[R-G] Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon’s “Human Terrain System”

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/13/ 
anthropologists_up_in_arms_over_pentagons

Anthropologists Up in Arms Over Pentagon’s “Human Terrain System” to  
Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan

A new $40 million Pentagon program called the Human Terrain System  
has begun enlisting recruits with graduate degrees in anthropology to  
serve in the military. The move has anthropologists up in arms. They  
point to the ethical implications of renewing a program like CORDS  
during the Vietnam War, that assassinated over 26,000 suspected Viet  
Cong. We speak with David Price, a founding member of the Network of  
Concerned Anthropologists. [includes rush transcript]


AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the issue of anthropologists and war. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. Well, the Pentagon has a new strategy in Iraq and  
Afghanistan. An experimental $40 million program called the Human  
Terrain System has begun enlisting recruits of a different kind to  
win the battle of hearts and minds. They have graduate degrees in  
anthropology and serve as cultural advisers to the US military.

Some military analysts have hailed the program as the twenty-first  
century equivalent of a Vietnam-era military project called CORDS, or  
Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support.

But the move has anthropologists up in arms. They point to the  
ethical implications of renewing a program like CORDS, that  
assassinated over 26,000 suspected Viet Cong.

In September, a group of scholars formed the Network of Concerned  
Anthropologists. Inspired by physicists who opposed the Reagan-era  
Star Wars program, they drafted a “Pledge of Non-Participation in  
Counter-Insurgency.”

AMY GOODMAN: By late October, the executive board of the American  
Anthropological Association issued a preliminary statement calling  
the Human Terrain System project “an unacceptable application of  
anthropological expertise.” The Association’s Ad Hoc Commission on  
the Engagement of Anthropology with U.S. Security and Intelligence  
Communities released its final report in November. It emphasized  
certain kinds of involvement with the military would violate the  
Association’s Code of Ethics.

David Price is associate professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s  
University in Lacey, Washington. He’s a founding member of the  
Network of Concerned Anthropologists. He was also a member of the  
Association’s Ad Hoc Commission. He has written extensively on the  
history and ethics of anthropologists interacting with members of the  
military and intelligence agencies.

David Price joins us now from Seattle. Welcome to Democracy Now!

DAVID PRICE: Good morning. Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Why don’t you lay out  
what this debate is?

DAVID PRICE: Well, this debate very much cuts to the core of what the  
appropriate uses of anthropology are, regarding warfare and regarding  
large ethical issues about what does it mean to have anthropologists  
embedded with military forces during a time of war. You know, there  
are large ethical issues about embedding ethnographers with troops.  
Basically, fundamental research ethics require that research subjects  
have voluntary meaningful informed consent, that they’re told, you  
know, what’s going to be done with the research, and that no harm  
come to those who are studied.

The executive board of the American Anthropological Association  
weighed these and others issues and made a very strong statement  
against the Human Terrain program, because it saw it clearly  
wandering into these very ethical problematic areas and not really  
showing due concern for the people who are studied.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What specifically is the Human Terrain program? How  
did it start, and how does it typically operate now in places like  
Afghanistan and Iraq?

DAVID PRICE: The Human Terrain program is run through BAE, which is a  
contracting agency. You know, in some ways it’s very similar to  
Blackwater in the way that it works. What they do is they take  
ethnographers, they take anthropologists, who may or may not have  
cultural expertise in the areas where they’re working, and they take  
these ethnographers, embed them with the troops, they travel with  
them, and then they try and advise commanders about taking culturally  
appropriate action.

Now, the claim by Human Terrain is that they can reduce casualties by  
giving more nuanced information to people in battle situations. But  
there’s a lot more to it than that, especially in that people in the  
Pentagon see this as being linked to the CORDS program. CORDS program  
in Vietnam was used to map human terrain, to identify suspected  
individuals and groups that the military believed were sympathizers  
for the Viet Cong, who were, in the Vietnam era, targeted for  
assassination.

Now, supposedly what’s going on with Human Terrain is that, you know,  
it’s essentially a manners lesson for people in the battlefield. But  
the problem is, is that there are armed ethnographers. Not all the  
ethnographers working for Human Terrain carry weapons, but we do know  
there are instances where they do. They’re given the option to do so.  
So they travel with troops and independently in the countryside,  
gathering culture information that they bring back and give to the  
command.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So these are not necessarily people who are already in  
the military? They’re, in essence, contracted to work alongside the  
military and embedded with them; is that accurate?

DAVID PRICE: That’s correct, yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, my understanding is that this is also potentially  
very lucrative. One of the folks who apparently spoke at the  
convention, who had been involved—at the anthropologist convention— 
who had been involved in this, claims she was getting offered a  
salary of $100,000 with special pay as a result of being in Iraq. It  
totaled up to $300,000 annually, was the salary?

DAVID PRICE: Yeah. These are certainly the reports that are coming  
out, well in excess of $100,000. And again, these are people with  
sort of marginal regional expertise who are being used. So, yeah,  
starting pay is certainly over $100,000, and by the time you’re done— 
especially if you’re living abroad for more than a year, you can wind  
up doing it tax-free—there are reports that people are getting close  
to $300,000 for their payment for services.

AMY GOODMAN: David Price, I want to follow up on this woman that Juan  
is talking about, Zenia Helbig, the doctoral student in religious  
studies at the University of Virginia, who spoke to the AAA. David  
Glenn wrote a piece about her—also this story was broken in Wired  
magazine—talking about how she was released from the Human Terrain  
System program amidst an investigation of her national loyalty  
shortly before she was to deploy to Iraq.

