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Today's Stories October 30, 2007 David Price Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual   October 29, 2007 Lisa Hajjar Inside Israel's Military Courts Joe DeRaymond The Politics of Lethal Injections Patrick Cockburn The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan Isabella Kenfield / Roger Burbach Corporate Murder in Brazil Fred Gardner The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner Farzana Versey Caricaturing Islam Stephen Fleischman The Greening of the Oligarchy Marcelle Cendrars The Congressional Rip Cord Eamonn McCann Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables Martha Rosenberg For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter! Website of the Day Campaign 2008   October 27 / 28, 2007 Alexander Cockburn So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Jeffrey St. Clair The Dam That Isn't There James Bovard Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture Ralph Nader Beyond the Rule of Law M. Reza Pirbhai The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming! Robert Sandels Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations Jacob G. Hornberger Ruling By Decree Missy Beattie The Arsonists in the West Wing John Ross U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca Robert Fantina Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader Ron Jacobs Labor at the Crossroads Ali Moayedian In Search of Logic About Iran David Michael Green What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism? Poets Basement Block, Davies and Ford Website of the Day Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video   October 26, 2007 Brian Cloughley Revenging Bloodshed Saul Landau Portrait of Rudy Ahmad Al-Akras Getting Justice in the HLF Case Franklin Lamb Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry? Mike Whitney Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest Dave Lindorff Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians Alan Farago A Castro Behind Every Bush Yifat Susskind Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror Website of the Day Dead Life in a Political Prison October 25, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair / Joshua Frank Iraq's Environmental Crisis Manuel Garcia, Jr. Homes of the Crash Test Dummies Paul Craig Roberts The Fraudulent War on Terror Col. Dan Smith The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment Alan Farago The Way to Paradise? Chris Kutalik The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels Brian McKinlay John Howard and the Curse of Bush Cindy Sheehan Pete, Nancy, George and WW III Website of the Day Support the America's Program!   October 24, 2007 Natalie Washington-Weik White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence Andy Worthington The Guantánamo Suicides Michael Birmingham What Happened in Nahr Al Bared? Corporate Crime Reporter The Nuclear Democrats Tariq Ali Bush's Cuba Detour Farzana Versey Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf Dave Zirin White Noise James Murren What "Support Our Troops" Means Todd Chretien Looking Reality in the Face Martha Rosenberg What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage? Website of the Day Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power   October 23, 2007 Ralph Nader Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric Lawrence R. Velvel Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept. Vijay Prashad The Nuke Deal is Dead Bonnie Bricker / Adil E. Shamoo The True Cost of War for Oil Dave Lindorff Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment Mike Whitney The Big Squeeze Farzana Versey Race with the Devil Stanley Heller / Ben George Something New from the Antiwar Movement Marcelle Cendrars You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive Regan Boychuk Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response Website of the Day King Corn   October 22, 2007 Ishmael Reed Should Blacks Go Green? Marjorie Cohn Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie Rannie Amiri Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness? Diane Farsetta Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams Todd Alan Price Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education Robert Jensen The Quagmire of Masculinity Stephen Lendman The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers Jemima Khan The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf Sunsara Taylor David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth Binoy Kampmark No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections Website of the Day Support the Center for International Policy     October 20 / 21, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld Tariq Ali A Massacre Foretold Jeffrey St. Clair Greetings from Echo Park Andy Worthington The Shame of Diego Garcia Mike Whitney Housing Flameout Daniel Wolff Play It As It Lays David Rosen Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution Saul Landau David and Goliath in Iraq Ron Jacobs COINTELPRO and the Panthers Robert Fantina The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones David Heleniak Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm Joe Allen Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS Prairie Miller Lions for Lambs Poets' Basement Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Crash!   