ANTHROPOLOGISTS for JUSTICE and PEACE

Concordia University: Up for Sale? Academic Autonomy and the Azrieli Institute

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:42:00 +0000

Up for Sale? Academic Autonomy and the Azrieli Institute
ERIC SHRAGGE — SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

Originally published by The Link

Concordia University’s recent announcement that it will be forming the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies—courtesy of a $5 million donation from the Azrieli Foundation—raises some interesting questions.

Specifically, it raises questions pertaining to the idea of the university being bought by those with personal wealth and an interest in backing their favourite cause.

Supporters of this Institute argue that it will be politically neutral and judge projects, speakers and visiting professorships exclusively on academic merit.

In an article published on June 30 in the Canadian Jewish News, Norma Joseph, co-director of the Institute, critically addresses academic boycotts of Israel: “Academics are scholars, people who search for knowledge untainted by political or religious (or any sort of) preference,” she wrote. “Their tasks are to seek information removed from common prejudice and slanted stereotypes.”

But politics—whether on the left or the right—are always present, and always seep into academia, wherever high-minded ideals are being professed. Denying this is either naïveté, or deliberate manipulation in order to allow a political position on Israel to be introduced into the university under the guise of free inquiry.

Institutes for the study of Israel and related Israel studies are not unique to Concordia, and they have historically been established through the support of private foundations having a strong identification with the Jewish community and Israel.

The university accepts the outside money and, in presenting its programs, attempts to normalize and legitimize the Israeli state—describing it as culturally and socially diverse, modern, progressive and facing various challenges.

The proposal for Concordia’s program is couched in academic language that avoids any discussion of Israel’s very contested role in the region and its relation to the displacement and colonization of the Palestinian people.

Would it be fair to teach a course or program on Canada that avoids a discussion of white settler colonization and its consequences for First Nations peoples? Of course not—so why are we letting a similar situation happen here?

Israel Studies programs have been developed in the context of mounting criticism of Israel internationally. Many forms of mobilization against it are on the rise—such as the presence of Israel Apartheid Week on campuses and the growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in Europe and North America.

Clearly, for the organized Jewish community that supports Israel, there is a battle to be waged for the hearts and minds on university campuses at home and abroad, and it is in this context that programs and Institutes for Israel Studies have been put in place.

But the process of developing the Institute reflects a wider problem about the emerging culture of the university, which couples the liberal ethos of academic freedom of free inquiry with the neoliberal ideology of entrepreneurialism.

It suggests that academics are free to do their own thing and pursue their academic questions—especially if they can raise their own funds.

The alleged autonomy of the Institute from its funder is also a huge concern, especially since academic freedom is at the core of this debate. The Azrieli Foundation and David Azrieli himself are known to be strongly pro-Israel.

But when the Institute was presented, the Faculty Council was assured that it would be academically independent from its funders. This is a superficial understanding of autonomy and ill befits a university.

For Concordia to be awarded a grant of this magnitude, it is more than likely that implicit guarantees upfront about the direction and pro-Israel positions of the Institute’s founders and leaders exist. In this case, academic “autonomy” is a kind of “non-issue,” since, if the leadership of the Institute shares an ideology with the Foundation to begin with, then the matter of autonomy becomes a moot point.

An underlying goal of the Institute, similar to the US programs described above, is to “de-politicize Israel,” erasing the role it plays in its region and the occupation of Palestinian territory with all of the consequences.

A telling example of this is the following extract from an article published on June 21 in The Gazette: “One of the institute’s founders says that the institute ‘is not about the politics. […] It’s about the study of a geographic area—its culture, its history, its economics, its diversity, even its food.’”

“[Norma Joseph] added that she believes the institute will bring together Jewish and Muslim students, possibly preventing conflicts like the 2002 riots that caused the cancellation of a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Understanding eliminates conflict,” she said.

Dialogue and understanding are fine when there is equal power and justice. But unless there is an end to the occupation and a just solution for the Palestinian people, “understanding” is not possible. Until that happens, conflict will not go away.

