality, community, conversation analysis, and links between anthropology and literature and philosophy. His recent books include The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity (Pluto, 2002); “I Am Dynamite”: An Alternative Anthropology of Power (Routledge, 2003); and (as editor) Democracy, Science and the Open Society: A European Legacy? (Transaction, 2006).

Linda Scarangella is an anthropologist and Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute for the Comparative Study of Language, Art and Culture (ICSLAC), in Ottawa, Canada. Linda Scarangella earned her PhD in Anthropology from McMaster University in June 2008. Her dissertation, “Spectacular Native Performances: From the Wild West to the Tourist Site, Nineteenth c. to the Present,” focuses on Native North American perspectives and experiences in both historic and contemporary Wild West shows and exhibitions. A short article in Anthropology News (May, 2005) considers the challenges of multisited fieldwork in conducting this research. She also published an article in the 2004 issue of Nexus that considers the ethical issues surrounding research on Indigenous knowledge. Based on ethnographic work conducted in 2001, her article in Anthropology in Action (2004) examines how Salish performers create a space in tourism for the witnessing of First Nation claims of history, culture, and identity by reclaiming discourses of “the Native” through performances of place, ancestry, and cultural continuity. Dr. Scarangella’s research and teaching interests include First Nations of Canada, identity and indigeneity, representation, performance and visual culture, anthropology of tourism, globalization and popular culture, narrative and oral history, ethnohistory and ethnographic research methods, and ethics.

Frans J. Schryer was Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University Of Guelph, Canada, at the time of writing. He has taught at Guelph since 1974, and he has held part-time teaching posts at Atkinson College (York University) and at the Centre for Rural Development Studies of the Colegio de Postgraduados at Chapingo (Mexico). He also spent four months in 1988 as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Research and Documentation on Latin America (CEDLA) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Agrarian Studies at Yale University in 1994–1995. Frans has done most of his ethnographic and historical research in Mexico, but has also carried out a study of postwar Dutch immigrants in Ontario. He is currently examining the impact of globalization on the Nahuas of the Alto Balsas region (Mexico), a group best known for its craft production (especially paintings on bark paper known as amates) and a successful struggle to stop the construction of a hydroelectric dam (in the 1990s). His recent publications include Farming in a Global Economy (Brill, 2006) and “Multiple Hierarchies and the Duplex Nature of Groups” (JRAI, 2001).

Julie-Ann Tomiak is a doctoral student in Canadian Studies, with a specialization in Political Economy, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include the political economy of urban Aboriginal service organizations, transnational First Nations, Métis, and Inuit positionalities, identities, and communities, and the application of intersectionality as an analytical framework.

Published by Peter Lang USA, 2010:
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien.
X, 223 pp., num. ill.
ISBN 978-1-4331-0102-1

Order from the publisher, or,

Order from Amazon.com.

(Speaking of Jamil, look for more of his research to be presented on this site, once it has been formatted for the Web.)

Once again, welcome John!

by John Stanton

18 March 2010

“According to several government and civilian sources, [Michael] Furlong’s operation was funded under a $24.6 million contract by the Defense Department’s Joint IED Defeat Organization [JIEDDO], which was set up early in the Iraq war to combat insurgents’ roadside bombs. His operation was part of a larger military information program, called Capstone”, Karen DeYoung, Washington Post.

Before linking JIEDDO to Furlong’s program, it’s worth noting that the US Army Human Terrain System is in the midst of an Army 15-6 investigation. According to sources one area the investigator is looking at is the “management/leadership side and fraudulent time and attendance records.” Many in the program have high hopes for positive change.

Cultural Operations Research – Human Terrain System (COR-HTS) — now simply HTS — was originally funded by the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). Coincidently, JIEDDO was formerly under the command of Steve Fondacaro, who now runs the turbulent HTS program. JIEDDO received a punishing audit by the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO described JIEDDO as an ad hoc organization that did not identify, track or report all contractor personnel, and sorely lacked accounting controls. Those activities allegedly have found their way into the HTS program.

The Washington Post was correct on its JIEDDO findings and JIEDDO was a good place to bury Furlong’s program. Furlong confirmed the funding for his effort came through JIEDDO.

Sanlian Lifeweek

Pu Shi, a journalist for Sanlian Lifeweek Magazine in Beijing, has requested contact information for HTS personnel. The purpose is to explore issues associated with the alleged US government sponsorship of a private contractor assassin program allegedly run by Robert Furlong formerly of STRATCOM. Contractors perform every military task imaginable (even Personnel Recovery) so what’s the rub with hiring them to kill/capture undesirables?

At any rate, Pu Shi found this email address cioran123@yahoo.com (mine) in a message string at Men’s Journal. ”I found this email address at this website in the hope of finding Dr. Steve Fondacaro and staff [at] HTS. Please forward the email to Dr. Steve Fondacaro at your convenience.”

Famed journalist/author Robert Young Pelton had written an article on the Human Terrain System in February 2009 for MJ that caused a bit of controversy and a considerable amount of discussion. Steve Fondacaro, Program Manager of HTS, and Montgomery McFate, Senior Social Scientist, were incensed about the story and wrote to Men’s Journal questioning Pelton’s professionalism. One point of contention was Pelton’s assertion that the information collected by HTS could be used for a variety of purposes by US Army Brigade Commanders. One such use of that information is as intelligence that ultimately makes its way into the Kill Chain.

Pelton was absolutely correct on that point. But why does Pelton think his information was immune to finding its way into the Kill Chain? Given his survivalist background, it is extraordinarily difficult to accept that he was “tricked” by a 56 year old bureaucrat in the USA.