October 19, 2007 John Ross Che's Mexican Legacy Sheldon Rampton Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda Rahul Mahajan A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha Devra Davis Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer Christopher Brauchli Blasphemous Science Wadner Pierre Haiti After the Deluge Bill Quigley Jailed for Justice Website of the Day Textbook Sticker Shock   October 18, 2007 Saree Makdisi Academic Freedom is at Risk Meg Dwyer What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead? Alevtina Rea Sketches of Russian Life Norman Solomon The United States of Violence Kristoffer Larsson Something is Rotten in Sweden Harvey Wasserman Nukes are Back and So are We Website of the Day Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"   October 17, 2007 Steve Niva Counter-Insurgency, American-Style Andy Worthington The Case of Mohamed Jawad Alan Farago The Credit Shock Russell Mokhiber The New Billionaire-Criminal Class Sharon Smith Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered Mike Whitney Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman Robert Fantina Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual Chris Irwin Where Have All the Rednecks Gone? Website of the Day Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University October 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize Paul Findley Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby Robert Bryce Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts Uri Avnery The Mother of All Pretexts Paul Craig Roberts The Iraqi Genocide Ray McGovern What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It? Norman Solomon The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal Martha Rosenberg The Curse of Cymbalta William S. Lind Out of the Frying Pan Joel S. Hirschborn Time to Boycott Voting Website of the Day Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play         Subscribe Online

October 30, 2007 A CounterPunch Special Investigation Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual * Core Chapter a Morass of "Borrowed" Quotes * University of Chicago Press Badly Compromised * Counterinsurgency Anthropologist Montgomery McFate's Role Under Attack By DAVID PRICE Editors' note: This expose of the stolen scholarship in the Army's new manual on counterinsurgency to which General David Petraeus has attached his name also runs in our current newsletter sent by US mail or as a pdf to our newsletter subscribers. Normally material in our newsletter does not run on the CounterPunch website. In the belief that David Price's story merits the widest and swiftest circulation, not only as regards the "borrowings" from unacknowledged sources but also the prostitution of anthropology in evil military enterprises we re making an exception in this case. AC / JSC   If I could sum up the book in just a few words, it would be: "Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill." --John Nagl, The Daily Show. Last December, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of "shock and awe" toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultural nuance. Some view the Manual as containing plans for a new intellectually fueled "smart bomb," and it is being sold to the public as a scholarly based strategic guide to victory in Iraq. In July, this contrivance was bolstered as the University of Chicago Press republished the Manual in a stylish, olive drab, faux-field ready edition, designed to slip into flack jackets or Urban Outfitter accessory bags. The Chicago edition includes the original forward by General David Petraeus and Lt. General James Amos, with a new forward by Lt. Col. John Nagl and introduction by Sarah Sewell, of Harvard's JFK School of Government. Chicago's republication of the Field Manual spawned a minor media orgy, and Lt. Col. Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, became the Manual's poster boy, appearing on NPR, ABC News, NBC, and the pages of the NYT, Newsweek, and other publications, pitching the Manual as the philosophical expression of Petraeus' intellectual strategy for victory in Iraq. The media buzz surrounding the Manual maintains it is a rare work of applied scholarship. Robert Bateman writes in the Chicago Tribune that it is "probably the most important piece of doctrine written in the past 20 years," crediting this success to the high academic standards and integrity that the Army War College historian, Conrad Crane, brought to the project. Bateman touts Crane's devotion to using an "honest and open peer review" process, and his reliance on a team of top scholars to draft the Manual. This team included "current or former members of one of the combat branches of the Army or Marine Corps". As well as being combat veterans, "the more interesting aspect of this group was that almost all of them had at least a master's degree, and quite a few could add 'doctor' to their military rank and title as well. At the top of that list is the officer who saw the need for a new doctrine, then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, Ph.D." The Manual's PR campaign has been extraordinary. In a Daily Show interview, John Nagl hammed it up in uniform with Jon Stewart, but amidst the banter Nagl stayed on mission and described how Gen. Petraeus collected a "team of writers [who] produced the [Manual] strategy that General Petraeus is implementing in Iraq now." When Jon Stewart commented on the speed at which the Manual was produced, Nagl remarked that this was "very fast for an Army field manual; the process usually takes a couple of years"; but for Nagl this still was "not fast enough". The first draft of each chapter was produced in two months before being reworked at an Army conference at Ft. Leavenworth. Most academics know that bad things can happen when marginally skilled writers must produce ambitious amounts of writing in short time periods; sometimes the only resulting calamities are grammatical abominations, but in other instances the pressures to perform lead to shoddy academic practices. Neither of these outcomes is especially surprising among desperate people with limited skills -- but Petraeus and others leading the charge apparently did not worry about such trivialities: they had to crank out a new strategy to calm growing domestic anger at military failures in Iraq. Last year, the anthropologist Roberto González determined that anthropologists