Readers will appreciate that a tremendous amount of historical research, and interviews with participants, went into this project to present the true history of the voyages of Christopher Columbus to Afghanistan, a history that thus far has been replete with misconceptions, unsubstantiated rumour, and popular myths. Clearly, Columbus and his brothers are to be celebrated for reversing the tide of extremism and terrorism, and that is one of the things we remember on October the 12^th. Columbus, who discovered the Khyber Pass, also named all of Central Asia AfPak. Memory, aided by solid historiography, can never be erased, not even by a thousand protests in Denver by the American Indian Movement. This historical account was first written, in part, yesterday in Twitter, and has since been through an exhaustive peer review process lasting years.* ** ***

Of course some of the facts are well established. The mother country, which sponsored the expeditions of the Columbus brothers, had been through the turmoil of the reconquista which temporarily suppressed the Republicans whose base was in San Clemente. Emerging triumphant were King Baraque El Segundo Bush and his partner, Queen Michelle de Chicago y Saks, who hailed from a powerful family that included Isabel Toledo and Narciso Rodriguez. Meanwhile, the Moors were appropriately banished to Guantánamo, where even after more than five centuries some remain and have yet to be charged with their crimes or face a trial. Let us not detain ourselves further with these pettier details.

As has been amply documented, on October the 12^th, the Nina, Pinta, and the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III arrived at Kandahar Air Base.

On Columbus’ first tour of duty, the Nina, Pinta, and Globemaster make their way toward Kandahar, after refueling in Dubai. Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense Flickr photostream.

The natives were apprehensive at the sight of the two ships, given their landlocked country, but were visibly possessed by the Globemaster which they claimed to have known about for thousands of years (native myths claimed that a Globemaster would return at the end of time to liberate them from domestic tyranny). The lack of qualified translators was a constant problem. Had it not been for the notes of the famous chronicler, Michael Moore (originally Miguel El Moro, who disguised his North African provenance by altering his name), and others, we might truly be adrift in a sea of speculation. However, disagreements persist. In his 35-volume History of the Failed States, the missionary Thomas Friedman claims that the natives were not surprised to see the Globemaster because they had much larger vessels of their own, which they used for intercontinental travel, and that they held the world to be flat.

This lone surviving fragment of the Marja Codex, which predates the arrival of Europeans by at least 7,000 years, is the basis for speculation that Afghan natives possessed mythical beliefs about a Globemaster god that would return to liberate them. Clearly shown to the bottom and left of the vessel is a depiction of planet earth. Down the right hand side are what are generally believed to be mini diagrams of various engine parts as well as numerical symbols indicating the order in which they were to be assembled. Others have speculated that they are navigational charts plotting a route to what was later known as the World Trade Center in New York.

Christopher Columbus was able to win the admiration of the locals by providing them with shiny gifts, small items which we little value but that were great novelties to them, such as: Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), bandages, Tootsie Rolls, concussion grenades, M18A1 Claymore directional anti-personnel mines, and for the lucky ones, roller blades. This explains why today the streets of Kandahar are full of roller bladers, and mines. Having won the temporary allegiance of some, they took Columbus on their shoulders, and marched to Khost. Columbus marveled at this new place, and decided to name it AfPak, which he promptly claimed for King Baraque and Queen Michelle. The ruins of the palace built on the site by Columbus remain to this day:

Ruins of the palace built by Christopher Columbus in the city of Khost. Immediately behind the palace one can see the famous Nazca Lines, a series of ancient geoglyphs created by the ancestors of the Taleban.

Christopher Columbus is widely known for his skills in GPS navigation, and at least two of his ships were equipped with OnStar. His success led him to discover the Khyber Pass. To this day he is widely regarded as the Discoverer of the Khyber Pass, and we celebrate this feat on every October the 12^th. In almost every village in Afghanistan, there is a statue of General Christopher Columbus. When children pass, they raise their right arms, palms facing forward, in salute.

Columbus meeting with natives in Kandahar. He is not understanding a word they are saying, but is nonetheless able to write detailed accounts of what the natives tell him about their country. Photo courtesy of Margaret Bourke-White.

Columbus also established three settlements in the area, named Camp Keating, FOB Chapman, and one at Wanat whose name remains unknown. Unfortunately, Columbus had appointed unscrupulous administrators who were known for their cruelty to the natives. Typical of maladministration that collided with efforts to pacify the countryside, Christopher Columbus’ brother Diego, appointed governor of Nuristan by Christopher, was accused of being on the CIA payroll, of involvement in smuggling opium, and suspected of illicitly giving trucking contracts to the Taleban. When Columbus returned to Khost three years later, he was shocked and horrified to discover that the camps had been overrun by their dreaded enemies, and that Diego lived barricaded in an underground bunker, reduced to a diet of Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz.

Christopher Columbus (right) passes a title of deed of ownership to his brother Diego (left), entitling him to possession of all of Nuristan. Nuristan would later fall into ruin under the corrupt administration of Diego. Photo courtesy of the ISAF Flickr photostream.

This takes us to a discussion that focuses more clearly on the natives, for they were a patchwork of clans, tribes, and private militias centered on the trucking business. On the one hand, there were the Taíno, led by Chief Hamideybana Karzaigua (certain prominent Anglophone historians, most notably Admiral Morrison, have arbitrarily shortened his name to “Hamid Karzai,” which is incorrect). Relations with the Taíno, descendants of Guarani and Tajik stock (the ethnohistoric details remain subject to debate), were never wholly pacific. Indeed, Amnesty International denounced the Columbus administration for the secret detention of 383 Taíno alleged warriors, at Bagram Air Base. A former Taíno shaman, Mulana Omarakán, remained at large, and was said to have a large band of warriors from the Carib tribe. The name “Carib” has been roughly mistranslated by chroniclers from different parts of Europe, based often on poorly transcribed local pronunciations. The term Carib is now understand to be a cognate of “caniba,” “cannibal,” and “Cariban,” sometimes written as “Taliban” or “Taleban.”

The Taleban are known cannibals whose social system has been classed by anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan as “criminal” (indeed, Morgan’s accounts are the root of Karl Marx’s theorizing of the Criminal Mode of Production in his magnum opus Die Terroristen). However, there is some dispute as to whether the Taleban captured enemies to eat, or merely inhaled their powdered bones to acquire their enemies’ power. Evidence of their likely cannibalism is to be found in the following:

(a) When they downed a Chinook helicopter over southern Dominica, in an area close to that island’s southern border with Iran, none of the crew members could be found—but their bloodied and tattered clothing remained strewn about the wreckage.

(b) Sometimes as punishment for crimes against the community, they will eat parts of each other (focusing on the eyes and the hands).

(c) The U.S. Army’s Bowe Bergdahl went missing in Afghanistan, and General Christopher Columbus alleged that he was eaten by Taleban cannibals (the same is true of Gilad Shalit, abducted and later eaten by Hamas, which is a lineage segment related to the Taleban, and reportedly based in the Gazari district of Bahamistan).

(d) That the Taleban, like their neighbours, practice cannibalism, is not doubted by the colonial chroniclers and imperial policy planners at the prestigious Salamanca-based Small Wars Journal (Periódico de las Guerrecitas Chiquititas), who published a report describing Afghanistan as a “Chaotic Cannibalistic State:”

“a state of being that consists of groups of people in perpetual conflict, feeding on each other until a foreign body is introduced, at which point they frenzy on the foreign body, sapping strength and resources until the foreign body must limp away.”

Limp away, that is, if they are lucky to have any remaining limbs. For example, Soviet intruders had to evacuate by helicopter because their troops had been reduced to mere torsos with large bite marks, as painstakingly documented by the Royal Historian, Lara Logan of the Colonial Broadcasting System, and by adventure photographer and geologist Louis Dupree.

After meeting with Columbus, this elder vows to wipe out his men. First, he eyes one in particular that he would like to eat. Photo by Louis Dupree, provided by NATO’s Historical Repairs Division.

Dupree later died in the arms of Don Lope de Aguirre on a voyage through a tributary of the Amazon River that runs through Kyrgyzstan. Don Lope had been assigned with Special Operations Command, and tasked by Christopher Columbus with finding El Dorado. A rare document of their journey, recorded by Werner Herzog, subsequently a NATO Secretary General, was recently leaked to Wikileaks and released as “Collateral Columbus,” where we hear what some anti-war critics misinterpreted as megalomaniacal statements made by Don Lope:

Vast mineral deposits were eventually discovered in Afghanistan, and Christopher Columbus claimed them, now citing firm evidence for the existence of El Dorado. Queen Michelle was very pleased.

When Christopher Columbus first encountered Taleban natives in eastern Cubanistan, he wrote a detailed account of their physical appearance, in a journal that was copied and uploaded to Cryptome, and illustrated by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera of Rolling Stone Magazine. These are some extracts from Columbus’ journal, containing some of his typical gaps and contradictions:

“The people of this land and of all the other nearby lands which I have found and of which I have (or do not have) information, all go completely covered, men and women, and especially the women who are covered in the burqa of their nature, leaving not even a slit by which to peer into their eyes and glimpse their souls. The absence of any vision of women in the state that their mother bore them is most striking when we remember the midriffs, short-shorts, and string bikinis of our maidens in San Diego, for which my men long excessively to the point of engaging in many quiet distractions of a nature that cannot be described in these pages. In trying to secure access to their women, one of my men lost his hand as he tried to reach for one standing in a group guarded by their jealous and proud turbaned males. Another made the unfortunate error, as we learned, of trying to purchase a bride with rum, only to find the cask of liquor turned on his head and set alight. These people can sometimes be ridiculously attached to norms of what they deem respectful and proper behaviour, that are strange to us. They seem compelled to maintain boundaries between their nation and ourselves….

“In all of these lands, I saw no great diversity in the appearance of the people or in their manners or language; on the contrary, they all understand one another, which is a very curious thing, on account of which I hope King Baraque will determine upon their conversion to ways of civilization and democracy, towards which they are much inclined….

“Thus I have found no monsters, nor report of any, except for an area under control of those who are Taleb, which is inhabited by a people who are regarded in all these lands as very ferocious, [and] who eat human flesh. They have many pickup trucks and motorcycles with which they range through all the lands of AfPak, rob and take whatever they can. They are no more malformed than the others, except for the notable absence of certain limbs among their men, and that they have the custom of wearing their beards long, some extending more than a meter. They are ferocious among these other people who are cowardly to an excessive degree.”

Reports of Taleban atrocities were later repeated by Christoper Columbus to the media. On Meet the Press, Columbus claimed that the Taleban cut the nose off a certain Aisha and then emphatically reminded viewers their warriors are cannibals. In terms of Columbus and NATO’s “cowardly” allies, Wikileaks revealed that a Taíno chief gave Christopher Columbus false information on a neighbouring tribe, which prompted an airstrike on a village of suspected Carib allies of the Taleban.

Lt. Col. Bronislaw “Bronto” Malinowski

Very little has been documented of Taleban lifestyle and customs, apart from the surviving records of a single U.S. Army Human Terrain Team (HTT), led by former Marine Lt. Col. Bronislaw “Bronto” Malinowski (left), which went missing for two decades in the wild and lawless areas of Waziristan. (The region was in the past notorious for raiding merchant vessels of the Soviet Socialist East India Company.) On that HTT was someone who later became famous in anthropology (read more about this esoteric discipline), one Margaret Mead, nicknamed “the mission monkey” by teammates owing to her peculiar appearance. Malinowski wrote down detailed accounts of their rituals, their marriage ceremonies, their agriculture, and their preparation of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), a phrase that he coined. He discovered a hitherto unknown gift economy among the Helmand Islanders that involved circulating suicide bombers counterclockwise through villages of Waziristan, while IEDs moved in a clockwise pattern. This was later called the Culling Ring, and new students in anthropology learn this in their first classes (for more, read Malinowski’s classic text, The Violent Life of Terrorists in North-Eastern Afghanistan). Mead, for her part, discovered that unlike what she found among adolescents in the United States, Taleban teenagers zealously guard virginity and will not let a female walk the streets unless in the company of two men, preferably older brothers. Mead was also the first to film Taleban villagers, by installing a surveillance camera in the centre of the village and letting it run for 24 hours at a time–thereby serving as inspiration for the work later to be done by Predator Drones. Mead was the only surviving member of the HTT after a botched rescue attempt by U.S. Special Forces mistakenly killed everyone, including her teammates. Clutching his enema bottle, LTC Malinowski was mistaken for a grenade-wielding militant. After the traumatic events had long passed, Mead became famous for her book, Coming of Age in Sheberghan.

Margaret Mead, HTT member under Malinowski

“Taking names and kicking ass,” a phrase invented by Bronto Malinowski to describe one of his favourite daily rituals. Here he takes the names of new Human Terrain Team members that he is marking to be fired and shipped back home, for having engaged in fraud, waste, abuse, drunkenness, and philandering, problems that plagued HTTs and caused endless headaches for the Columbus administration.

Christopher Columbus eventually fell into disrepute thanks to the liberal media. The breaking point was a remark he made to Rolling Stone, referring to King Baraque as “aquél moreno” (“the dark one,” owing to the King’s oddly swarthy complexion that raised doubts in some minds about his noble purity). He was promptly shipped back to the United States. His brothers, also disgraced, were sent home and later joined the Center for a New American Security and the Hoover Institution. Christopher himself only managed to muster enough respect to get him a weekly column in the Washington Post. Columbus recently used his column to suggest that a Predator drone go out and do a “meet and greet” with the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. In Twitter, where Columbus and Assange frequently trade insults, Assange responded by calling Columbus a “Nazi punk.” In an interview with Der Spiegel, Assange did in fact admit that a primary motivation behind his work is that, “I enjoy crushing Columbus.”

[Christopher Columbus’ main Twitter account is here, and he has two subsidiary accounts here and here. He also has an active Facebook page.]

With Christopher Columbus disgraced, General David Petraeus took the helm and rededicated himself to NATO’s civilization mission. Even though Petraeus had the support of armies from 4,373 nations, which together spoke a total of 18,956 languages—still, only the second largest international coalition, it must be noted—he failed to win territory from the Taleban-Caribs and was eventually forced to withdraw when resupply ships from the mother country stopped arriving after twenty years, despite numerous protestations from the cardinals and archbishops in the Pentagon.

Interviewed at his home in Virginia by his biographer, Bob Woodward, Christopher Columbus reflected quietly on his dismissal. “I’m the toad in the road,” he said quietly. “In personal terms, I’m absolutely pissed off.”

* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2007 conference of the Australian Society for the Pastoral Care of Aborigines (A-SPCA) held at Clifford Park Holiday Motor Inn in Toowoomba, Queensland; the 2008 meetings of the American Society for Urgent Paraethnography, held at the Holiday Inn-Airport in Fresno, California; and the 2008 convention of the International Association for Occult Historiologies, held at the Super 8 in Kapuskasing, Ontario. Another version was published in the Journal of Christianity as National Security.

** I am thankful for comments by three anonymous reviewers as well as detailed comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript provided by Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and Dinesh D’Souza. Research for this article was generously supported by grants from the Jesse Helms Foundation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Minerva Research Initiative.

*** This essay forms part of a larger introductory text that has been slated for teaching to high school students by NATO’s Global Board of Reeducation, with the approval of the Texas Commissioner of Education and State Board of Education (SBOE).

But it gets more complicated. The complete video of Schweitzer’s testimony was uploaded here. One cannot rely on the PDF of his address, since it excludes the back and forth of questions and answers after his formal statement. What comes almost at the very end of the recorded session, long past when most of us would bother paying any more attention to the facile assertions, common place truisms, and milspeak, is a surprising admission. Listen to it for yourselves, concerning the work of Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan–whose sole job is killing, night raids, and not passing out candies to kiddies (indeed, they have killed a number of those kids in cold blood)–and their relationship with HTS:

“A continued sharp edge.” Fear, not just favour. Fear is the dirty secret of the American counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, which back home is portrayed by the compliant media as a war of delivering stuffed toys and sweet candies, when not too busy taking children by the hand to schools, and delivering notepads and pencils. If there is one thing American militarists definitely understand, if anything from observing their civilian compatriots at home, it is the power of fear for inducing obedience and support. What U.S. Special Operations Forces do in Afghanistan in some cases appears to be a deliberate targeting of innocent and unarmed civilians, subjecting them to executions.

The counterinsurgency gurus like to drop a lot of names of special authorities that presumably support their arguments. One of those names is David Galula. Galula, French theorist and practitioner of counterinsurgency in Algeria, certainly argued for such measures as gaining the support of the population, isolating and “protecting” it from the resistance (who also knew well the power derived from instilling fear), and building local civilian government. Yet, as Laleh Kkalili wrote, “Galula is mostly matter-of-fact about torture, and mentions that the ‘single most important improvement in our counterinsurgency operations in Algeria’ was the improvement in the detention and interrogation facilities of the colonial military.” Galula’s written work was developed in the U.S. in two core volumes during fellowships at the RAND Corporation and Harvard University. The second volume, Khalili tells us, “is now on the US Army Command and General Staff College curriculum, and has served as inspiration for the new US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.” Justin Raimondo also observed that, “in Algeria, a theater in which the war tactics recommended by Galula were carried out–in certain instances, by him personally–the French record was of brutality unmitigated by either decency or common sense. In order to cut the links between the insurgents and the populace, a large-scale resettlement program was carried out, leading to the massive disruption of Algerian society (and ultimately backfiring on the colonialists).”

It is already backfiring on the colonialists in Afghanistan. While the Taliban are no strangers to committing executions, and killing civilians as part of their attacks on occupation forces, there is an interesting anthropological issue at work here, noted but not commented on much: Afghans tend to resent killings of civilians by foreign forces far more than by the Taliban. While the Taliban part of the Afghan resistance may reap the rewards of both fear, sympathy and local anti-imperialism, the occupying forces reap hatred.

Military-controlled Information Access, Academic Imperialism, and the Cultural Cleansing of Iraq

On three previous occasions I raised the issue of the illegality of seizing Iraqi documents, relocating them to the U.S., and then controlling access to them for the purpose especially of Pentagon-funded academic researchers–see: “Minerva Research Initiative Violates International Law and Iraqi Sovereignty,” and “Minerva Project and Looted Iraqi Documents,” and “What are the Pentagon’s Minerva Researchers Doing?“.

Given news over the past two years since I started writing about this, and the U.S. ratifying the 1954 Hague Convention, plus the promised return of the documents (having made digital copies), and further reading of the legal principles established for the protection of written records during an occupation, it seemed that some further analysis was needed.

Illegality and the Supreme Crime: the Starting Point

The starting point of this case is, of course, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an unprovoked act of aggression that had no support in international law, which violated the U.N. Charter, and failed to win the support of the U.N. Security Council. Who says the invasion of Iraq was illegal?

First, we have the admissions from the U.S. and the U.K., namely from Richard Perle and Jack Straw themselves. Richard Perle, one of the notorious “neocons,” a key member of the Bush’s Defense Policy Board which advised Donald Rumsfled, told an audience in London back in November 2003: “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing” (source). From early on, he conceded that the war was illegal. He added, “international law…would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone” and that there was “no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein” (source). In a “secret and personal” letter from Jack Straw (the U.K. Foreign Secretary in 2002) to Prime Minister Tony Blair, he “warned the prime minister that the case for military action in Iraq was of dubious legality“; Straw also stated that “regime change per se is no justification for military action” and “the weight of legal advice here is that a fresh [UN] mandate may well be required” (source). It is important that they both concede this point, because it means that at the highest levels there was recognition of the fact that the U.S. and U.K. had committed the “supreme crime” as outlined in Nuremberg (more below). Any actions committed as part of this supreme crime, thus come under its shadow.

Second, Kofi Annan, then U.N. Secretary general, in an interview broadcast by the BBC World Service Interview Program, declared explicitly that the U.S.-led invasion violated the UN charter and hence international law: “I have indicated [the war against Iraq] was not in conformity with the UN Charter,” and, “from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal” (source).

Third, the greatest mass of international legal opinion also supported Annan’s view. The International Commission of Jurists on 18 March 2003 expressed its “deep dismay that a small number of states are poised to launch an outright illegal invasion of Iraq, which amounts to a war of aggression. The United States, the United Kingdom and Spain have signalled their intent to use force in Iraq in spite of the absence of a Security Council Resolution. There is no other plausible legal basis for this attack. In the absence of such Security Council authorisation, no country may use force against another country, except in self-defence against an armed attack” (source).

Fourth, agencies and agents within some of the states that took part in the invasion, have confirmed both international legal opinion, and what Perle and Straw rightly conceded. This year, an official inquiry in The Netherlands, “in a damning series of findings on the decision of the Dutch government to support Tony Blair and George Bush in the strategy of regime change in Iraq, the inquiry found the action had ‘no basis in international law’” (source). Willibrord Davids, a Dutch supreme court judge, said U.N. resolutions in the 1990s prior to the 2003 invasion have no authority for the invasion. In the 551-page report (scroll to page 517 for the English version), the inquiry stated: “The Dutch government lent its political support to a war whose purpose was not consistent with Dutch government policy. The military action had no sound mandate in international law” (source). In the U.K., Lord Bingham, a former Lord Chief Justice, explained that the British decision to invade Iraq along with the U.S. was “fundamentally flawed” in terms of its legality (source). Also in the U.K., in a minute dated 18 March 2003 from Elizabeth Wilmshurst (Deputy Legal Adviser) to Michael Wood (The Legal Adviser), copied to the Private Secretary, the Private Secretary to the Permanent Under-Secretary, Alan Charlton (Director Personnel) and Andrew Patrick (Press Office), Wilmshurst stated: “I regret that I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution I cannot in conscience go along with advice – within the Office or to the public or Parliament – which asserts the legitimacy of military action without such a resolution, particularly since an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances which are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law”–Wilmshurst resigned in March 2003 because she did not believe the war with Iraq was legal (source).

The 2003 aggression against Iraq was not just any violation of international law, it was specifically a crime.

The Nürnberg (Nuremberg) Tribunal condemned a war of aggression in the strongest terms: “To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” It held individuals accountable for “crimes against peace”, defined as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.” The U.N. General Assembly unanimously affirmed the Nürnberg principles in 1946, and it affirmed the principle of individual accountability for such crimes (source).

U.S.-led Occupation and the 1907 Hague Convention

The U.S. invasion was followed by what was/is an occupation, formally described as such under international law, and though the U.S. was not a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1954 at the time, it was a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1907: “Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land.” In our debates about the Minerva Research Initiative, the Pentagon program for funding academic research using seized Iraqi documents, we have so far focused only on the 1954 Convention, which became relevant only in the last two years.

The U.N. Security Council in 2003 formally recognized the U.S. and the U.K. as occupying powers. The UNSC resolution expressly recognizes the status of the two occupying powers in its preamble where it in states that, “Noting the letter of 8 May 2003 from the Permanent Representatives of the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the President of the Security Council (S/2003/538) and recognizing the specific authorities, responsibilities, and obligations under applicable international law of these states as occupying powers under unified command (the ‘Authority’),” and the Security Council resolution affirmed that the 1907 Hague Convention was in force: in paragraph 5 the Security Council, “Calls upon all concerned to comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907” (source). So there is agreement, from the U.S. and U.K., to respect the Hague Convention of 1907.

So what do the 1907 Hague regulations stipulate?

SECTION III
MILITARY AUTHORITY OVER THE TERRITORY OF THE HOSTILE STATE

• Art. 43. The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.
• Art. 46. Family honour and rights, the lives of persons, and private property, as well as religious convictions and practice, must be respected.
  Private property cannot be confiscated.
• Art. 47. Pillage is formally forbidden.
• Art. 56. The property of municipalities, that of institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, even when State property, shall be treated as private property.

The Minerva Research Initiative, the Hoover Institution, the Conflict Records Research Center: Adding to Illegality, Promoting Colonialism in Research, Dismissing Iraqi Sovereignty

Saad Eskander, director of the Iraqi National Library and Archives

In “Minerva Research Initiative: Searching for the Truth or Denying the Iraqis the Rights to Know the Truth?,” Saad Eskander, the Director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, raises several very pertinent, very critical, issues concerning the highly problematic nature of the “Iraqi Perspectives Project,” one of the five component research areas that make up the Pentagon’s Minerva grant program. Eskander speaks of the records that were “illegally seized by its [the U.S.'] military and intelligence agencies” Eskander, who in fact supported the U.S. invasion (see his interview with Charlie Rose below, which also addresses the same issues of the seized records), said that the Pentagon’s Minerva program continues a pattern of U.S. “violation of international conventions on the safeguarding of cultural heritage of occupied territories, and goes against the principles of rule of law, self-determination, and human rights that are supposed to govern the so-called Free World.” He adds: “Records are fundamental for the construction of any nation’s collective historical memory. This is why the protection of documentary heritage has been enshrined in international legislation, notably the 1954 Hague Convention.” This also raises the issue of academic and political colonialism, of who gets to write the history of the conquered and the occupied, an issue that more hopeful types might not have expected to surface again as late as now. That the records were seized without Iraqi consent or knowledge, is also pointedly raised by Eskander, who blames U.S. forces for some of the looting: “The Americans were themselves involved in the lootings. We all know that tens of millions of the seized Iraq records were shipped to the U.S.” During the reign of the U.S. occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority, Eskander notes that “U.S. military and U.S. State Department officials encouraged and even helped others to loot and then to ship abroad Iraqi records, notably the Iraqi Memory Foundation (IMF).” The IMF is “essentially a private American initiative, whose activities unequivocally violate current Iraqi archival legislations (No. 111 of 1969 and No. 70 of 1983).” In order to better dismiss Iraqi concerns, “the IMF does not recognize Iraq’s national government or its sovereignty. And this is ironic, given the fact that the ‘New Iraq’ is considered to be a close ally of America!” exclaims Eskander. These acts of seizure, looting, and what can only be described as pillage (with the full weight of the term implied under international law), means that “the Pentagon is practically and overtly usurping our duty of collecting, preserving and facilitating access to Iraqi records for all people, who may and should use them for research and other legitimate purposes”. The coloniality of the situation is inescapable: “Providing access to sanctioned U.S. universities, U.S. research centers and U.S. scholars is gross discrimination against the undeniable owners of the seized records, the Iraqi People, who are the main subject of the records“. For Iraqis, “this is an undeniable cultural imperialism, which is not really different from the colonists’ looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts of colonized peoples during the last two centuries.”