If there is to be academic openness, the politics cannot be pushed to the side, rather, it is the core question and seems to be precluded from being addressed at the Institute, given the clear academic restriction on inquiry from the beginning.

A particular challenge for critics is that, so long as the liberal entrepreneurial system is in play, academics can claim “academic freedom” to justify whatever they want to do as long as it uses the rhetoric of objective inquiry and openness to diverse opinion.

There are very few restrictions on university research besides the standard ethical reviews for animal or human subjects. In the context of struggles against cuts to public education, this is a key example of the way in which the future direction of education is being sold off to the highest bidder.

This practice should be resisted, along with broader movements against the privatization and corporatization of the public sector. The university is clearly for sale and its academics are bought in service of causes that are part of the dominant political ideology. Dissent, unfortunately, is not usually financed.

Eric Shragge is an Associate Professor and Principal of the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia.

Obama Terror Drones: CIA Tactics in Pakistan Include Targeting Rescuers and Funerals

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:37:00 +0000

Missiles being loaded onto a military Reaper drone in Afghanistan.

February 4th, 2012 | by Chris Woods and Christina Lamb

(This report originally appeared on the site of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism)

For more, please see TBIJ's special section "Covert Drone War" and in particular these articles:

A question of legality
February 4th, 2012 | by Chris Woods

Analysis: Obama outs CIA drone campaign – but do his words add up?
February 1st, 2012 | by Chris Woods

Senior US official accuses Bureau of ‘helping Al Qaeda’
February 6th, 2012 | by Rachel Oldroyd

Attacking the messenger: how the CIA tried to undermine drone study
August 12th, 2011 | by Chris Woods

Number of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan hits 300
October 14th, 2011 | by Chris Woods

Bureau reporter meets 16-year-old three days before US drone kills him
November 4th, 2011 | by Pratap Chatterjee

Over 160 children reported among drone deaths
August 11th, 2011 | by Chris Woods

US claims of ‘no civilian deaths’ are untrue
July 18th, 2011 | by Chris Woods

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a ‘targeted, focused effort’ that ‘has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.’

Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, Obama claimed last week they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’.

‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’, he told a questioner at an on-line forum. ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying to go in and harm Americans’.

But research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children. A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.

Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama.

There have been 260 attacks by unmanned Predators or Reapers in Pakistan by Obama’s administration – averaging one every four days. Because the attacks are carried out by the CIA, no information is given on the numbers killed.

Administration officials insist that these covert attacks are legal. John Brennan, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, argues that the US has the right to unilaterally strike terrorists anywhere in the world, not just what he called ‘hot battlefields’.

‘Because we are engaged in an armed conflict with al- Qaeda, the United States takes the legal position that, in accordance with international law, we have the authority to take action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces,’ he told a conference at Harvard Law School last year. ‘The United States does not view our authority to use military force against al-Qaeda as being restricted solely to”hot” battlefields like Afghanistan.’

State-sanctioned extra-judicial executions
But some international law specialists fiercely disagree, arguing that the strikes amount to little more than state-sanctioned extra-judicial executions and questioning how the US government would react if another state such as China or Russia started taking such action against those they declare as enemies.

The first confirmed attack on rescuers took place in North Waziristan on May 16 2009. According to Mushtaq Yusufzai, a local journalist, Taliban militants had gathered in the village of Khaisor. After praying at the local mosque, they were preparing to cross the nearby border into Afghanistan to launch an attack on US forces. But the US struck first.

A CIA drone fired its missiles into the Taliban group, killing at least a dozen people. Villagers joined surviving Taliban as they tried to retrieve the dead and injured.

But as rescuers clambered through the demolished house the drones struck again. Two missiles slammed into the rubble, killing many more. At least 29 people died in total.

‘We lost very trained and sincere friends‘, a local Taliban commander told The News, a Pakistani newspaper. ‘Some of them were very senior Taliban commanders and had taken part in successful actions in Afghanistan. Bodies of most of them were beyond recognition.’