Montgomery McFate and David Kilcullen authored sections of the Manual and contributed to new Iraq counterinsurgency programs, relying on embedded military ethnographers in "Human Terrain System" teams, using anthropologists to assist troops making judgments in the field, employing cultural knowledge as a weapon of "pacification." Drs. McFate and Kilcullen have become media darlings. Kilcullen took on warrior-anthropologist status in last year's uncritical New Yorker profile by George Packer; profiles of McFate in the New Yorker, the S.F. Chronicle Magazine, and More (a glossy women's magazine "celebrating women 40+") sculpt images of Kilcullen and McFate as heroic soldier-thinkers, uncompromisingly harnessing knowledge for the state's agenda. This media campaign provides McFate with frequent opportunities to characterize her critics publicly (as she recently did in the Wall Street Journal) as having no ideas about the military beyond "waving a big sign outside the Pentagon saying, 'you suck.'" While such outbursts make Dr. McFate seem like a character right out of Team America, the military and intelligence community takes her and her work very seriously. Montgomery McFate holds a Harvard law degree and a Yale anthropology Ph.D. and has worked for various organizations linked to U.S. military and intelligence agencies, including RAND, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Institute for Defense Analysis' Joint Advanced Warfighting Program. She is currently the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System's Senior Social Science Adviser. McFate's current role as Senior Social Science Adviser for the Human Terrain program demonstrates how the military is implementing the Manual's approach to the use of culture as a battlefield weapon. Human Terrain Teams are now embedding anthropologists with troops operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Human Terrain anthropologists have publicly identified themselves (the anthropologist Marcus Griffin even writes a blog on limited elements of Human Terrain work while working in Iraq), while others do not disclose their identity. Human Terrain anthropologists use ethnographic knowledge to advise and inform troops in the field while traveling with armed escorts and are, in some instances, themselves armed and wearing uniforms, yet McFate maintains that these anthropologists are in compliance with basic anthropological ethical standards, mandating that participants in research projects participate under conditions of voluntary informed consent. In a recent exchange with Dr. McFate, Col. John Agoglia and Lt. Col. Edward Villacres on the Diane Rehm Show, I pressed McFate for an explanation of how voluntary ethical informed consent was produced in environments dominated by weapons. In response, McFate assured me that was not a problem because "indigenous local people out in rural Afghanistan are smart, and they can draw a distinction between a lethal unit of the U.S. military and a non-lethal unit." It also remains unclear how Human Terrain Teams comply with basic ethical standards, mandating that their research does not result in harm coming to the individuals they study as a result of their work. Human Terrain research gathers data that help inform what Assistant Undersecretary of Defense John Wilcox recently described as the military's "need to map Human Terrain across the Kill Chain". The disclosure that anthropologists are producing knowledge for those directing the "kill chain" raises serious questions about the state of anthropology. The Secrets of Chapter Three Montgomery McFate and an unnamed "military intelligence specialist" co-wrote the Manual's chapter 3, the Manual's longest and the key chapter on "Intelligence in Counterinsurgency." Chapter 3 introduces basic social science views of elements of culture that underlie the Manual's approach to teaching counterinsurgents how to weaponize the specific indigenous cultural information they encounter in specific theaters of battle. General Petraeus is betting that troops working alongside Human Terrain System teams can apply the Manual's principles to stabilize and pacify war-torn Iraq. When I read an online copy of the Manual last winter, I was unimpressed by its watered-down anthropological explanations, but having researched anthropological contributions to the Second World War, I was familiar with such oversimplifications. But some in the military found the Counterinsurgency Manual to be revolutionary. McFate claims the Manual is so radical that it "is considered 'Zen tinged' not just by the media, but also by many members of the military who felt that the Manual, and chapter 3 in particular, was 'too innovative' and 'too politically correct.'" Like any manual, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual is written in the dry, detached voice of basic instruction. But as I re-read Chapter 3 a few months ago, I found my eye struggling through a crudely constructed sentence and then suddenly being graced with a flowing line of precise prose: "A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interest." (Counterinsurgency Manual, 3-51) The phrase "stereotyped sequence" leapt off the page. Not only was it out of place, but it sparked a memory. I knew that I'd read these words years ago. With a little searching, I discovered that this unacknowledged line had been taken from a 1972 article written by the anthropologist Victor Turner, who brilliantly wrote that religious ritual is: "a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests." (See full citation in the concluding "comparison" section of this article.) The Manual simplified Turner's poetic voice, trimming a few big words and substituting "supernatural" for "preternatural". The Manual used no quotation marks, attribution, or citations to signify Turner's authorship of this barely altered line. Having encountered students passing off the