U.S. Occupation and the 1954 Hague Convention

On 25 September 2008, the U.S. Senate finally voted to become party to the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, a convention that the U.S. itself helped to draft but failed to ratify for half a century (source), a fact that seemingly went entirely unreported by major news media. However, now that the Convention has acquired force, and becomes part of the corpus of U.S. domestic laws as well, the obligations of the U.S. are indisputable.

The Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) sets out the following principles and regulations for the handling of cultural property.

First, what is “cultural property” and hows does it relate to this case?

In Chapter 1, Article 1, the 1954 Hague Convention includes in its definition of cultural property, “(a) movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people, such as monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or secular; archaeological sites; groups of buildings which, as a whole, are of historical or artistic interest; works of art; manuscripts, books and other objects of artistic, historical or archaeological interest” and “(b) buildings whose main and effective purpose is to preserve or exhibit the movable cultural property defined in sub-paragraph (a) such as museums, large libraries and depositories of archives.”

In Chapter 1, Article 4, the Convention includes the following regulations: “3. The High Contracting Parties further undertake to prohibit, prevent and, if necessary, put a stop to any form of theft, pillage or misappropriation of, and any acts of vandalism directed against, cultural property. They shall refrain from requisitioning movable cultural property situated in the territory of another High Contracting Party.” In addition, while the Convention ambiguously refers to “military necessity” (not defined) as a possible waiver of the obligations set out in Article 4/1 (not quoted here), it is clearly not a blanket waiver of the entire Convention. Indeed, in Article 4, the final point states: “5. No High Contracting Party may evade the obligations incumbent upon it under the present Article, in respect of another High Contracting Party, by reason of the fact that the latter has not applied the measures of safeguard referred to in Article 3.” That means that the argument that the Iraqis had failed to establish adequate measures for protecting their own property, does not free the U.S. from its obligations.

In Chapter 1, Article 5, under the heading of “Occupation,” the Convention requires that “1. Any High Contracting Party in occupation of the whole or part of the territory of another High Contracting Party shall as far as possible support the competent national authorities of the occupied country in safeguarding and preserving its cultural property.” However, “2. Should it prove necessary to take measures to preserve cultural property situated in occupied territory and damaged by military operations, and should the competent national authorities be unable to take such measures, the Occupying Power shall, as far as possible, and in close co-operation with such authorities, take the most necessary measures of preservation.” Again, the U.S. did neither–it did not cooperate with local authorities, and taking the most necessary measures of preservation certainly does not imply airlifting all of the archives to another country, and making access available only to select academics funded by the Pentagon, or those in allied think tanks.

Under the heading of “Military Measures” in Chapter 1, Article 7, the Convention states: “1. The High Contracting Parties undertake to introduce in time of peace into their military regulations or instructions such provisions as may ensure observance of the present Convention, and to foster in the members of their armed forces a spirit of respect for the culture and cultural property of all peoples” and “2. The High Contracting Parties undertake to plan or establish in peacetime, within their armed forces, services or specialist personnel whose purpose will be to secure respect for cultural property and to co-operate with the civilian authorities responsible for safeguarding it.” Clearly the U.S. had done neither with respect to Iraqi archives, and had indeed ignored the demands for the return of the documents, by those same civilian authorities responsible for safeguarding the records, most notably, Saad Eskander, the Director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, and several Iraqi government ministers.

Over the past 20 years, several meetings and conferences of state representatives party to the Convention have met to solicit and discuss legal opinions and proposals for tightening the “military necessity” provisions of the Convention, for both defining it, delimiting its use, or even eliminating it entirely from the Convention (source). This is important because the U.S. cannot simply ignore evolving legal opinion. “Military necessity” is very much up in the air.

Minerva’s “Iraqi Perspectives Project” after the 1954 Hague Convention

On the specifics of international law, Eskander very rightly notes that the established principles “do not provide for the shipment of the seized records to the occupiers’ Capital or for making all or parts of these records accessible for propaganda and politically-motivated research purposes”. Eskander is aware that the U.S. was not a signatory to the 1954 Hague Convention, until 2008– “After signing the 1954 Hague Convention recently,” he says–and thus it had no force over American actions (that is why we spoke of the 1907 Hague Convention, which was in force, but ignored). Eskander argues “the U.S. now has clear obligations to protect and to return all current and non-current records of the occupied Iraq”. That is in fact the case, and the U.S. government has not disputed his interpretation.

Indeed, not only has the U.S. government not disputed the illegality of the seizure of the records, it has promised some small ex post facto recompense. That is not a gift, but rather a plain recognition of the obligations the U.S. has undertaken with respect to international law.

The U.S. State Department has not challenged Iraq’s claims (the Pentagon has, however), as we should note (source). It is also the fact that Eskander is not alone in making his requests for the return of the seized documents. In fact, it was a “high-level Iraqi delegation led by Deputy Culture Minister Taher al-Humoud” that met with U.S. State Department officials this May to press for the return of records held in the U.S., and specifically records pertaining to Iraq’s Jewish minority (source). Not all of the records are even in the U.S.: some are held at a U.S. military base in Qatar (source). The U.S. took the documents and then dispersed them to several corners, no doubt helping to make the seized documents much harder to find and reclaim.

Again, the U.S. State Department has not only not challenged Iraq’s claims, it has finally agreed to them. Shortly after meeting with the delegation above, it was announced in Baghdad by Vice-Minister of Culture Taher Hamoud: “We have reached an agreement after negotiations with the State Department and the Pentagon for the repatriation of Jewish archives and millions of documents that have been made taken following the events of 2003″. Hamoud added that “these documents have been released from the Hoover Institution (at the University of Stanford), the State Department and National Archives”. According to Hamoud, “48,000 containers filled with millions of records and Jews archives were transported to the United States” (source1, source2).

There has also been support for Iraqi demands to return all documents, from within relevant bodies in the U.S. In February of 2008, the central council of the American Library Association passed a resolution that called for millions of stolen Iraqi documents now in the United States to be returned to the Iraq National Library and Archives. The resolution stated that the documents “represent Iraqi social memory” and that the ALA “condemns the confiscation of documents…by the United States and British forces and strongly advocates the immediate return of all documents.” We are also told that this resolution garnered support from professionals around the world (source). Indeed, the Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists have supported Eskander’s claim against the U.S. government and the Iraq Memory Foundation, issuing a joint statement condemning the foundation’s gathering of the documents as “an act of pillage, which is specifically forbidden by the 1907 Hague Convention” (source).

In Light of the Crime: A Look at Some of the Criminals

To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”–Nuremberg Tribunal

“Harvard University pulled back from a proposal to store the documents fearing, apparently, that it might break international law by doing so.” (source)

One of the most troubling characters in this story is Kanan Makiya of the “Iraq Memory Foundation,” a group set up by Iraqi expatriates in the U.S. Makiya claims he received permission from the Coalition Provisional Authority–the colonial government that ruled Iraq– to move the records to his parents’ home in Baghdad (source). The first step therefore was to remove to private possession what was the property of the state and people of Iraq. The Iraq Memory Foundation then began to interfere with the documents, setting about to scan and organize them (source), and we do not know what might have been done to records that the politically motivated Makiya might have found troubling to his preferred narrative of Iraq’s political history. He was under no one’s supervision. In 2005, the IMF claims it reached an agreement with the U.S. military–again Iraqi authorities are absent–to ship the documents to the U.S. (even though the U.S. had, and has, numerous large and heavily protected bases within Iraq). The U.S. government was also to make for itself a digital copy of the collection, without seeking the permission of Iraqis (source). Saad Eskander cited “Iraqi laws passed in 1963 and 1983, as well as international law (both The Hague and Geneva Conventions regard documents as part of a nation’s cultural heritage), to bolster his assertion that the Iraq Memory Foundation’s possession of the documents is illegal” (source). Eskander is right, and the Hague Convention of 1907 (Art. 43 above) firmly stipulates that existing local laws governing the use of records must be upheld by an occupying power–except that this occupying power premised its whole operation on a complete denial of any laws.

As Eskander rightly noted, Makiya “is not under the supervision of the Iraqi state. He just represents himself. He cannot decide alone where to store them,” speaking about the Baath records, “They are our documents—the documents of the Iraqi people” (source).

One of the institutions that was among the targets of Eskander’s complaints was a think tank, the Hoover Institution, housed on the campus of Stanford University. This has been discussed in the previous articles I mentioned at the outset. The interesting thing about the Hoover Institution is that it has arrogated to itself the right to decide when Iraq deserves to have the documents again, deeming itself the most important authority on the security situation in Iraq. This is in spite of the 1954 Hague Convention to which the U.S. is now a party, which  does not permit any party, let alone a private one, to decide that because one party’s conditions for protecting documents is bad, that therefore another party can just simply take everything back to its home country. That is a wild misinterpretation at best, and particularly glaring in Hoover’s case, in light of the many generals and public officials who have told all of us, repeatedly, that “the surge worked,” and that Iraq is now peaceful and sovereign. Who is the Hoover Institution to say otherwise?

The Hoover Institution has records consisting of more than seven million documents that once belonged to Iraq’s Baath Party and security forces. The documents came to Hoover via the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), another of Eskander’s targets for legitimate criticism. Indeed, neither Hoover nor the IMF–what an appropriate acronym–are the only villains in this story. Eskander has also asked for the return of Iraqi documents kept by the National Archives in Washington, which took Iraq’s Jewish archive, and to the Pentagon and the CIA, which took other Iraqi records (source). Each of these has usurped the right to dictate who should see the records, which is purely an Iraqi decision to be made. In terms of Hoover and others, this is decidedly an act of colonialism.

Jessica Huckabey, the acting director of the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) at the National Defense University is another of the characters in another institution that has taken the same colonialist posture, in determining who should get access to Iraqi records, and for the most part, they are to be American academics. Mark Stout, a friend of Huckabey’s, is one of the academics that has exploited this situation having used the records, and he writes lustily: “I can tell you that for those scholars interested in modern Iraq, terrorism, or modern military history, there is a goldmine here.  Reputations to be made.  Dissertations to be written….” If anyone misses the air of exploitation and self-serving greed around the colonizer, then one needs to start inhaling. Don’t hold your breath if you expect American elites, and the opportunists among them, to act with due regard for the rights of other human beings, instead opting to hunt and capture trophies to display for their personal aggrandizement. Reputations to be made, certainly. But what kind of reputation?

Stout‘s concern for the law and morality is nil–he emphasizes: “The originals were ‘seized’ as provided for under international law and are held by the U.S. Government.” He is wrong on all counts, as we see from reading what is provided for by international law, by any and all of them that established the principles for the U.S. to follow, and which it flouted. Stout even doubts the act of seizure, placing snark quotes around the word “seized,” as if the act could have been anything else, like a temporary donation perhaps. As we also know, unless the Hoover Institution is a branch of the U.S. government, the documents are not all held by the U.S. Government, as Stout wrongly asserts.

“As provided for under international law.” Elsewhere, in an argument with Hugh Gusterson, Stout again insists, saying “In fact, there is specific provision for this in international law.” But he does not actually point to any international law, nor any article in one. He points to an opinion piece, and even that mostly contradicts his assertions. Trudy Peterson, at any rate, is not The Hague. When one wishes to make use of legal provisions to support one’s argument, then it is incumbent on you to demonstrate that your assertions are correct, by exact and specific reference to those provisions. Saad Eskander did, and that is why he is right, and the U.S. ultimately has conceded the argument. What the Hague Conventions of 1907 and 1954 most decidedly never did is to err on the side of occupying powers and their “rights” nor did they invite readers to lessen the rights of the occupied to their cultural property. Any argument that suggests otherwise, would then have the unenviable task of explaining why such conventions even exist.

Speaking of Trudy Peterson, she is a “a former acting archivist of the United States under President Bill Clinton and an international archival consultant” (source). In fact, she supports the basis of Eskander’s argument: “Ms. Peterson believes the National Library and Archive should be the ultimate home of the documents, and she stands by the recommendations of the International Council on Archives, a professional group, which state that ‘the alienation of public archives can … only occur through a legislative act of the state’” (source). Where Peterson clearly is in error is in saying to a reporter that “the violence and insecurity in Baghdad may be good reasons to keep the records out of Iraq for now” (source). There is no provision under international law for doing so. She also conflates Baghdad with all of Iraq. Like the people at the Hoover Institution–namely, Richard Sousa, the director of Hoover’s library and archives, and Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies and an Iranian exile–Peterson takes a view opposite that of Gen. David Petraeus–”the surge worked”–John McCain–”the surge worked”–and various high officials in both the Bush and Obama regimes that claim Iraq is a better place, including Vice President Joseph Biden who claims Iraq is a success story (source). At any rate, this is besides the point: Chapter 1, Article 5 of the 1954 Hague Convention says that Peterson, Sousa, and Milani are all wrong–security conditions are no excuse for an occupying power to remove cultural property to the occupier’s home country.

Trudy Peterson’s and others’ supercilious remarks that Iraq is not ready to get back its property, have been the justified targets of heavy criticism from Jeffery Spurr, Islamic and Middle East Specialist at Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library, who observed: “That the newly-designated temporary custodian should be a private institution, and that notable bastion of conservative views, the Hoover Institution, should come as no surprise given that Mr. Makiya has perforce become a fellow traveler of the Neo-cons since he made common cause with the Bush Administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. That such an institution in far-off California should consider itself the proper site for these documents as opposed to the national archives of Iraq is the height of arrogance.” He added, in criticism of the Gravois article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that I also sourced for this essay, that it appears to “privilege the self-serving arguments of Kanan Makiya and his colleagues, and employs quotations from Dr. Trudy Huskamp Peterson, a prominent expert on archives and international law relating to archives, in such a way as to support the plausibility of the refusal to return the originals to their proper custodian, the Iraq National Archive, and its Director General, Dr. Eskander” (source).

Stout’s defense of the CRRC is that it only houses digital copies. How did it get them? Who makes the decisions of who gets to access the “goldmine”? Were any Iraqi civilian authorities, and any Iraqi laws, consulted before making what is clearly a unilateral decision based on illegal possession? How is copyright protected? How are documents relating to the recent past, and the identities of individuals, protected? If there were any legitimacy to Stout’s argument, would he not have been able to cite the numerous Iraqi scholars and Iraqi national agencies that support his view? How many scholars from Iraq have had access to those same digital copies? Can he name even one? Or this is just another one-sided American perspective, expressing muted jingoism and cheering colonial capture with gusto?

Sources (ordered by date of publication, earliest to latest):

1. “Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land,” The Hague, 18 October 1907.
2. “Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict,” The Hague, 14 May 1954.
3. “The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the notion of military necessity,” Jan Hladik, International Review of the Red Cross, 30 September 1999.
4. “Crimes within the Court’s Jurisdiction,” International Criminal Court/United Nations Department of Public Information, May 1998.
5. “Iraq – ICJ Deplores Moves Toward a War of Aggression on Iraq,” International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 18 March 2003.
6. “‘Preventive War’ and International Law After Iraq,” Duncan E. J. Currie LL.B. (Hons.) LL.M., GlobeLaw: Iraq, 22 May 2003.
7. “War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal,” Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger, The Guardian (UK), 20 November 2003.
8. “Iraq: Annan Calls U.S.-Led Invasion Violation Of UN Charter,” Charles Recknagel, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 16 September 2004.
9. “Wilmshurst resignation letter,” BBC, 24 March, 2005.
10. “Disputed Iraqi Archives Find a Home at the Hoover Institution,” John Gravois, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 January 2008.
11. “Librarians and archivists demand US return of stolen Iraqi documents,” Sandy English, World Socialist Website, 01 March 2008.
12. “Iraqi Files in U.S.: Plunder or Rescue?” Hugh Eakin, The New York Times, 01 July 2008.
13. “Minerva Project and Looted Iraqi Documents,” Maximilian Forte, Zero Anthropology, 26 July 2008.
14. “US Senate Ratifies Agreement to Protect Cultural Resources,” American Anthropological Association, September 2008.
15. “Minerva Research Initiative: Searching for the Truth or Denying the Iraqis the Rights to Know the Truth?” Saad Eskander, The Minerva Controversy, October 2008.
16. “Minerva Research Initiative Violates International Law and Iraqi Sovereignty,” Maximilian Forte, Zero Anthropology, 31 October 2008.
17. “Iraq war ‘violated rule of law’,” BBC, 18 November 2008.
18. “What are the Pentagon’s Minerva Researchers Doing?“, Maximilian Forte, Zero Anthropology, 12 June 2009.
19. “Iraq launches bid to recover Saddam-era documents,” Aseel Kami, Reuters, 15 July 2009.
20. “RAPPORT COMMISSIE VAN ONDERZOEK BESLUITVORMING IRAK,” Amsterdam, The Netherlands, January 2010.
21. “Iraq invasion violated international law, Dutch inquiry finds: Investigation into the Netherlands’ support for 2003 war finds military action was not justified under UN resolutions,” Afua Hirsch, The Guardian (UK), 12 January 2010.
22. “Captured Documents: Military Historians and Terrorism Scholars vs. Anthropologists?” Mark Stout, On War and Words, 15 January 2010.
23. “Revealed: Jack Straw’s secret warning to Tony Blair on Iraq,” Michael Smith, The Sunday Times, 17 January 2010.
24. “Captured Documents, Historians, Anthropologists, etc. (Part II),” Mark Stout, On War and Words, 18 January 2010.
25. “Captured Documents, Historians, Anthropologists, etc. (Part III),” Mark Stout, On War and Words, 18 January 2010.
26. “Iraq’s battle is one for the books,” Matti Friedman, Josef Federman, Randy Herschaft, The Washington Times, 20 January 2010.
27. “Iraq Demands Jewish Artifacts Be Returned,” Virtual Jerusalem, 04 May 2010.
28. “Iraq: Agreement with the United States to recover Jewish archives,” Ennahar Online, 14 May 2010.
29. “US agrees to return Iraq records,” Anne Barker, ABC News, 14 May 2010.
30. “Iraq asks U.S. to return millions of archive documents,” Aseel Kami, Reuters, 19 May 2010.
31. “Iraq asks Hoover to return records,” Devin Banerjee, The Stanford Daily, 25 May 2010.
32. “Captured Iraqi and Terrorist Records Now Available,” Mark Stout, On War and Words, 27 May 2010.
33. “‘Cultural cleansing’ of Iraq?” David Tresillian, Al-Ahram, 03-09 June 2010.
34. “The United Nations, International Law, and the War in Iraq,” Rachel S. Taylor, World Press Review, no date.

Click here to see Saad Eskander interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show

Maximilian C. Forte is a professor of anthropology in Montreal, Canada. His opinions are his own and writes here entirely in a private capacity and not as a representative of any institution, which remains unnamed for these reasons. He is the author of Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago (2005), and the editor of Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival And Revival (2006) and Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century (2010).

For more, please see the main site for the Zero Anthropology Project. What follows is a very brief synopsis.

He started this site back in October of 2007, when it was called “Open Anthropology” and resembled more of a blog than it does now. On this site Max writes about militarism, the militarization of the social sciences, U.S. foreign policy, imperialism, decolonization, the Human Terrain System, the Minerva Research Initiative, and AFRICOM. He also writes about anthropology after empire, and occasionally items about the Caribbean, with a mixture of humorous pieces, video posts, and fiction. His articles on Zero Anthropology have covered topics pertaining to Canada, the U.S., Trinidad & Tobago, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Gaza, Libya, and Afghanistan. All of these articles are listed on the Contents page of this site, and categorized here. Also see the parent site for this project. Max is also a founding member of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace (AJP).

Max sometimes goes by the name of Dr. Rat (after being “accused” of defending “the rat people” of Afghanistan); he also goes by 1D4TW (“One Day for the Watchman”).

Here are some of Max’s main series on Zero Anthropology (to be updated as more material is added):

The ZERO SERIES (in progress):

1. Welcome to ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY: The End of the Beginning of the End
2. 0.20: “Potentially Dangerous Implications for the Practice of Anthropology Today”
3. 0.19: Questions about Colonialism and Anthropology: Epistemology, Methodology, and Politics
4. 0.189: Stanley Diamond & Claude Lévi-Strauss on the Nature and Future of Anthropology
5. 0.185: Terms of Incorporation, Concepts of Domination
6. 0.18: Anthropology and the Rise of the Social Sciences within the Structures of Knowledge – Immanuel Wallerstein
   
7. 0.179: Imperialism, Americanization, and the Social Sciences
8. 0.178: The Social Production of Science and Anthropology as Knowledge for Domination
9. 0.171: Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: Vassos Argyrou

The HTS & MILITARIZATION SERIES (2010):

1. 02 February 2010: Bibliography and Archive: The Military, Intelligence Agencies, and the Academy (with special reference to anthropology) – Documents, News, Reports – subsequent updates to be found here.
2. 28 February 2010 (with subsequent updates): Mapping the Terrain of War Corporatism: The Human Terrain System within the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.
3. 04 March 2010: Multiplying Human Terrain Dreams of Victory and Fortune.
4. 19 March 2010: Information Traffickers of the Imperial State: American Anthropologists and Other Academics.
5. 27 March 2010: AFRICOM, Human Terrain, Empire, and Anthropology.
6. 27 March 2010: Mercenary Humanism.
7. 27 March 2010: CIA Feminism.
8. 04 April 2010: 100 percent (Militarized) American.
9. 20 May 2010: Imperial Instruction: The Human Terrain System’s Academic Trainers, Part 1.
10. 20 May 2010: Imperial Instruction: The Human Terrain System’s Academic Trainers, Part 2.
11. 21 May 2010: Human Terrain System Criticized by U.S. Congress.
12. 28 May 2010: Time Line and FAQ for the Human Terrain System and Responses by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association.
13. 29 May 2010: The Pentagon’s “Other” Human Terrain System?
14. 29 May 2010: Changing Fortunes in Washington: The Evolution of House Armed Services Committee Reports on the Human Terrain System.
15. 30 May 2010: SCRATs: AFRICOM after the Human Terrain System.
16. 03 June 2010: Human Terrain System Video News: John Stanton, and the AGS Bowman Expeditions in Mexico.
17. 07 June 2010: A Major Report of a Minor Exception, or a Minor Report of a Major Problem? The American Anthropological Association’s CEAUSSIC vis-à-vis the Human Terrain System, Part 1.
18. 07 June 2010: A Major Report of a Minor Exception, or a Minor Report of a Major Problem? The American Anthropological Association’s CEAUSSIC vis-à-vis the Human Terrain System, Part 2.

The WIKILEAKS SERIES (2010): here you can get a complete list of all of my articles, wherever published, focusing on Wikileaks.

Max has also written over 200 posts on HTS, Minerva, and the militarization of academia, since this blog began–those items are all listed here.

ARAB REVOLUTIONS, LIBYA WAR SERIES (2011):

1. The Fall of the American Wall: Tunisia, Egypt, and Beyond
2. EE: Report #11, Focus on Egypt
3. Encircling Empire: Report #12, FOCUS ON EGYPT: Revolution and Counter-Revolution
4. The American Anthropological Association and Egypt: It’s Mostly About the Artifacts?
5. Egypt and the Clinton Doctrine
6. Encircling Empire: Report #13—Revolution, Intervention, Anthropology
7. Globalization, Compression, and the Desire for Intervention
8. Encircling Empire: Report #14—Foreign Military Intervention in Libya: A Report on Neo-colonial dependency and humanitarian imperialism
9. The Libyan Revolution is Dead: Notes for an Autopsy
10. The Humanitarian-Militarist Project and the Production of Empire in Libya
11. Libya and the Passive Repeaters: Deploying Depleted Information Warheads
12. Libya: What Revolution? Whose Revolution?
13. The War in Libya: Race, “Humanitarianism,” and the Media, published in Essays on Empire at Open Salon

AL JAZEERA

Starting in August of 2010, Max began authoring a series of monthly columns for Al Jazeera (Arabic and English websites):

1. 08 August 2010: نواقص في تسريبات ويكيليكس
2. 17 September 2010: الهجوم على ويكيليكس.. هل من مخرج؟
3. 16 February 2011: مصر والإمبراطورية الأميركية
4. 22 February 2011: “The Clinton doctrine: US reaction to events unfolding in the Arab world reveals the emergence of more insidious approach,” Al Jazeera English.

