[R-G] Procuring Academics for Empire: The Pentagon Minerva Research Initiative

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/8969-procuring-academics-for-empire-the-pentagon-minerva-research-initiative.html
	
Procuring Academics for Empire: The Pentagon Minerva Research Initiative
Written by James Petras
Saturday, 04 April 2009 09:25
	
by James Petras

The Pentagon’s military strategists have recognized that they have  
suffered political losses, with strategic consequences in their recent  
military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. US military support for  
the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the US-sponsored Ethiopian  
occupation of Somali, the coup attempts in Venezuela (2002) and  
Bolivia (2008), have also failed to defeat popular incumbent regimes.  
Worse still, civilian, family, community and national networks have  
reinforced the anti-colonial movements providing essential logistical  
support, intelligence, recruits and legitimacy.

Pentagon strategists, recognizing the socio-political bases of their  
failures, have turned to willing accomplices in the academic world to  
provide intelligence, in the form of ethnographic accounts of targeted  
peoples, tactics and strategies in order to divide and destroy local  
and national loyalties. The Pentagon is contracting social scientists  
to develop ‘social maps’ to identify leaders and groups, susceptible  
to recruitment in the service of the empire. For example, Pentagon- 
contracted academic ‘field research’ is designed to demonstrate ways  
in which traditional religious practices and rituals can be harnessed  
to facilitate imperial conquest through cultural warfare discouraging  
subjugated peoples from giving their support to national liberation  
movements. Rather than confront the imperial occupier with a goal of  
re-establishing national sovereignty, ‘cultural warfare’ strategies  
direct people to focus on ‘local concerns’. These are a few of the  
Pentagon funded “research projects” taken up by the ‘academics in  
uniform.’

The Pentagon is seriously engaged in this military-academic empire  
building strategy, allocating almost 100 million dollars to  
contracting academic collaborators and funding multiple ‘research’  
projects throughout the world against targeted states, movements and  
communities.

The “Minerva Research Initiative” (MRI)

The biggest, but not the only, Pentagon-funded empire building  
research program in the social sciences is dubbed the Minerva Research  
Initiative (MRI). The MRI has contracted scores of academics from the  
usual prestigious academic brothels, including the veteran academic  
hookers and ambitious neophytes among post-doctorates and graduate  
assistants. These ‘scholars for empire’ are currently engaged in at  
least fourteen projects. MRI money has attracted a wide assortment of  
university affiliated psychologists, political scientists,  
anthropologists, economists, professors of religious studies, public  
affairs specialists, labor economists and even nuclear physicists from  
MIT, Princeton, University of California at San Diego, and Arizona  
State University among others. This Pentagon largess provides what  
Science (Jan 30, 2009 p 576) (official journal of the American  
Association for the Advancement of Science) calls a “banquet for a  
field accustomed to living on scraps.”

All of the regions and groups specifically targeted for the ‘Pentagon- 
academic’ investigation are currently in conflict with the US empire  
or its Israeli ally and include Southwest Asia, West Africa, Gaza,  
Indonesia, the Middle East. The Pentagon’s ideological parameter,  
which defines the MRI, is the “war on terror” or its ‘Overseas  
Contingency Operations’, new facsimile under President Obama.

The MRI has a special interest in academics who can target the field  
of Muslim-Arab organizations and activities, in order to study and  
develop methods to “diffuse and influence counter-radical Muslim  
discourse.” In other words, the MRI is contracting academic research,  
which will allow the Pentagon to penetrate Muslim communities, co-opt  
the leaders and turn them into imperial collaborators.

MRI is not merely a mechanism of “soft power” – a battle of ideas – it  
engages US academics in some of the more brutal aspects of colonial  
warfare. For example, the Pentagon-funded Human Terrain Teams (HTT),  
which operate in Afghanistan, are deeply immersed in the  
identification and torture/interrogation of suspected resistance  
fighters, civilian sympathizers and members of extended families and  
clans. One San Francisco State psychology professor on the MRI  
payroll, with longstanding ties to Pentagon counter-insurgency  
operations, is deeply involved in the “study of emotions in stoking or  
quelling ideologically driven movements.” Covert occupation  
intelligence operations have been deeply involved in “stoking”  
hostility between Shia and Sunni communities in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran,  
and Afghanistan. Torture and harsh interrogation techniques, used in  
the Middle East and Afghanistan, are based on academic studies of  
cultural and emotional vulnerabilities of Muslims and are used by US  
and Israeli military interrogators to “break” or cause profound mental  
breakdown of anti-occupation activists (“quelling ideological  
movements”).

Two US professors who solicited and secured major funding under MRI,  
one Eli Berman of the University of California San Diego and Jacob  
Shapiro of Princeton are working with Israeli counter-insurgency  
academics in researching what it takes for the Jewish state to  
manipulate Palestinian communities “to counteract grass-roots  
movements such as Hamas” (Science Jan 30/09) .

Berman and Shapiro have their own academic empire building ambitions,  
feeding off the Pentagon largesse and its military driven empire  
building. With the Pentagon money Berman claims “I’ll be able to do  
surveys and experiments around the world, partner with additional  
organizations and bring postdocs as well as several graduate students.  
We’ll be able to accomplish things in a matter of years rather than  
decades.”