For the Americans the attack was a success. A surprise tactic had resulted in the deaths of many Taliban. But locals say that six ordinary villagers also died that day, identified by Bureau field researchers as Sabir, Ikram, Mohib, Zahid, Mashal and Syed Noor (most people in the area use only one name).

Yusufzai, who reported on the attack, says those killed in the follow-up strike ‘were trying to pull out the bodies, to help clear the rubble, and take people to hospital.’ The impact of drone attacks on rescuers has been to scare people off, he says: ‘They’ve learnt that something will happen. No one wants to go close to these damaged building anymore.’

The legal view
Naz Modirzadeh, Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) at Harvard University, said killing people at a rescue site may have no legal justification.

‘Not to mince words here, if it is not in a situation of armed conflict, unless it falls into the very narrow area of imminent threat then it is an extra-judicial execution’, she said. ‘We don’t even need to get to the nuance of who’s who, and are people there for rescue or not. Because each death is illegal. Each death is a murder in that case.’

The Khaisoor incident was not a one-off. Between May 2009 and June 2011, at least fifteen attacks on rescuers were reported by credible news media, including the New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, ABC News and Al Jazeera.

It is notoriously difficult for the media to operate safely in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Both militants and the military routinely threaten journalists. Yet for three months a team of local researchers has been seeking independent confirmation of these strikes.

Eyewitness accounts
The researchers have found credible, independently sourced evidence of civilians killed in ten of the reported attacks on rescuers. In five other reported attacks, the researchers found no evidence of any rescuers – civilians or otherwise – killed.

The researchers were told by villagers that strikes on rescuers began as early as March 2008, although no media carried reports at the time. The Bureau is seeking testimony relating to nine additional incidents.

Often when the US attacks militants in Pakistan, the Taliban seals off the site and retrieves the dead. But an examination of thousands of credible reports relating to CIA drone strikes also shows frequent references to civilian rescuers. Mosques often exhort villagers to come forward and help, for example – particularly following attacks that mistakenly kill civilians.

Other tactics are also raising concerns. On June 23 2009 the CIA killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud, a mid-ranking Pakistan Taliban commander. They planned to use his body as bait to hook a larger fish – Baitullah Mehsud, then the notorious leader of the Pakistan Taliban.

‘A plan was quickly hatched to strike Baitullah Mehsud when he attended the man’s funeral,’ according to Washington Post national security correspondent Joby Warrick, in his recent book The Triple Agent. ‘True, the commander… happened to be very much alive as the plan took shape. But he would not be for long.’

The CIA duly killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud in a drone strike that killed at least five others. Speaking with the Bureau, Pulitzer Prize-winner Warrick confirmed what his US intelligence sources had told him: ‘The initial target was no doubt a target anyway, as it was described to me, as someone that they were interested in. And as they were planning this attack, a possible windfall from that is that it would shake Mehsud himself out of his hiding place.’

Up to 5,000 people attended Khwaz Wali Mehsud’s funeral that afternoon, including not only Taliban fighters but many civilians. US drones struck again, killing up to 83 people. As many as 45 were civilians, among them reportedly ten children and four tribal leaders. Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud escaped unharmed, dying six weeks later along with his wife in a fresh CIA attack.

Clive Stafford-Smith, the lawyer who heads the Anglo-US legal charity Reprieve, believes that such strikes ‘are like attacking the Red Cross on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a combatant.’

Christof Heyns, a South African law professor who is United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra- judicial Executions, agrees. ‘Allegations of repeat strikes coming back after half an hour when medical personnel are on the ground are very worrying’, he said. ‘To target civilians would be crimes of war.’ Heyns is calling for an investigation into the Bureau’s findings.

One of the most devastating attacks took place on March 17 last year, the day after Pakistan had released American CIA contractor Raymond Davis, jailed for shooting dead two men in Lahore. Davis had been held for two months and was released after the payment of blood money said to be around $2.3m.