COUNTERPUNCH

Also starting in August of 2010, a series of articles began to be produced for CounterPunch:

1. 14 December 2010: Notes from the Insurrection: The Wikileaks Revolution
2. 02 August 2010: Reason for Celebration, Cause for Concern: The Wikileaks Afghan War Diary — reprinted by Alternet as “7 Reasons Why We Should Celebrate Wikileaks, and 8 Reasons It’s Not the Panacea Some Are Calling It: The release of thousands of documents from the failed war in Afghanistan is a major milestone that should be celebrated. But it also opens up questions about Wikileaks.”
3. 11 August 2010: Unhinged at the US State Department and Pentagon: A War on Wikileaks? – also republished on Mathaba — also translated into Spanish, appearing on Spain’s Rebelión, “¿Guerra contra Wikileaks? Desquiciados en el Departamento de Estado y el Pentágono;” and the latter became the basis for this article in the Venezuelan newspaper, Correo del Orinoco, “EEUU amenaza a los soldados que busquen consultar los documentos – El Pentágono pretende callar a Wikileaks.”

MONTHLY REVIEW

In the media:

Max Forte has also been interviewed or quoted, or his articles reprinted, in the following media, with the latest  instance appearing first:

1. Interviewed by Phil Taylor, CIUT 89.5 FM, “The Taylor Report” (on liberal imperialism, “humanitarian” interventionism, human rights, and the media), August 15. Click here  for the podcast.
   
2. Interviewed by Brendan Stone, CFMU 93.3 FM, “Unusual Sources” (on Libya, race, mercenaries, and the media), 27 April 2011. The podcast is also available here, and here.
3. Interviewed by War News Radio for “Leaked,” 29 October 2010.
4. Interviewed for: “Coverage of the G20 proved Twitter’s news edge,” by Antonia Zerbisias, The Star, 11 July 2010.
5. Interviewed by War News Radio for “The Human Terrain,” 18 June 2010.
6. The Dominion, “Building Heroes: Professors protest Project Hero as military PR ploy,” by Cameron Fenton, 31 May 2010.
7. Reproduction of article on AFRICOM, “SCRATs: AFRICOM after the Human Terrain System,” in The Accra Mail of Ghana, 02 June 2010, and in Modern Ghana, 01 June 2010.
8. Interviewed on Al Jazeera Arabic, In Depth, Monday, 19 April 2010:
   
9. The Dominion, “The Ethnography of an Air-Strike: Canada’s military academics in the Afghan war and at home,” by Cameron Fenton, 12 April 2010.
10. Zero Anthropology was featured in the American Anthropologist‘s Public Anthropology Reviews: “Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs,” by David H. Price, American Anthropologist, 112 (1) March 2010, pages 140-142 (available here and here).
11. Reproduction and translation into Farsi of “America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution,” click here.
12. Reproduction and translation into Arabic of “America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution,” on Al Jazeera or here.
13. Reproduction of “America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution,” on Mathaba or here.
14. Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt): Date line: #IranElection.
15. As-Safir (Lebanon): «إيران إيليكشن»: «تويتر»
    بدلاً من الخيار العسكري على إيران؟.
16. CubaDebate: Twitter, del miedo y las ilusiones.
17. Boston Globe: Anthropologist’s War Death Reverberates.
18. Derek Walcott’s response to Max on the BBC.
19. Newsday (Trinidad): A Brief Overview of the History of Arima’s
    Indigenous People.
20. UAE’s The National on the Human Terrain System.
21. Washington Post: Military’s Social Science Grants Raise Alarm.

For almost two years we have heard little more than passing statements and speculation about the U.S. Army’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) adopting the “human terrain” concept or deploying human terrain teams in Africa, even if individuals in the Human Terrain System seemed relatively confident this would happen (particularly, Montgomery McFate on the Charlie Rose show in December of 2007, and Christopher A. King, in person in May of 2008). On this and a related site, I previously spoke about AFRICOM in “AFRICOM, Human Terrain, Empire, and Anthropology,” “Resisting AfriCOM: The U.S. Military’s Imperial Reoccupation of Africa,” “The ‘Culture’ Virus: The Human Terrain System spreads to Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean,” and, “Human Terrain System spreads to Africa: ‘Oil and Terrorism’.” Another post, “AfriCOM: Africa, U.S. Imperialism, and Resistance,” that featured efforts to resist AFRICOM, received the visits and comments from a very pleasant Doug Brooks, on behalf of an international association of mercenaries known as the International Peace Operations Association, which also includes Audrey Roberts, a HTS employee, on its staff (see “Mercenary Humanism”).

The question here is whether HTS will in fact play the role in AFRICOM that has been anticipated, given the development of an AFRICOM Social Science Research Center that is not in its hands, and the proposed formation of new research teams (SCRATs) that abide by ethical standards and promise to uphold academic integrity, showing a greater political reflexivity than HTS ever has.

Another Time Line: HTS in AFRICOM?

Let us start by reviewing a sample of what we have heard about HTS and AFRICOM over the past two years:

On 16 May 2008, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee in its report stated its support for AFRICOM implementing Human Terrain 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” (p. 475). HTTs were then described by the HASC as “critical enablers to shaping military planning in pre-conflict environments, and are supportive of reconstruction and stabilization efforts” (p. 475).

In January of 2009, Nathan Hodge reported that,

“it looks like the human terrain teams—or something very much like them—are coming to Africa. Research and risk management firm Archimedes Global, Inc. recently sent out help-wanted ads for a new ‘socio-cultural cell’ within U.S. Africa Command, the new regional military headquarters. Within two months of the contract start, the company will deploy a six-contractor team to eastern Africa. The job description states:

“USAFRICOM requires approximately 24 personnel to support the base effort.  On day one of the contract, USAFRICOM requires six (6) contractor personnel to make up the first Socio-Cultural Cell and an additional six (6) contractor personnel will be required to make up the Social Scientist Research Center (SSRC).”

It seemed clear then that HTS would try to maneuver its way into AFRICOM. As Hodge reported, “Fondacaro has visited AFRICOM as a preliminary step towards setting up human terrain teams there.” However, as he noted, “the AFRICOM job description is for a ‘socio-cultural cell,’ not a human terrain team. Is there some re-branding at work here? Or might the two projects work side-by-side?” Since HTS has already lost its monopoly on “human terrain” research, within the U.S. Army itself, what we now know is that more than just rebranding is involved.

(Archimedes Global Inc. is one of the corporations that I covered previously, though it may have been contracted by the U.S. Army’s “other” human terrain analysis branch, rather than HTS proper.)

In a 29 July 2009 job ad from BAE Systems, “AFRICOM Mid-Level Human Terrain Analyst,” we see a call for people with “expertise in research, and knowledge of empirical research within the theoretical concepts in academia (behavioral psychology, social psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography, history, economics, and political science)” and “expert level knowledge in geospacial analytical tools and methods, and social networking models.” The location would be AFRICOM’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.

David H. Price, in an interview with Dahr Jamail for a report published on 26 January 2010 (“When Scholars Join the Slaughter”), said of possible AFRICOM plans for HTS:

“The military seems increasingly interested in adapting some sort of Human Terrain like program for use in AFRICOM, and given AFRICOM’s merging of military personnel and projects with counterinsurgent tactics and goals, it stands to reason that as AFRICOM takes on an increasing role in exploiting civil unrest in Africa as a way to leverage an increasing American military presence in resource rich Africa, something like HTS will be a part of these plans. Given all the bad publicity HTS has been getting, I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed the name but used a similar program.”

Then very recently, other job advertisements began to appear, for social scientists to join the Pentagon and work in Africa. This one, for “4th PSYOP Group (ABN) – Researcher/analyst (Intelligence Specialist, IA-032-Band 3),” announced that there were four positions open for two-year terms:

The U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group seeks regional specialists in African studies with graduate-level knowledge of the political, social, cultural, economic and/or communications environment. Four temporary positions are now open at the IA-Band 3 level. The beginning salary for the positions is $59,158. These are two-year temporary positions. A successful candidate must have strong reading and listening comprehension skills in a language directly associated with their area of studies; be able to conduct social science or intelligence-related research and analysis; be able to write high quality studies and assessments in English at the MA level or higher, using a broad range of data and sources. Research experience in North Africa, East Africa/Horn of Africa, Central Africa, or West Africa is desirable. The position requires travel within the U.S. and abroad. Ability to work closely with U.S. and possibly foreign military personnel is essential, but military experience is not required. Must be a U.S. citizen and be able to obtain and keep at least a SECRET level security clearance. The position closes on 17 June 2010.

The latter is neither explicitly connected with HTS, nor does it mention AFRICOM, but I include it since it shows the multiplication of programs that effectively do the same thing: incorporating academics to do research in Africa for the Pentagon. That is the most important detail, and of greatest relevance to us, rather than the particular unit involved.

Lately, as reported on 24 May 2010 by Mark Mazetti in The New York Times, “U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast”:

“General Petraeus’s September order is focused on intelligence gathering—by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others—to identify militants and provide “persistent situational awareness,” while forging ties to local indigenous groups.”

This is part of a radical expansion of the U.S.’ clandestine military activity.

As noted here recently, this does not necessarily imply involvement by HTS as such, seeing that the U.S. Army has expanded and in some ways duplicated the implementation of “human terrain” programs in its fold.

Scratch HTTs? SCRATs

In the last three weeks I received two unclassified documents prepared by Dr. Christopher Varhola, the Director of the Social Science Research Center at AFRICOM. One is a short “information paper,” titled “U.S. Africa Command Intelligence and Knowledge Development Social Science Research Center (SSRC).” The second paper, a draft plan circulated to invite commentary, is titled “Guiding Principles and Operating Procedures U.S. Africa Command Social Science Research Center.” If it was meant as a sub-media campaign, it has been limited to academic email networks, and one article in Wired’s Danger Room.

Varhola describes AFRICOM’s Social Science Research Center as “a seven-person core element located in Stuttgart,” which will deploy “a Socio-Cultural Research and Advisory Team (SCRAT) that will operate with the explicit approval of the country team in the countries to be visited.” While he speaks of the approval of the “country team” in place in a given African nation, he does not indicate how, or if, a SCRAT goes about gaining the permission and approval of an African nation in order to conduct its work.

SCRATs appear to be AFRICOM’s version of Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), and a SCRAT also comprises one to five members. There is no indication, in either document, of whether SCRAT members would all be social scientists or not, a point on which the documents remain vague—in the second document: “A SCRAT is composed of individuals with a variety of skill sets.  The specific composition of a SCRAT is determined by the SSRC to best address problem-driven research.” A SCRAT’s work consists of providing “socio-cultural advice in support of DoD activities, to include exercises, humanitarian civic action, and interaction with security forces.” Left ambiguous here is what those Pentagon “activities” are, what is meant by “exercises,” and what is the nature of the “interaction” with “security forces” (what kind? U.S. forces? Local forces? Paramilitary groups? Hired soldiers of fortune?).

Varhola promises “full disclosure and transparency” on the part of SCRATs, with publications to be made accessible to the wider public, and that “SCRAT members will present statements of ethics and research designs describing funding sources, methods, and objectives.”

There is an indication that research produced by SCRATs will be presented at conferences, and submitted to scholarly journals for publication, as well as through in-house publications. If and when that happens, it will be interesting to see how academic specialists working in Africa, without any ties to the military, perceive, evaluate, and react to the research produced by their military-affiliated colleagues. It will also be important to learn if those without military ties, are suspected of having them nonetheless by local communities that have been previously visited by a SCRAT.

There is no discussion as to why SCRATs are to be deployed, even when the draft repeatedly acknowledges the presence of local researchers. In addition, given the many social scientists doing research in Africa, independent of the military, it is not clear why AFRICOM needs to have its own social science teams, and how the knowledge they produce is expected to be different—and it must be different, or else this draft is a plea for wasting taxpayer funds on redundant activities. Why is current academic research not good enough? What is AFRICOM really looking for?

Yet, the documents, and in particular the longer one, are mindful about the need for strict adherence to ethical codes, and in what might be the first time that I have read anything like this in a document relating to academics supporting military activity, there is recognition of “academic freedom.” Ethical research is discussed in two full sections in the longer draft, and appears at other points throughout. The SSRC has its own code of ethics—attached as an appendix to the longer draft. Varhola stresses that

“research will be carried out in full compliance with the local norms, customs, and laws as well as the ethical guidelines laid out in the SSRC Code of Ethics. Researchers will make their research objectives clear and will remain aware of the concerns and welfare of the individuals or communities studied.”

They promise to obtain “freely given, informed consent.” The consent form provided in the longer document does not appear to require formal identification of an informant, or ask for his or her signature. Informants’ identities will be concealed, and will be permitted to speak “off the record.” Indeed, “we will not be involved in activities that will harm our credibility as social scientists or compromise our relationship with local communities.” Researchers will not be tasked with research that they have not been trained to undertake as part of their professional development—“for ethical reasons, team members will employ the skills in which they are proficient, and will not employ methods that go beyond the scope of their training and professional experience.”

There is no mention of a training program, so that unlike HTS, it seems that AFRICOM’s SSRC intends to hire only fully qualified individuals. There is also no mention of a “reach back center,” like HTS has, other than the SSRC headquarters in Stuttgart itself.

Varhola promises that “SSRC and SCRAT identify their highest priority as conducting research in a manner consistent with ‘do no harm’,” and that “to the best of our abilities we will conduct our research in accordance with the guidelines of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the National Research Act, and the Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Subjects set forth in the Belmont Report.” Researchers will not be required to act in a manner that is contrary to the SSRC’s Code of Ethics.

SCRATs will deploy “prior to a U.S. military exercise,” in order to “conduct a socio-cultural assessment to better focus U.S. efforts and develop beneficial objectives.” They may also “accompany U.S. forces during the exercise in a cultural advisory capacity and conduct a post-exercise assessment of the impact on the local population.” “Ideally,” Varhola writes, “SCRATs will collaborate with local researchers.”

There seems to be some consciousness of the fact that a SCRAT must comport itself in a manner that does not offend local sensibilities: “Our relationship with the communities we work with in Africa is crucial as it contributes to shaping African perceptions of U.S. Africa Command and the United States.” In addition, Varhola adds they have a “commitment to conduct ourselves in a professional and responsible manner whenever we carry out research, and to treat all people with dignity, respect, and transparency.”

There does not seem to be any naivety about how SCRATs will be perceived, given their role in the U.S. military and association with AFRICOM, widely opposed across the African continent: “We are conscious that our research has socio-political implications….we will carefully take into consideration the apprehension with which military (both U.S. and other military groups) activities are perceived and the political contexts in which we are operating.” Indeed, this theme is developed further:

“US military presence on the African continent is sometimes regarded with strong misgivings. There are many reasons for this skepticism, some political and some historical. It would not be an exaggeration to say that suspicion related to the activities of U.S. military forces on the continent is a reality, especially among African intellectuals. As such, there is a strong burden to gain and maintain the trust and confidence of academic counterparts and populations at large.”

While seemingly conscious of the need to distance academic research from violent military application, the longer draft is at best ambiguous on this point. Varhola states:

“The SSRC and SCRAT will provide direct support to military task forces operating in Africa. SCRATs are under the operational control (OPCON) of these units. While the task force might have missions that involve the use of force, the collection of intelligence, and/or intent to counter violent extremism, SCRAT’s mandate is to adhere to the academic and ethical codes set forth in this document.”

SCRATS might undertake “research into socio-political conditions that could foster violent extremism,” but, Varhola adds, “SSRC and SCRAT are not actively involved in task force missions to counter violent extremism” that might also compromise “credible academic research.”

Again, there is some ambiguity here, as there necessarily must be whenever academic research is tied to a military institution inserting itself into a zone of acute conflict, as one of the interested parties. SCRATs are not “actively” involved in countering “violent extremism” (the Obama administration’s preference for this over “war on terror” is in evidence here), which means they can be “passively” or indirectly involved, and this could well be perceived by local actors. What happens then? If local researchers or a local community protest the presence of a SCRAT, and its ties to a U.S. military mission, will the SCRAT leave? The document does not raise, and thus does not answer, such questions.

Post-Traumatic Revision or a Soft Sell?

It would seem indisputable that the proposals for SCRATs working under AFRICOM are very mindful of the public controversies and raging debates surrounding HTS, and that AFRICOM does not wish to repeat the same mistakes. These documents were drafted in a context of debate with one or more members of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, on the assumption that research that was completely transparent, not linked to the “war on terror,” nor designed to do harm, would not meet with their active disapproval or condemnation—as I say, that has been his stated assumption. Rather than dismiss all concerns, AFRICOM’s Varhola seems prepared to raise them and address any new ones posed to him. These documents are deliberately circulated by him, not simply to “make news,” but to request input. Feel free to write to him at Christopher.varhola@africom.mil. I say not simply to make news, rather than dismissing that aspect altogether—Varhola’s approach, contrasted to that of McFate, is the more academically-sensitive, low key approach, going as far as calling for feedback.

What he will do with such feedback is open to question. He has not been sympathetic to the works of Catherine Lutz or David Vine, and his own position seems to take the military, and militarization, as a permanent given, not one to be condemned, and not open to what has been a classical mainstay of anthropology, in fact: imagining alternative social orders on the basis of lessons learned from very different societies.

There are, on the surface, some striking differences between AFRICOM’s SSRC and HTS. For one, there is no great public propaganda campaign for the SSRC, as mentioned. Varhola is not parading himself as the social sciences’ new public star—he is not photographed wearing big hats, or detailing the troubles of growing up as a teen. There is no attempt to target anthropology as the premiere discipline of choice for the kind of work to be done by SCRATs, although it is quite clear that it is implied, and he maintains an active interest in military anthropology. On the whole, SCRATs seem to be designed to have a lighter footprint—not directly connected to war and counterinsurgency, there is no talk about housing SCRATs on military bases, or having them do their research in battle gear in the company of a heavily armed military patrol. The documents do not say that can never happen, however. These documents seem to be far more concerned about ethics than anything produced by HTS. Indeed, they have at least a rudimentary Code of Ethics, and a promise of ethical review. A lawyer will be on a panel that oversees plans for research. Academic integrity appears to be a paramount concern. Again, for those of us immersed in HTS debates for the past few years, this has a sound of being different, at the very least, an overtly cautious modification. HTS also promised open access research products—and indeed, we have had at least a couple of papers circulate (included in this site’s document box)—and we will have to see if SSRC does better in keeping the promise.

A few notes about the SSRC’s director. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Varhola, U.S. Army, was a civil affairs reservist, and is a cultural anthropologist, having earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the Catholic University of America in 2007. He is a Commander in the 457^th Civil Affairs Battalion, based in Kaiserslautern, Germany. His main applied interests in anthropology have been in cultural heritage protection, with experience in Iraq. He has been stationed in different parts of the Middle East for over six years, with postings in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. In 1991, in the Gulf War, he was a tank platoon leader with the 2^nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He was also in the U.S. occupation of Iraq after 2003, in the 352^nd Civil Affairs Battalion. Varhola has spoken out against U.S. abuses in Iraq, on the use of excessive force, and he was the author of a report that detailed American use of collective detentions in Iraq, including the detention of wives and children of suspected “insurgents” to get them to surrender or to talk.

Lingering Questions, Continuing Debates

The largest issues of debate still remain. There are also many questions, some listed above, that remain to be answered by Varhola and others involved with AFRICOM. For example, and in no particular order:

1. A need to be more precise about what SCRATs will actually do, and not just what they will not do, and how they will go about not doing it.
2. Explanation of the military-academic context in which SCRATs will work—where do they fit in, exactly, in an arena increasingly populated with Human Terrain Teams, Human Terrain Analysis Teams, Civil Affairs operatives, Foreign Area Officers, Psychological Operations, Minerva-funded academics, and “warrior diplomats”? Thus, again, what will SCRATs do that is not being done by any of these, and therefore, what is their real, distinctive purpose? Varhola has not yet explained that.
3. If they are conscious of the socio-political implications of their work, as Varhola says they are, and how their activities will be perceived (so perhaps it is best that he not shut himself off from anthropological/activist condemnations prematurely)—then what exactly will they do with this consciousness? Apologize repeatedly? Understand that the validity of the information they gain may be seriously compromised, perhaps even rendered useless, and thus not publish?
4. SCRATs will not be a part of the “war on terror,” and yet AFRICOM is—so how does an AFRICOM-embedded unit distance itself from AFRICOM in order to maintain academic credibility and gain acceptance from local communities?

While SCRATs and AFRICOM seem to be where the focus of our debates will go, after HTS, and after Afghanistan, and even after counterinsurgency—all of which are efforts in decline—I am not sure that Varhola will easily succeed in disarming critics. Indeed, in some ways, Varhola brings military anthropology into a far more contentious arena, with many more critical activists than HTS ever had to face. Resistance to AFRICOM, both in Africa, and in the U.S., has been organized and widespread for years now, so that anthropologists critical of AFRICOM find themselves with a new mass of potential allies. We have seen ongoing action from Resist AFRICOM, with several supporting organizations; public education critical of AFRICOM (see these resources as well); the formation of Africa Against AFRICOM; the near universal African rejection of AFRICOM (which is why Varhola’s SSRC is in Stuttgart, and not on the African continent); a great many African-Americans incensed about a militarized approach to African problems; and the prominent activism of actor Danny Glover (“Say No to Africom”; “Actor and Activist Danny Glover & TransAfrica Forum’s Nicole Lee on the U.S. Militarization of Africa and Africom”). Which Hollywood celebrity ever stood up to denounce HTS?

Varhola will be working in a political arena that is far larger than HTS ever faced. Opposition to AFRICOM is popular, and in some countries, massively so. Varhola does not address this. His writing on how SCRATs may be perceived is too diplomatic and understated to be adequate. The issue of the militarization of anthropology would thus also get new audiences, and much larger ones.

Issues raised by critics of the Minerva Research Initiative, are in most cases just as relevant to debating SCRATs in AFRICOM. How will this newest military foray into academic research, with a new source of funding, alter what research is done and which gains prominence? How will open alignment of academic research with the military, and U.S. foreign policy, affect how all American academics are viewed and received?

While Varhola writes a lot about the ethics of the SSRC’s research procedures, this does not go very far. To be fair, it does not go much further with most other academics either, as I raised earlier when speaking of deontological and consequentialist stances. At any rate, compared with HTS, Varhola has done almost infinitely more to address the ethics debate. The debate around the morality and politics of militarization, will continue, with or without Varhola.

Nonetheless, it is not likely that the debate will be as straightforward as it was against HTS,  an entity whose self-presentation was brash and brazen, emerging in a context where the attitudes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, literally ruled. Occupation and counterinsurgency may not be the premiere concepts here. The premiere concepts for critics will likely be those pertaining to penetration, infiltration, and surveillance (oh no, here come the Foucauldians). SCRATs will be deployed in countries where, unlike the case of HTTs, U.S. forces are not leading a military occupation. If HTS returned us to paradigms derived from counterinsurgency in Vietnam, and the use of social scientists in that, AFRICOM is returning us to British colonial anthropology in Africa, in the latter decades of the empire. CORDS, Phoenix, and Camelot may not be as relevant now as revisiting the histories of the International African Institute, the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, and the work of Seligman, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, Nadel, Schapera, and others. We may need, given that “academic integrity” and “academic freedom” have been promised to SCRAT members, to revisit the conflicts, contradictions, and (ir)relevance of anthropological work for colonial officials. Fortunately, new research is being done precisely in this area—see this extensive review of Ordering Africa, and the author’s response, which directly addresses HTS debates.

A persisting issue will be precisely that of militarization, and of the decisively un-anthropological stance of taking the military for granted as a political institution, removed to some place beyond question, with no alternative social order imaginable, and with the result that all we can do is to accommodate ourselves to that fact. That leaves the door permanently open to war. In the meantime, many tens of thousands of Americans have gone to enjoy their retirement in Costa Rica, a country that abolished its army in 1949, and that since then has not had a civil war, not gone to war, and not been invaded, in a region that has known many military dictatorships, cross border incursions, and civil wars, for decades. Each December 1^st, Costa Ricans celebrate Army Abolition Day. How utterly implausible. Indeed, if Americans are incapable of imagining an alternative order, they certainly seem capable of living in one. If debating “military anthropologists” means that such topics are restricted and removed from the agenda, then no, we can have no productive dialogues. They would then become uninteresting and unenlightened interlocutors whose ambition is to merely use us as tools to serve their agendas.