Pu Shi requested an interview with “Dr.” Steve Fondacaro and “staff” at HTS. That request was received on 16 March 2010 at roughly 6:45 PM (Eastern). I responded by pointing out that using me as a circuit to get to Mr. Fondacaro was ill-advised. But I did provide Pu Shi with the link to the Contact section of the HTS.mil website. I also offered other resources on HTS (pro-con) and suggested looking at the Washington Post’s coverage of the Furlong matter.

Four Questions for HTS Management

“To whom it may concern, I am a Chinese journalist working with Sanlian Lifeweek, one of the most widely circulated weekly magazines in China with 300,000 readers per week in more than 30 Chinese big cities. It is published by Sanlian Publishing House of China Publishing Group. Sanlian Publishing House was founded in the 1930s and is one of China’s largest publishing houses of long history. One of our topics this week is Mr. Michael D. Furlong’s private intelligence network and the role private contractors play in intelligence gathering in Afghanistan. We would really appreciate if he could kindly share your opinions with us. The interview questions are as follows, for his reference:

1. How and why has the former Army official, Michael D. Furlong’s private security network come into the attention of C.I.A. and the media? Does the surface of this episode imply some of the problems with intelligence work in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

2. Mr. Furlong is said, according American officials, to be using the network to gather intelligence to target militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the top military told the N.Y.Times that the intelligence collection is originally intended to gain a deeper understanding of the country and society. How is intelligence gathering targeted at militants and targeted at understanding a country different? How do you think Mr. Furlong’s work can be identified as tracking and killing militants?

3. What role do private contractors and companies play in intelligence gathering in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and by large, in wars? Where is the line between the field of professional contractors and journalists and the field of military intelligence?

4. It seems that there have been frictions between the army and the freelancers in Afghanistan for long. What is behind these frictions?

Our press time is on Sunday midnight (we are 12-13 hours ahead of you). We would really appreciate if he could accept our interview. Thank you very much and we anticipate your reply!”

A Thousand Flowers Blossom From JIEDDO/HTS Efforts

This item appeared in a 2009 publication by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office titled Experimentation and Rapid Prototyping in Support of Counterterrorism. Note that many aspects of HTS are being used for intelligence purposes. Many within HTS have argued all along that HTS is an intelligence effort.

Quoting directly from the publication:

SKOPE is a joint intelligence cell with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), SOCOM, and the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM). It began with a specific request for sensors to help narrow the search space for terrorists and terror groups. The RRTO recommended the development of the SKOPE approach and was the sole funding source for the initial operating capability of the analytic cell. Currently the RRTO is developing new tools in response to specific requests from commanders based on the success and experience with this operational capability.

The SKOPE cell applies all-source, multi-intelligence analysis linked to a spot on Earth. Through its application of human terrain analysis, SKOPE incorporates aspects of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a new proof-of-concept program run by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and serving the joint community. The near-term focus of the HTS program is to improve the ability of the military to understand the highly complex, local sociocultural environment in areas of deployment. In the long term however, it is hoped that HTS will assist the U.S. government in understanding foreign countries and regions prior to an engagement within a region. According to the Army Web site, the HTS program represents the first time that social science research and advising have been done systematically, on a large scale, and at the brigade level.

[MF: For more, see the recently updated list of intelligence companies involved with HTS: Mapping the Terrain of War Corporatism: The Human Terrain System within the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex]

John sent this article a few days ago, my apologies for being late. It is reproduced here with his permission, and has already been published in CounterPunch, which is also featuring an extended article by David Price in its print edition (a summary is coming next on this blog).

John has also published a book of his work on the Human Terrain System: General David Petraeus’ Favorite Mushroom.

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Human Terrain System 2009-2010: US Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harm’s Way

by John Stanton

• “They are writing hours down that they do not work.”
• “If the Department of Defense does not take a close look with a microscope at the program, then millions or perhaps billions of dollars will be wasted by the federal government and taxpayers.  The biggest and most grotesque problem that this program faces is the fear of calling it what it really is — Intelligence.”
• “I believe there are some serious power struggles and back stabbing within the HTS Program. The students are paying the price. Too many in HTS seem to be on a power kick or need their egos boosted. They say things to students or in front of students that are wrong or against US Army regulations.”
• “The social science personnel need serious screening to keep the psycho ones out. There seems to be an over abundance of them in the program. They all seem to be on some type of crusade.”
  
• “It may be the commander’s battle space but it is your research.”
• “Many HTT personnel would be willing to avoid the US Army Unit of Assignment mission to protect their research, and stand idly by while US /Coalition Forces and Local Nationals suffered casualties. This is not US Army policy and is completely contradictory to the HTS manual.”
• “Forget the money speech. Drill it into the heads of everyone your work belongs to the US Army, not you.”
• “HTS personnel do not recognize that the security element is in charge of the HTT’s safety when outside the wire — not the Social Scientist or the Team Leader. If the security element commander says it is time to go, then it does not matter if it is a Sergeant or a Captain giving the order — we leave, period. The Security Team Commander is responsible for the safety of an HTT. No Social Scientist has the tactical training or experience to make a critical decision.”
• “A Social Scientist, who remains in the program, should be investigated for placing a classified brief from theater on the shared drive when not everyone in the class had a final clearance. He can spin it any way he wants but the fact is the brief is classified.”
• “He was trying to pimp his book and see how many names he could drop. He dropped F-bombs and dipped tobacco during class. He was totally unprofessional.”
• “There are no written reports on anything the unit wants that are worth a damn.”
  

Doctor Max Forte over at Open Anthropology highlights some interesting language contained in the Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009.