This contemporary version of Dr. Strangelove with his version of  
instant counter-insurgency formulas cooked up by a world network of  
academics in uniform can poison the academic ambience – in much the  
same way that the Professor ‘Bermans’ at Michigan State, MIT, Harvard  
and elsewhere developed techniques for search and destroy missions  
against grassroots movements during the Viet Nam War. The danger and  
appeal to academics of Pentagon funding is especially acute nowadays,  
given the economic depression and the pseudo-progressive image of the  
Obama regime. Wall Street bailouts and the crash of the US stock  
market have reduced university endowments resulting in sharp  
reductions in academic budgets, salaries and research funding  
especially on non-military, non-business related research. The Obama  
regime’s double discourse of talking peace and escalating military  
budgets, increasing troops in Southwest Asia and extending sanctions  
on Iran may entice academics to justify the latter by citing the  
former. To procure academic recruits to the MRI stable, the Pentagon  
organized a workshop in August 2008, under the ideological façade of  
“complete openness and strict adherence to academic freedom and  
integrity.” Subsequently the Pentagon claimed to have received 211  
inquires from academics seeking a place at the imperial trough.

Notwithstanding the Pentagon’s claim of success in procuring  
academics, there are counter-signs appearing in the academic world,  
especially in light of the highly publicized kidnapping, torture and  
interrogation of thousands of Muslims and activists throughout the  
world including in the United States, by Special Forces.

Outside the far-right there has been a widespread reluctance among  
academics to be associated with a government identified with abuses at  
Abu Gharib and Guantanamo prisons, the shredding of the US  
Constitutional protections and open ended colonial wars of occupation.

Even in the case where powerful pro-Israel academics and lobbyists  
have successfully secured the dismissal of highly published professors  
critical of the Hebrew state, these vindictive purges were openly  
opposed by scores of professors around the country including several  
dozen Jewish academics. More recently, hundreds of scholars and  
researchers in the US, the United Kingdom and Canada, horrified by the  
Israeli war crimes in Gaza, have called on universities to boycott  
Israeli academic institutions and individuals who collaborate with the  
Israeli Defense Forces and the Mossad in the destruction of  
Palestinian institutions especially the bombing of universities in Gaza.

The principled stand of academics critical of Israel and US policy  
notwithstanding, distinguished academics who have substantially  
challenged the empire through their research and publications are not  
immune from retaliation designed to discourage other intellectuals: A  
recent case in point is the suspension of academic medical  
epidemiologist, Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Bloomberg School of Public  
Health at John Hopkins University. Dr Burnham was publicly reprimanded  
and suspended from directing any research involving ‘human subjects’  
for 5 years because of ‘ethical breaches of confidentiality’(Science,  
March 6, 2009 Vol 323 page 1278). These ‘ethical violations’ referred  
to his co-authorship of the first rigorous large-scale epidemiologic  
survey of mortality in Iraq during the US invasion and occupation.

Extensive site surveys throughout Iraq found that upwards of 600,000  
Iraqi civilians had died from violence between the time of the US  
invasion in March 2003 and the summer of 2006. The results of this  
study of imperialist war-induced death and destruction, published in  
the prestigious medical journal Lancet in October 2006, was denied by  
a furious Pentagon but confirmed by subsequent studies. The so-called  
‘ethical violations’ referred to a minor technicality: the incomplete  
coding of some of the names of the Iraqi families interviewed on the  
Arabic language survey sheets.

For imperialist institutions, like Johns Hopkins University, using the  
phony pretext of ‘protecting the privacy’ of the hundreds of thousands  
of nameless dead in a US war of aggression to punish a distinguished  
epidemiologist send a message of intimidation to scholars to refrain  
from documenting the genocidal consequences of imperialist wars on a  
colonized people. By publicly punishing Dr. Burnham on these trumped  
up charges, the Pentagon-John Hopkins University are sending an  
unambiguous message to academics not to research and reveal the real  
human costs of military empire building. One thing is clear, the  
identity of those tortured or dispossessed on the basis of policies  
developed by the Pentagon sponsored Minerva ‘academics’ will certainly  
be kept ‘confidential’ – and very likely hidden in mass graves.

The fact that the Bloomberg School of Public Health levied  
extraordinarily severe punishment on one of its own faculty  
epidemiologists for a technical methodological error (the usual  
procedures is a private reprimand) and the fact that the sanctions  
were given the widest public notice indicates the highly political  
nature of the entire process. What is not clear is whether the  
financial backers of the Bloomberg School (with their own Middle East  
Agenda) may have had a say in the punitive decision.

We can expect the Obama regime, with its ‘missiles for peace’ rhetoric  
and populist images, will provide a cover for Pentagon recruitment of  
liberal academics to “work for change from within.” Unmasking the role  
of the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative as an integral part of  
Obama’s military escalation is a challenge to all academics who are  
opposed to empire building and who support the reconstruction of an  
American republic supportive of international rights of self- 
determination.