The investigation stemmed from a quip she made over beers late one  
night in June. As she recalls, she said, “OK, if we invade Iran,  
that’s where I draw the line, hop the border and switch sides.”  
Helbig says her firing, which was first reported in Wired magazine,  
was a ludicrous overreaction to a casual piece of hyperbole. With the  
help of at least one senior administrator in the Human Terrain  
program, she is fighting to expunge her security record and to clear  
her name.

Can you talk a little more about what you know of Ms. Helbig’s case?

DAVID PRICE: Yeah. I know basically the facts that you stated there.  
I was on a panel with her in a session organized by the Network of  
Concerned Anthropologists at the anthropology meetings, and her  
critique was very interesting. Her critique of Human Terrain is not  
my own. Part of it is. She had serious complaints, from the inside,  
about basically the intellectual incompetence of the people who are  
involved in the program. The ethnographers really don’t have  
linguistic or cultural competence for the regions that they’re  
working in. And so, her critique was that it’s being run very poorly.

But this is where I differ with her. She believed that if, you know,  
better anthropologists or people with higher degrees of competence  
were involved, then the program would be a good one. I disagree with  
that entirely, because that would not resolve the ethical issues, you  
know, as well as the moral issues of being involved in a very corrupt  
war being fought in Iraq today.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this debate is being played out in the  
Anthropological Association and what this oath is all about.

DAVID PRICE: Well, the oath is very simple. You know, it’s a pledge  
that’s modeled after actions taken by physicists during the Reagan  
era, during Star Wars, where physicists said that they just wanted to  
be clear, individuals wanted to be clear, they did not want their  
research and they were not willing to be involved in the Star Wars  
program. Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist who studies nuclear  
weapons production, came up with the idea of modeling a very similar  
pledge. So, you know, a small group of us, eleven of us, got together  
and hammered out some language—it’s very simple—saying that we’re not— 
you know, all of us are not even necessarily opposed to some work  
with the military, but anything involving counterinsurgency, such as  
this, or anything that violates ethical standards of research, we’re  
opposed to, and we’re simply asking our colleagues to stand up and be  
counted with us, saying that they’re not willing to use anthropology  
to these ends.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, David Price, doesn’t this make the situation more  
difficult, considering that anthropology in general, especially  
Western anthropologists in third-world countries are highly suspect  
as it is, in terms of being seen as an arm of cultural imperialism or  
neocolonialism, in investigating what is going on in many of these  
countries? Doesn’t this make it even more difficult for folks in your  
discipline to be able to conduct the work that they do?

DAVID PRICE: Yeah, Human Terrain certainly casts a large shadow of  
suspicion on the entire discipline of anthropology. But, you know,  
I’m very proud that the American Anthropological Association’s  
executive board took very proactive action and has done what they can  
to outline what the problems are with this and, you know, to clarify  
for the world that this is inappropriate action for anthropologists  
to undertake.

AMY GOODMAN: David Price, you’ve written a book about the history of  
anthropologists, coming up, coming out, Weaponizing Anthropology:  
American Anthropology in the Second World War. Can you talk about the  
historical use of anthropologists?

DAVID PRICE: Yeah. There’s a largely unexplored history of  
anthropologists being involved in military action. You know, in fact,  
you can look at it going back to the Indian wars and, you know, early  
anthropology in the nineteenth century, where anthropological  
knowledge was used or, in many cases, anthropologists protected the  
knowledge in ways that the military could not access it.

My book on the Second World War uses the Freedom of Information Act,  
a lot of archival research, oral history and such, to try and piece  
together how broad was the anthropological contribution to the war.  
You know, well over half of American anthropologists were involved in  
some sort of contribution to the war, working for agencies like the  
Office of War Information. Many worked for the OSS, the intellectual  
or the institutional predecessor to the CIA—you know, and many other  
uses.

Some of this, in my view, was not really ethically problematic. It  
involved sort of library work and such. But even during World War II,  
there were ethically troubling things that happened. Probably the  
most egregious example those involves anthropologists at the OSS who  
were consulted and agreed to work on efforts to try and identify  
biological weapons that would—to be used against the Japanese, under  
the belief that the Japanese were somehow a different race and they  
might be able to find and exploit a biological difference, you know,  
in Japanese physiology.

You know, there are many other cases. There were also anthropologists  
at the Office of War Information who spent the last year of the war  
basically beating their head against the wall, trying to convince the  
White House and Pentagon that the Japanese were ready to surrender  
and were culturally capable of surrendering. And they did very good  
work. They did very good work on this, but, you know, the Pentagon  
marched on and the administration marched on and didn’t really listen  
to them.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in Vietnam, what was the role of some  
anthropologists there?

DAVID PRICE: Vietnam, you know, the American Anthropological  
Association really blew up in a large uproar, when it was disclosed  
that there were ethnographers that were providing information for use  
in counterinsurgency, basically modeling what was known about village  
life in Thailand and also the highlands of Vietnam, that was used by  
Special Forces. So that really created rifts in the association that  
are still there today. And, you know, Human Terrain is really  
resurrecting some of these issues today.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, David Price, can you compare what’s going on in  
the American Anthropological Association to what’s going on in the  
American Psychological Association, this group of 150,000  
psychologists, largest in the world, that is really being ripped  
apart inside by whether psychologists should be participating in  
these interrogations, like take place at Guantanamo?

DAVID PRICE: You know, fortunately, as far as we know, we don’t have  
the interrogation issues, in terms of anthropologists being present  
for something as horrendous as that. But there are still many of the  
same dynamics. I see the leadership of the American Anthropological  
Association as acting much more conscientiously, if not  
progressively, in dealing with these issues. But many of the same  
dynamics are there in play, and there are real battles going on with  
people, you know, on both sides being very passionate, worrying about  
the soul of their discipline.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, David  
Price, associate professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University  
in Washington, speaking to us from Seattle. His forthcoming book is  
called Weaponizing Anthropology: American Anthropology and the Second  
World War.