“HTTs [Human Terrain Teams] are currently proving their value in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the committee believes that capability would prove equally valuable in other combatant command areas of responsibility. The committee recommends $90.6 million in Operation and Maintenance for the purpose of fielding additional HTTs to meet the current Central Command requirement of 26 teams. The committee encourages the Department to begin training, equipping, deploying, and sustaining human terrain teams with other regional combatant commands to include at least one each for Pacific Command, Southern Command, and Africa Command.”

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees are supporting an HTS program that is still in its infancy and whose concept — as of October 2009 — has not yet been proven. It can hardly qualify as a success story even though it was glowingly  portrayed as such by the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense,  Advanced Systems and Concepts in 2008 (acq.osd.mil/jctd/success.html). None other than the SECDEF, a Brigade Commander and “Sheiks of Al Tajy North, Iraq” weighed in by intimating that the US Army Human Terrain System was the best war fighting tool since the clenched fist. Wow! Not!

It is unfortunate that the proponents of using the US Army TRADOC HTS to divine the Human Terrain remain blind to program weaknesses and dubious data collection and reporting methodology. They are content to charge the American Anthropological Association as the primary opponent of HTS though it is those internal to the program — that have gone or are going through the HTS experience — that are its most vocal critics and, at the same time, strong supporters of the concept.

So here we are in October 2009 and reports continue to come in describing persistent problems with recruitment, training, deployment, and in-country performance. Sources indicate that little has changed to address these issues. Fraud in the form of over billing has now been alleged.

Social Scientists Do Not Understand the Mission: Screening Needed

“The academics in the program understand the world of quantitative and qualitative research and have typically worked alone,” said a source.  “They simply do not understand the team concept. This creates friction with other team members.  Further, the academics associated with the program only understand counterinsurgency from reading articles, books, and/or policy statements. This, they feel, makes them matter experts in the field.  Very few, if any, have ever been actively involved (on the ground) and experienced counterinsurgency in a direct fashion.  Just because someone (an academic) has read Galula, Kilcullen, Sepp, Nagl,  Schoomaker, Army FM 3-24, 3-24.2, or 3-0 does not mean that they have become experts in the field. Academics find it insulting to their intelligence that someone without a PhD could possibly know more [about counterinsurgency] than they do.” [Max Forte: one wonders if they are referring here to Karl Slaikeu, who took leave from his allegedly lucrative conflict resolution business to reinvent himself as a counterinsurgency theorist.]

Sources report that training needs improvement and that training should use real down range scenarios to teach the students.  For example, Counterinsurgency Training does not touch on platoon, company or battalion levels. These are the levels at which HTTs interact with the most. Training should include Patrolling, Reaction to Snipers, IED, Weapons Safety and Handling at a minimum.

“Students need to understand how training ties in with a combat unit’s downrange mission.  This point is the most important and is not explained or stressed during coursework. HTT personnel must understand that they are there to support the commander’s mission. This is not clearly understood by the students,” said one source. According to a source, HTT personnel can pick and choose research items and present what they want to the unit.

Some social scientists within HTS believe that their mission is to make the US Army a kinder-gentler fighting force when dealing with non-combatants, while at the same time warring with insurgents and other unfriendly elements.

Training rarely follows the HTS Handbook or is completely contradictory to it, according to sources. “Instructor’s put their personal spin during classes discussing politics, ethical beliefs, religious beliefs, and war stories. This is not conducive to a training environment and is very unprofessional. The instructors do not present the training well and it is obvious they are not trained in how to instruct. When the participation method of instruction is used the instructors often lose the class or lose control of the class.  There is too much training geared toward the Social Scientists and very little for Research Managers and Analysts.”

Peer evaluations should be modeled after the US Army evaluations. This leaves students no opportunity to evaluate someone’s personality and only allows for the review of someone’s performance and behavior.  In a program loaded with super-egos, this is very important.

According to sources, new social scientists to the HTS program were extended an invitation by the HTS lead social scientist. “Too many times I have heard that there was a personal invitation extended to them,” said one source. “Nearly all of the social scientists that I have had interaction with are in the program solely for the purpose of getting published at the conclusion of their deployment and return home.” According to sources, the social scientists guard their information as if it were Military Top Secret.  A local Unit Commander has continually been denied research data by social scientists who claim their work is proprietary, they say.

Sarcastic Know-it-Alls

Some HTS personnel are abrasive, sources indicate. One was rude and arrogant and would belittle the students during class. In one instance, sources say, a briefing by one instructor turned sour as she informed students that “the Social Scientist runs the teams and no one else has a say in anything.”  Clearly, according to sources, the instructor did not know the difference between an aggressive operation and a non- aggressive operation.  “For example, students are instructed that they will not be involved in a kinetic operation, such as a cordon and search. But any mission can go kinetic at anytime. “

The anthropology instructors have no practical experience with the HTS mission and attempt to relate their personal experiences in places like Africa studying AIDs/HIV to the students, sources report. The mission of the HTS is being lost in translation.  Sources say they can’t stress enough that “it is being presented to students that all the HTT will be doing is research on culture and people in the area. It is not understood that the HTT works for the unit of assignment, researching the items the unit wants and the HTT can lawfully perform. The primary focus is on the commanders.”

According to sources, a good example of this is an Ethics Class given by one instructor.  “Through the entire presentation he was adamant about how to handle research data. He made clear that HTT members should not write down any names of interviewees because this information should not be given to the military to be used for kinetic purposes. When the question was asked, What if the information gathered would directly impact the safety of the unit the HTT is assigned?  The instructor responded that the information was the property of the researcher and did not have to be given to the US Army Unit of Assignment.  He also stated that HTT personnel should avoid writing any information down so it could not be forced from the researcher. That being the case, many HTT personnel would be willing to avoid the US Army Unit of Assignment mission to protect their research, and stand idly by while US and Coalition Forces and Local Nationals took casualties. This is not US Army policy and is completely contradictory to the HTS manual.