Pressed on how I interpreted the language, I recently replied, “one way to understand it might be to read it as what it is not saying–for example, it is not saying that the future of the program is guaranteed, and it is not saying that there will be an increase in funding, or that the funding will be continuous even in the short term.” Another way to put the language in context, is to juxtapose all three statements made by the HASC about HTS over the past two years.

2008

In what appears to be the first instance, here is the HASC’s final report on H.R. 5658, dated 16 May 2008:

“The committee notes that today’s military forces are involved in a growing number of complex missions from counterinsurgency to security and stability operations. These missions are best served by a security force that understands and appreciates the individual, tribal, cultural, ethnic, religious, social, economic, and other aspects of the human terrain. The committee supports the Department’s effort to reshape their approach to research, training, and doctrine to adapt to the current irregular warfare environment. The Department’s creation and deployment of Human Terrain Teams (HTT) that employ cultural awareness and analysis practices notes one approach toward adapting to complex military operations” (p. 271).

“In title XV of this Act, the committee notes the contributions of the prototype HTTs currently supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and believes that sound research and resulting tools are key technology enablers for success of these teams now and in the future” (pp. 271-272).

“The committee recommends $13.4 million, an increase of $4.0 million, in PE 63670D8Z and $8.0 million, an increase of $2.0 million, in PE 64670D8Z for the continued development, demonstration and rapid transition of key technologies supporting human terrain understanding and forecasting to include, Mapping the Human Terrain Joint Capability Technology Demonstration and the Conflict Modeling, Planning and Outcome Experimentation Program” (p. 272).

Not just additional monetary support, but this unmistakable endorsement:

“The committee has also been encouraged by the success of integrating social science expertise into Department of Defense operations via the Human Terrain Teams (HTT), which provide culturally relevant advice to military decision makers. As has been pointed out in recent testimony before the committee, these teams provide value added to traditional military operational planning and have been instrumental in saving lives in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. The committee believes that more programs in the future should be informed by social science research” (p. 279)

And, the grand finale in their report on HTS in 2008—money, well wishing, applause:

“The committee supports the concept for the prototype Human Terrain Teams (HTT) currently supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. HTTs have been instrumental in saving the lives of coalition troops by reducing casualties among Afghani and Iraqi civilians. HTTs provide our warfighters with non-kinetic options in planning and carrying out their missions. The committee is aware that the first prototype HTT is credited with reducing kinetic operations by more than 60 percent during its first 6 months of deployment in Operation Enduring Freedom. HTTs are critical enablers to shaping military planning in pre-conflict environments, and are supportive of reconstruction and stabilization efforts. HTTs 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” (p. 479)

2009

What a difference a year can make.

HASC’s final report on H.R. 2647, dated 18 June 2009:

“The committee continues to support the concept behind the Human Terrain Teams (HTT) and the overall Human Terrain System (HTS). In the committee report (H. Rept. 110–652) accompanying the Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, the committee expressed support for expansion of the HTT concept, including to other combatant command areas of responsibility” (p. 154)

But?

“The committee is aware of anecdotal evidence indicating the benefits of the program supporting operations in the Republic of Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The committee also notes that a number of press accounts provide anecdotal evidence indicating problems with management and resourcing. The committee finds it difficult to evaluate either set of information in the absence of reliable, empirical data” (pp. 154-155).

Therefore?

“Therefore, the committee directs the Secretary of Defense to conduct an independent assessment of the Human Terrain System, and submit to the congressional defense committees a report detailing that assessment by March 1, 2010. The independent assessment should consider the following elements:
(1) An overview of all of the components of HTS, including related technology development efforts;
(2) The adequacy of the management structure for HTS;
(3) The metrics used to evaluate each of the components of HTS;
(4) The adequacy of human resourcing and recruiting efforts, including the implications of converting some contractor positions to government positions;
(5) An identification of skills that are not resident in government or military positions, and how the Army can leverage academic networks or contracting opportunities to fill those gaps;
(6) An identification of policy or regulatory issues hindering program execution; and
(7) The potential to integrate HTS capabilities into existing Exercises” (p. 155).

2010

HASC’s final report on H.R. 5136, dated 20 May 2010:

“While the Committee remains supportive of the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) to leverage social science expertise to support operational commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is increasingly concerned that the Army has not paid sufficient attention to addressing certain concerns. The Committee encourages the Department to continue to develop a broad range of opportunities that leverage the important contributions that can be offered by social science expertise to support key missions such as irregular warfare, counterinsurgency, and stability and reconstruction operations. The bill limits the obligation of funding for HTS until the Army submits a required assessment of the program, provides revalidation of all existing operations requirements, and certifies Department-level guidelines for the use of social scientists” (p. 25).

Has there been a change of tone, a decline in enthusiasm, more questions being asked, less praise, and less mention of new money to support the program? It seems so.

Next: to complete the series of research articles that I began on HTS on this site starting earlier this year, and then resume the interrupted Zero series.

“The Secretary, acting through the Under Secretary for Science and Technology, shall designate a university-based center or several university-based centers for homeland security. The purpose of the center or these centers shall be to establish a coordinated, university-based system to enhance the nation’s homeland security.”

Uniform “Research”

We have been looking at the array of private corporations with contracts for intelligence, surveillance, and targeted killing that are involved in recruiting, training, and equipping the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, and its program of recruiting social scientists. In addition, we examined some examples of the “human terrain” as a doctrine, taken up by both independent and university-based research institutes, and by sections of the military itself and for itself, without necessarily seeking the aid of the academy. Here we look at a broader phenomenon, more reminiscent of the way the national security state has tried to rope academics into “terror research” via the Minerva Research Initiative. In particular, we are dealing with universities, or units within them, making themselves into willing servants of the national security state, actively seeking contracts for terror research, selling their expertise to make war against those who resist unprovoked aggression and occupation by the U.S. state.

In essence they are selling protection, in this case knowledge for protection (“security”), and as we have seen this is not the only suggestion of racketeering. More than that, we are faced with a case of what some might call the Sovietization of the academy, what others could rightly identify as the reinvention of a fascist university that aligns with the state, under the guise of serving the people, hoping we do not detain our attention on the fact that it is in classical fascist regimes where the state is equated with the people.

We ought to be reminded here of the very wise warnings that have been articulated by Hugh Gusterson and David Price, and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists to which they belong:

in a society where thought is already too deeply militarized, academic spaces of dissent from the prevailing military mindset will be further eroded as researchers talk themselves into believing that telling the military how to do kinder, gentler, more informed military occupations represents critical thinking. (Hugh Gusterson and here in “Unveiling Minerva)

Regarding the iron clad institutionalization of the Lysenko doctrine in the Soviet academy, David H. Price wrote,

So powerful was Lysenko’s impact that the bogus experimental data he produced to justify his work stood unchallenged for decades as valid empirical work.

Soviet biologists learned to align their work with the state’s conception of the world, and the career’s of those dissidents who would not so align their views fell by the wayside.

The demands of conforming scientific knowledge with the ideological positions of a powerful state stunted the development of Soviet biology for decades.  But today, American social science faces new forms of ideologically controlled funding that stand to transform our universities’ production of knowledge in ways reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s ideological control over scientific interpretations. (David H. Price, “Social Science in Harness“)

“University” of Maryland: START…back in 1984

One example of what I mentioned in the first paragraph is in focus here: the University of Maryland’s START leading a National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, with the University of Maryland boasting that it is a “center of excellence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security“, one of several in a program instituted in 2002 — deriving its legitimacy, and supposedly its prestige (?), from such an association. According to the START website, anthropologists are among the 65 researchers working in the program. START derives its senior advisors from the military, intelligence, and defense contracting industry.

A banner image appears on the front page, with the American flag caressing the New York City skyline (the  seemingly redundant reminder that this distinctive skyline is American is meant to appeal to patriotism). It’s a skyline of patriotism, a frontline in war against “terror.” But look at this! What does this skyline have? It has the World Trade Center in it:

One might ask, “But weren’t the WTC Towers destroyed? They’re not part of that skyline anymore.” To that the banner answers, “Exactly! Now you get our point.” Making this even more ridiculous is that it decorates a university website, where intellectuals have stopped being intellectuals and have instead become data gathering apparatchiks. There is no freedom of thought here, no autonomy, rather we have ritual incantation of magical patriotic tropes, playing on fear, and we should all know very well what the powerful effect of fear is on the ability to think rationally and critically. So much for unemotional, objective science, we have its representation above.

Research at START is divided into three working groups. One looks at “terrorist group formation and recruitment.” No mention here, of course, of even the slightest hint of the possibility that the U.S. provokes responses to its own state terror, or that such an idea could even be discussed. (This is the “University” of Maryland after all, and we are not meant to read too much into that archaic first word in its title.) Far from it, and if anything one merely expressing such concerns might draw their aim, as the primary concern of this working group is “radicalization” — radicalization, happening elsewhere, according to its own laws, its own logic, hermetically sealed off from the actions and effects of U.S. imperialism.

The second working group focuses on “terrorist group persistence” — persistence, of course, because U.S. strategies have failed to do anything other than spread the conflagration. Note here the tremendous fear, and the aspersions implicitly cast by these “researchers” when it comes to “radicalization” — it turns out that the “pyramid of terrorism” includes at its base “all who sympathize with terrorist goals, even though they may disagree with terrorists’ attacks on civilians.” Get it? You may well be a terrorist.

The third working group has to do with “societal responses to terrorist threats and attacks,” which makes sense, because there is no point cultivating fear if you cannot inculcate it and train the populace to unanimously respond in concert when “threatened.” These are always innocent victims, but apparently innocent also in the sense of simpletons, mentally impaired, child-like, innocent as in retarded by fear. This is an inclusive program, that seeks to bring its findings down to the level of “household and community preparedness for terrorist attacks.”

Is START an isolated case. Hardly. Look at its impressive list of U.S. academic partner institutions.

Workshop of Military Anthropology in the UK

We find other, smaller-scale examples of universities and their academics seeking to cash in on “terror research” by offering their knowledge as a source of “protection.” One example involves the “Culture in Conflict Symposium” at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, on 16 – 17 June 2010. It includes a Workshop on “Spatial Sociocultural Knowledge” (read human terrain) and followed by a one-day Military Anthropology Workshop. There is no clearer expression of the way academics have become comfortable players in the pyramid scheme of war corporatism than when they call themselves “military anthropologists.”

U.S. Pacific Command’s Socio-Cultural Dynamics Program

Of course it is not always up to the initiative of academics to create academic centers that supply research to the national security state. As with Minerva, the state itself can seek out research, but sometimes in even more innocuous and surreptitious ways. Corey Stutte, the Engagement Manager for U.S. Pacific Command’s (PACOM) Socio-Cultural Dynamics (SCD) Program has announced that they “will have opportunities in the near future for professors and students to publish non-military related Asia-Pacific research articles that will be used by both civilian and military decision makers.” Stutte is looking for “information gaps” in “both military and socio-cultural intelligence for the Asia-Pacific region.”  How to fill those gaps? Invite academics to supply it in the form of published journal articles, as “mid to long term socio-cultural dynamics requirements…can best be met by academia,” and for that reason PACOM is establishing a quarterly academic E-Journal (yet to be named) hosted by PACOM to provide a central location for publishing research on important non-military matters.”

Stutte is the social science “academic liaison” for PACOM. Among his tasks is to “develop SCD contracts with academia and/or industry think tanks. The SCD academic outreach may include, but not be limited to, organizations with expertise in the fields of: Cultural Anthropology….” He will “develop and implement a JIOC academic/industry engagement strategy and a geo-referenced SCD data acquisition plan,” and “establish and optimize the working relationship between JIOC, academia, and industry to incorporate geo-referenced SCD data into PACOM JIOC analysis” and he will “monitor SCD data collected through PACOM’s academic outreach to ensure that data adheres to PACOM taxonomy requirements.” Surely, it is purely innocent journal publishing.

Social Scientists to Fight Jihadists

“I’ve been with would-be martyrs and holy warriors from Morocco’s Atlantic shore to Indonesia’s outer islands, and from Gaza to Kashmir….This is an apt moment for such a hearing, given the recent uptick in homegrown terror activities” — Dr. Scott Atran, anthropologist, director of research for ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling, speaking to the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, 10 March 2010, p. 2

With reference to “upticks” of violence (because they can be so calibrated, presumably) Scott Atran deployed his security-speak to address research on conflict in “hotspots” (what the rest of us know as places where U.S. hegemony is put at risk). He told the Senate subcommittee that, “If you want to be successful in the long run where it counts ─ in stopping the next and future generations of disaffected youth from finding their life’s meaning in the thrill and adventure of joining their friends in taking on the world’s mightiest power; if this committee is to be truly relevant in solving the radicalization problem that it poses, then you have to understand these pathways that take young people to and from political and group violence. Then, knowing these pathways, you can do what needs to be done” (p. 2). His major complaint was that this research was not being well funded. Money, for protection.

This is the now usual sales pitch, pioneered by the Human Terrain System: research to save lives and money (p. 2). Atran promises results, to counter “radicalization,” none of which involve the U.S. changing its basic approach to the world. The U.S. is blameless, it is those “rootless and restless” others that “we” are to be concerned about. As with the START banner above, a deep rooted patriotism is what ultimately underpins the thinking here.

Atran is not calling for another HTS program, however, his plan has one difference: “There is a pressing need for fieldwork by social scientists in actual and potential conflict zones. There is also compelling case for involving social scientists in helping to form cultural and social awareness in the military theater. Nevertheless, social scientists should not be directly embedded with military units in theater” (p. 6). Indeed, he can become quite critical of HTS, for being both counterproductive, dangerous, and should be made redundant:

I do not think that efforts like the Human Terrain System experiment in Afghanistan are all that promising. It is the infantry units themselves that should be trained before they go in theater to be culturally sensitive, and not have to rely on temporarily embedded “combat ethnographers” who move from unit to unit, thus undoing the personal connections that may have made them effective with the local population by providing medical aid and other needed non military services.

such efforts as these, small as they are, are potentially quite counterproductive. They only further alienate most social science academics from the military or, indeed, from any involvement in U.S. policy decision making that involves projection of power or conflict. The military and cultural reality of the terrain may favor having embedded social scientists be uniformed and armed (in part, because unarmed Western civilians would more likely draw fire as high-value targets). But the possibility that social scientists themselves would have to fire their weapons and perhaps kill local people – indeed, the mere sight of armed and uniformed American social scientists in a foreign theater – is guaranteed to engender academia’s deep hostility. (p. 6).

Yet it is superficial critique that is offered by Atran, a mere difference over tactics, not goals, and in that he largely misses the point made by Gusterson and Price above. Atran’s “solution” to the divide between anthropology and the military is this: “Training and rewarding soldiers for being culturally knowledgeable and socially savvy ─ which goes beyond learning a language or studying a checklist of cultural preferences and habits ─ could be so much more effective for achieving our country’s political and military mission. Moreover, involvement of top social scientists in deliberations such as these, and in publicly transparent field projects, could help heal the divide between some of our best thinkers and policymakers and operators” (p. 6).

His program? “Preventing radicalization…Countering radicalization…De-radicalizing those who have committed to violence” (p. 6). Americans have not achieved this at home, but some promise success in foreign societies and cultures. Atran proposes to give “jihadist” youth new heroes (p. 7). Hamid Karzai? Mahmoud Abbas? Brittney Spears?

This program raises all the serious questions that confronted HTS. It is difficult to see how ATRIS, or START for that matter, can secure approval from an Institutional Review Board, the body that in an American university examines whether research follows basic ethical principles. It seems improbable that ATRIS researchers could secure informed consent, or engage in anything other than deceptive research whose aim is to harm those studied. It would not appear to be research that is either ethical, open, or one that respects the reputation of anthropology. Yet again, another program that will make us all look like state spies.

But what impressed me the most, especially about the tenor and content of Scott Atran’s opening words to the senators a few days ago, was that I had heard all of this long ago. Readers can ascertain this for themselves, by viewing this video clip from Atran’s address to the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities:

By Maximilian C. Forte

Over 470 reports have been published online concerning the relationships between anthropology, other parts of academia, and the military and intelligence agencies since 2001. The items covered here consist of online publications of the mainstream and alternative media, documents online referred to by journalists, statements and reports from professional associations, and journal publications by some of the key actors. The period in focus stretches mostly from 2000 to 10 February 2010. Blog posts, too numerous, are generally not included in this bibliography/archive, nor are books (which generally cannot be annotated and archived in their non-electronic formats) — indeed, a Google search for “human terrain system” returns almost 5.9 million results. The focus here is largely on the Human Terrain System; the Pentagon’s Minerva research initiative; the role of intelligence agencies in American universities, the use of social science research for developing torture techniques used in Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and Guantánamo (U.S. colony in Cuba); and, the use of social science in fashioning a “culturally sensitive” counterinsurgency doctrine.

These materials are presented in a variety of formats, each of which serves a particular purpose. The HTML list following below is for easy and rapid access, and to generate an output that can be mined by search engines. The Diigo list/archive provides the same items but with a difference: extended extracts from each piece are provided, along with each item’s own archived web page, especially since already many items are beginning to vanish from the Internet. The Diigo PDF does not provide the archived pages, but is a printable version of the extracts for each item. The PDF bibliography for downloading is identical in content to what follows on this page. Finally, the complete list of all posts on HTS and Minerva published on this blog since its inception are provided in a separate Diigo list (again with each post archived via Diigo).

THE BIG LIST & ARCHIVE

Items are presented in no particular order. This is the only item that will be updated for the foreseeable future. You can also play the entire collection as Webslides.

SUBSCRIBE TO RECEIVE UPDATES

TO THE “BIG LIST & ARCHIVE”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Identical to what is presented below on this page, in alphabetical and chronological order, but with neither the extracts nor the archived web pages offered above. [45 pages, 210 Kb]

LIST WITH EXTRACTS

Same as the above, except that archived web pages are not included. The items are mostly in alphabetical order. This file will not be updated. [990 pages, 14.6 Mb]

ALL RELATED POSTS FROM THIS BLOG

A complete list and archive of all 204 posts published to date on this blog dealing with anthropology, the  Human Terrain System, and the Minerva Research Initiative. They are presented in the order in which they appeared, with the earliest posts appearing first.

Photo: (left) Army Capt. Thomas H. Melton, a native of Shreveport, La., and commander of Troop A, 1st Squadron, 75th Cavalry Regiment, and Marcus Griffin, an anthropologist for the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team (left-center), talk with an Iraqi woman inside her home in Ghazaliyah, Iraq, Jan. 13, 2008. Photo by Sgt. James P. Hunter, USA. http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48766

HTML BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, Spencer. (2008). The rise of the counterinsurgents: Women prominent in the defense movement. The Washington Independent, July 8.
http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/women-prominent-in

Ackerman, Spencer. (2008). A counterinsurgency guide for politicos. The Washington Independent, July 28.
http://washingtonindependent.com/427/a-counterinsurgency-guide-for-politicos

Agar, Michael. (2008). War and peace. Newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology 19 (1) Feb: 5-7.
http://www.sfaa.net/newsletter/feb08nl.pdf

Albro, Robert. (2007). Cultural Knowledge for the Military and the Limits of Anthropological Ethics. Presented at the Symposium “Rights and Responsibilities: Scientific Associations and International Human Rights Norms.” AAAS. Washington, DC. Dec. 10.
http://shr.aaas.org/hrday/2007/HRday_2007_Robert_Albro.pdf

Albro, Robert. (2008). Scholars and security. The Minerva Controversy, November 14.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/2008/11/14/albro/

Albro, Robert. (2009). CEAUSSIC: Anthropologists and analysts. Blog of the American Anthropological Association, June 8.
http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/06/08/ceaussic-anthropologists-and-analysts/

Alpert, Bruce. (2009). Family of Afghan victim seeks to help her avenger. The Times-Picayune, February 14.
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/02/family_of_afghan_victim_seeks.html

Alpert, Bruce. (2009). Contractor gets probation in death of Afghan prisoner. The Times-Picayune, May 8.
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/05/alexandia_the_military_securit.html

American Anthropological Association. (2006). Anthropologists weigh in on Iraq, torture at annual meeting. American Anthropological Association, 11 December.
http://www.aaanet.org/pdf/iraqtorture.PDF

American Anthropological Association. (2007). AAA Executive Board Statement on the Human Terrain System Project. October 31.
http://www.aaanet.org/about/Policies/statements/Human-Terrain-System-Statement.cfm

American Anthropological Association. (2007). AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities, Final Report. November 4.
http://www.aaanet.org/pdf/FINAL_Report_Complete.pdf

American Anthropological Association. (2008). Letter from President Setha Low to the Honorable Jim Nussle, Office of Budget and Management. May 28.
http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/upload/Minerva-Letter.pdf

American Anthropological Association. (2008). Proposed changes to the AAA Code of Ethics. AAA Public Affairs Blog, September 24.
http://aaanewsinfo.blogspot.com/2008/09/proposed-changes-to-aaa-code-of-ethics.html

American Anthropological Association. (2009). CEAUSSIC Releases Final Report on Army HTS Program. American Anthropological Association, no date.
http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/CEAUSSIC-Releases-Final-Report-on-Army-HTS-Program.cfm

American Anthropological Association. (2009). AAA Commission Releases Final Report on Army Human Terrain System. Blog of the American Anthropological Association, December 8.
http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/12/08/aaa-commission-releases-final-report-on-army-human-terrain-system/

American Anthropological Association. (2009). AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) — Final Report on The Army’s Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program. Submitted to the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, October 14.
http://www.box.net/shared/5fbd28vbox

American Anthropological Association. (2010). Annual Meeting Podcast: War and Counter-Counterinsurgency. Blog of the American Anthropological Association, January 28.
http://blog.aaanet.org/2010/01/28/annual-meeting-podcast-war-and-counter-counterinsurgency/

Anderson, Claudia. (2010). Getting to know you: The U.S. military maps the human terrain of Afghanistan. Weekly Standard, January 18.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/getting-know-you

Asher, Thomas. (2008), Making sense of Minerva controversy and the SSRC. The Minerva Controversy, October 9.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/2008/10/09/asher/

AP. (2010). Shiite Militant Group Posts Video of Abducted American in Iraq. Associated Press, February 6.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,584993,00.html

The Atlantic. (2009) Brave New Thinkers: Montgomery McFate. The Atlantic, November.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brave-thinkers2/7

August, Oliver. (2010). Missing US contractor Issa Salomi paraded by terrorist group. Times Online, February 8.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article7018359.ece

Axe, David. (2008). Anthropologists launch ‘Human Terrain’ probe. WIRED Blog Network, August 1.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/08/anthropologists.html

Axe, David. (2009). War is boring: After setbacks, Human Terrain System rebuilds. World Politics Review (WPR), November 25.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=4697

BAE Systems. (2008). BAE Systems statement regarding the loss of employee in Iraq. Business Wire, June 25.
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080625006032&newsLang=en

BAE Systems. (2009). [Brochure] Supporting on the Front Line.
http://www.baesystems.com/BAEProd/groups/public/documents/bae_publication/bae_pdf_cr08_workplace_a.pdf

Barakat, Matthew. (2009). Army contractor pleads guilty in detainee shooting. Washington Post, February 4.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/04/
AR2009020402885.html?tid%3Dinformbox&sub=AR

Barakat, Matthew. (2009). Contractor gets probation for killing prisoner. Associated Press, May 8.
http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2009/05/ap_army_contractor_050809/

Bateman, Robert. (2007). How to make war: Unusual U.S. military field manual had an unusual provenance. Chicago Tribune, September 8.
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2007/sep/08/books/chi-manualbw08_qqsep08

Baty, Phil. (2005). CIA outrages UK academics by planting spies in classroom. Times Higher Education Supplement, June 3.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=196432

Baty, Phil. (2006). Life-risking ‘spy’ plan pulled. Times Higher Education Supplement, October 20.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=206121

BBC. (2005). Fears over CIA university spies. June 2.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4603271.stm

BBC. (2009). Anthropology at War. BBC Radio Four. Audio:
http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/05/24/audio-anthropology-and-counterinsurgency/

Beeman, William O. (2008). “Lethal field work: Anthropologists cry foul over colleagues’ aid to Iraq occupation.” AlterNet (reprinted from Le Monde), April 5.
http://www.alternet.org/world/80490/

Belt, Mike. (2007). Troops, profs explore ‘cultural agility’: Discussion to focus on saving lives through social sciences. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, November 9.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/nov/09/troops_profs_explore_cultural_agility/?more_like_this

Belt, Mike. (2007). Army general: Military adapting to modern wars. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, November 15.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/nov/15/army_general_military_adapting_modern_wars/?more_like_this

Belt, Mike. (2007). Three questions with … Britt Damon, civilian analyst with the Army. [Video] Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, November 16.
http://www2.ljworld.com/videos/2007/nov/16/16030/

Belt, Mike. (2007). Military veteran: Knowing war zone’s culture important. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, November 16.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/nov/16/military_veteran_knowing_war_zones_culture_importa/

Belt, Mike. (2007). Anthropologists feel tug of rocky wartime union: Their knowledge can be useful to the military, but the marriage makes some uncomfortable. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, November 19.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/nov/19/anthropologists_feel_tug_rocky_wartime_union/?more_like_this