work of other scholars as their own, I know that such acts are seldom isolated occurrences; this single kidnapped line of Turner got me wondering if the Manual had taken other unattributed passages. While I did not perform exhaustive searches, with a little searching in Chapter 3 alone I found about twenty passages showing either direct use of others' passages without quotes, or heavy reliance on unacknowledged source materials. In the concluding "comparison" section of this article are listed some of the unattributed passages I identified in the Manual's third chapter, along with the unacknowledged sources that I tracked down. These examples show a consistent pattern of unacknowledged use in this chapter. Any author can accidentally drop a quotation mark from a work during the production process, but the extent and consistent pattern of this practice in this Manual is more than common editorial carelessness. The cumulative effect of such non-attributions is devastating to the Manual's academic integrity. The inability of this chapter's authors to come up with their own basic definitions of such simple sociocultural concepts as "race," "culture," "ritual," or "social structure" not only raises questions about the ethics of the authors but also furnishes a useful measure of the Manual and its authors' weak intellectual foundation. Other sections of the Manual have unacknowledged borrowings from other sources. The anthropologist Roberto González found that the Manual's Appendix A was "inspired by T.E. Lawrence, who in 1917 published the piece 'Twenty-seven articles' for Arab Bulletin, the intelligence journal of Great Britain's Cairo-based Arab Bureau." González compared several passages of Lawrence with Kilcullen's Appendix A, and found parallel constructions where paragraphs were reworded but followed set formations between the two texts . González observed that while these parallel constructions can be seen, "Lawrence is never mentioned in the appendix. González shows that Kilcullen's other written work makes a passing reference, but does not acknowledge the degree to which Lawrence's ideas and style have been influential." Sources for the Manual's pilfered passages range from the British sociologist Anthony Giddens' introductory level sociology textbook to the writings of American symbolic anthropologist (and World War Two conscientious objector) Victor Turner, to an online study guide for an MIT anthropology course, to Fred Plog and Daniel Bates' anthropology textbook Cultural Anthropology, to the writings of Max Weber. Chapter Three's hidden debt to the great German sociologist Max Weber is intriguing. Weber had his own armchair dalliance with counterinsurgency when he supported the military's suppression of German radicals' 1919 uprising, proclaiming, "Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoological gardens!" Weber's views on "power and authority" are reproduced in the body of the Manual, without quotation marks, as if they were the words of Petraeus' staff (see Comparisons section at the end of this artilcle), while section 3-63 is organized following Weber's tripartite division of authority structures: "Rational-Legal Authority," "Charismatic Authority" and "Traditional Authority." In some sentences, the Manual so directly follows the vocabulary and structure of sentences in other works that the sources can easily be identified. For example, the Manual's (3-26) entry for "ethnic groups" says: "An ethnic group is a human community whose learned cultural practices, language, history, ancestry, or religion distinguish them from others. Members of ethnic groups see themselves as different from other groups in a society and are recognized as such by others." Elements of this definition closely echo a passage in Anthony Giddens' 2006 Introduction to Sociology text (5th ed, p. 487), discussing ethnicity: "Different characteristics may serve to distinguish ethnic groups from one another, but the most usual are language, history, or ancestry (real or imagined), religions and Members of ethnic groups see themselves as culturally distinct from other groups in a society, and are seen by those other groups to be so in return." Several sections of the Manual are identical to entries in online encyclopedia sources like www.answers.com. For example, the Manual's definition of "language" is the same as that on http://www.answers.com/topic/duration-poem-4). The most damning element of the Manual's reliance on unattributed sources is that the Manual includes a bibliography listing of over 100 sources, yet not a single source I have identified is included. My experience with students trying to pass off the previously published work of others as their own is that they invariably omit citation of the bibliographic sources they copy, so as not to draw attention to them. Even without using bibliographic citations, the Manual could have just used quotes and named sources in the same standard journalistic format used in this article, but no such attributions were used in these instances. The few published critical examinations of the Manual focus on the text's provenience and philosophical roots. In The Nation, Tom Hayden links the Manual to the philosophical roots of U.S. Indian Wars, reservation policies, and the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program. In the Royal Anthropological Institute's journal Anthropology Today, Roberto González criticizes McFate and Kilcullen's contributions to the Manual, observing that the Manual "reads like a manual for indirect colonial rule." That a press as drenched in "reflexive" critiques of colonialism as Chicago would publish such a manual is an ironic testament to just how depoliticized postmodernism's salon bound critiques have become; and a recent New York Times op-ed by Chicago anthropologist Richard Shweder indicates a stance of inaction from which the travesties of Human Terrain can