Bright Spots

“There are numerous people in the HTS program who have an overabundance of knowledge related to counterinsurgency and the human terrain.  But these people are ignored because they do not have a PhD in Anthropology, Psychology, Political Science, etc.  It is my opinion that people who are in positions such as HTA’s, RM’s, and TL’s are just as important, if not more important, than the social scientists in that they are the ‘link’ between the military and social science,”  said one source.

According to sources, there are a number of training personnel who are top-notch. “The Immersion Training for Afghanistan is great.  The Language Training by one instructor is excellent. He takes a lot of time with us and is very patient.  The Geological Training conducted by another instructor was very educational. The History of Islam class is excellent.” According to one source, “I now have a better understanding of how Islam functions and why the attitudes of Islamic people seem so different from our own. It was very enlightening to see that Islam believes many of the same things as Christians do.”

Still, sources say, training should focus on the tribal problems, and areas of external tribal disputes. If HTT personnel had a general understanding of the differences between the Pashtu, Uzbek, and others, as well as why for example the Taliban was able to take over the country and it people when others in history could not do both, they say.

The Introduction to Anthropology Class and the Open Source Research Class received good marks.

“Language Training is the best,” said one source. “I would recommend staying away from the writing Arabic, three weeks is not enough time. Concentrating on conversational language would be more helpful. “

Sources had high praise for one instructor and some of the films made available to them for viewing in class. “The documentaries that another instructor has shown us are informative and provide a different view of how people used to live in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion. The instructor has, as is his normal operational procedure, taken extra time with us to ensure we understand the language and proper usage. He is a very fine instructor.  The documentaries we have watched from the library are very good and informative in their own respect. But students who come here in future classes must understand that some of the issues portrayed in these films are blamed on the US and NATO. These documentaries are also very much based on Women’s Rights and how the women of Afghanistan are being mistreated and how this is the fault of the USA. It must be understood that some of the things said maybe offensive to some students and could cause serious differences between students of different genders, political persuasions, rank and religious background.”

Dark Spots: Fraud, Waste Abuse Again: Regulations and Policy Are Just Guidelines

Logistical nightmares remain the norm for HTS personnel during deployment. One source believes that the entire operational side of HTS needs to be overhauled. Transportation miscues, identification badge errors, delayed clearances, HTT arrival in-country not expected by military personnel, and billeting issues have yet to be smoothed out.

Worse, according to sources, is that some HTT personnel are inflating hours on time sheets charging the US government for activity never undertaken. Research reports have little value. “They have no product that can be given to the US Army Units of Assignment.  Army personnel have been asking for a product but have been given just enough verbal information by HTT personnel to keep them off their back.”

“This needs to be reported to someone,” said one source.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security and political matters. His book, General David Petraeus’ Favorite Mushroom—Inside the US Army Human Terrain System—is available here http://www.wisemanpublishing.com/page11.php. Contact John at cioran123@yahoo.com.

M. Jamil Hanifi

15 August 2009

Everything touched by the American imperial stupor turns to dust. This mindless, bloody and brutal machine has reduced to rubble the state of Afghanistan. In violation of every international standard it destroyed the secular state of Iraq and installed in its place a fragmented theocracy. This rogue Zionist-infested fascist state and its rulers are guilty of crimes against humanity. From the onset, the American imperial presence in Afghanistan has been engaged in a culture cleansing project. The imposition of “secular” schools for Afghan girls in Panjsher is the tip of the iceberg in this project. Christian missionaries and Western liberal feminism are lurking in all corners of the so called reconstruction of Afghanistan. Christian missionary activity including the distribution of Bibles in Paxtu and Farsi (distinguished with blue and green covers) by American soldiers has been documented. Most of the nearly 4500 NGOs in Afghanistan have direct or indirect connections to Christian agendas for Muslim Afghanistan. Virtually all of these NGOs receive subsidies, in one form or another, from the American and other Western governments and are sheltered by the American and NATO military umbrellas. The “Clash of Civilizations” is the foundational premise of the Western presence in poor and helpless sub-industrial Afghanistan. The HTS teams are the American frontline scouts in this brutal and destructive scandal. The program is a crude, simple-minded, and counterproductive attempt at imposing colonial culture with the tips of bayonets and military boots on the people of Afghanistan through the “C3”, comparative cultural competence, buzzwords in the so called “military anthropology”, and staffed with incompetent and clueless but expensive (annual salaries of 300-400K) “social scientists” and interpreters (“terps”) from the poverty stricken Afghan diaspora in the United States. Blind leading the blind!

From the start radical feminism and the American occupation of Afghanistan have manipulated each other for the promotion of their respective agendas in Afghanistan. During February 2005, while speaking in public, the US Marine General James Mattis who commanded troops in Afghanistan stated that “it is fun to shoot some people….Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know , it’s a hell of a hoot….I like brawling…You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil…You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of lot of fun to shoot them” (afghaniyat@yahoogroups.com February 3, 2005). The general was merely “counseled” by the Pentagon for this obscene backwater display of patriarchal feminism. This writer retorted: “Abusing human beings is reprehensible. But this is fascist vulgar rhetoric and for Mattis to speak about women’s rights anywhere is a profound hypocrisy. In no other country are women so abused , exploited, demeaned and vulgarized as in the country he pretend to defend” (Lansing State Journal, February 14, 2005).