Bender, Bryan. (2007). Efforts to aid US roil anthropology: Some object to project on Iraq, Afghanistan. Boston Globe, October 8.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/10/08/efforts_to_aid_us_roil_anthropology/?page=1

Beyerstein, Lindsay. (2007). Anthropologists on the Front Lines: The Pentagon’s new program to embed anthropologists with combat brigades raises many concerns. In These Times, November 30.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/print/3433/

Blackwell, Tom. (2008). Mapping ‘white’ Afghans aim to end civilian deaths. Calgary Herald, November 8.
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/
story.html?id=a6df4358-cec0-4555-9efa-d7e66b4a31bc

Blackwell, Tom. (2008). ‘Situational awareness’ teams deployed — Afghanistan; Units help military better understand local communities. National Post, November 15.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=961884

Blascovich, James J., and Hartel, Christine R. (Eds.). (2007). Human Behavior in Military Contexts. Committee on Opportunities in Basic Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences for the U.S. Military, Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council of the National Academies, September 17.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12023.html
and
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/files/HumanBehavior.pdf

Boas, Franz. (1919). Scientists as spies. The Nation, October 16. Reprinted in Roberto J. González, ed. (2004) Anthropologists in the Public Sphere, pp. 23-25. Austin: University of Texas Press.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=oHx0Mao7nnMC&oi=fnd&pg=PP15&dq=%22Gonz%C3%A1lez%22+%22Anthropologists+in+the+
Public+Sphere:+Speaking+Out+on+…%22+&ots=UCB0JA566R&sig=Vip44oAqfru96AkXFFCKpzONZmA
#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Boot, Max. (2005). Navigating the ‘human terrain’. Los Angeles Times, December 7.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9377/navigating_the_human_terrain.html?breadcrumb=%2Fbios%2F5641%2F%3Fgroupby%3D3%26amp%253Bhide%3D1%
26amp%253Bid%3D5641%26filter%3D2005

Bottum, Joseph. (2010). Afghanistan studies. First Things, January 31.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/01/31/afghanistan-studies/

Boyle, Mark. (2009). KU professor set to retire. [Video] Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, December 7.
http://www2.ljworld.com/videos/2009/dec/07/27911/

Bracken, Paul. (2008). Scholars and security. The Minerva Controversy, November 10.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/2008/11/10/bracken/

Brainard, Jeffery. (2008). U.S. Defense Secretary asks universities for new cooperation. Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16.
http://chronicle.com/news/article/4316/us-defense-secretary-asks-universities-for-new-cooperation

Burghardt, Tom. (2008). Militarizing the social sciences. Global Research.ca, August 6.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9753

Burleigh, Nina. (2007). McFate’s Mission — Can a former punk rocker raised on a houseboat change the way America fights? meet the pentagon’s newest weapon in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. MORE, September, 122, 124, 126, 128.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/files/McFateinMore.pdf

Butcher, David R. (2007). Army of anthropologists enter war zones. Industry Market Trends, October 16.
http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/archives/2007/10/human_terrain_system_united_states_
military_anthropologists.html

Campbell, Monica. (2008). Fulbright Scholar Says He Was Asked to Spy While in Bolivia. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54 (24) February 2.
http://www.diigo.com/cached?url=http%3A%2F%2F0-web.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca%2Fehost%2Fdetail
%3Fvid%3D1%26hid%3D107%26sid%3Dfb8874c2-6663-4a5d-a5c6-e7f89bed18d2%2540sessionmgr104%26bdata%3DJnNpdGU9ZW
hvc3QtbGl2ZQ%253d%253d

Canon, Scott. (2007).  Anthropologists debate ethics of working on war effort. Kansas City Star, September 30. (no longer online)

Carlough, Montgomery Cybele (1994).  Pax Brittania: British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969-1982. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, United States — Connecticut. (Publication No. AAT 9522728).
http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/10/14/news-from-the-military-academic-complex-mcfates-phd-hts-contracts-minerva-grants-afghanistan/
and
http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/10/10/mcfate-does-good-anthropology-contribute-to-better-killing/
and
http://www.box.net/shared/kg7ivl26x5

Caryl, Christian. (2009). Reality check: Human Terrain Teams. Foreign Policy, September 8.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/08/reality_check_human_terrain_teams

Chandler, Jennifer V. (2005). Why culture matters: An empirically-based pre-deployment training program. Thesis for the M.A. in National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.
http://www.nps.edu/Academics/Centers/CCC/Research/StudentTheses/chandler05.pdf

Charles, Henry, Fr. (2007). Anthropologists on front lines. Trinidad Guardian, November 26.
http://legacy.guardian.co.tt/archives/2007-11-26/henrycharles.html

Chronicle of Higher Education. (2007). Embedded anthropologists. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54 (8), October 19.
http://www.diigo.com/cached?url=http%3A%2F%2F0-web.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca%2Fehost%2Fdetail%3Fvid
%3D1%26hid%3D107%26sid%3D1c1aa6a4-d303-4885-93c6-fd25d281252a%2540sessionmgr110%26bdata%3DJnNpdGU9ZWhvc3Qtb
Gl2ZQ%253d%253d

Cohen, Patricia. (2008). Pentagon to consult academics on security. The New York Times, June 18.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/arts/18minerva.html?_r=1&sq=Pentagon%20to%20Consult%20
Academics%20on%20Security&st=nyt&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=
1213791919-nRLtAtfAjED8D1B6o7lV9Q&pagewanted=all

Cohen, Patricia. (2009). Panel criticizes military’s use of embedded anthropologists. New York Times, December 3.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/arts/04anthro.html?_r=3

Cole, Rob. (2010). Video Of US Hostage Held In Iraq Released. Sky News, February 6.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Video-Of-Man-Thought-To-Be-US-Hostage-Issa-Salomi-Held-In-Iraq-Released-By-League-of-the-Righteous/Article/201002115543937?f=rss

Coll, Steve. (2009). Human terrain. The National, December 17.
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091217/REVIEW/712179986/1008/ART

Connable, Ben. (2009). All our eggs in a broken basket: How the Human Terrain System is undermining sustainable military cultural competence. Military Review, March-April: 57–64.
http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20090430_art010.pdf

Constable, Pamela. (2009). A terrain’s tragic shift: Researcher’s death intensifies scrutiny of U.S. cultural program in Afghanistan. Washington Post, February 18.
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Gregory, Derek. (2008). ‘The rush to the intimate’: Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn. Radical Philosophy (150) July-August.

see also:

files/Rush%20to%20the%20intimate%3AFINAL.doc

Griffin, Marcus B. (2007). Research to reduce bloodshed. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54 (14) November 30.
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Gusterson, Hugh. (n.d.). An interview with Hugh Gusterson. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, n.d.
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Gusterson, Hugh. (2005). The ethics of spying: A response to B. Dean, AT 21[4]. Anthropology Today, 21 (5) October: 21-22.
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Hansen, Matthew. (2009). For Afghanistan: brains, not bombs. Omaha World-Herald, September 11.
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Hayden, Tom. (2007). The new counterinsurgency. The Nation, September 6. Retrieved July 18, 2008, from
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Helbig, Zenia. (2007). Personal perspective on the Human Terrain Systems program. Delivered at the AAA’s Annual Conference, November 29.
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Hill, Mike. (2009). “Terrorists Are Human Beings”: Mapping the U.S. Army’s “Human Terrain Systems” Program. Differences, 20 (3): 250-278.
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Hodge, Nathan. (2008). Afghanistan Diary: Mapping the Human Terrain in Helmand, Part I. Wired Blogs: Danger Room, Oct. 14. Retrieved October 17, 2008, from
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Hodge, Nathan. (2009). ‘Oil Spot Spock’ and the Human Terrain Team. WIRED: Danger Room, August 31, 2009. Retrieved August 31, 2009, from
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Hodge, Nathan. (2010). Spies Like Us: Top U.S. Intel Officer Says Spooks Could Learn From Journos. WIRED Danger Room, January 5.
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Jackson, Jean. (2009). CEAUSSIC: Reflections on the soon-to-be-released CEAUSSIC Report. Blog of the American Anthropological Association, November 30.
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Jamail, Dahr. (2009). Colonizing Culture. Dahr Jamail’s Mideast Dispatches (blog), May 27.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2006). Torture and social scientists. Inside Higher Ed. November 22.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2007). Ethics rebellion in Psychology. Inside Higher Ed. October 12.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2007). Are IRBs needed for war zones? Inside Higher Ed. October 22.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/22/anthro

Jaschik, Scott. (2007). Ethics and engagement with the military. Inside Higher Ed., November 29.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2007). Questions, anger and dissent on ethics study. Inside Higher Ed. November 20.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2008). Defining a Ban on Secret Research. Inside Higher Ed. March 13.

http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/13/anthro

Jaschik, Scott. (2008). A Pentagon olive branch to academe. Inside Higher Ed. April 16.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2008). Pentagon provides details on ‘Minerva.’ Inside Higher Ed. May 12.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2008). Pentagon shift on ‘Minerva.’ Inside Higher Ed. May 28.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2008). Torture and the research star. Inside Higher Ed. July 22.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2008). First ‘Minerva’ grants awarded. Inside Higher Ed. December 29.
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Jaschik, Scott. (2009). Anthropologists toughen ethics code. Inside Higher Ed. February 19.
http://insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/19/anthro

Jayson, Sharon. (2007). Anthropologists battle over ethics of embeds. USA Today, November 27.
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Joxe, Alain. (2008). Should the social sciences contribute to the art of war in the era of securitization? Or to the crafting of peace? The Minerva Controversy, October 27.

http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/2008/10/27/joxe/

Kahlenberg, Jessica. (2008). Project Minerva combines anthropology with the military. The Flat Hat (College of William & Mary), September 10.
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Kavanaugh, Lee Hill. (2008). Army takes Human Terrain to heart. Kansas City Star, October 14, p.1.
http://www.successthroughquality.com/blog/?p=421

Kavanaugh, Lee Hill. (2008). Social-support worker attacked in Afghanistan. Kansas City Star, November 10.
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Kilcullen, David. (2006). Twenty-eight articles: Fundamentals of company-level counterinsurgency.
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Kintisch, Eli. (2008). Defense, NSF team up on national security research. Science, 11 July, 321 (5886): 186-187.
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Krebs, Ronald R. (2008). Minerva: Unclipping the owl’s wings. The Minerva Controversy, November 19.
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Landers, Jim. (2009). Anthropologist from Plano maps Afghanistan’s human terrain for Army. Dallas Morning News, Sunday, March 8.
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Lawrence Journal-World & 6News. (2002). University ROTC-style program would prepare national security and intelligence officials. February 22.
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Lawrence Journal-World & 6News. (2007). Roundtable combines military, social sciences. November 13.
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Lawrence Journal-World & 6News. (2007). Modern warfare discussed at Dole. [Video], November 14.
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Lawrence Journal-World & 6News. (2009). Editorial: Knowledge is power: An intelligence education plan that has caught President Obama’s eye had its start right here in Lawrence. July 3.
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Logos. (2008). Got No Culture: Anthropology confronts Counterinsurgency. Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, November 22.
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Londoño, Ernesto, and Fadel, Leila. (2010). Officials confirm kidnapping of U.S. contractor in Iraq. Washington Post, February 6.
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Lucas, George R. (2008). ‘This is Not Your Father’s War’: Confronting the Moral Challenges of ‘Irregular War’. Banquet Keynote Address, NATO 60th Anniversary Conference: “Building Integrity,” Monterey, CA,February 26.
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Lucas, George R. (2008). The morality of military anthropology. Journal of Military Ethics, 7 (3): 165-185.
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Lutz, Catherine. (2008). Selling our independence? The perils of Pentagon funding for anthropology. Anthropology Today, 24 (5) October, 1-3.

Lutz, Catherine. (2008). The perils of Pentagon funding for anthropology and the other social sciences. The Minerva Controversy, November 6.
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Lutz, Catherine. (2009). Anthropology in an era of permanent war. Anthropologica, 51 (2), 367-380.
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Lynch, Marc. (2009). Will the Iraq war change how scholars study the Middle East? Foreign Policy, July 29.
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Marcus, George. (2009). CEAUSSIC: Origin story and grande finale. Blog of the American Anthropological Association, December 7.
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Marlowe, Ann. (2007). Anthropology goes to war: There are some things the Army needs in Afghanistan, but more academics are not at the top of the list. The Weekly Standard, 013 (11), November 26.
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Marrades, Addaia. (2006-2007). Anthropology and the ‘War on Terror’: Analysis of a complex relationship.
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Marrero, Tony. (2010). Weeki Wachee man’s task is to win minds, hearts of Afghans. St. Petersburg Times, January 2.
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Masselis, Nick. (2009). Human Terrain: A Strategic Imperative on the 21st Century Battlefield. Small Wars Journal.
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Maurer, Kevin. (2009). Paratroopers off to new job training Afghan police. Associated Press, August 18.
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McAlexander, Joseph C. (2007). Hearts and Minds: Historical Counterinsurgency Lessons to Guide the War of Ideas in the Global War on Terrorism. Air Command and Staff College, Wright Flyer Paper No. 29, Air University Press, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, December.
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McCleary, Paul. (2008). Human Terrain Teams. World Politics Review, October 14.
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McFate, Montgomery. (2005). Anthropology and counterinsurgency: The strange story of their curious relationship. Military Review, March-April.
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McFate, Montgomery. (2005). The military utility of understanding adversary culture. Joint Force Quarterly (38).
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McFate, Montgomery. (2007). U.S Military Requirements for Socio-Cultural Knowledge. Institute for Defense Analyses, June 13.
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McFate, Montgomery. (2007). Building bridges or burning heretics? A response to González in this Issue. Anthropology Today, 23 (3) June: 21.
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McFate, Montgomery. (2008). Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, 110th Congress, 2nd session, Hearings on the Importance of Socio-Cultural Knowledge to the U.S. Military. Washington DC: United States House of Representatives, July 9.
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McFate, Montgomery, and Fondacaro, Steve. (2008). Cultural knowledge and common sense: A response to González in this Issue. Anthropology Today, 24 (1) February: 27.
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McFate, Sean. (2010). I built and African army: Now here’s what it will take to build Afghanistan’s. Foreign Policy, January 7.
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McKenna, Brian. (2008). Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College: What would Smedley Butler do? CounterPunch, May 28.
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McNamara, Laura A. (2010). Moving forward with the CEAUSSIC Ethics Casebook: What is the Casebook, and why now? Blog of the American Anthropological Association, January 27.
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Melville, Robin. (2009). Review of David Price’s Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, 8 (2).
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Mervis, Jeffrey. (2009). DOD funds new views on conflict with its first Minerva grants. Science, 323, January 30: 576-577.
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Metz, Thomas F. (2008). Statement by Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz, Director, Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization before the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Defense, House of Representatives, February 14.
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Miska, Steven M. (2007). The Contribution of Scholars. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54 (14) November 30.
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Montgomery, Rick. (2005). Secret students major in spying. Knight Ridder Newspapers, June 28.
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Mulrine, Anna. (2007). The culture warriors: The Pentagon deploys social scientists to help understand Iraq’s ‘human terrain.’ U.S. News & World Report, November 30.

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Mulrine, Anna. (2007). Leading the charge for change: An anthropologist challenges conventional thinking. U.S. News & World Report, November 30.

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Nugent, David. (2008). ‘Operations other than War’: The politics of academic scholarship in the 21st century. The Minerva Controversy, October 20. Retrieved November 10, 2008, from
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http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/75825/

Pelton, Robert Young. (2009). Afghanistan: The new war for hearts and minds. Men’s Journal, Jan. 21.

http://www.mensjournal.com/new-war-for-hearts-and-minds

(read: “U.S. Army response to Robert Young Pelton’s “The new war for hearts and minds” plus author’s response:
http://www.mensjournal.com/armyresponse)

Peter, Tom A. (2009). Should anthropologists help US military in Iraq, Afghanistan wars? Embedding anthropologists with US military in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is both praised and derided by academics as violating a social scientist’s basic pledge: to do no harm. Christian Science Monitor, December 11.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2009/1211/Should-anthropologists-help-US-military-in-Iraq-Afghanistan-wars

Peters, Ralph. (2000). The Human Terrain of Urban Operations. Parameters, Spring: 4-12.
http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:av3Uq_H-l0oJ:scholar.google.com/
+%22human+terrain%22&hl=en&as_sdt=2000

Peterson, Scott. (2007). Counterinsurgency efforts focus on better grasping and meeting local needs. Christian Science Monitor, September 27.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0907/p01s08-wosc.html

Porter, Patrick. (2007). Good anthropology, bad history: The cultural turn in studying war. Parameters 38 (2) Summer: 45-58.
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/07summer/porter.htm
and
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/07summer/porter.pdf

Price, David H. (1998). Cold War Anthropology: Collaborators and Victims of the National Security State. Identities, 4 (3/4): 389-430.
http://www.diigo.com/cached?url=http%3A%2F%2F0-web.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca%2Fehost%2Fdetail%3Fvid%3D1%
26hid%3D107%26sid%3D6a55a8c4-017e-4fb0-b10d-309e29311766%2540sessionmgr114%26bdata%3DJnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%
253d%253d%23db%3Daph%26AN%3D3985805

Price, David H. (2000). Anthropologists as spies. The Nation, November 20.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001120/price/single

Price, David H. (2000). The AAA and the CIA. Anthropology News, 41(8): 13-14. November.
http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/price.html

Price, David H. (2001). Spying on radical scholars. Radical History Review, Winter, 79: 169-172.
http://www.diigo.com/cached?url=http%3A%2F%2F0-web.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca%2Fehost%2Fpdf%3Fvid%3D1
%26hid%3D107%26sid%3D8243755d-023a-4c75-b548-d5111e582547%2540sessionmgr110

Price, David H. (2002). Present dangers, past wars and past anthropologies. Anthropology Today, 18 (1): 3-5.
http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/price-at1.pdf

Price, David H. (2002). Interlopers and invited guests: On anthropology’s witting and unwitting links to intelligence agencies. Anthropology Today, 18 (6): 16-21.
http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/price-at-12-02-CIA.pdf

Price, David H. (2002). Lessons from Second World War anthropology: Peripheral, persuasive, and ignored contributions. Anthropology Today, 18(3).
http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/price-at-6-02-WWII.pdf

Price, David H. (2003). Cloak and trowel. Archaeology, 56 (3), May-June.
http://www.diigo.com/cached?url=http%3A%2F%2F0-web.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca%2Fehost%2Fdetail%3Fvid
%3D1%26hid%3D107%26sid%3D54a3c571-fc8a-42f8-9a5f-2f94127b2452%2540sessionmgr114%26bdata%3DJnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbG
l2ZQ%253d%253d

Price, David H. (2003). The spies who came in from the dig. The Guardian, September 4.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/sep/04/research.artsandhumanities

Price, David H. (2003). Anthropology Sub Rosa: The AAA, the CIA and the Ethical Problems Inherent in Secret Research. In Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (Ed.), Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice, pp. 29-49.  Second Edition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
http://books.google.com/books?id=RnvrAw-jtFkC&pg=PA29&ots=slQkzQM0cy&dq=%22anthropology+sub+rosa%22&sig=bAJortAdOcT8mSwdU
bC9rLQJhPs#v=onepage&q=%22anthropology%20sub%20rosa%22&f=false

Price, David H. (2005). The CIA’s Campus Spies: Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program. CounterPunch, March 12-13.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price03122005.html

Price, David H. (2005). CIA skullduggery in academia: Carry on spying (or pay us back at the rate of 2,400 per cent). CounterPunch, May 21-22.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price05212005.html

Price, David H. (2005). America the ambivalent: Quietly selling anthropology to the CIA. Anthropology Today, 21 (5): 1-2.
http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/AmericaDAmbivalent.pdf

Price, David H. (2006). American anthropologists stand up against torture and occupation of Iraq. CounterPunch, November 20.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price11202006.html

Price, David H. (2007). Buying a piece of anthropology, part one: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA. Anthropology Today, 23 (3): 8-13.
http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/Price-AT-HEF1.pdf

Price, David H. (2007). Buying a piece of anthropology, part two: Our tortured past. Anthropology Today, 23 (5): 17-22.
http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/Price-AT-HEF2.pdf

Price, David H. (2007). Pilfered scholarship devastates General Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Manual. CounterPunch, October 30.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price10302007.html

Price, David H. (2007). Interview with Amy Goodman for story on “Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon’s ‘Human Terrain System’ to Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan” on Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, December 13.
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/13/anthropologists_up_in_arms_over_pentagons

Price, David. H. (2008). Social science in harness: Inside the Minerva Consortium. CounterPunch, June 24.
http://www.counterpunch.com/price06252008.html

Price, David H. (2008). First Read of a Leaked Handbook: The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems. CounterPunch, December 12-14.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price12122008.html

Price, David H. (2008). Payback time: The student who decided not to be a spook. CounterPunch, 15 (15), 1-15 September: 6-8.
http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/09/21/david-price-on-the-costs-of-serving-empire/

Price, David H. (2009). Roberto González on Human Terrain Systems: Counterinsurgency, Anthropology and Disciplinary Complicity. CounterPunch, February 3.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price02032009.html

Price, David H. (2009). Counterinsurgency’s free ride: The press and Human Terrain Systems. CounterPunch, April 7.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price04072009.html

Price, David H. (2009). Son of PRISP: Obama’s classroom spies. CounterPunch, June 23.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price06232009.html

Price, David H. (2009). Anthropology, Human Terrain’s Prehistory, and the Role of Culture in Wars Waged by Robots: From “Gentle Pursuasion” to “Better Killing.” CounterPunch, 16 (17) Oct. 1-15: 1, 4-6.
Reproduced online as:
A Better Way to Kill? Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan. CounterPunch, December 1.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price12012009.html

Price, David H. (2009). Anthropological engagements with military and intelligence agencies: Ethics, politics, and ongoing discourse. Blog of the American Anthropological Association, September 9.
http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/09/11/ceaussic-anthropological-engagements-with-military-and-intelligence-agencies/

Price, David H. (2009). Going Native: Hollywood’s Human Terrain Avatars. CounterPunch, December 23.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price12232009.html

Pryor, Mike, Sgt. (2007). Culture Experts: Human Terrain Team helps Soldiers in Iraq understand the cultural landscape. First Team News, Fort Hood, December.
http://www.hood.army.mil/1stcavdiv/news/2007/07Dec/dec039.htm

RadioCable.com (2010). ¿Debe ser un antropólogo un “arma” de guerra? February 5.
http://www.radiocable.com/antropologo-guerra987.html

Raimondo, Justin. (2009). The Afghan ‘Experiment’: When all else fails, mobilize the social scientists! AntiWar.com, December 11.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/12/10/the-afghan-experiment/

Redden, Elizabeth. (2007). Secrecy and anthropology. Inside Higher Ed. December 3.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/03/anthro

Redden, Elizabeth. (2008). Ethics and militarization dominate anthropology meeting. Inside Higher Ed, November 21.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/21/anthro

Redden, Elizabeth. (2008). Anthropological engagement, for good and for bad. Inside Higher Ed, November 24.

http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/24/anthro

Redden, Elizabeth. (2008). Raised eyebrows over keynote choice. Inside Higher Ed, November 26.

http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/26/swaa

Reid, Tim. (2009). Freedom for US contractor Don Ayala who shot dead handcuffed Taleban killer. The Times, May 9.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6251000.ece

Renzi, Fred, Lt. Col. (2006). Networds: Terra incognita and the case for ethnographic intelligence. Military Review, Sep-Oct.
http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/volume4/december_2006/12_06_1.html

Ricks, Thomas E. (2010). The Flynn Report (V): How to feed the beast. Foreign Policy, January 18.
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/18/the_flynn_report_v_how_to_feed_the_beast

Ridgeway, James; Schulman, Daniel, and Corn, David. (2008). There’s something about Mary: Unmasking a gun lobby mole. Mother Jones, July 30.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/
mary-mcfate-sapone-gun-lobby-nra-spy.html

Riechmann, Debb. (2009). NATO official: US intel lacking in Afghanistan. Associated Press, January 5.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100105/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan

Roberts, Audrey. (2009). A unique approach to peacekeeping: Afghanistan and the Human Terrain System. Journal of International Peace Operations, 5 (2) Sept-Oct: 24-25.
http://www.box.net/shared/jpmgkuchrn

Rohde, David. (2007/10/5). Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones. The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?ei=5070&en=43b7c2fc6edcd8fe&ex=1192248000&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all

Rombeck, Terry. (2003). Government backs idea to train spies on college campuses. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, May 13.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2003/may/13/government_backs_idea/?more_like_this

Roxborough, Ian. (2008). The military-social science interface. The Minerva Controversy, October 29.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/2008/10/29/roxborough/

Rush, Laurie W. (2009). CEAUSSIC: Mars turns to Minerva:  Thoughts on archaeology, the military, and collegial discourse. Blog of the American Anthropological Association, July 21.
http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/07/21/ceaussic-mars-turns-to-minerva/