A case of retaliation?
The Agency was said to be furious at the affair. The following day when a massive drone strike killed up to 42 people gathered at a meeting in North Waziristan, Pakistani officials believed it to be retaliation.

The commander of Pakistan forces in the area at the time was Brigadier Abdullah Dogar. He admits that in drone attacks in general ‘people invariably get reported as innocent bystanders’. But in that case he has no doubt. ‘I was sitting there where our friends say they were targeting terrorists and I know they were innocent people’, he said.

The mountains in the area contain chromite mines and the ownership was disputed between two tribes, so a Jirga or tribal meeting had been called to resolve the issue.

‘We in the Pakistan military knew about the meeting’, he said, ‘we’d got the request ten days earlier.’

‘It was held in broad daylight, people were sitting out in Nomada bus depot when the missile strikes came. Maybe there were one or two Taliban at that Jirga – they have their people attending – but does that justify a drone strike which kills 42 mostly innocent people?’

‘Drones may make tactical gains but I don’t see how there’s any strategic advantage’, he added. ‘When innocent people die, then you’re creating a whole lot more people with an issue.’

Growing tensions
Drone attacks have long been a source of tension between the US and Pakistan despite the fact that the Pakistan government gave tacit agreement, even allowing them to fly from Shamsi airbase in the western province of Baluchistan, while publicly denouncing the attacks.

In return the US made sure that some of the terrorists killed were those targeting Pakistan.

However the relationship has been stretched to breaking point, first with the raid to kill Osama bin Laden in May and subsequent US accusations of Pakistani complicity, then the NATO bombing of a Pakistani post in November, killing 24 soldiers. In December Pakistan ordered the CIA to vacate the Shamsi base. For a while drone attacks stopped but they resumed two weeks ago.

The US claims the drones are a vital tool that have helped them almost wipe out the leadership of al Qaeda in Pakistan. But others point out they have stoked enormous anti-American sentiment in a country with an arsenal of 200 nuclear weapons.

Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Initiative at the Brookings Institution, points out the operation has never been debated in Congress which has to approve sending US forces to war.

So dramatic is the switch to unmanned war that he says the US now has 7,000 drones operating and 12,000 more on the ground, while not a single new manned combat aircraft is under research or development at any western aerospace company.

After a remarkable lack of debate, there is starting to be unease in the US at the lack of transparency and accountability in the use of drones particularly as the campaign has expanded to hit targets in Libya, Yemen and Somalia and until recently to patrol the skies in Iraq.

Three US citizens were killed by missiles fired from drones in Yemen last September. Anwar al Awlaqi, an alleged al Qaeda operative, was deliberately targeted in what some have described as the US government’s first ever execution of one of its own citizens without trial. His colleague and fellow citizen Samir Khan also died in the attack. Two weeks later Awlaqi’s 16 year old son Abdulrahman died in a strike on alleged al Qaeda militants.

Such unmanned war is a politician’s dream, avoiding the inconvenience of sending someone’s son or daughter, mother or father, into harm’s way.

The fact that the operations are carried out by the CIA rather than the US military enables the administration to evade questions. The Agency press office responds to media inquiries on the subject with no comment and refusal to give names of those killed or who are on the target list.

Until Obama’s comments last week, the White House would not even confirm the programme existed.

‘We don’t discuss classified programs or comment on alleged strikes’, said a senior administration official in response to the findings presented by the Sunday Times.

Lawsuit
The ACLU filed a lawsuit last week demanding the Obama administration release legal and intelligence records on the killing of the three US citizens in in Yemen.

Privately some senior US military officers say they are extremely uncomfortable at the way the administration is carrying out these operations using the CIA which is not covered by laws of war or the Geneva Convention.

The use of drones outside a declared war zone is seen by many legal experts as setting a dangerous precedent. Aside from allies such as Israel, Britain and France, other countries have drone technology including China, Russia and Pakistan. Iran recently captured a downed US drone.