Now comes the Dakota educated, Big Sky Country settler cowboy and mountaineer Greg Mortenson on the shoulders of the “warrior chief”, U. S. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, fighting the phony “war on terrorism” with opening a “secular” school for young Afghan girls in the Panjshaer valley. Mullen has armored himself for this occasion by reading “The Book Seller of Kabul” by Asne Seierstad who has been sued in a Scandinavian court by her chief Kabuli informant for publishing lies about women’s lives in Afghanistan. The report of this militarized feminist scam is produced by a Zionist mouthpiece and tutor of the imperial presence, Thomas L. Friedman who thinks “Urdu” is the local language as if the cultural content of Dari speaking Panjshaer valley is interchangeable with the cultures of India, Pakistan, and Nepal where Urdu is a universal language. Imperial hubris thrives on essentializing the dominated. Afghanistan is simply another footprint.

Cowboy Mortenson is the co-author of “Three Cups of Tea”, a story about mountain climbing in northern Pakistan and his rescue by Balti villagers whom he reciprocates by destroying their way of life through building “secular” schools for their little girls. He drifts into Afghanistan with this deconstructive project by opening 48 secular schools—one and one half school in every Afghan province. Faithful to a vulgarized understanding of secularity Mortenson expects these innocent little girls to have “fewer children” when they grow up. Of course, this design will require classes in sex education and family planning with free contraceptives in the Panjshaeri school curriculum. Everything will be modern, industrial and “up to date” in Panjshaer including young women in high heeled seductive shoes, make-up, contraceptives, abortion clinics, and bikini clad sunbathing teenage Panjshaeri girls on the banks of the Panjshaer River. I am sure Mortenson has plans for shelters all over Afghanistan for abused Afghan women just as in Butte, Lansing, Little Rock, Cedar Rapids, Mobile, Phoenix, and all over Eastern Pennsylvania. And he will look the other way when these Afghan girls end up as the abused, exploited, demeaned, and vulgarized subjects of pornography produced in Rokha, Charikar, and Kabul. Far more importantly, mountaineer Mortenson hopes to reverse the conventional old to young human process of cultural reproduction. Mortenson’s Montana zeal will create an Afghan world in which “the girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mother will learn about politics and about women who are exploited”. His model will culture to flow from young to old, bottoms up, so to speak, whichin practical terms will terminate the culture of present day Afghan mothers and grandmothers. He will replace the cultural construction of women, femininity, and womanhood in Afghanistan with the nightmares of radical NOW and Eleanor Roosevelt, the original chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission.

I wonder whether Greg Mortenson, Admiral Mike Mullen, and Thomas Friedman have read the current American imposed constitution of Afghanistan. Here are relevant sections from this document that speak to Mortenson’s project of building “secular” schools in Afghanistan: Chapter 1, article 1, “Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unified, indivisible state; chapter 1, article 2, “the religion of the state of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam”; chapter 1, article 3, “in Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam”; chapter 2, article 2, “education is the right of all citizens of Afghanistan, which should be provided up to the level of B. A. (lisans) free of charge by the state”; chapter 2, article 24, “the state shall devise and implement a unified educational curriculum based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam, national culture, and in accordance with academic principles, and develop the curriculum of religious subjects on the basis of the Islamic sects existing in Afghanistan”. A bystander would say: By opening the secular school for Afghan girls, Admiral Mike Mullen and mountaineer Greg Mortensen are trampling the Afghan constitution. Never mind. The “warrior chief” gives and the “warrior chief” takes back.

Greg Mortenson is the founder and CEO of Central Asia Institute headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. Is his institute subsidized by funds from the American government? One of his pamphlets (An introduction to Central Asia Institute, p. 12) contains a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “We cannot shake hands with a clenched fist”. How much American military hardware and how many American soldiers were present at the opening of the “secular” school for girls in Panjshaer? Bagram airbase is about thirty miles from Panjshaer. When Mortenson’s secular school was being opened Afghanistan was occupied by more than one hundred thousand Euro-American soldiers.

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Dr. M. Jamil Hanifi is currently an independent scholar whose long standing research interests focus on the anthropology and history of Afghanistan. He is himself an Afghan, born in Sorkhab, Logar Province. He obtained his Ph.D in Anthropology from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, in 1969. He earned his M.A. in Political Science, from Michigan State University, in 1962. He graduated with a B.Sc. in Social Science, from Michigan State University, in 1960. Dr. Hanifi is also fluent in Farsi/Dari, and Paxtu. He also has reading ability in Arabic, Russian, Tajiki (in Cyrillic), and Urdu. He teaches part time in anthropology at Michigan State University and Lansing Community College. He was formerly a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northern Illinois University, from 1969 to 1982. Dr. Hanifi’s research has been partially supported by the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies, in the period from 1982 to 2006. He is also the author of the Historical and Cultural Dictionary of Afghanistan (1976) and numerous articles in journals and encyclopedias. You can read more about Dr. Hanifi here, here, and see his Anthropology of Afghanistan group page.

