Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
CQ Weekly
January 7, 2008
Pg. 10
By Elaine Monaghan, CQ Staff
Anthropologists are the original participant-observers, but they don’t much like what they’re seeing — and what some members of their profession are doing — at the behest of the Department of Defense.
In February 2007, the Pentagon started embedding anthropologists in its brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of an ambitious effort called the Human Terrain System. The idea, Defense Department officials say, is to refine the cultural understanding of U.S. forces so as to promote “non-kinetic” — i.e., non-violent — modes of conflict resolution in their ranks. For example, the ability to recognize the Iraqi hand signal for “stop” — a hand held parallel to the ground as opposed to the Western gesture of a palm raised in the air — could greatly reduce civilian casualties at occupation checkpoints. Presently, embedded anthropologists have joined five units in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, of a planned 22 and four respectively, that Defense hopes ultimately to deploy.
But some anthropologists contend that their colleagues should vacate the Human Terrain, since it would potentially breach the profession’s code of ethics, which pledges to do no harm to native populations it studies. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, an ad hoc coalition opposed to the project, has publicized a presentation by Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John Wilcox before a “Precision Strike Winter Roundtable” last February; there, Wilcox used a PowerPoint display indicating that the Human Terrain project “enables the entire kill chain for the GWOT (global war on terrorism).”
Such talk puts anthropologists in mind of the Defense Department’s Vietnam-era forays into the study of native populations. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists notes that the Pentagon has likened the program to the Vietnam conflict’s Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program, which secretly lifted the work of anthropologists that was subsequently used, says David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., to help kill thousands of Viet Cong.
Anthropologists in the Network are circulating a petition pledging not to take part in the Human Terrain project. They have gathered about 1,000 signatures after making the rounds at the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference in Washington last month. The debate over the program acquired a new level of intrigue at the conference when a pair of Defense officials representing Human Terrain were seen copying the names of some pledge signatories. To further stoke suspicions among the anthropologists, one of those name-takers was Laurie Adler, a Human Terrain consultant who came into some notoriety in 2005 as a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Group, a public relations firm caught planting favorable propaganda about the American occupation in Iraqi newspapers.
Adler, communicating through Army spokesman Thomas McCuin, says she was just culling names of fellow graduates from her alma mater, the University of Chicago, so as to clue them in on the Human Terrain System’s virtues. However, Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology and sociology professor at George Mason University, another original signatory to the pledge, notes that as of the third week of December, the petition had 22 signatures associated with the university, and only one had originated from the annual meeting. Gusterson reports that Adler was seen writing down multiple names; she has subsequently denied that account, claiming that she wrote just one name alongside other notes on the same page.
In a separate report on the Human Terrain initiative released in late November, the American Anthropological Association called it “certainly the most ethically fraught” form of anthropological engagement with the military and intelligence sectors. But the report concluded that it was up to individual association members to decide whether to take part in Human Terrain or in any similar programs in the national-security sector.
For its part, the Pentagon doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Frankly, I am baffled that people oppose the Army’s efforts to find non-lethal ways to achieve our goals,” says McCuin. Perhaps military communication with the profession of anthropology is a rich topic for future anthropological study.
January 7, 2008
Pg. 10
By Elaine Monaghan, CQ Staff
Anthropologists are the original participant-observers, but they don’t much like what they’re seeing — and what some members of their profession are doing — at the behest of the Department of Defense.
In February 2007, the Pentagon started embedding anthropologists in its brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of an ambitious effort called the Human Terrain System. The idea, Defense Department officials say, is to refine the cultural understanding of U.S. forces so as to promote “non-kinetic” — i.e., non-violent — modes of conflict resolution in their ranks. For example, the ability to recognize the Iraqi hand signal for “stop” — a hand held parallel to the ground as opposed to the Western gesture of a palm raised in the air — could greatly reduce civilian casualties at occupation checkpoints. Presently, embedded anthropologists have joined five units in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, of a planned 22 and four respectively, that Defense hopes ultimately to deploy.
But some anthropologists contend that their colleagues should vacate the Human Terrain, since it would potentially breach the profession’s code of ethics, which pledges to do no harm to native populations it studies. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, an ad hoc coalition opposed to the project, has publicized a presentation by Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John Wilcox before a “Precision Strike Winter Roundtable” last February; there, Wilcox used a PowerPoint display indicating that the Human Terrain project “enables the entire kill chain for the GWOT (global war on terrorism).”
Such talk puts anthropologists in mind of the Defense Department’s Vietnam-era forays into the study of native populations. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists notes that the Pentagon has likened the program to the Vietnam conflict’s Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program, which secretly lifted the work of anthropologists that was subsequently used, says David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., to help kill thousands of Viet Cong.
Anthropologists in the Network are circulating a petition pledging not to take part in the Human Terrain project. They have gathered about 1,000 signatures after making the rounds at the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference in Washington last month. The debate over the program acquired a new level of intrigue at the conference when a pair of Defense officials representing Human Terrain were seen copying the names of some pledge signatories. To further stoke suspicions among the anthropologists, one of those name-takers was Laurie Adler, a Human Terrain consultant who came into some notoriety in 2005 as a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Group, a public relations firm caught planting favorable propaganda about the American occupation in Iraqi newspapers.
Adler, communicating through Army spokesman Thomas McCuin, says she was just culling names of fellow graduates from her alma mater, the University of Chicago, so as to clue them in on the Human Terrain System’s virtues. However, Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology and sociology professor at George Mason University, another original signatory to the pledge, notes that as of the third week of December, the petition had 22 signatures associated with the university, and only one had originated from the annual meeting. Gusterson reports that Adler was seen writing down multiple names; she has subsequently denied that account, claiming that she wrote just one name alongside other notes on the same page.
In a separate report on the Human Terrain initiative released in late November, the American Anthropological Association called it “certainly the most ethically fraught” form of anthropological engagement with the military and intelligence sectors. But the report concluded that it was up to individual association members to decide whether to take part in Human Terrain or in any similar programs in the national-security sector.
For its part, the Pentagon doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Frankly, I am baffled that people oppose the Army’s efforts to find non-lethal ways to achieve our goals,” says McCuin. Perhaps military communication with the profession of anthropology is a rich topic for future anthropological study.