Rylko-Bauer, Barbara. (2008). Applied anthropology and counterinsurgency. Newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology 19 (1) Feb: 1-5.
http://www.sfaa.net/newsletter/feb08nl.pdf

Sapone, Montgomery. (1999). Have rifle with scope, will travel: The global economy of mercenary violence. California Western International Law Journal, 30 (1), Fall.
http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/calwi30&div=6&id=&page=

Satia, Priya. (2008). The forgotten history of knowledge and power in British Iraq, or why Minerva’s owl cannot fly. The Minerva Controversy, October 17.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/2008/10/17/satia/

Schwartz, Jeremy. (2009). Austin psychologist on the front lines in fight against Taliban. Statesman.com, September 27. Retrieved October 4, 2009, from
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/09/27/0927afghanistan.html

Schweitzer, Colonel Martin P. (2008). Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Terrorism & Unconventional Threats Sub-Committee and the Research & Education Sub-Committee of the Science & Technology Committee , 110th Congress, 2nd Session Hearings on the Role of the Social and Behavioral Sciences in National Security. Washington DC: United States House of Representatives, 24 April. Retrieved August 4, 2008, from
http://armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/TUTC042408/Schweitzer_Statement042408.pdf

Shachtman, Noah. (2007). Iraq diary: shame and honor in Fallujah. WIRED Danger Room, September 4.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/09/post-1-2/

Shachtman, Noah. (2007). Weekly Standard blasts “Human Terrain.” WIRED Danger Room, November, 18.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/weekly-standard.html

Shachtman, Noah. (2007). Army social scientists calm Afghanistan, make enemies at home. WIRED Danger Room.
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/11/human_terrain?currentPage=all

Shachtman, Noah. (2007). Academics turn on “Human Terrain” whistleblower. WIRED Danger Room, December 3.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/12/the-fight-betwe.html

Shachtman, Noah. (2007). Exploring Baghdad’s “Human Terrain” (Updated). WIRED Danger Room, December 13.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/12/exploring-baghd.html

Shachtman, Noah. (2007). How technology almost lost the war: In Iraq, the critical networks are social — not electronic. WIRED Magazine, 15.12, November 27.
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-12/ff_futurewar?currentPage=all

Shachtman, Noah. (2008). “Human Terrain” called year’s biggest euphemism. WIRED Danger Room, January 8.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/01/human-terrain-c/

Shachtman, Noah. (2008). 2nd ‘Human Terrain’ social scientist slain in 7 weeks. WIRED Danger Room, June 25.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/06/second/

Shachtman, Noah. (2008). Montgomery McFate: Use anthropology in military planning. WIRED Danger Room, September 22.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-10/sl_mcfate

Shacthman, Noah. (2008). Army anthropologist’s controversial culture clash. WIRED Danger Room, September 23.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/09/controversial-a/

Shachtman, Noah. (2008). Army social scientist set afire in Afghanistan. WIRED Danger Room, November 6.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/11/army-social-sci/

Sharlet, Jeff. (2000). Tinker, writer, artist, spy: Intellectuals during the Cold War. Chronicle of Higher Education, 46 (30) March 31.
http://www.diigo.com/cached?url=http%3A%2F%2F0-web.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca%2Fehost%2Fdetail%3Fvid%3D1%
26hid%3D107%26sid%3D8038a349-5817-4317-8309-a381597aafca%2540sessionmgr111%26bdata%3DJnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2
ZQ%253d%253d

Shay, Christopher. (2008). Should anthropologists go to war? TIME Magazine, December 13.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1947095,00.html?xid=rss-topstories-cnnpartner

Shweder, Richard A. (2007). Op-Ed: A true culture war. New York Times, October 27.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/opinion/27shweder.html?ex=1351137600&en=34fe446b495a6360&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Sider, Gerald M. (2009). Can anthropology ever be innocent? AnthroNow, 1 (1) April.
http://www.box.net/shared/ct0qdbkshc

Silverman, Adam. (2008). The why and how of Human Terrain Teams. Inside Higher Ed, February 19.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/19/humanterrain

Barry G. Silverman. (2007). Human Terrain data — What should we do with it? Proceedings of the 2007 Winter Simulation Conference.
http://www.informs-sim.org/wsc07papers/029.pdf

Simons, Dolph C. Jr. (2002). Proposed program could benefit nation’s intelligence effort. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, February 23.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2002/feb/23/proposed_program_could/?more_like_this

Simons, Dolph C. Jr. (2003). Intelligence training plan could provide vital insight to U.S.. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, November 29.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2003/nov/29/intelligence_training_plan/?more_like_this

Simons, Dolph C. Jr. (2004). Roberts and Moos: Right men, right place, right time. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, July 24.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2004/jul/24/roberts_and_moos/?more_like_this

Slaikeu, Karl L. (2009). Winning the war in Afghanistan: An oil spot plus strategy for Coalition Forces. Small Wars Journal, May 18, 2009.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/227-slaikeu.pdf

Sluka, Jeffrey A. (2009). Curiouser and Curiouser: Montgomery McFate’s Strange Interpretation of the Relationship between Anthropology and Counterinsurgency. Paper presented at the Southwestern Anthropological Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, April 30-May 3.
http://www.csus.edu/org/swaa/swaa_conference/past_conferences/swaa_2009/abstracts_2009/sluka_abstract.html

Spina, Romina. (2007). More culture, language skills necessary in modern warfare, KU professors say. Lawrence Journal-World & 6News, September 12.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/sep/12/more_culture_language_skills_necessary_modern_warf/?more_like_this

Stannard, Matthew B. (2007). Montgomery McFate’s mission: Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq? San Francisco Chronicle, April 29.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/29/CMGHQP19VD1.DTL

Stanton, John. (2008). US Army Human Terrain System in Disarray: Millions of Dollars Wasted, Two Lives Sacrificed. Cryptome, July 22.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-joke.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). US Army Human Terrain System: From Super Concept to Absolute Farce. Cryptome, August 14.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-farce.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). US Army Human Terrain System Madness Mayhem Cash. Cryptome, October 6.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-madness.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). Cleaning Up US Army/TRADOC’s Human Terrain System (HTS): Terminate Current Management, Move HTS to Civil Affairs. Cryptome, November 6.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-cleanup.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). Law Breaking, Fraud Alleged at Imploding US Army Human Terrain Program. Cryptome, November 12.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-fraud.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). Guantanamo Treatment for US Civilian Human Terrain Team Member. Cryptome, November 17.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-gitmode.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). Human Terrain System: Murder Charges, Espionage, Paranoia, General Sacked. Cryptome, November 26.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-murder.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). General Petraeus’ Favorite Mushroom: The US Army’s Human Terrain System. Cryptome, December 4.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-petraeus.htm

Stanton, John. (2008). US Army Promotes Waste, Fraud and Abuse in TRADOC Human Terrain Program. Cryptome, December 11.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-waste.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). Human Terrain System Info G3 Briefing FGUO. Cryptome, January 14.
http://cryptome.org/hts-g3.zip

Stanton, John. (2009). Hamas IT Tops Human Terrain System IT in Internet Capability, Savvy. Cryptome, January 14.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-hamas-it.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). Human Terrain System Meets the Bowman Expeditions: US Army/TRADOC Embroiled in Another Controversy. Cryptome, January 29.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-nasty.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). US Government Takeover of Human Terrain System: HTS Program Managers Spared, Laugh On Way to Bank. Cryptome, February 11.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-bailout.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). The Mystical Realm of Human Terrain and COIN: Who is in Charge?. Cryptome, February 17.
http://cryptome.info/0001/hts-mystic.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). Death Threat Tarnishes Army Human Terrain System. Cryptome, February 26.
http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-tarnish.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). US Army report on Human Terrain System: toxic at headquarters and in Bagram. Pravda, April 6.
http://english.pravda.ru/print/world/americas/107360-Bagram-0

Stanton, John. (2009). USA v Don Ayala: HTS, Army Leaders on Trial Too. Cryptome, May 8.
http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-ayala.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). US Army’s Human Terrain System Like Swine Flu: Get Near it and You’re Infected. Cryptome, June 8.
http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-swine.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). Human Terrain System in the Kill-Pacify Chain: Key Element in Obama’s Hearts & Minds, Smart Power Campaign. Cryptome, August 7.
http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-killpacify.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). Human Terrain System 2009-2010: US Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harms Way. Cryptome, October 8.
http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-harmsway.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). HTS Sergeant Wesley Cureton Wounded. Cryptome, December 10.
http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-cureton.htm

Stanton, John. (2009). US Army Human Terrain System Giving Birth? Cryptome, December 15.
http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-birth.htm

Stanton, John. (2010). The New Face of the Human Terrain System. Zero Anthropology, January 22.
http://zeroanthropology.net/2010/01/22/john-stanton-the-new-face-of-the-human-terrain-system/

Stanton, John. (2010). Iraqi Insurgents Capture Human Terrain Team Member: Issa T. Salomi. Zero Anthropology, February 7.
http://zeroanthropology.net/2010/02/07/iraqi-insurgents-capture-human-terrain-system-member-john-stanton/

Stanton, John. (2010). New Details Emerge in Salomi Hostage Case: High Drama in HTS. Zero Anthropology, February 8.
http://zeroanthropology.net/2010/02/09/new-details-emerge-in-salomi-hostage-case-john-stanton/

Stein, Jeff. (2009). Anthropology Association condemns work with U.S. counterinsurgency. The Huffington Post, December 3.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-stein/anthropology-association_b_378503.html

Sterling, Bruce. (2008). Private spooks in American politics. WIRED Beyond the Beyond, July 30.
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/07/private-spooks.html

Stier, Ken. (2007). Anthropologists on the front lines. TIME, December 11.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1693592,00.html

Stille, Alexander. (2003). Experts can help rebuild a country. The New York Times, 19 July.
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/stille/Politics%20Fall%202007/Readings%20–%20Weeks%201-5/
Stille,%20Experts%20Help%20Rebuild%20A%20Country.htm

Stockman, Farah. (2009). Anthropologist’s war death reverberates. Boston Globe, February 12.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/
2009/02/12/anthropologists_war_death_reverberates/?page=full#

Swire, Nathan. (2008). McFate explains Human Terrain Teams. The Dartmouth.com, September 26.
http://thedartmouth.com/2008/09/26/news/htt/

Thiry, Martin, and, Lemonds, David W. (n.d.). At Cross Currents, But Decidedly Not At Odds: Military-Industry and the Social Sciences.
http://2008.hngvso.org/fellowspapers/Martin%20Thiry%20paper%20%2011-6%20Final.pdf

Tirman, John. (2008). Pentagon priorities and the Minerva program. The Minerva Controversy, October 9.
http://www.ssrc.org/essays/minerva/2008/10/09/tirman/

Tompkins, Matthew, Capt. (2008-2008). Iraq’s Human Terrain: The Most Critical Piece of Ground. Blog.
http://iraqht.blogspot.com/

Troop Scoop (2009). Soldiers meet with leaders in remote Afghan province. Canada Free Press, December 29.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/18400

Tyrell, Marc W.D. (2007). Why Dr. Johnny won’t go to war: Anthropology and the global war on terror. Small Wars Journal, February.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/swjmag/v7/tyrrell-swjvol7.pdf

Tyrell, Marc W.D. (2007). Response to Gusterson and Price. Small Wars Journal.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/response-to-gusterson-and-price.pdf

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — Army Geospatial Center. (n.d.). Human Terrain System (HTS).
http://www.agc.army.mil/fact_sheet/HTS.pdf

U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center. (2009). Counterinsurgency SITREP. February 18.
https://coin.harmonieweb.org/Knowledge%20Center/FEB2009SITREP.pdf

U.S. Department of the Army (2006). Counterinsurgency Field Manual, FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5. Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army.
http://www.box.net/shared/0mhx0ie2b2

U.S. Department of Defense. (2008). Broad Agency Announcement Number W911NF-08-R-0007 (Solicitation of grant proposals for the Minerva Research Initiative).

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By David Price

CounterPunch

February 15, 2010

I first came into contact with cultural anthropologist John Allison a couple of years ago when he invited me to join a session of a global organization of archaeologists presenting innovative papers at the World Archaeology Congress in Dublin, including themes related to military uses of anthropology and archaeology. I couldn’t make the conference, but we corresponded occasionally after that. I hadn’t heard from John in a while, and then last November I suddenly got an email from him telling me that he was writing me from inside the Human Terrain Systems training program in Leavenworth, Kansas.

My initial inclination was to wonder if this was a gag, or, having written several critiques of the Human Terrain Systems program describing why it is an ethical and practical anthropological disaster, whether someone was setting me up. While I’ve had several other Human Terrain social scientists write me with complaints about the program, it didn’t seem likely that Human Terrain Systems (HTS) would hire someone with John’s politically progressive views. But the email address was the same one John had used for years, and John’s story checked out and made sense, so I approached our correspondence along the lines of his initial request to help him organize his focus and to understand critiques of HTS. As he undertook his HTS training, we corresponded and I passed along articles, and offered friendship and critiques of what he was learning in this training; not that John needed help with this critique, the flaws in the program were pretty obvious to him.

John explained to me that a few weeks earlier he had lost his job working as a Cultural Resource Management archaeologist. He had been terminated for fulfilling his duties as a Program Manager, which led to him being accused of failing to follow the Chain of Command after having consulted with the California State Historic Preservation Officer. Within minutes of posting his resume on a job hunting website, he was contacted by a HTS contractor and recruited to begin training as a HTS social scientist. The contractor indicated John was just what they were looking for because he had conducted anthropological fieldwork in Afghanistan in 1969-70 while working towards a PhD in anthropology. So, the Human Terrain program recognized him as potentially a very valuable asset to the program. All this for a handsome salary during the pre-deployment training stage at a rate that is twice the salary I earn as a full professor.

Given the public claims that the Human Terrain program is saving lives of Afghan civilians, it made sense that John Allison would consider joining Human Terrain Systems (HTS). HTS proponents claim that it mixes ethnographic fieldwork and troop education in ways that will reduce violent interactions between troops and occupied/enemy populations. But the claims of what Human Terrain Teams (HTT) accomplish are far different from the reality; and anthropologists’ ethical commitments to secure voluntary informed consent and to not harm studied populations creates insurmountable ethical problems for anthropologists in the HTS program. A recently released detailed report written by a commission of the American Anthropological Association (of which I was a contributor) found that HTS was an ethical and practical failure that sloppily mixed education, research and intelligence gathering functions and had such poor safeguards that it inevitably contributes to the targeting of populations. This report concluded that, “when ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.” Yet, the well orchestrated PR campaigns pitching HTS to the public has made it an inviting program for many.

From the beginning, John was skeptical of the claims offered by the Human Terrain Systems program. While his research in Afghanistan, not to mention the deaths of Afghan friends made the possibility of reducing harm a personal issue; he was skeptical that the military could use anthropological knowledge in ways that would serve the Afghan people. Given the range of claims about the Human Terrain program and conflicting reports that its social scientists did or didn’t engage in targeting or collect intelligence, he knew he was in a unique position to observe how the training program approached these issues; and the closed door reports from HTS team members reporting in from “down range” could provide a clear view of these and other issues.

Since mid-October I’ve heard from John several times each week. Sometimes John wrote me, asking for links to articles and sources on HTS; things like the American Anthropological Association’s 2009 report on HTS, and articles written by Roberto González and other members of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. Other times he wrote with brief reports on the day’s activities.

Early on, a lot of my correspondence with John consisted of just sending him journal articles, drafts of papers I was working on or the same news clips that I regularly sent to friends. A few days after his initial email, I sent John a link to a pretty typical, uncritical HTS story that had come out in World Politics Review, writing that I thought “it reads like the dozens of uncritical propaganda pieces that have come before it. Anything that you can gather on how the forty or fifty of these uncritical hegemonic press reports keep coming off the assembly line might be interesting–it isn’t really a mystery how it works, it just might be interesting for you to watch how these reporters are corn-fed the party line from the inside.”

John replied, that the function of these ongoing uncritical feature profiles on Human Terrain was clarified for him earlier that day when a retired Colonel had spoken to the group about the status of HTS, explaining that,

“the program is still in the status of a Project. Projects are funded from year to year as non-recurring line items. They are trying to get the status of ‘Program,’ which is a recurring budget line item. So, all these articles that are published in the military press and in public media, are attempting to influence both the military budget decision-makers and anyone in the civilian sector who might be able to influence the military decision-makers. That is what it is all about: budget turf wars.”

Some of what is told to the media in these PR stories is simply not true. But the impossibility of Human Terrain Teams ever achieving most of the claimed outcomes, such as establishing local rapport and being the patient listening face of a harsh military occupation, so regularly fed to the American public, was made very clear to HTS trainees. In late November John wrote that,

“One interesting fact that was revealed today is that the time that an anthropologist or social scientist has to finish an interview before the probability of a sniper attack becomes drastically high, is about 7 minutes. How deep an understanding, rapport or trust develops in 7 minutes? It seems that the ‘data’ sought is very limited to operationally tactically useful stuff. For anything deeper, they “reach back” to the research centers for work from anthropologists that they will use without permission and without attribution.”

Classical ethnographic research usually takes a year or more of fieldwork before anthropologists begin figuring how things work. Given HTS’s difficulty in hiring culturally competent social scientists, seven minutes isn’t even enough time for an ethnographer to get properly confused. John’s reference to a “reach back” to Human Terrain research centers refers to the program’s theoretical practice (theoretical, because the technology doesn’t work as designed) of HTT field social scientists linking with US based HTT staff accessing published and unpublished social science data for use by HTT social scientists down range, with or without consulting with and getting permission of the researcher for using their data for this purpose.

Several emails from John detailed how the training used a classroom setting with a pretext of “teaching” and fostering “discussions” as a way to impart heavy-handed distortions about topics ranging from counterinsurgency, history, anthropological research methods and norms of ethical anthropological practice.

Some Human Terrain Team classroom training tried to address questions of ethics. But John wrote me that these classes were “strictly pro forma as, no doubt, required; but not much relevant discussion of the salient moral/ethical questions about what we would be required to do as integral part of a platoon.” But John wrote me that anthropological ethics conflict with HTS mission, and rather than focusing on ethics, the training focused on:

“the pressure to conform to the military mindset by the dominant and majority of the class that is military, either in uniform or in civilian clothes. If you don’t join the lockstep notion that a US life is much more valuable than an Afghan life, then you will get marginalized and stigmatized in the class and down-graded during the peer review process. Most civilian ‘social scientists’ (which include historians, psychologists and industrial psychologists) have merged into that military mindset. The few who have not are being made to feel our separateness. If I was allowed to go downrange, those who would be my Team Leader would relish to opportunity to get rid of me at the first difference of opinion.”

John wrote that one of the training instructors, a Ph.D. anthropologist who worked mostly with statistical sociological methods as a public relations consultant teaching the class in “Ethnographic Field Methods” – that never touched on the central methods of ethnography – dismissed the ethical complication of HTS ethnography telling the class that, “Consent is implied by the continued participation” of the ‘informant’, and also, by those who join in the discussion without an invitation.” Not only is this a predatory standard of consent, but it runs counter to the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report, and US federal research consent guidelines.

Human Terrain Systems is desperate to hire anthropologists, but the ethical problems presented for anthropologists working on HTS counterinsurgency operations makes it difficult to keep actual anthropologists in the program. John had important insights into the program’s failures to hire anthropologists or social scientists with pertinent cultural or linguistic experiences:

“Though they want to have an anthropologist be the HTT Social Scientist, they are happy to get anyone with what could be remotely considered an ‘advanced’ degree in a social science. So, although we have five anthropologists, we also have several historians, an economist, an industrial psychologist, etc; and only one for the Iraq group and one (me) for the Afghanistan group has any previous experience in the region of their destination.”

There are good historical reasons why anthropologists find HTS’s practices to run counter to their disciplinary commitments to the people with whom they share their lives when doing fieldwork. Historians and industrial psychologists often approach the people they study as “objects,” or in ways that are more distant, or are fundamentally different than anthropologists. After reading these observations about the program’s difficulties in finding anthropologists, I wrote to John that,

“Though the HTS dream is to use anthropologists, it will have a next to impossible time hiring any (or at least any decent ones, esp. not ones with actually field research in the areas where HTS will work—today Afghanistan, tomorrow AFRICOM), so they will grab historians, religious studies, political science, accountants etc. to fill the gap, but these people won’t come from disciplines that champion ethnographic fieldwork.”

John wrote me that HTT personnel are given cursory lectures on research ethics, including information on the basics of the Nuremberg Code and ethical principles by professional organizations such as the American Anthropological Association, but that the specifics of how to negotiate ethical research in armed, occupied settings are not made clear to students. But such discussions are by far overshadowed by the demands of the larger military mission which HTS personnel exist to support. John wrote,

“Clearly [HTS] does not give its participants [the] luxury [to] consider whether the orders they comply with consider the ethical obligations to those they interview in the presence of their armed Team Leaders; some of whom have a deep dislike for “the enemy” which includes most Muslims. And this is why they are hiring economists, historians and others as “social scientists” who, initially, were intended to be cultural anthropologists.”

These issues have such significance to professionally trained anthropologists that the military is increasingly becoming aware that the unethical nature of the everyday procedures makes it difficult for them to hire Ph.D. anthropologists with normative understandings of ethical practices. One choice for the military facing this problem would be to halt a program that necessitates engaging in ethically problematic behaviors; the other choice for the military could be to start training their own “ethnographers” and “anthropologists,” with a different standard of ethical behavior. According to John Allison, the military appears interested in the second of these two choices; in early December he wrote me that he concluded, “that the military is beginning to do an end run by producing its own anthropologists/social scientist PhDs at West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy and other cooperating institutions; thus marginalizing the criticism.”

This makes a lot of sense. It fits with larger institutional moves in which the military (through programs like the Minerva Program, the Intelligence Community Scholars Program and the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program) is trying to bend independent scholarship in ways that will recruit scholars ready to will tell them what they want to hear or what they already believe.

This military university system can be used to produce social scientists operating with different ethical commitments, where military scholars can be trained to do the military’s bidding without raising the sort of fundamental ethical questions that members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and other groups have raised. They can develop their own “ethics codes” that can warp ethical commitments in ways that will align with military missions. Allison wrote,

“If military academies want to displace the AAA’s ability to advise and sanction through resolutions, by providing degrees to career military officers who will not question the chain of command, then they will have their way … for awhile. When the results of the HTTs in providing “data” to the brigades are shown not to be what they had been anticipating, the “HTS Project” will be denied “Program” status, and the military will again turn to PsyOps, Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and the other standard military options for COIN. In the end, David, it is all really about profit and control.”

Huge profits for the military contractors running the program (HTS training is managed by CLI contractors) and control for the army commanders directing HTS activities in the field. Promises of profit and control are the sort of desired outcomes that will keep HTS funded long after internal military evaluations show the program to be an abject failure.

John wrote me that in a class covering Information Operations (InfoOps) they were told that HTTs are used to “measure the change in the population’s mental image after a PsyOps propaganda pamphlet drop.” John wrote that “part of HTS’s job is to devise such measures and make such an evaluation to be presented to the commander as a brief PowerPoint slide presentation.” Such mercenary acts transform anthropological sensitivities into mechanical instruments measuring the efficiency of military occupations.

Throughout our correspondence John’s hopes for the program came and went. He began with hopes that HTS could shift the military’s focus away from violent “kinetic engagements” towards engaging with the population without force. In early January he wrote me an enthusiastic email after engaging in some training role-playing when he had,

“asked one of the two Arabic-speaking HTT woman who where the interviewer and the interviewee, whether she would feel more safe if she were there with the woman alone, rather than accompanied by armed, uniformed soldiers. Her answer was “yes” (she has done fieldwork in Yemen for couple of years). I went on to make two suggestions that were well-received:

1. That HTT’s job is as much to shift the ‘Center of Gravity’ (COG, in COIN-speak) of the military, including those military who are participating in HTTs, from the Kinetic to the COIN position. That is, to get them to see the world and their role in it differently. That they need to do that before they can effectively try to shift the COG of how Afghans perceive them from negative to positive. In other words, their intent toward the Afghan people needs to become positive, not that of forceful occupiers.

2. That this would best be achieved by putting the HTT social scientist as resident with the local people, not embedded in the military and ‘inside the wire.’

I was shocked at the response – quite positive, even from hard-nosed career soldiers.

Subversion, it may be; but for improving things so deeds match words.”

I replied to John pointing out that the political issues raised by military-anthropologists embedding with villagers or the political and ethical issues raised by anthropologists becoming agents of occupation and counterinsurgency. I wrote him that this proposal sounded,

“like the dream of panoptical control of the enemy: becoming the all seeing eye; surveillance ethnography brought to a new level. The counterinsurgency dream is to understand and control the other by shifting COG from the external shooting and threatening with harm by the military, to other means of cooption and control. The key is that the military still seeks to control local populations, not through hard power, but through soft power. The problem is found in what one means by ‘become positive’ in your sentence reading ‘the intent toward the Afghan people needs to become positive, not that of forceful occupiers.’ Notions of what would entail ‘positive’ would be measured not only by local standards (if this were the case, then ‘positive’ might include in some instances enabling insurgents to remove foreign occupiers by force) but by US military standards; in other words, if the US presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, (coming soon: Yemen, Nigeria, etc.) has anything to do with issues of empire (it does), then these issues remain elements of what a ‘positive’ outcome would be.