1. Whitewashing a U.S. War Crime in Afghanistan: The Trial of Don Ayala, “Human Terrain” Mercenary (1,090 views)

2. Open Anthropology Cooperative (735 views)

3. No Time in Jail for a U.S. War Criminal: A Mercenary Gets Away with Murdering a Detainee in Afghanistan (643 views)

4. On the Militarization of Anthropology: Report #1 from the CASCA-AES Conference in Vancouver (533 views)

5. The War Criminals’ Roundup: Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Israel (489 views)

My personal favourites were quite different from those of viewers. They include:

• Single-Cell Resistance in the TimeSpace of Kairos
• “Deep Obeah,” by Roi Kwabena
• “Useless Anthropology”: Strategies for Dealing with the Militarization of the Academy

and

• A Vehicle for Protest: The Van in Vancouver

1. Some Breaking News on the Human Terrain System: Death Threats Against Female Colleagues
2. The Deafening Silence of the “Milbloggers”: Inconvenient Truths?
3. Latest News on the Human Terrain System: No Longer Private Contractors
4. Questions and Allegations about Robert Young Pelton’s Reporting on a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan
5. Canadian Academic Boycott of Israel: Why We Need to Take Action
6. “Civilian Contractor” Pleads Guilty to Voluntary Manslaughter of Afghan Detainee
7. Attacking Ward Churchill…By Losing Your Marbles?
8. Robert Fisk at Concordia: “Obama, Us, and the Middle East Wars”
9. “American Radical”: Norman Finkelstein Movie in 2009
10. Academic Freedom News: Ward Churchill, Joel Kovel
11. Beyond Molehills, the High Ground: Dershowitz, Finkelstein, Plagiarism, and Academic Freedom (1.7)
12. Teaching Gender Equality to Afghan Men: Using Gunshots to the Head
13. Misunderstanding and Misrepresenting the Charges Against Ward Churchill
14. Show Me the Human Shields! The Propaganda has Expired for Israeli State Terrorism
15. Dr. Rat: Defender of the Rat People

Overall, February continued the recent trend of the last three months for site visits overall, nearly doubling the monthly average of the pre-December 2008 period. Yet, while as reported previously, January 2009 brought over 28,000 views, February brought in less, at just a few short of 18,000. That is still 80% more than the highest monthly average pre-December 2008.

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In the latest installment of reporting on the Human Terrain System, John Stanton continues to outline the transition of the program as it becomes a government-owned and operated program, rather than one contracting the private transnational military corporation, BAE Systems.

One of the points of contention is whether the Status of Forces Agreement signed between the U.S. and Iraq has anything to do with de-contracting HTS. I believe that it does. As explained here previously, the SOFA stated the following:

Article 12 (3): Iraq has the primary legal jurisdiction over contractors with the U.S. and their employees.

Had social scientists continued to be recruited and employed by BAE Systems, then the Iraqi government would have had some measure of authority over them.

The additional point raised by Stanton’s articles, is whether he is revealing that many HTS social scientists’ primary interest in the program was primarily a monetary one. To the extent that is true, that would seem to reinforce the earliest attacks in anthropology against those who were supporting the program: that the one argument they never advanced, the financial reward, was in fact their primary concern. One can see such discussions here. Further details on the salary reduction entailed by the government nationalization of HTS were provided, apparently by a member of a Human Terrain Team, here.

The website of the Human Terrain System continues to state that HTS is not an “intelligence” program (see here). Yet, social scientists working for the intended reincarnation of the program as one that is wholly under the Pentagon, will now be officially classed as “intelligence analysts.”

John Stanton’s earlier articles are available here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. His latest article, also published in Pravda, is reproduced here with the writer’s permission.

••••••• ••••••• •••••••

The mystical realm of Human Terrain and COIN: Who is in charge?

By John Stanton

“To this day I carry the Army Values on my dog tags as a constant reminder and I am having difficulty understanding which of those have been thought of during this decision.”

“This transition is due to ineptness and mismanagement of funds that started long ago. Only 15 people out of 230 have signed the transition contract. The whole program is destined to implode within a matter of weeks. There are some who are trying to get a congressional inquiry into the mismanagement of the HTS program and some have even tried to contact investigative reporters from CNN and CBS/60 minutes.”

Human Terrain System employees have been given a stay of execution. On 16 February, HTS management sent the following to HTS team members:

“Mr. Robert Reuss TRADOC Deputy G-2 has approved an extension on making a decision to transition until 2 March. The previous deadline of 18 Feb 09 is no longer in effect. This allows all teams more time to better coordinate the transition decision with their families, enables the project to better answer your questions and still allows us to complete program total transition by 31 May. We will send out a thorough update on all questions no later than the end of the week after we have conferred with TRADOC Staff from the G1, Personnel Administration, contracting, legal and security this week.”

According to sources, the “transition” underway in the US Army’s/TRADOC Human Terrain System has little to to do with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq and everything to do with the good-old-boy network. That network, claim sources, is trying one last time to salvage the current version of the HTS program and, in so doing, rescue the reputations and salaries of program manager Steve Fondacaro, deputy program manager Steve Rotkoff, and senior social scientist Dr. Montgomery McFate-Sapone.

But something else seems afoot here. That the US Army would go to wits’ end on behalf of a troublesome $200 million program gives rise to some interesting speculation. It seems plausible that flag rank and/or high ranking civilian officials have staked their reputations on HTS and human terrain geospatial analysis as the new thought of choice underpinning non-kinetic warfare. And that, in turn, makes it seem likely that–in spite of report after report of HTS internal corruption, ineptitude and abuse—the life of the HTS program has become a political struggle somewhere in Washington, DC, that likely pits US Army General and Dr. David Petraeus and his Think Tank Mafia (Dr. McFate-Sapone; Dr. Mike Meese—advisor; Dr. David Kilcullen—advisor; Dr. John Nagl—advisor; Dr. Fred Kagan—the latter from the American Enterprise Institute and father of the “surge”) and more traditional elements in the US Army who know BS when they hear and see it.

HTT Member versus McDonald’s Team Member

According to Rotkoff, SOFA is the primary motivator behind the HTS transition. Rotkoff, like Fondacaro above him, cares little about those operating in the field. It’s the attitude that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held: “People are fungible,” he used to say.