be lightly critiqued while anthropologists are urged not to declare themselves as being "counter-counterinsurgency". Role of the Chicago University Press The role of University of Chicago Press in bringing the Manual to a broader audience is curious. That such shoddy scholarship passed so easily and so briskly through the well-guarded gates of this press raises questions concerning Chicago's interest in rushing out this faux academic work. Ramming a book through the production process at an academic press in about half a year's time is a blitzkrieg requiring a serious focus of will. There was more than a casual interest in getting this book to market -- whether it was simply a shrewd recognition of market forces, or reflected political concerns or commitments. The Press is enjoying robust sales of a hot title (it was one of Amazon's top 100 in September); but it did not consider the damage to the Press' reputation that could follow its association with this deeply tarnished service manual for Empire. To highlight the Manual's scholarly failures is not to hold it to some over-demanding, external standard of academic integrity. However, claims of academic integrity are the very foundation of the Manual's promotional strategy. Somewhere along the line, Petraeus' doctorate became more important than his general's stars, touted by Petraeus' claque in the media as tokening a shift from Bush's "bring 'em on" cowboy shoot-out to a nuanced thinking-man's war. The University of Chicago Press acquisitions editor, John Tryneski, told me the Manual went through a peer review process, but there are unusual dynamics in reviewing an already published work whose authors are not just unknown (common in the peer review process), but essentially unknowable. Tryneski acknowledged that peer reviewers came from policy and think tank circles. When I asked Tryneski if there had been any internal debate over the decision by the Press to disseminate military doctrine, he said there were some discussions and then, without elaboration, changed the subject, arguing that the Press viewed this publication more along the lines of the republication of a key historic document. This might make sense if this was an historic document, not a component of a campaign being waged against the American people by a Pentagon, surging to convince a skeptical American public that Bush hasn't already lost the war in Iraq. The significance of the University of Chicago Press' republication of the Manual must be seen in the context of the Pentagon's domestic propaganda campaign to generate support for an indefinite U.S. presence in Iraq. Here is an "independent" academic press playing point guard in the production of pseudo-scholarly political propaganda. As the Middle East scholar Steve Niva recently suggested to me, "General Petraeus' counterinsurgency in Iraq has failed, but his domestic campaign for American hearts and minds is succeeding in textbook fashion; the strategy is to weaken the demand for withdrawal by dividing insurgents (anti-war activists) from the general population (American public)." That militaries commandeer food, wealth, and resources to serve the needs of war is a basic rule of warfare -- as old as war itself. Thucydides, Herodotus and other ancient historians record standard practices of seizing slaves and food to feed armies on the move; and the history of warfare finds similar confiscations to keep armies on their feet. But the requirements of modern warfare go far beyond the needs of funds and sustenance; military and intelligence agencies also require knowledge, and these agencies commandeer ideas for use to their own purposes in ways not intended by their authors. Pressganging scholars to fight dirty wars The requisitioning of anthropological knowledge for military applications has occurred in colonial contexts, world wars and proxy wars. After World War II, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton Coon recounted how he produced a 40-page text on Moroccan propaganda for the OSS by taking pages of text straight from his textbook, Principles of Anthropology. "[He] padded it with enough technical terms to make it ponderous and mysterious, since [he] had found out in the academic world that people will express much more awe and admiration for something complicated which they do not quite understand than for something simple and clear." The most egregious known instance of the military's recycling of an anthropological text occurred in 1962, when the U.S. Department of Commerce secretly, and without authorization or permission from the author, translated into English from French the anthropologist Georges Condominas' ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central highlands of Vietnam, Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt. The Green Berets weaponized the document in the field. The military's uses for this ethnographic knowledge were obvious, as assassination campaigns tried to hone their skills and learn to target village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor author knew this work had been stolen, translated, and reprinted for militarized ends. In 1971, Condominas described his anger at this abuse of his humanistic work, saying: "How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about life, should be offered to the technicians of death -- of their death! ...You will understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the 'pirating' [of my book] only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces in the camp of Phii Ko.'" Today, anthropologists serving on militarily "embedded" Human Terrain Teams study Iraqis with claims that they are teaching troops how to recognize and protect noncombatants. But as Bryan Bender reports in the Boston Globe, "one Pentagon official likened [Human Terrain anthropologists] to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project during the Vietnam