Under the cover of "national security," CIA and Army researchers sought to create magic bullets they hoped would provide Cold Warriors a leg up over their Soviet rivals in the development of "mind control" technologies.
While that quixotic mission ended in failure, other discoveries in behavioral psychology and psychiatry -- such as illicit experiments in sensory deprivation and conditioning -- led to the development of today's "enhanced interrogation" techniques (torture) at Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and the CIA's transnational network of secret prisons.
Recent articles in Antifascist Calling have explored the militarization of biological, cognitive, and information sciences as constituent elements of the Bush administration's "war on terror." We now turn to Pentagon schemes to militarize the social sciences, both as a tactical necessity under battlefield conditions and as a strategic instrument to further military / media psychological operations (PSYOPS), particularly within societies under threat of imperialist attack. - Tom Burghardt
But as anthropologist David H. Price points out, similar funding trends now threaten to undermine and subvert the sensitive work -- and academic freedom -- of social scientists. Price avers,
As non-directed independent funding for American social scientists decreases, there are steady increases in new directed funding programs such as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, the National Security Education Program, Intelligence Community Scholars Program; these programs leave our universities increasingly ready to produce knowledge and scholars aligned with the ideological assumptions of the Defense Department. ("Inside the Minerva Consortium: Social Science in Harness," CounterPunch, June 24, 2008)
The latest move towards militarizing academia came April 14, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the formation of the Minerva Research Institute. - Tom Burghardt
Will rampant poverty, exploitation, repression in the form of the "political genocide" of left alternatives, state-sponsored religious fundamentalism, often in concert with Western intelligence agencies, not to mention the environmental crises brought on by widespread habitat destruction for profit, be mitigated by such schemes? Or will universities, already dependent on DoD and corporate research dollars become ideologically-biased outposts tied ever-closer to the military-industrial-surveillance complex?
As the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) point out,
The US university system is already highly militarized, that is, many universities take in a large proportion of their research funding from military sources. This is problematic ...
The fields so supported are distorted by focus on issues of utility to warmaking. Whole fields of study hypertrophy and others shrink or are never developed as researchers are drawn from one field into the other, Pentagon-desired ones. Nuclear and other weapons research related areas grow, at the expense of environmental research, for example. Moreover, theory, methodology, and research goals in such fields as physics, computer science, and engineering after decades of military funding now operate on assumptions that knowledge about force is paramount. ...
The University becomes an instrument rather than a critic of war-making, and spaces for critical discussion of militarism within the university shrink. ("Some Concerns about the Minerva Consortia Project," Network of Concerned Anthropologists, May 28, 2008)
Unfortunately, this process is well-underway. - Tom Burghardt
As Roberto Gonzalez and David Price wrote in a 2007 piece for CounterPunch, SAIC "has begun describing anthropology as a counter-insurgency related field in its job advertisements." As a job description it doesn't get any more explicit!
Problems have plagued the program since its inception. Newsweek reported,
Of 19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who...are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home. ...
Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants. The pool of academics across the country who speak Arabic and focus on Iraq, or even more broadly on the Middle East, is not large to begin with. ... Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America's goth, punk and rave subcultures. (Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring, "A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other," Newsweek, April 21, 2008)
But more problematic than the poor administration of the program by the Army and outsourced contractors, is the nature of HTS and the proposed Minerva Research Initiative itself.
As the NCA document, Assistant Under Secretary of Defense John Wilcox, has described Human Terrain Mapping, a constitute element of the program, as one that "enables the entire kill chain across the Global War on Terror." Indeed, in a 2006 article in Military Review, Pentagon analysts describe HTS as "a CORDS for the 21st Century." Such analogies are troubling to say the least. - Tom Burghardt
More disturbing still, are recent developments. In keeping with the "global war on terror" paradigm that opposition = subversion = terrorism, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists reported that at a November 30 panel discussion which featured three of their members during the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, "witnesses saw two U.S. Army personnel affiliated with the human terrain program writing down the names and institutional affiliations of anthropologists who had signed copies of the NCA pledge circulating during the panel."
In a subsequent letter to HTS commander Colonel Fondacero, Hugh Gusterson wrote:
I'm writing to you in the hope you might shed light on an incident that concerns me. A former US intelligence officer who now works with the Network of Concerned Anthropologists saw Laurie Adler of TRADOC and Jessica Lawrence of the US army writing down the names and institutional affiliations of anthropologists who had signed the pledge of non-participation in counter-insurgency work as the pledge was passed around a session at the meetings. This raises a number of questions:
Whose orders were Adler and Lawrence following when they engaged in this behavior? How many names of signatories to the pledge has the US military collected How and where are those named being stored? Who will have access to these names? What is the US military's purpose in collecting the names of people who have signed the pledge?
Surveillance of ethical social scientists who have taken a stand against militarizing their discipline is a clear harbinger of what awaits those who heed the Pentagon's siren song. With annual salaries exceeding $300,000 according to Newsweek, will anthropologists and social scientists become the academic equivalent of the armed gangs of mercenaries already employed by dozens of private military contractors?
Social scientists, as David Price forcefully argues "cannot ignore the political context in which their knowledge will be used." Minerva and the Human Terrain System, like earlier counterinsurgency programs funded by the Defense Department and the CIA seek to increase of the efficiency of the Bush Doctrine across "the entire kill chain," not question it. - Tom Burghardt
More disturbing still, are recent developments. In keeping with the "global war on terror" paradigm that opposition = subversion = terrorism, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists reported that at a November 30 panel discussion which featured three of their members during the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, "witnesses saw two U.S. Army personnel affiliated with the human terrain program writing down the names and institutional affiliations of anthropologists who had signed copies of the NCA pledge circulating during the panel."
get out the guerilla, spread the wØrd - LoTek