Heyns, the UN rapporteur, said an international legal framework is urgently needed to govern their use.

‘Our concern is how far does it go – will the whole world be a theatre of war?’ he asked. ‘Drones in principle allow collateral damage to be minimised but because they can be used without danger to a country’s own troops they tend to be used more widely. One doesn’t want to use the term ticking bomb but it’s extremely seductive.’

Iraq: An Education in Occupation

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:05:00 +0000

By Hugh Gusterson

First published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 2, 2012.

As the last American soldiers left Iraq in December, so, too, did many of the journalists who had covered the war, leaving little in the way of media coverage of post-war Iraq. While there were some notable exceptions -- including two fine articles by MIT's John Tirman that asked how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the US invasion -- overall the American press published few articles on the effects of the occupation, especially the consequences for Iraqis.

As a college professor, I have a special interest in what happened to Iraqi universities under US occupation. The story is not pretty.

By 1991, women had come to constitute 30 percent of all university faculty in Iraq, proportionally more women faculty than at Princeton University in 2009.

After the 2003 invasion, Iraqi universities were stripped of their cultural artifacts as well as basic equipment—such as books, lab equipment, and desks—that allowed them to function at all.

As of 2006, an estimated 160 to 380 Iraqi professors had been killed, and over 30 percent of Iraq’s professors, doctors, pharmacists and engineers emigrated between 2003 and 2007.

Up to one million books and ten million unique documents have been destroyed, lost or stolen across Iraq since 2003.

The US Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Education received only $8 million dollars to reconstruct Iraqi universities, including the provision of basic supplies. American Universities meanwhile received exorbitant contracts: A team from the State University of New York at Stony Brook won a $4 million grant to “modernize curricula in archaeology” at four Iraqi universities--schools without desks and chairs.

The Defense Department is now the third largest source of funding for university research and development, after NIH and NSF, distributing about $1 billion of research money every year.

Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students -- churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries -- the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.

Iraqi universities began their decline in the 12 years after the 1991 Gulf War. As the international sanctions regime cut off journal subscriptions and equipment purchases, academic salaries fell precipitously, and 10,000 Iraqi professors left the country. Those faculty who remained were increasingly closed off from new developments in their fields.

In 2003, after the invasion, many Iraqi professors hoped that their university system would be revitalized under US occupation. They expected funding to buy new books, to replace equipment, and to repair the damage inflicted by the sanctions. And they hoped for new tolerance for open debate and inquiry.

In fact, the opposite happened.

It started during the chaos following the invasion. While American troops guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior but ignored cultural heritage sites, looters ransacked the universities. For example, the entire library collections at the University of Baghdad's College of Arts and at the University of Basra were destroyed. The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandresekara described the scene at Mustansiriya University in 2003: "By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day."

At the same time, the United States stripped Iraq's universities of their leadership. In his first executive order as the new head of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, Paul Bremer removed members of the Ba'ath Party from senior management positions at all public institutions. Since one had to join the Ba'ath Party -- whether one truly supported the party or not -- in order to get ahead in Hussein's Iraq, this order had the effect of removing most of Iraq's senior university administrators and professors overnight. In the words of journalist Christina Asquith, after this purge, "half of the intellectual leadership in academia was gone." Control over Iraq's universities now lay in the hands of Andrew Erdmann, a 36-year-old American, well-connected in Republican Party patronage networks, who was senior adviser to Iraq's Ministry of Education. Erdmann spoke no Arabic and had no experience in university administration.

In September 2003, Erdmann was succeeded by John Agresto, the former president of St. Johns College in New Mexico and a conservative opponent of multicultural education in the US culture wars of the 1980s. Agresto was picked to run the Iraqi university system because he was friends with Lynne Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. He too spoke no Arabic and, when the Post's Chandresekaran asked what he had read to prepare for his assignment, Iraq's new top educator said he decided to read no books at all about Iraq -- so he would have an "open mind."