War. That effort helped identify Vietnamese suspected as communists and Viet Cong collaborators; some were later assassinated by the United States." This chilling revelation clarifies the role that Pentagon officials envision for anthropologists in today's counterinsurgency campaigns. McFate's Anthropology The military and intelligence community loves McFate and her programs not because her thinking is innovative -- but because, beyond information on specific manners and customs of lands they are occupying, the simplistic views of culture she provides tell them what they already know. This has long been a problem faced by anthropologists working in such confined military settings. My research examining the frustrations and contributions of World War II era anthropologists identifies a recurrent pattern in which anthropologists with knowledge flowing against the bureaucratic precepts of military and intelligence agencies faced often impossible institutional barriers. They faced the choice of either coalescing with ingrained institutional views and advancing within these bureaucracies, or enduring increasing frustrations and marginalized status. Such wartime frustrations led Alexander Leighton to conclude in despair that "the administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." In this sense, Montgomery McFate's selective use of anthropology -- which ignores anthropological critiques of colonialism, power, militarization, hegemony, warfare, cultural domination and globalization -- provides the military with just the sort of support, rather than illumination, that they seek. In large part, what the military wants from anthropology is to offer basic courses in local manners so that they can get on with the job of conquest. The fact that military anthropologists appear disengaged from questioning conquest exposes the fundamental problem with military anthropology. I'm sure that Chapter Three's authors had no idea the Manual would receive such public scrutiny; and that notions of University of Chicago Press distribution were not on the horizon when these identified passages were lifted. It remains unclear how these unattributed passages entered the Manual. If the Army or the Chicago Press care about scholarship, they will conduct an investigation and make public their findings. There's plenty of blame to go around. It would be simple to blame Gen. Petraeus and the University of Chicago Press for running such a sloppy operation, but Montgomery McFate's areas of expertise are those consistently coinciding with the chapter's pilfered passages. I have such high respect for Jon Nagl's academic work and sense of propriety that I cannot imagine his knowing involvement in such sloppy work, but his name, as a significant element in the public face of this project, is sullied. These commandeered passages make curious McFate's insistence that "it is the nature of knowledge to escape the bonds of its creator; to believe otherwise is to persist in a supreme naivety about the nature of knowledge production and distribution." We are left to wonder how much unattributed "escaped" knowledge appears in classified documents, now sequestered beyond the public's view. In one sense, the particular details of how the Manual came to reprint the unacknowledged writings of scholars do not matter. If quotation marks and attributions were removed by someone other than the chapter's authors, the end result is the same as if the authors intentionally took this material. The silence on the reproduction of these passages, the lack of any authorial erratum, and the failure to add quotation marks even when Chicago Press republished the Manual seems to argue against the likelihood of a simple editorial mix-up, but who knows. The ways that the processes producing the Manual so easily abused the work of others inform us of larger dynamics in play, when scholars and academic presses lend their reputations, and surrender control, to projects mixing academic with military goals. With hindsight, Dr. McFate replies to queries and critiques of the Manual's scholarship seem odd. In response to González's critique in Anthropology Today of the Manual's weak anthropological base, McFate framed the Manual as "military doctrine, not an academic treatise" and inexplicably proclaimed that "doctrine does not have footnotes." But McFate knows that the Manual has both footnotes and citations where it suits its purpose (for example see footnote on Pages 53, 151, 188, of the Chicago Press printing; and see citations on 6-85, 6,87, etc.; and attributions for use of copyright materials on Chicago version, Pages 151, 188). One measure of the Manual's status as an extrusion of political ideology rather than scholarly labor is that when quotes and attributions are used, they are frequently deployed in the context of quoting the apparently sacred words of generals and other military figures -- thereby, denoting not only differential levels of respect but different treatment of who may and may not be quoted without attribution. Last August, I emailed McFate in Afghanistan to confirm that she had co-authored the Manual's Chapter 3. Unprompted, she replied, "Words, phrases and concepts that I was attached to were removed by other authors or the editors to make it more accessible to general readers. Also, all my footnotes were removed (naturally)." McFate listed words, phrases, concepts, and footnotes as removed elements of text, with no mention made of the removal of quotation marks or narrative attributions. Rather than providing shielding, Dr. McFate's disclaimers make me wonder if she was aware that somewhere along the line unacknowledged academic texts had been pilfered for reasons of state. In recent years, McFate and other militarized anthropologists have been demanding more academic respectability. While some in this group are producing interesting quality studies of the military and intelligence