“I [Rotkoff] ask you all to remember the reason we are doing this: to enable the Human Terrain System [HTS] to operate under the conditions associated with the Security Agreements. If no one were to sign up for transition the Security Agreements [SA] would still require us to build this program around government vice contractor service. We would lose good experienced people and have to make the changes anyway. Believe what you want. This is not about money it is about the SA, the SA for Afghanistan is all ready in place just not currently enforced; however, we have been informed it will be enforced soon. This change does not effect anyone at Operations or Fort Leavenworth because there is no SA at either location.”

An enterprising HTS program member decided to do a salary and benefit comparison between an HTT member and McDonald’s Team Member. Turns out McDonald’s in Chicago, Illinois is paying pretty well.

“I was offered $67,613.00 by HTS. I’ve got 20 years direct experience and a college degree. I’ve been deployed multiple times. I’m a qualified linguist and hold clearances. Now if I were an assistant manager at McDonald’s in Chicago, here’s what I’d get. Hourly rate of $13.25 at 40 hours a week: $530.00. If 80 hours a week: $1,325.00 (McDonald’s pays time and a half). Monthly Check would be: $5,300.00. Yearly Salary: $63,600.00. Average sales/performance bonuses: $10,000.00 (it can actually be up to $20,000.00). Total yearly compensation: $73,600.00. Additional McDonald’s incentives are pretty good. In addition to my 80 hour work week, I’d be home with mom and the kids every night. I’d be living in a real home and not a plywood cubicle. I would not be getting shot at, bombed, or mortared. And I’d have unlimited access to bowling alleys, movie theaters, libraries, restaurants and shopping malls. Plus I’d get free Big Macs, milkshakes, fries, and apple pies. So who is being loyal to who ??? And you wanted to stay???”

US Army, HTS Management Skews Moral Compass

Can the US Army afford to keep losing its human capital?

“I burned some bridges, both civilian employment and my service in uniform, to come to HTT. I came here, like many, attracted to this concept and have met many outstanding individuals in the process. The DA Civilian position is an opportunity that is outstanding stateside, but was never really intended for use by people who dirty their boots with the infantry. The decisions made in the mystical realm of TRADOC G2, as presented by our leadership, come down to a person somewhere.

“To this day I carry the Army Values on my dog tags as a constant reminder and I am having difficulty understanding which of those have been thought of during this decision. If it was just lower pay — I wouldn’t hesitate. If it was a conversion to government position that gave me the opportunity to support this stateside also so my medical benefits continued –- I wouldn’t hesitate. If the offer was equivalent to other DA Civilians that work here with me currently — I wouldn’t hesitate. If leadership decisions supported mission first, subordinates always — I wouldn’t hesitate. But all these combined — I hesitate.”

Welcome to the Sinking Ship: Swim Home, If You Can

“I don’t envy those HTS employees that are now being told to convert to government positions or else. Hopefully, this is a decision that was made for the right reasons, not the wrong reasons. I have to be honest, though. I don’t feel sorry or bad for someone dropping from a six figure to a five figure salary. From what I know of the HTS program, these are wonderful people doing extremely dangerous work in the service of their country. But before you fret too much over the old dollar sign, just remember this: The Soldiers, Marines, and Airmen they serve with are lucky if they’re making half of what HTS employees are making. Some of the military they’re serving with have been to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times.

“Some of the military they’re serving with have families that qualify for welfare and food stamps. About 600,000 people across the U.S. lost their jobs in January. Yes, HTS employees have an extremely difficult decision ahead of them. However, there are hundreds of thousands across the U.S. that have been told ‘we don’t need you anymore, go home.’ It’s better to go from six to five figures than from six or five figures to nothing.”

The military/civilian management chain of command above HTS program manager Fondacaro has one noteworthy quality: its unpredictability. That the Army continues to tolerate this programmatic state of affairs can only be due to either complete incompetence in program oversight or, as seems more likely the case, someone further up the chain of command is pushing to keep the effort alive—no matter what the cost. There is a concerted effort within government/business these days to understand and attempt to quantify the Human Terrain for an assortment of strategic and tactical objectives: soft power/non-kinetic power, COIN, Unconventional Warfare, Information Warfare (the media as battleground), etc.. From a business perspective, this is little more than marketing/sales: attempting to quantify consumer/market behavior either as individual or collective.

General Gordon Sullivan, USA (Ret.), now head of AUSA, once said that in the end, the military—particularly the US Army—is about nuts and bolts, blocking and tackling. The new wave of leadership ought to keep that in mind as they pile higher and deeper in PhD’s and lose themselves in network centric warfare.

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in political and national security measures. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com.

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University of Strathclyde Principal Andrew Hamnett has conceded the following:

“1. We will not place any further orders with Eden Springs for operational reasons.

2. Funds for 1-3 scholarships.

3. Co-operation between students and management in posting Gaza Appeal on campus. Link on Uni website advertising Gaza Appeal.

4. Press Release reiterating Strath Uni longstanding relationship with the University of Gaza.”

We have also secured the uni’s commitment to a public debate between representatives of BAE Systems and anti-war student activists, on the weapons manufacturers’ ethical credentials and whether the talents of our engineering students should be used for BAE’s benefit.

We consider this a victory and have already done a lap of the uni in celebration. We are simultaneously elated, exhausted and looking ahead to the battles to come. The struggle must continue until BAE is evicted from Strathclyde and freedom and justice is secured for the people of Palestine.

Today we have taken a tiny step towards the final victory.