Moving HTT social scientists into local settings isn’t some form of social work; it is a form of social control. The HTT project seeks to blur what COIN is, so that we internalize it as humanitarian assistance and cross-cultural understanding; but counterinsurgency remains counterinsurgency. Soft power in these circumstances remains military power. It leaves less obvious dead bodies in the streets, but it remains a tool of empire.”

But even as John was working to keep his hopes for Human Terrain Systems alive, he – who had worked for five years as the Tribal Anthropologist for the Klamath Tribes – was engaging in some serious internal arguments with HTS personnel in which he openly compared the outcomes of HTS enterprises to other disastrous American campaigns. John wrote to HTS training personnel that this,

“is not so different from what the European-Americans did to the Native Americans in the USA. Now, several generations later, the stories are passed on and are deep in the collective consciousness of those Indian peoples and colors their way of seeing the European-Americans today, having its effect on how they view “government programs”, attempts to change their view of work, alcohol & drugs, etc.”

In January, John wrote that his HTT training group was undertaking intense role playing where Human Terrain social scientists advised commanders about whether or not the US military should undertake an air strike on a specific northern Afghani village. Johns said the information used for these decisions, in the classroom and in Afghanistan, was mostly whatever they could muster from Google, but in one role-playing scenario assigned to him: the village under consideration in this instance was one he knew from his dissertation research. John wrote me that one team was ask to advise on a training scenario set in the Waigal Valley of Nuristan; the HTT social scientists assigned this case,

“based all his information on internet resources – as did everyone; and, as would be necessary for the real situation, since the air assault was necessary because the people their were not receptive to our occupation.

Waigal Valley is the next valley east from the Ashkun area, where I did my doctoral research. When he finished, I gave a brief summary of the reality of Nuristan, told them that the suggestion of attacking them because they resisted invasion as they had against Islam, against the British and against the Russians, made me want to cry. I suggested that there has to be another function for the HTTs than simply to loyally and without direct knowledge of the people, subscribe to such an attack. I made it clear that I understood that the Air Assault would have to be followed by air support fire because the Nuristanis WILL RESIST. Afterward some of the career military folks and career CIA folks came over to try to explain the difference between an air assault and an air attack; and I told them that I understood the difference and also knew that the assault would be followed by air support if there was resistance; and that there would be resistance.”

Insofar as Human Terrain seeks to connect hearts and minds, it is doomed to fail for all the dynamics played out in the above training scenario: the voice of anthropological knowledge and moderation was plowed under by the dominant military approach. If such failures were the rule in the classroom, there is no chance these views could hold sway in the battlefield.

John and a second anthropologist dissenter regularly raised questions about ethical and political issues related to HTS’s mission in class. In the beginning this was welcomed as normal classroom discourse. With time these dissenters became increasingly marginalized within the cohort. Two months into the program John wrote me that the program was,

“getting tighter on those who don’t buy into the military’s version of what HTT should do. Now, it is becoming highly pressured to begin private lessons with firearms; and the image is that we will actually be soldiers who also do a little intel work as prescribed by the commander. The truth of the situation in the field is not quite that, as told by some who have recently returned, but the various career guys make it out that way: that you have to carry a weapon because you are bumping a soldier from the vehicle going on a mission that is exclusively military, and they are being so kind as to maybe allow you a few minutes to do some interviewing; but you better have a gun so as to be able to fill in for the soldier whose place you took in case of attack. The old Stockholm Syndrome pressures are increasing.”

I wrote him back that,

“from the outside, the timing of now introducing firearms lessons seems pretty smart: at this point you have all been indoctrinated with enough stories about what ‘really happens down range’ that whatever logical resistance to becoming armed members of a counterinsurgency team that would have naturally been vocalized by many in your class will have been pushed below the surface. The notion that you are all ‘taking the seat of a soldier’ on a mission where you may have to kill those you are trying to defeat with soft power is just another way of establishing how HTS social scientists are soldiers. I can only imagine how nasty the subtle and not so subtle group dynamics with all this can get.”

During the past month, John’s descriptions of the program increasingly presented a picture of an inflexible program that turns against individuals offering advice aligned with perspectives outside the narrow limits of military doctrine. During the first week of February, John described how the range of acceptable views was rapidly narrowing and adherence to military doctrine became an objective unto itself, writing that the most important of:

“the Targeting indoctrination presentation by the contractors, was that we all need to adopt the doctrinal language and viewpoint. Only by doing that can we successfully influence the tactical and strategic decisions of the commander and the planning team. When I tried to point out – again – that by being limited to talking and thinking like one of them the social scientist loses his own perspective and cannot really make the changes in perspective of the military – that is, to move the military’s Center of Gravity toward a more human terrain, anthropology-focused viewpoint. Of course, then I had to put up with facing the usual solid wall of musk oxen telling me that I would be excluded from the Team if I tried to approach it with that suggestion.”

Wargaming Against Radical Greens in Kansas and Missouri

John’s last day of HTS training was the first day of MARDEX, a military role playing exercise designated as “Weston Resolve.” For the exercise, the class was presented with a training scenario in which the fictional nation of “Lakeland” was located in an area to the northeast of Kansas City was the focus of operations. John wrote that,

“In the PowerPoint slide presentation laying out the background for the “operations”, the Wargame role-playing is represented by staff as merging into the real world drug, crime, and environmental “contention” within the community. The whole mission is represented as bringing a military state control of the local population which has recently elected a local government that is a “permissive” (supportive) environment for US Army activities after the previous local government had withdrawn from the US as a sovereign society. Now the US military is taking over the area to reestablish public security.”

The class was then told that the mission they were training to support was one in which the military was establishing order in a setting where environmentalist-separatists had taken over. John explained that in this hypothetical training scenario,

“IATAN, a coal-fired power plant on the Missouri side of the river is one of the main military foci due to “contention within the community” over the environmental pollution it is causing. Sierra Club and other, more radical groups have been active in this area: ELF is one such radical group. Even though there is an elected government and rule of law in Lakeland, there are some ‘insurgents’ who are opportunistic.’ That is why the US Army has moved into this area that has broken away from US control.

Staff Assignment to the several Human Terrain Teams that make up the class of the November Cycle were issued as follows: 1. ‘Find out more details on the criminal activity.’ 2. Find out the best conduits to pass ‘information’(PsyOps and InfoOps) to the local population. 3. HTT is assigned to produce a ‘Research Plan’ to understand the situation at the IATAN power plant – people’s concerns, desires, etc., and identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.

As I thought about what was being done in this activity, and the way it adapted COIN strategy for Afghanistan/Iraq to be applied by the US military in situations in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order, I began to think back on stories that circulated among the ant-war movement in the 1960s-70s, about concentration camps being developed just for imprisoning such protestors an “problem-causers”. And I wondered who would be working on the Human Terrain Teams to enable the US military’s actions against unruly segments of their own countrymen; perhaps Afghan and Iraqi anthropologists who had specialized in US ethnography?”

Human Terrain Teams practicing training scenarios set in regions actually within the United States bring the very notion of “human terrain” back home to its domestic counterinsurgent roots. As anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez documents in his book, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, the very phrase “human terrain” grew out of domestic counterinsurgency initiatives. Gonzalez describes how in 1968 the US House Un-American Activities Committee released a report entitled “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States” which warned that the Black Panthers and other militant groups threatened the country’s political stability. HUAC warned that “irregular forces…possess the ability to seize and retain the initiative through a superior control of the human terrain.” The clear implication was that the control of civilians in America’s cities was vital to winning the counterinsurgency struggle at home.

When John resigned from the program last Wednesday, he submitted a summary critique of HTS to those directing the program. John’s words convey his hopes and disappointments for the Human Terrain Systems program, and clarify the deep systemic problems with this flawed program. Below is the critique he submitted upon his resignation:

Summary Critique of Human Terrain Systems from a Trainee’s Perspective

John Allison, Cultural Anthropologist. (Resigned from the Human Terrain System Training Program, November 2009 Cycle, effective February 10, 2010)

“I volunteered for the HTS program because I had done my doctoral research in the Hindu Kush area of Afghanistan known as Nuristan long before the train of disasters, caused by foreign forces over the past 35 years, ran through this land of diverse peoples, historic sites and monuments, and ecosystems. I had hope that I could help to save the loss of any more innocent Afghan lives. Several of my Afghan friends had died, some having been executed because of their associations with US agents there.

After beginning training in the HTS program, I was shocked when I first mentioned that this was my purpose and one of my classmates expressed contempt for that motive and said that he was only there because he didn’t want to see one more US soldier’s life lost; didn’t want to have to take the US flag to the door of an US mother and tell her that her son was killed. And, when I asked about Afghan mothers whose sons were killed by US errors of judgment causing “collateral damage” in their kinetic warfare, he responded that he didn’t ‘… give a fuck about those people. I would just drive through their village in my Humvee and throw money at those mothers.’ This was a Colonel who is a doctoral candidate in a military history program at a military-funded university; a Team Leader. Although this man was more out-spoken than most of his military colleagues, my impression now is that he expressed what almost all of them think and feel.

My experience in the program included both instruction in such things as military culture, military language, military decision-making process, Counter-Insurgency doctrine, and many other topics intended to socialize the trainees into the world as seen by the military. During this time, more than once, the majority of the class – who were either current or retired career military or those with former military service who were hoping to convert into an intelligence role such as CIA – would speak about the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. This refers to how the majority in a group can shape the values and perception of the minority. Apparently, in most ‘cycles’ (six-month long training group schedules up to deployment), the majority of the HTT candidates are such military personnel as were in our November 2009 Cycle, which actually began mid-October. It became clear that the majority saw their job as to expedite the acculturation of the rest of us – those who had the skills and credential that were needed to support the ‘soft’ warfare image that HTS advertises – an image of winning the hearts and minds of the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq – to win the anthropologists over to their military culture’s world view and values; or to marginalize and force the non-compliant to resign.

In addition there were a couple weeks of ‘Introduction to Anthropology’ and three weeks of ‘Ethnographic Method’. The Introduction to Anthropology was cursory and quick. Some important terms were introduced – e.g. ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ – but not taken to enough depth in examples to drive home the deeper implications. Holt, who served on an HTT in Afghanistan and wants to return, is a cultural materialist, and limited his perspective to mostly the etic. He was the dominant voice. He soon transitioned into a scenario in which he assigned the several class teams to provide a 5-slide PowerPoint presentation (with a maximum of 5 bullet ‘points’ on each slide) to the Commander to advise him on what to do when he has troops on the ground in a village area that he has heard is ‘hostile’, based on HTT research. Of the seven teams, only one dared to suggest that the commander should wait until the HTT had done further field research before launching the assault. This was clearly the Stockholm effect of the Team Leader and others forming the behavior of the Social Scientist.

There were several weeks of ‘Ethnographic Method’, in which there was no introduction to real participant-observer methods or anything really related to ethnographic method. Instead, this was a rapid fire, cursory presentation of a myriad of methods used in sociological statistics; but not in enough depth in any one of them to really become functional if the student did not already have a strong background. It was also rooted in computer software that might not be available ‘downrange’. It gave colorful, simplistic representation of complex social facts – in US society – that fit well into the PowerPoint presentations of five slides, each with a few bullets or a single, simple graphic.

On the one hand, HTS contractors make a concerted effort to recruit and hire cultural anthropologists because these are the obviously most qualified professionals to participate as social scientists on the HTTs in the theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the anticipated expansion of COIN to sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and other places in the Islamic world. In the November cycle, I was the only social scientist on 5 teams who had previous experience in Afghanistan. Among those teams scheduled for Iraq, there was also only one social scientist who had such experience.

Yet, on the other hand, the prevailing military culture, and the nature of the operations at the Brigade and lower unit levels at which HTT’s are assigned, subordinate the judgment of these anthropologists and other ‘social scientists’ (which include such as historians, psychologists, and economists who have absolutely no training in cross-cultural field research) to the dictates of the Brigade or Battalion command.

The command is dominated by the military (specifically US Army) culture and the related inclination to use the HTT to aid in gathering intelligence useful for supporting kinetic operations; which is strictly forbidden in the surface representation of the HTS. Yet, it is made clear in training that this is the fact of life on the Team. Since the Team Leaders are part of the military culture, the social scientist has no recourse. One presenter from the Reachback Research Center (RRC) estimated that 30% of the HTTs become tools for such intel needs of the Brigade rather than to provide needed information for moving the population’s Center of Gravity from favoring the resistance forces’ agenda to favoring the occupying ‘Coalition’ forces and their agenda, as represented in the public representation of HTS.

There is a great distance, an effective separation, between the HTS ‘Directorate’ and the training staff and the trainees. This was emphasized in my exit interview with my Seminar Leader, XXXXXXXX. When I told him that I had only one other possibility other than entirely resigning, he told me in so many words, ‘forget it’; explaining that there was not a lot of interest at the Directorate level in talking with trainees about such things. XXXXXXXX clearly regrets this fact.

This was reinforced in my telephone conversation with my CLI supervisor XXXXXXXX when I told her of this conversation with XXXXXXXX. She reciprocated with a story from a returning social scientist who had served a tour in Afghanistan. He told her that he had many suggestions for improving the program that he hoped to communicate to the HTS Social Science Directorate. However, when he got to his debriefing interview and attempted to relate his thoughts and suggestions to the upper echelons, the interviewer (either Montgomery McFate or Jennifer Clark) simply blew him off and cut him short, not allowing him to really express himself in less than ten minutes allotted to him after a year of service.

You, yourself, Mark, told me that this was consistent with your impressions: there is not a lot of receptiveness to feedback from the rank and file if it runs against the grain of military culture – especially US Army culture, as contrasted with US Navy, Air Force or even US Marine culture, that still is the dominant kinetic perception of the purpose of deployment. Even though Generals McCrystal and Petraeus have made the transition to the “soft” strategy of modern COIN, the predominant US Army mindset is still deeply set into the kinetic approach.

Until the Center of Gravity of the brains of the US military’s ‘boots on the ground’ is moved to understand the value of a cultural anthropologist’s in-depth research to really helping the US military and civilian assistance to enable a nation such as Afghanistan to achieve self-determined stability and sovereignty, the money spent on HTS will be greatly a waste of US taxpayer money. This includes the need for the military as well as the US Department of State to understand the reasons behind the ethical concerns of anthropologists regarding this program.”

The significance of John Allison’s insider account of HTS training is found in the details he provides about the program’s inability to address basic ethical or functional issues. While John was open to the possibility of reforming a program with so many structural shortcomings, I remain convinced that the program’s flaws are too fundamental for a course correction; the ethical problems alone will make it impossible for the program to recruit competent anthropologists. As the Human Terrain program is now under review by the House Armed Services Committee, I would hope that John Allison is called before the House Armed Services Committee so that his first person account of the failures of the program will add some serious weight to those informed voices who are calling for the termination of the Human Terrain Systems program.

David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist.  He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ new book Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published last month by Prickly Paradigm Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu

Over 470 reports have been published online concerning the relationships between anthropology, other parts of academia, and the military and intelligence agencies since 2001. The items covered here consist of online publications of the mainstream and alternative media, documents online referred to by journalists, statements and reports from professional associations, and journal publications by some of the key actors. The period in focus stretches mostly from 2000 to 10 February 2010. Blog posts, too numerous, are generally not included in this bibliography/archive, nor are books (which generally cannot be annotated and archived in their non-electronic formats) — indeed, a Google search for “human terrain system” returns almost 5.9 million results. The focus here is largely on the Human Terrain System; the Pentagon’s Minerva research initiative; the role of intelligence agencies in American universities, the use of social science research for developing torture techniques used in Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and Guantánamo (U.S. colony in Cuba); and, the use of social science in fashioning a “culturally sensitive” counterinsurgency doctrine.

These materials are presented in a variety of formats, each of which serves a particular purpose. The HTML list following below is for easy and rapid access, and to generate an output that can be mined by search engines. The Diigo list/archive provides the same items but with a difference: extended extracts from each piece are provided, along with each item’s own archived web page, especially since already many items are beginning to vanish from the Internet. The Diigo PDF does not provide the archived pages, but is a printable version of the extracts for each item. The PDF bibliography for downloading is identical in content to what follows on this page. Finally, the complete list of all posts on HTS and Minerva published on this blog since its inception are provided in a separate Diigo list (again with each post archived via Diigo).

THE BIG LIST & ARCHIVE

Items are presented in no particular order. This is the only item that will be updated for the foreseeable future. You can also play the entire collection as Webslides.

SUBSCRIBE TO RECEIVE UPDATES

TO THE “BIG LIST & ARCHIVE”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Identical to what is presented below on this page, in alphabetical and chronological order, but with neither the extracts nor the archived web pages offered above. [45 pages, 210 Kb]

LIST WITH EXTRACTS

Same as the above, except that archived web pages are not included. The items are mostly in alphabetical order. This file will not be updated. [990 pages, 14.6 Mb]

ALL RELATED POSTS FROM THIS BLOG

A complete list and archive of all 204 posts published to date on this blog dealing with anthropology, the  Human Terrain System, and the Minerva Research Initiative. They are presented in the order in which they appeared, with the earliest posts appearing first.

Photo: (left) Army Capt. Thomas H. Melton, a native of Shreveport, La., and commander of Troop A, 1st Squadron, 75th Cavalry Regiment, and Marcus Griffin, an anthropologist for the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team (left-center), talk with an Iraqi woman inside her home in Ghazaliyah, Iraq, Jan. 13, 2008. Photo by Sgt. James P. Hunter, USA. http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48766

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE TO THE HTML BIBLIOGRAPHY…

Between now and then, a number of posts will appear dealing with the Human Terrain System (HTS), and doubtfully anything else in terms of subject matter. A special “gift” is also being prepared for readers interested in the relations between anthropology and the military and intelligence agencies, HTS, and the Minerva Research Initiative. Otherwise, there is an abundance of current developments, from news of the war in Afghanistan, to the militarization of American aid to Haiti, that under ideal circumstances numerous posts would have already been published by now.

At present I am devoting my energies to related areas that in some ways were shaped by experience with this blog, and knowledge gained in part from preparing its various postings. One is a new course I am currently teaching, The New Imperialism, and another course, Political Activism and the Internet. All of these will come together in some new writing projects that I am to begin this summer, or as soon as my current publishing backlog has been overcome.

After this blog I am planning a very different, and perhaps more ambitious online project that is more in line with the two courses identified above, and more in line with my next research and writing goals. That will have to wait until August. (That project will be very different especially in the sense of no longer orienting itself toward anthropology, or forming an unmistakable part of an online anthropology ‘community’.)

In the meantime, I am very much engaged in the “same thing” as here, just in different arenas and with different participants and interlocutors.

Concerning Montgomery McFate’s doctoral dissertation:

Montgomery McFate’s PhD dissertation (when she was Montgomery Cybele Carlough) has been digitized in its entirety and is available for download by persons using libraries with subscriptions to ProQuest. What follows are some of the significant details about her dissertation, especially with reference to recent discussion on this blog.

Carlough, Montgomery Cybele (1994).  Pax Brittania: British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969-1982. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, United States — Connecticut. (Publication No. AAT 9522728).

In her Preface/Statement of Disclosure, Carlough (McFate) indicates her sources of financial support for her research: “This doctoral research was financially supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship (1991-94), Yale University Fellowships (1990-94), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation pre-dissertation Fellowship (1990-91), a Council on West European Studies travel grant (1993-4), John F. Enders Fellowship (1993-4), the William’s Fund (1991,1993-4), and the International Security Program/Smith-Richardson Foundation at Yale (1993-4).”

Providing us with an overview of her fieldwork activities, she writes: “Fieldwork was conducted in 1989, 1991, 1993, and 1994. Interviews, prison visits, participant observation, correspondence, and conversations were conducted with members of the Republican Movement in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Holland, and North America, including but not limited to the following groups: Provisional Sinn Fein (PSF), Glor na n-Gael, Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), Irish Northern Aid (NORAID), the Ulster Gaelic Club (UGC), and Information on Ireland (IOI).”

In addition, “Interviews, participant observation, correspondence, and conversations were conducted with members of the British defence establishment in the UK, including but not limited to the following groups: serving and retired members of the British Army, the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI), the Corporation for Operations Research and Defence Analysis (CORDA), historians at Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and an ‘independent military sub-contractor’ (mercenary).” [As David Price noted in his CounterPunch article, at this time Carlough/McFate was barely softening usage of the term, mercenary.]

Carlough/McFate also tells the reader: “Neither members of the British defence and security establishment, nor their Republican counterparts, were aware of my research on the other side of the military looking-glass, and this manuscript may therefore come as somewhat of a surprise to them. This research was conducted informally, without the assistance or official sanction of the British Army or the Republican Movement. No members of either organization exceeded the limits of security, or jeopardized their operations, by allowing me access to classified documents.”

Finally, with respect to her supervision, and other academics who assisted her, she writes: “I would like to acknowledge the intellectual contributions of Professor Harold Scheffler [anthropology], Professor David Apter, Professor George Andreopoulos, Professor John Middleton [anthropology], and Professor John Szwed [anthropology] at Yale University. I would also like to thank Professor Paul Bracken, Professor Graham McFarlane at Queen’s University, Belfast, Dr. John C. Dolan at University of Otago, New Zealand, Omid Mantashi, Linda Angst, Peta Katz, Alistair Renwick, Brian Baer and especially Arturo Cherbowski-Lask.”

Update: Thanks to a trackback from An American Lion, I “discovered” that Montgomery McFate is a “brave thinker” in this brave new world — The Atlantic, selects this as the quote of choice for this brave thinker: “If you understand how to frustrate or satisfy the population’s interests to get them to support your side in a counterinsurgency, you don’t need to kill as many of them.”

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Human Terrain System Contract: Georgia Tech

As indicated here:

Principle Contractor: Georgia Tech Applied Research Corporation [applied commercial research arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology]
Date of Issuance: 10/9/2009
Branch of Service: Army

Contract Details:
Georgia Tech Applied Research Corp., Atlanta, Ga., was awarded on Sept. 30, 2009 a $7,820,869 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the Human Terrain System Project used to train personnel to deploy on human terrain teams and human terrain analysis teams in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Work is to be performed Leavenworth, Kan., (65 percent), Atlanta, Ga., (30 percent), and Oyster Point, Va., (5 percent) with an estimated completion date of Aug. 31, 2010. One bid solicited with one bid received. U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, Ala., is the contracting activity (W31P4Q-08-D-0006).

Total Contract Value: $7,820,869

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Minerva Research Initiative: Department of Defense, National Science Foundation

(1) I have been interested in finding which academic institutions outside of the U.S. have partnered with U.S. counterparts in receiving and working on projects funded by the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative. Despite proclamations of openness, the Pentagon never released this information in its first announcement of grants awarded, although the fact that three foreign institutional partners existed was mentioned. Searching the faculty news pages of the institutions of American grant recipients, I learned of the following non-U.S. institutional partners:

• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sweden) — collaborating with Susan Shirk and Tai Ming Cheung on “The Evolving Relationship between Technology and National Security in China” (source).
• Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po (France) — led by sociologist Riva Kastoryano, collaborating with Arizona State University’s Mark Woodward on “Finding Allies for the War of Words: Mapping the Diffusion and Influence of Counter-Radical Muslim Discourse” (source).
• S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) — led by Kumar Ramakrishna, collaborating with Arizona State University’s Mark Woodward on “Finding Allies for the War of Words: Mapping the Diffusion and Influence of Counter-Radical Muslim Discourse” (source).

In the second round of awards, a Canadian university is the lead institution on a Minerva project:

• Patrick Barclay (University of Guelph) and Stephen Bernard (Indiana University) – “Status, Manipulating Group Threats, and Conflict Within and Between Groups”

(2) While some are saying that no anthropologist has been awarded a Minerva grant, that is not correct. Mark Woodward, of Arizona State University, mentioned above, is in fact a cultural anthropologist who teaches in the Department of Religious Studies.

Miscellaneous: Patricia Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies is conducting research with a Minerva grant, that violates international law. Martha Crenshaw, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, has made available online the research proposal she submitted to the National Science Foundation — have a look at it: “Mapping Terrorist Organizations” is a very good example of the kind of self-selecting adhesion to group-think, of telling the authorities what they want to hear (and in their own language too), that makes this an excellent example of the “Sovietization” of academic research in the U.S. It also mocks the intellectual credibility and academic value of the entire Minerva selection process, regardless of NSF “peer review.”