Agresto estimated that it would cost $1.2 billion to rebuild Iraq's 22 major universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges. Given that the US Congress appropriated over $90 billion for reconstruction and counterinsurgency in Iraq for 2004, this was not a large amount, and it was significantly less than the $2 billion that the United Nations and the World Bank had estimated would be the minimum necessary. (To give some sense of scale, $1.2 billion is the same as North Carolina State University's annual budget.) But Congress only appropriated $8 million -- less than 1 percent of what Agresto requested. In other words, Congress told Iraqi universities they were on their own.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) did set aside $25 million to help revitalize Iraqi universities -- but the money went to American universities to do curriculum development. For example, USAID gave the State University of New York at Stony Brook $4 million (half the amount Congress appropriated to restore the entire Iraqi university system) to develop a new archaeology curriculum on behalf of four Iraqi universities.

By 2004, looted, impoverished, and stripped of their intellectual and administrative leadership, Iraqi universities nevertheless embodied one of the last spaces -- in a country increasingly engulfed by sectarian tensions -- where people of different creeds could gather together. However, the principled commitment of many in university communities to cosmopolitanism and interfaith tolerance made the universities themselves targets for sectarian extremists and fundamentalists. Armed militias threatened women who did not cover themselves and intimidated professors who said things they did not like. According to The Washington Times, 280 Iraqi professors were killed and another 3,250 fled the country by the end of 2006. Those assassinated included Muhammad al-Rawi, the president of Baghdad University; Isam al-Rawi, a geology professor who was compiling statistics on assassinated Iraqi academics when he himself was killed; and Amal Maamlaji, a Shia information-technology professor and women's rights advocate at a predominantly Sunni university, who was killed with 163 bullets.

Those faculty fortunate enough to move abroad became part of the great middle-class exodus from Iraq under US occupation. It is estimated that 10 percent of Iraq's population, and 30 percent of its professors, doctors, and engineers, left for neighboring countries between 2003 and 2007 -- the largest Arab refugee displacement since the Palestinian flight from the holy lands decades earlier.

In just 20 years, then, the Iraqi university system went from being among the best in the Middle East to one of the worst. This extraordinary act of institutional destruction was largely accomplished by American leaders who told us that the US invasion of Iraq would bring modernity, development, and women's rights. Instead, as political scientist Mark Duffield has observed, it has partly de-modernized that country. In the words of John Tirman, America's failure to acknowledge the suffering that occupation wreaked in Iraq "is a moral failing as well as a strategic blunder." Iraq represents a blind spot in our national conversation, one that impedes the cultural growth that stems from a painful recognition of error; and it hobbles the rational evaluation of foreign intervention. Is it too late to look in the mirror?

A longer version of this article can be found here, and the research paper can be dowloaded below:

Indigenous Survival: What is "Development" Good For?

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:47:00 +0000

By Stephen Corry of Survival International

First published in The Guardian, Friday 25 November 2011

Reproduced with the permission of the author

Do indigenous peoples benefit from 'development'?

We need to think about whether development brings any benefits to those who are largely self-sufficient – like many of the world's 150 million tribal people

What's "development" for? That may be straightforward to people who don't have water or food, or sewerage in urban areas (faecal contamination is the biggest, easily preventable, manmade killer). But, although millions still lack such basics, they form only a tiny part of what passes for development these days. The duplicity of politics and business ensures much else – arms, for example – is shoehorned into the same category.

What should development mean for those who are largely self-sufficient, getting their own food and building their dwellings where the water is still clean – like many of the world's 150 million tribal people? Has development got anything helpful for them, or has it simply got it in for them?

It's easy to see where it has led. Leaving aside the millions who succumbed to the colonial invasion, in some of the world's most "developed" countries (Australia, Canada and the US) development has turned most of the survivors into dispossessed paupers. Take any measure of what it ought to mean: high income, longevity, employment, health; low rates of addiction, suicide, imprisonment and domestic violence, and you find that indigenous people in the US, Canada and Australia are by far the worst off on every count – but no one seems to heed the lesson.