community, the Manual shows the sort of low quality work that can pass as "innovative" uses of anthropology for the military. Chapter three reads like the work of lazy C students, taking phrases and sentences promiscuously from various sources, cobbling them together into a sort of Cliffs Notes version of anthropology, which the University of Chicago Press has now laundered into a book posing as an object of academic respectability. Considering the Manual's importance for Iraq, perhaps it is only fitting that American strategists are now trying to win a war based on lies with the stolen words and thoughts of others. Comparisons of Unacknowledged Sources for Passages in The Counterinsurgency Field Manual Here are specific examples of portions of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, derived from other unacknowledged sources. The hyphenated numbers preceding passages indicate the citation used in the Counterinsurgency Manual. Bold writing indicates the portion of the passage that has been used without attribution from another source; indented passages present the original unacknowledged source passage (references for source passages appear in parenthesis). Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-20: Society "...sociologists define society as a population living in the same geographic area that shares a culture and a common identity and whose members are subject to the same political authority." Unacknowledged Source: "Formally, sociologists define society as a population living in the same geographic area that shares a culture and a common identity and whose members are subject to the same political authority." (Newman, David. Sociology. 6th ed. Pine Forge Press, 2006. P. 19.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-24: Groups "A group is two or more people regularly interacting on the basis of shared expectations of others' behavior and who have interrelated status and roles." Unacknowledged Source: "Group: two or more people regularly interacting on the basis of shared expectations of others' behavior; interrelated statuses and roles." (Silbey, Susan. Sociology study notes. 2002. http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Anthropology/) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-25: Race "A race is a human group that defines itself or is defined by other groups as different by virtue of innate physical characteristics. Biologically, there is no such thing as race among human beings; race is a social category." Unacknowledged Source: [Race] "refers to a human group that defines itself or is defined by others as different by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics." (Encyclopedia Britannica. "Race." 1974, vol. 15.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-26: Ethnic groups "Members of ethnic groups see themselves as different from other groups in a society and are recognized as such by others." Unacknowledged Source: Members of ethnic groups see themselves as culturally distinct from other groups in a society, and are seen by those other groups to be so in return." (Giddens, Anthony. Sociology, 2006, 5th ed, P. 487.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-27: Tribes "Tribes are generally defined as autonomous, genealogically structured groups in which the rights of individuals are largely determined by their ancestry and membership in a particular lineage." Unacknowledged Source: "[A Tribe is an] autonomous, genealogically structured group in which the rights of individuals are largely determined by their membership in corporate descent groups such as lineages." (Brown, Kenneth. "A Few Reflections on the 'Tribe' and 'State' in Twentieth-Century Morocco." In F. Abdul-Jabar & H. Dawod, eds., Tribes and Power. Saqi Books, 2001. P. 206.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-37: Culture "Culture is a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another." Unacknowledged Source: "The system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with this world and with one another." (Plog, Fred and Daniel Bates. Cultural Anthropology. Random House, 1988. 2nd ed. P. 7.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-44: Values "A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence." Unacknowledged Source: "A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence." (Rokeach, Milton. The Nature of Human Values. Free Press, 1973. P. 5.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-51: Cultural Forms "A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interest." Unacknowledged Source: Religious ritual is "a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests." (Turner, Victor. W. "Symbols in African Ritual". In J. Dolgin, et al., eds., Symbolic Anthropology. Columbia Univ. Press, 1977. P. 2.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-51: Cultural Forms "Symbols can be objects, activities, words, relationships, events, or gestures." Unacknowledged Source: "The symbols I observed in the field were, empirically, objects, activities, relationships, events, gestures, and spatial units in a ritual situation" (Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols. Cornell University Press, 1967. P.19.) Counterinsurgency Manual, section 3-55: Power and Authority "Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her own will despite resistance." Unacknowledged Source: "Power [Macht] is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her own will despite resistance." (Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Univ. Calif. Press, 1978 [orig. 1922]. P. 53.) David Price is author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke, 2004). His next book, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, will be published by Duke University Press in March 2008. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu   Your Ad Here

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