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How to get out of Afghanistan

Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 12 October 2009

EXTRACTS:

“The counterinsurgency strategy will fail because foreign troops, especially in a country such as Afghanistan, provoke nationalist resistance. Thus, counterinsurgency will be fuel for, not an antidote to, insurgency. The Biden-Levin strategy also will fail because Pashtuns don’t want to be policed by Uzbeks and Tajiks and because newly trained Afghan troops won’t fight hard in a war in which they see themselves as surrogates for Americans, deployed on behalf of an American cause for which Americans weren’t willing to give up their own sons. Did Washington learn nothing from the failure of the Vietnamization of the Vietnam War? Moreover, the aerial attacks on suspected Al Qaeda fighters advocated by Biden will, as counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen has argued, inevitably miss many insurgents while killing many innocent civilians. This will, in turn, produce further hatred of the United States among the Afghan population.”

“If it is not already doing so, the Obama administration should be entering into discreet conversation with a range of insurgent leaders in Afghanistan, seeking an accommodation that would divide a majority of the insurgents from the hard-line sympathizers with Al Qaeda. Such an agreement might allow Afghanistan to be ruled by a more legitimate government that would incorporate elements of the Taliban into a central administration or devolve regional power to them. In exchange for this and for foreign reconstruction aid, the United States might receive an assurance that Al Qaeda wouldn’t be allowed to resume its former operations in Afghanistan. If Al Qaeda returned, the penalty would be the loss of foreign aid and return of the drones.”

“Those who find it hard to imagine an accommodation with the Taliban should remember that, in the 1980s, as portrayed in the book and film Charlie Wilson’s War, we funded and armed some of these people. They fought the Soviets as our allies and surrogates, and President Ronald Reagan welcomed them to the White House, calling them the Afghan equivalent of our founding fathers. While it would be too much to hope for a Taliban Thomas Jefferson, that doesn’t mean we cannot reach a modus vivendi that will enable Afghans to live without their country being full of U.S. bases or Al Qaeda training camps.”

In key respects, Hugh is echoing the arguments made by Andrew Bacevich, and I have some sympathy for them. I do believe that one vital mistake is being made, and that is in thinking that Americans will be allowed any opportunity to meaningfully dictate the terms of their withdrawal to Afghans. The Taliban, some of whose leaders now insist they be called mujahidin (because maybe only a tenth of their fighters are actual Talibs), seem very content to forcibly drive out the U.S. and impose humiliating defeat…and it is succeeding. Given that the Taliban now control as much territory as when they formed the national government, I am not sure there is much incentive for them to agree to U.S. terms. The threat of drones? How about another 9/11 in return.

The NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2010 points out that,

In the committee report (H. Rept. 110-652) accompanying the Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, the committee expressed support for expansion of the HTT concept, including to other combatant command areas of responsibility.

The committee is aware of anecdotal evidence indicating the benefits of the program supporting operations in the Republic of Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The committee also notes that a number of press accounts provide anecdotal evidence indicating problems with management and resourcing. The committee finds it difficult to evaluate either set of information in the absence of reliable, empirical data.

Let us turn then to the Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, specifically Title XV of H. Rept. 110-652. (if you have trouble accessing the document, you can obtain it here: 9.3 Mb PDF). Quoting directly from pages 271-272 (underlining added):

Human, social, and cultural behavioral modeling advanced development

The budget request contained $9.4 million in PE 63670D8Z and $6.0 million in PE 64670D8Z for human, social, cultural, and behavior (HSCB) modeling advanced development.

The committee notes that today’s military forces are involved in a growing number of complex missions from counterinsurgency to security and stability operations. These missions are best served by a security force that understands and appreciates the individual, tribal, cultural, ethnic, religious, social, economic, and other aspects of the human terrain. The committee supports the Department’s effort to reshape their approach to research, training, and doctrine to adapt to the current irregular warfare environment. The Department’s creation and deployment of Human Terrain Teams (HTT) that employ cultural awareness and analysis practices notes one approach toward adapting to complex military operations.

In title XV of this Act, the committee notes the contributions of the prototype HTTs currently supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and believes that sound research and resulting tools are key technology enablers for success of these teams now and in the future.

The committee recommends $13.4 million, an increase of $4.0 million, in PE 63670D8Z and $8.0 million, an increase of $2.0 million, in PE 64670D8Z for the continued development, demonstration and rapid transition of key technologies supporting human terrain understanding and forecasting to include, Mapping the Human Terrain Joint Capability Technology Demonstration and the Conflict Modeling, Planning and Outcome Experimentation Program.

On page 279:

Social science research within the Department of Defense

As noted elsewhere in this title, the committee is encouraged by the effort within office of the Director for Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) to place an increasing focus on the human, social, and cultural behavior (HSCB) elements of research. The committee is further encouraged by a corresponding emphasis within the science and technology (S&T) programs of the respective services.

The committee has also been encouraged by the success of integrating social science expertise into Department of Defense operations via the Human Terrain Teams (HTT), which provide culturally relevant advice to military decision makers. As has been pointed out in recent testimony before the committee, these teams provide value added to traditional military operational planning and have been instrumental in saving lives in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. The committee believes that more programs in the future should be informed by social science research.

Despite this recent emphasis on efforts such as HSCB and the deployment of HTTs, the committee is concerned about the dearth of social scientists within the Department’s S&T community and especially within program management leadership positions. The committee believes the Department should take steps to leverage social scientist expertise existing within other parts of the federal government, such as the National Science Foundation.

And on page 475:

Human Terrain Team Support

The committee supports the concept for the prototype Human Terrain Teams (HTT) currently supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. HTTs have been instrumental in saving the lives of coalition troops by reducing casualties among Afghani and Iraqi civilians. HTTs provide our warfighters with non-kinetic options in planning and carrying out their missions. The committee is aware that the first prototype HTT is credited with reducing kinetic operations by more than 60 percent during its first 6 months of deployment in Operation Enduring Freedom. HTTs are critical enablers to shaping military planning in pre-conflict environments, and are supportive of reconstruction and stabilization efforts. HTTs 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.

This is the only presentation I have made at a conference where those attending and participating found it to be “shocking,” “chilling,” and “extremely depressing,” in the words of three different participants. The vast majority of those participating and attending the conference were not anthropologists.

The second of only two conference papers I have presented thus far that involve the Human Terrain System was presented this past May in Vancouver: “Useless Anthropology”: Strategies for Dealing with the Militarization of the Academy.

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Smart, Soft and Long: Propaganda Abroad and at Home

In promoting a “long war” against so-called “extremism,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has spearheaded initiatives to assimilate social scientists into the so-called “global war on terror,” with culture and ethnography being the two most salient areas of interest that drive the renewed military creep into universities, coupled with the expansion of military activity into areas previously dominated by civilian efforts, such as relief work (also see this, this, this). The result is a realignment of academic research with the imperatives of the national security state. Canada is by no means immune to this, it is merely a latecomer, as I will discuss later.

For the past two years the Pentagon has actively sought to recruit anthropologists, and now other social scientists, in its twin wars of occupation and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking the form of the Human Terrain System and now the much broader Minerva Research Initiative. The Human Terrain System, or HTS, embeds academics with military units, with the purported aim of mapping local cultural formations so that U.S. military can better understand who the local power brokers are, the prevailing customs, and material needs that can be satisfied to win local loyalty and collaboration with U.S. forces. HTS claims that its aim is to save the lives of U.S. troops first and foremost, and to lessen the need for directing firepower at local populations. Critics have argued, among many points, that social scientists are being used to better refine targeting, given that the Assistant Undersecretary of Defense, John Wilcox, noted: “the human terrain enables the global kill chain.” The embedded academics wear American military uniforms and carry weapons if and when they conduct interviews.

My belief is that it was created above all for domestic consumption, as part of a domestic propaganda effort and a public relations war conducted through the mainstream media. The aims include, in my view, quelling the homegrown intellectual insurgency of critical academics, by luring academics with salaries up to $300,000 when they are in the field, while at the same time promoting a new image for increasingly unpopular wars by emphasizing that smart people [and smart power] are replacing smart bombs, that a new intellectual elite is at the helm as personified by General David Petraeus, and that wars are now winnable because they are being fought within the cultures of the occupied. Ethnography is the shiny new tool in the armory of intellectual counterinsurgency. While the Pentagon takes over civilian developmental efforts elsewhere, it is bringing in more outsourced civilians into the war zone, contracted by British Aerospace in the case of HTS, and celebrating their counterinsurgency effort as an increasingly civilian affair.

Moreover, the principles and mechanisms behind the Human Terrain System have been incorporated in newly expanded designs for the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which came into being on October 1^st, and its Latin American and Caribbean Command (SOUTHCOM), to better penetrate local cultures and expand the nature of U.S. military presence in those regions, in part with the aid of social science research. The aim is to get U.S. troops used to the climates, cultures, and so-called human terrain of these various zones, through so-called humanitarian, development, and relief work, so as to maintain a regular presence and a higher sense of familiarity should more forceful action be required. Here too Canada is directly involved once more – at this very moment, Canadian military personnel are part of the crew of the USS Kearsarge, a US Marine aircraft carrier and amphibious assault vessel, currently docked in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The Kearsarge has been touring Central America and the Caribbean since August, as part of this expanded Pentagon mission and the reconstitution of the 4^th Fleet that has alarmed both Brazil and Venezuela.

U.S.S. Kearsarge

ARIMA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 26, 2008) Lt. Cmdr. Kathaleen Sikes, a Navy nurse embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), gives a young girl a routine check-up at the Arima District Health Facility as part of the partnership between Continuing Promise (CP) 2008 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 30, 2008) 1st Lt. Lindsey Maddox, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), reads to children from the All in One Child Development Center, a local daycare where engineers embarked aboard Kearsarge are making renovations supporting Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

COUVA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 29, 2008) Lt. Cmdr. Kathaleen Sikes, a Navy nurse embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), listens to a young woman during a routine check-up at a medical clinic at the Couva District Health Facility during the humanitarian/civic assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of CP, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

BELMONT,Trinidad and Tobago (Nov. 3, 2008) Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Andrew Bryson, assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), teaches Sister Helena of the Carmelite Sister Convent how to use the Internet. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise 2008. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo (Released)

(See Operation Continuing Promise 2008; the blog for the mission; its extensive photo gallery; note from the U.S. Embassy in Trinidad, the operation as a form of “soft power;” more on Kearsarge as soft power; the main operation page from SOUTHCOM, and a short overview/summary of the mission; and, concerning the Canadian presence, a note from the Dept. of National Defence, a photo gallery of the Canadian military personnel on the Kearsarge mission, and “Ahoy, eh! From the Canadian Medical Contingent in KEARSARGE!“)

Anthropology: Sucker for Power

Where the employment of anthropologists in HTS is concerned, this is a repeat or continuation of the long history of anthropological service to expansionist states, colonial management, and imperial domination, a history with which institutional anthropology has yet to come to terms, if the relative paucity of literature on anthropology and colonialism, or the rarity of courses on decolonizing anthropology attest. This is not say that anthropology does not contain within it a significant critical and even activist tradition, especially since the 1960s, as much as it is to suggest that anthropology has no real core, as David Price argues, with which to either align or collide with state power. Primary motivations and compulsions within anthropology, that pre-date its institutional birth and continue into the present, include:

• the constant perceived need to promote the relevance and usefulness of anthropology;
• policing its proprietary claims over ethnography;
• bemoaning the lack of attention from other disciplines and the wider society;
• the drive to develop applied anthropology;
• self-promotion as a science that should be valued by those in power;
• the desire for a higher public profile and engagement with the world;
• the goal of helping to do good; and,
  
• selling knowledge of the other.

All of these varying emotional, intellectual and political strains within the discipline contribute, individually or collectively, to propel some into the folds of the Pentagon, to keep many others silent, and to provoke the visceral critiques of a few, such as myself.

Research in the National Security State

Both HTS and the Minerva Research Initiative (Minerva or MRI from now on) are additions to an already existing array of programs that meld the national security state with academia in the U.S. These programs include the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), formed with the guidance and active support of an anthropology professor (Felix Moos) at the University of Kansas, as well as the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP), and the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security (NACHOS), and an array of private think tanks that link social science research to the so-called “global war on terror” with some of these, like the Hoover Institution at Stanford, housed on campuses. One could also mention the presence of ROTC on many campuses, and the fact that as far back as 1988 a CIA spokeswoman publicly proclaimed that the CIA had enough professors on its payroll to staff a large university. Clearly, in addition to casting a critical and vigilant eye on anthropologists, we also need to be realistic of the many intertwining connections meshing American academia more broadly with the American national security state, and build a plan of action accordingly.

This past summer the National Science Foundation, with the support of the American Anthropological Association, successfully lobbied to administer $8 million of the Pentagon’s $75 million for Minerva, offering its seal of approval to projects by offering semi-independent peer review. The NSF boasted of its long service to the state: “To secure the national defense was one of the original missions we were given when we were chartered in 1950,” said David Lightfoot, assistant director of NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, “We’ve always believed that sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists, through basic social and behavioral science research, could benefit our national security. In fact, we’ve always done so through various research projects.” Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council, at a recent Minerva workshop organized and hosted by the Pentagon, went on the record cheerfully praising Minerva and calling for more ways of expanding the nature and range of academic collaboration with the military and intelligence communities.

The MRI has been accepting grant proposals, with the deadline passing on October 30 [2008], the results to be announced before the end of this year. Proposals are being accepted for projects that address any of the following areas: (1) Chinese Military and Technology Research and Archive Programs; (2) Studies of the Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural Changes within the Islamic World; (3) Iraqi Perspectives Project; (4) Studies of Terrorist Organization and Ideologies; (5) New Approaches to Understanding Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation. The Pentagon will pay out awards to universities, and awards will range from $500,000 to $3 million (US) per annum, with the average award estimated at $1.5 million per annum.

One way in which this program can directly engage Canadian academics and universities is apparent from the fact that foreign universities are also encouraged to participate, as the Pentagon announced with the call for applications,

“This MRI competition is open to institutions of higher education (universities) including DoD institutions of higher education and foreign universities, with degree-granting programs in social sciences. Participation by foreign universities either as project lead or in a supporting role is encouraged”.

The Pentagon’s MRI calls on academics to themselves identify an organization or an ideology as “terrorist” without providing any guidelines or list of suggested organizations and ideologies, or even how it defines terrorist. The Pentagon announced in its call for research proposals that, “This effort will involve the development of models and approaches to study behavior networks, groups, and communities over time” — so surveillance is intended, over the long term, and anthropologists are specifically called upon, as “the relevance of context and situation may require field research”.

The Pentagon continues:

“there is an urgent need to be able to locate the points of influence and characterize the processes necessary to influence populations that harbor terrorist organizations in diverse cultures as well as individuals who identify with terrorist group figures”.

The Pentagon announcement states,

“Especially helpful…is understanding where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how to circumvent its spread. Research on belief formation and emotional contagion will provide cultural advisors with better tools to understand the impact of operations on the local population. This research should also contribute to countermeasures to help revise or influence belief structures to reduce the likelihood of militant cells forming”.

In addition, Minerva’s “Iraqi Perspectives Project” involves the study of documents looted from Iraq by U.S. forces and private individuals and illegally relocated to the U.S., at such places as the Hoover Institution at Stanford. This is despite the repeated protests and calls for their return from the Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archives, and despite the fact that capturing and holding these documents clearly violates the 1954 Hague Convention. Academics are therefore being invited to violate international law and Iraqi sovereignty, in writing Iraqi history for the Iraqis, another classic act of colonial domination. In the meantime, no one can know which documents have been made to disappear or have been altered in the years that they have been in the hands of the Pentagon.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist of military industries and national security, recently wrote a compelling overview of the many dangers of Minerva and other programs for the social role of academia. He writes:

“When research that could be funded by neutral civilian agencies is instead funded by the military, knowledge is subtly militarized and bent in the way a tree is bent by a prevailing wind. The public comes to accept that basic academic research on religion and violence ‘belongs’ to the military; scholars who never saw themselves as doing military research now do; maybe they wonder if their access to future funding is best secured by not criticizing U.S. foreign policy; a discipline whose independence from military and corporate funding fueled the kind of critical thinking a democracy needs is now compromised; and the priorities of the military further define the basic terms of public and academic debate”.

Given the ambivalent and unsteady reactions of academic anthropologists, these developments are undoing the past thirty years of effort of some in decolonizing anthropology, thereby threatening to return the discipline to an adjunct in the service of imperial power. As I said, reactions have been varied, with the American Anthropological Association (or AAA) going as far as issuing an executive condemnation of HTS as unethical, to proposing to revise its entire code of ethics by 2010 in order to preclude such involvement from the military from claiming adherence to professional, ethical standards. At the same time, the current president of the AAA worries primarily about whether Minerva research can live up to professional standards of peer review. Absent is any questioning of why there ought to be any “terrorism” research whatsoever — indeed a letter this summer from AAA President Setha Low to the U.S. Office of Budget and Management states very simply: “We believe that it is of paramount importance for anthropologists to study the roots of terrorism.” In the name of pragmatism, there seems to be a lack of a consistent critical discourse for dealing with state power and imperialism, and perhaps one should not expect this from a professional association as such.

As mentioned, the Pentagon is inviting foreign researchers and their universities to participate in the Minerva program. Conditions in Canada seem ripe for its spread here, given Canada’s own intervention in Afghanistan and the government’s collaboration with the U.S.’ “global war on terror,” and the relative paucity of social science research funding. A minority can hope to win a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and even fewer will ever get a grant close to the maximum of $250,000 spread over three years. Canada Research Chairs, fewer in number but with more funding, still cannot compete with the massive amount offered by Minerva, whose maximum grant is 12 times higher than the maximum offered by SSHRC as a standard research grant, and perhaps three times higher than that offered to Canada Research Chairs. With greater pressure from university administrations to secure more and more research funds, from all possible sources, it is just a matter of time before we find Minerva advertised by our own campus research offices, and taken up by researchers here. As for the Human Terrain System, it too has already made an appearance in Canada, for now relying on the service of civilian employees of the government. Some of you may have read recently that Canadian forces operating in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province have employed so-called “white situational awareness teams” to reportedly help troops navigate the complex tribal landscape of southern Afghanistan. As Tom Blackwell of CanWest News reported earlier this week:

“Drawing on information from Canadian civilians and troops operating in Kandahar, local cultural advisers and NATO allies, the team is trying to map out the movers and shakers of the province and how they relate to each other”.

That is exactly the same as HTS, indeed human terrain mapping has also been referred to as “white situational awareness” by its proponents in the U.S. Also, an American infantry unit operating under Canadian command has its own “human terrain” team, Blackwell reports. Elissa Goldberg, who is in charge of Canada’s civilian officials in Afghanistan, says that the deployment of the team is “a recognition that you really have to understand the human terrain of the environment, so you do no harm.” Refined targeting, focusing on enemy Afghans, is also a stated purpose of gaining a sense of local dynamics. When results of this first month’s trial mandate it, we should not be surprised when the Canadian military comes knocking on the doors of universities, and you already know that university presidents hungry for cash will warmly welcome them, while firmly prodding us to get more money, always more.

Towards the End of the White Discipline

I have mentioned that Canadian forces work with the US’s SOUTHCOM, we know they participate in Afghanistan, that a Canadian HTS is being developed, and that Minerva is open to Canadians. Canadian anthropology is not insulated from its American partner either. Many Canadian anthropologists, if not most, also belong to the AAA, and travel to the U.S. for annual meetings of the AAA and/or its member associations. We share the same space on editorial boards of journals. We often jointly organize conferences between the Canadian Anthropology Society and the American Ethnological Society. Some Canadian departments are modeled on the American four-field system. Prominent faculty in anthropology have served both in Canada and the U.S. We have undergraduates from the U.S., and a good number of our graduates earning degrees in anthropology in the U.S. We use the AAA’s code of ethics and its case studies as part of our teaching materials. We read and adopt texts written by our American colleagues. Even if none of the preceding were true the fact of the worldwide dominance of American anthropology alone would ensure an eventual impact on how our discipline is reproduced, presented to the wider world, and received (if at all).

The military’s cultural turn has focused attention on ethnography, in what Derek Gregory calls the rush to the intimate. Anthropology has been a victim of its lust for influence as Satia put it, and of its own success, having sold itself as the owner and master of ethnography, often wrongly equating anthropology with ethnography. Having claimed it had much to offer, now the national security state wants it. I believe we need to consider the ways we can make ourselves toxic to power overall, while rethinking, or even unthinking many things, such as the value and role of “fieldwork” (a despicably colonial and scientistic term), open access publishing, the funding of research, and the meaning of academic freedom. Without any response, the fatal uses of anthropology will likely marginalize and perhaps terminate what is arguably academia’s whitest discipline.

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More Photos from the U.S.S. Kearsarge and “Operation Continuing Promise 2008″:

TUNAPUNA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 25, 2008) Chief Steelworker Gerald Wheeler and Air Force Sgt. Scott Boucher, both embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), conducts a site survey before beginning engineering operations at Cyril Ross Nursery as part of the partnership between Continuing Promise (CP) 08 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean Phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Columbia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class David Danals/Released)

ARIMA,Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 25, 2008) Medical personnel embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) unload supplies from helicopters, preparing to assist health clinic personnel with patients as part of the partnership between Continuing Promise (CP) 08 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

ARIMA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 26, 2008) Capt. Fernandez "Frank" Ponds, mission commander for Continuing Promise (CP) 2008, greets a little boy at a local children´s home during a survey of the mission sites as part of the partnership between CP 08 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

ARIMA,Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 27, 2008) - Capt. Fernandez "Frank" Ponds, mission commander for Continuing Promise (CP) 2008 and Capt. Walter Towns, commanding officer, USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), discuss humanitarian operations with U.S. Ambassador Roy Austin and Administer of Health Jerry Narace as part of the partnership between CP 2008 and Trinidad and Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Erik Barker/Released)

ARIMA,Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 27, 2008) - Capt. Fernandez "Frank" Ponds, mission commander for Continuing Promise (CP) 2008 and Capt. Walter Towns, commanding officer, USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), discuss humanitarian operations with U.S. Ambassador Roy Austin as part of the partnership between CP 2008 and Trinidad and Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Erik Barker/Released)

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The Canadian Presence with the U.S.S. Kearsarge during “Operation Continuing Promise 2008″:

TERRE DE NEGRES, Haiti (Sept. 24, 2008) -- Canadian Forces Cpl. Eva-Marie Rogerson, ‎currently attached to USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), talks with locals during a medical assessment ‎survey to determine what aid will be needed for future relief efforts. Kearsarge embarked ‎personnel from the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard, along with medical ‎personnel from the U.S. Public Health Service, Canadian Army, Air Force and Navy, Brazil, ‎Project HOPE and International Aid are working together to conduct disaster relief operations in ‎Haiti. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Erik C. Barker/Released)‎

TERRE DE NEGRES, Haiti (Sept. 26, 2008) - Lt. Sophie Levoie, Canadian Forces Health Services Centre, currently attached to USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), meets with a local child before starting medical and veterinary aid at a neighborhood church. Kearsarge completed its humanitarian assistance/disaster relief mission in Haiti Sept. 26, delivering more than 3.3 million pounds of food, water and other supplies to communities devastated by several tropical storms and Hurricane Ike. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class (SW) David Danals/Released)

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti (September 18, 2008) - Canadian Army Lt. Stephanie Lavoie, ‎embarked aboard USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), speaks with members of the Haitian Red ‎Cross regarding medical care for citizens of Haiti who were displaced by recent storms. ‎Kearsarge is utilizing helicopters and amphibious landing craft to reach storm victims in ‎areas of Haiti where the roads are inaccessible. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass ‎Communication Specialist Seaman Ernest Scott)‎

BETANIA, Nicaragua (Aug. 17, 2008) Canadian Air Force Pvt. Tabitha Beynen, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), uses a syringe to give de-worming medication into a child at the Betania medical clinic. Kearsarge is deployed supporting the Caribbean phase of Continuing Promise 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christopher Lange/Released)

PALMIRA, Colombia (Aug. 29, 2008) Air Force Tech. Sgt. Karen Merrow, right, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), comforts a Colombian child as Canadian Army Capt. Ian Thornton extracts a tooth during dental services provided during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean phase of CP, an equal-partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Ernest Scott/Released)

SANTA MARTA, Colombia (Aug. 29, 2008) Canadian Army Capt. Maximilian Callahan, left, speaks with patients at a Candeleria medical clinic with the help of translator Aviation Machinist Mate 1st Class Emilio Trujuillo, assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean phase of CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

SANTA MARTA, Colombia (Aug. 29, 2008) Canadian Army Capt. Kim Templeton, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), gives a sticker to a young boy at a neighborhood clinic during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean phase of CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

BAYAGUANA, Dominican Republic (October 5, 2008) - Canadian Air Force Capt. Jolene Cook, a medical augmentee embarked aboard USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), gives a local man a general medical examination at the El Deporte y Recreacion Derecho de la Poblacion during the humanitarian/civic assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of CP, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, France, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class (SW/AW) William S. Parker/Released)

SABANA GRANDE, Dominican Republic (Oct. 15, 2008) Canadian Army Pvt. David Pivato, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), administers an anti-parasitic medication to a young Dominican boy. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, France, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (Oct. 16, 2008) Canadian Air Force Lt. Col. Roger Scott, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), examines a patient at the 27 Febrero medical site during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of Continuing Promise, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, France, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class William S. Parker/Released)