These are the consequences of a dispossession more total in North America and Australia than almost anywhere on Earth. The colonists were determined to steal tribal lands, and unquestioning about their own superiority. They espoused politico-economic models in which workers produced for distant markets, and had to pay for the privilege. The natives, using no money, paying no taxes, contributing little to the marketplace until forced to, were "backward". At best, they were to be integrated to serve colonist society.

Colonialism set out to take away their self-sufficiency, on their own territory, and lead them to glorious productivity, as menials, on someone else's. There's little point in calling for retroactive apologies for this because it's not confined to the past: most development schemes foisted on tribal peoples today point in exactly the same direction.

Two of its main themes are housing and education. Traditional housing has many benefits – not least the fact that it's free – but development decrees it must be replaced by modern dwellings. In West Papua, the tribespeople put their pigs in the new houses and live in the old. Rwanda recently outlawed thatch altogether; everyone must use metal sheets, by law.

So what about modern education? In Australia, mixed-race children were forced into distant boarding schools to "breed out" their "Aboriginalness" and turn them into an underclass. From frozen Siberia to sunlit Botswana, boarding schools remain a main plank in integrationist policies, which destroy more than educate. It's no hidden conspiracy: it's openly designed to be about turning people into workers, scornful of their own tribal heritage.

Many indigenous people have observed that even the modern medical attention they might receive from the wealthiest governments doesn't begin to solve the illnesses the same government's policies have inflicted on them. It isn't "backwardness" that makes many tribal peoples reject development projects, it's rational anxiety about the future.

As for largescale infrastructure development – dams and mines, even irrigation – its real effect on the ground is invariably to enrich the elites while impoverishing the locals.

So is it possible to offer tribal peoples any truly beneficial development? Yes, if we accept their right to reject what we, with our "advanced" wisdom, can give; we have to stop thinking them childish when they make decisions we wouldn't. Everyone wants control over their future, and not everyone wants the same things out of life, but such truisms are hardly ever applied.

Development, at least for most tribal peoples, isn't really about lifting people out of poverty, it's about masking the takeover of their territories. The deception works because the conviction "we know best" is more deeply ingrained even than it was a generation ago; Victorian-era levels of narrow-mindedness are returning. As a Botswana Bushman told me: "First they make us destitute by taking away our land, our hunting and our way of life. Then they say we are nothing because we are destitute."

In a 21st century of expensive water, food, housing, education, healthcare and power, self-sufficiency has its attraction. It may not boost GDP figures, but there are many tribal peoples in the world who live longer and healthier lives than millions in nearby slums. Who's to say they've made a bad choice?

• Stephen Corry is director of Survival International and author of Tribal Peoples for Tomorrow's World

First, a World Revolution of Decolonization

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:05:00 +0000

The article that follows, written by anthropologist Jason Hickel, is a welcome critique of the shadows of Eurocentrism and the desire for middle-class privilege in the West as found in the "Occupy" movement. Hickel links these to the failure of the Occupy "movement" to exist as a phenomenon outside of North America and Europe, where it is predominantly located, and the neglect of critically important realities of the role of imperialism in developing and enforcing the middle-class lifestyles of the West. This is a constructive critique that adds to some of the previous articles reproduced on this site, such as "Decolonize Wall Street," and "Decolonizing the Occupations".

View Occupy Wall Street protests around the world in a larger map

How to Occupy the World: A Call for True Internationalism

Published December 15, 2011, in PULSE.

Dr. Jason Hickel

The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for World Revolution.” This is an ambitious claim, to be sure. And in most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centers around the world. On October 15, Occupy Wall Street’s success inspired a broad wave of coordinated occupations across Europe. I was a founding participant in the one that began in London.

But the Occupy movement has been notably absent outside of North America and Europe. Not for want of trying, of course: in southern Africa, where I am originally from, small groups of committed activists tried to instigate occupations in a few key regional cities, but without much success. In South Africa, a society pided by violent inequalities that proceed directly from neoliberal policy, Occupy managed to attract only a few dozen souls – a poor showing for a country known for one of the highest protest rates in the world.