Solidarity forever,

The Strathclyde Uni Occupation

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• This blog was started on 11 October 2007 (with some posts imported from previous blogs, that predate the launch of this particular blog).
• December 2008 was by far the busiest month for writing, with 51 posts.
• The number of visitors to this blog steadily increased each month, from a low of 378 views for the very first month (Oct. 2007), to 11,000 visitors by the end of November of 2008.
• In December, a radical change occurred, with the overall number of visitors for that month jumping to almost 19,000.
• That was exceeded in the following month: for January of 2009, the total number of visitors was over 28,000.
• The total number of visitors this blog as received since its first day is 116,306.
• The site that refers the most traffic to this blog is metafilter.com.

Since the Open Anthropology Project consists of a cluster of sites, and not just this blog, I should also report on the progress of the related sites:

Related Sites:

• 1D4TW, has received only 5,200 visitors since it started in August of 2008, and I have been losing interest in maintaining it, preferring to use it more for discussion of Canadian politics, or for displaying images and videos which appear better there.
  
• Videos in my YouTube channel have apparently received 54,700 views since the channel first started in October of 2006. Half that number of visitors viewed one single video in particular: Bingo Bango Bongo. It seems that 1950s children’s television is still a major draw (?).
  
• Open Anthropology TV has received 11,900 visitors since the video collection was started in May of 2008.
• openanthropology.org has received 1,029 unique visitors from 04 October 2008 when it was launched, to 01 February 2009.
  

Peaks of interest?

The most popular posts in December 08 and January 09 had to do with “breaking news” — either news that appeared first on this blog, such as the occupation of the New School in New York (this first post receiving 3,000 views), or news that was reported here first about the death of U.S. contractor, Paula Loyd, who was working with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System in Afghanistan (that post receiving 2,400 views), as well as posts that surround each of these two issues.

In addition, posts dealing with the Greek riots in December, and the Israeli war against in Gaza throughout this month were the ones to attract the greatest number of readers.

Sometimes, within this context, it is the simplest of posts that receive the greatest number of hits — my all time number one post in terms of views was simply, “Live Cam on Gaza,” receiving 4,700 visitors as of this moment. Likewise, where people could find videos of Paula Loyd as in, “On the conduct of military ‘contractors’ in Afghanistan: In the words of Paula Loyd,” it has received 3,700 visitors thus far. The Paula Loyd videos in my YouTube channel have now become virtual memorial sites for those who knew her, or sympathized with her work or felt aggrieved by her death.

Finally, apparently people are curious to know who I am, so that my top page is “About the Blogger,” with over 1,740 views overall.

Report for January 2009

Top search terms, by category and in order of most hits within each category:

• gaza live cam, live cam gaza, live gaza cam, live cam from gaza, gaza live cams, live camera gaza, livecam gaza, gaza live stream, live webcam gaza, live cam in gaza, gaza cam live, cam live gaza, gaza cam, gaza live webcam, live camera from gaza, live camera in gaza
• paula loyd, “paula loyd,” don ayala, “don ayala,” paula loyd afghanistan, human terrain system
• idi amin,  michael ignatieff, abu ghraib, guantanamo torture, patrick brazeau, john stanton, shit stain
• open anthropology, openanthropology

GAZA — top posts, ordered by most hits received:

1. Live Cam on Gaza
2. On which planet does the Associated Press live?
3. Campus Gaza: Academic Boycotts and Complicit Silence
4. Gaza Solidarity Protests Across Canada Today
5. Accepting the Might to Exist: Some Israeli Lessons for Anthropology
6. Uprising News for Jan. 9, 2009: Greece, Gaza
7. Montréal Solidarity Demonstration for Gaza, January 10, 2009
8. Because They are Dirty Arabs… (63 diggs)
9. Boycott Israel: Montreal Professors and Academic Employees
10. SIXTEEN BRITISH UNIVERSITIES OCCUPIED IN SOLIDARITY WITH GAZA: Three Thousand Cheers for Student Protest!
11. Noam Chomsky: Obama’s position on Gaza is “approximately the Bush position”
12. News from the War of Choice: Gaza Links for 18 January 2009
13. Currently Covering and Commenting on the Gaza Massacre
14. Israel: What is being defended? Who is the victim?
15. Get Ready Montreal for Sunday, January 25: Next Demonstration Against the War in Gaza
16. Tweets of Conflict in the New Online War Zone
17. Gaza is Dying: Global Movement to End the War
18. Obama as Intermission for Gaza: Mass Murder Hits the Pause Button
19. Gaza Q & A by Stephen Shalom
20. An Unfolding Pattern of Genocide: Notes from Gaza
21. GazaTalk: New Media Resistance
22. Message to Obama: From an Undefeated Hamas
23. Gaza, West Bank: Settlements and Borders

MILITARIZATION, IMPERIALISM, HUMAN TERRAIN — top posts, ordered by most hits received:

1. The Unreported Death of Staff Sgt. Paula Loyd of the Human Terrain System: Third Researcher to Die
2. Gassing Puppies, Burning Women, and Playing Tennis
3. John Stanton: Hamas’ IT Tops Human Terrain System IT in Internet Capability, Savvy (2.1)
4. Bumming a Ride with the Occupation Parade: A Look at Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan
5. Contemporary Colonial Scholarship and the Spreading Human Terrain System: AGS Bowman Expeditions, Zapotec Indians, and onto the Caribbean
6. Kenneth Anderson: Imperial Clash on the Congo Resource Front
7. America’s New Counterinsurgency Doll: On Store Shelves this January 20
8. The Afghanistan Scam and the American Path to Failure

GENERAL — top posts, ordered by most hits received:

1. Why do “Leftist” Professors Predominate in Academia?
2. One Year Later: Viva Roi Kwabena!
3. Round Table: “The Anthropologist in Mined Fields”
4. “In Complete World” at the International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec, 2009
5. subMedia News for Jan. 9, 2009

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