What accounts for the failure of Occupy to capture the imagination of the global South, which comprises precisely the people whose lives have been most brutally affected by the recent global financial crisis? And in what sense can Occupy claim to be a world revolution if it leaves out – and in some cases even alienates – the vast, non-white majority of humanity?

Occupy is “international” at the moment only inasmuch as it exists in many different countries at the same time. But each of the occupations is primarily concerned with particular local or national issues. For instance, Occupy Wall Street is focused on corporate personhood, the Glass-Steagall Act, and collateralized debt obligations, while Occupy London is worried about tuition hikes, preserving the National Health Service, and reversing Thatcher’s 1986 financial deregulation bonanza.

Yes, the occupations communicate, and yes, they stand in solidarity with one another. But they are not united around concerns that are recognizably global in scope.

True, Occupy protestors and their sympathizers have helped sound the alarm on issues of international concern like fossil fuels and climate change, as we saw recently at the COP17 meetings in Durban. But as it presently stands the Occupy agenda is rather provincial – even Eurocentric. Aside from its radical elements, most of the movement’s American and European supporters simply want to reclaim their rights to live decent, dignified, middle-class lives.

Western Affluence and the Global System

There’s nothing wrong with this aspiration, in and of itself. But middle-class affluence in the West depends on a system of extraction that produces and perpetuates tremendous poverty in the global South. This was true under European colonialism, when the gap between the richest and poorest countries increased from 3:1 to 35:1, and it obtains even more so in this era of neoliberal capitalism, during which – according to the Human Development Report – that gap has reached an unprecedented 74:1.

According to World Development Indicators, in 2005 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population – a proportion that includes almost all of the Occupy protestors – accounted for 76.6 percent of total private consumption. The wealthy nations of Europe and North America have an inordinate degree of control over the world’s resources, which they command through international financial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization.

Occupy Wall Street correctly criticizes the fact that an increasing proportion of these spoils has gone to the top 1 percent of U.S. society since the mid-1970s. But it is not enough to want to redistribute that wealth back to middle-class Americans. Even if the Occupy movement does manage to fix the financial sector, stabilize the economy, and redress social inequality in the West, the violent, imperialist modes of accumulation will still remain in place.

The process of extraction from global “periphery” to global “core” is what sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has called “the world-system.” Since the 1980s, one way of facilitating extraction within the world-system has been through “structural adjustment” loans from Western governments to post-colonial countries. Debts from these loans are leveraged to forcibly liberalize markets, privatize resources, cut social services, and curb labor and environmental regulations to create business opportunities for multinational companies and facilitate the flow of wealth to the West.

Western corporations realize huge profits by taking advantage of these policies. They, externalize the costs of production to the global South where they can get away without paying for the labor they exploit, the resources they extract, and the pollution they leave behind.

Forced liberalization has plunged poor countries into economic collapse, slashing average per capita income growth in half after 1980 and leading in some cases to negative rates. Economists estimate that poor countries have lost $480 billion per year as a result of structural adjustment, while multinational corporations have stolen as much as $1.17 trillion (from Africa alone!) through loopholes created by market deregulation since 1970. The upshot of this has been rising inequality, deepening poverty, and worsening health, mortality, and literacy rates in much of the global South.

Finding the Right Targets

Western affluence and the consumer lifestyles of the “99 percent” in the United States and Europe depend on the plunder of other places and other peoples. This is one of the reasons that people in the global South tend to feel alienated by Occupy. First of all, they don’t see why they should support a movement of Westerners who want to regain levels of affluence that depend at least in part on the extraction of their countries’ labor and resources. What’s more, the locus of the economic decisions that affect them is not ultimately their national governments, but the institutions in Washington, DC and Geneva that determine economic policy from afar; it doesn’t make much sense to occupy locally when the power lies elsewhere.

Occupy’s vision for world revolution will only catch on in the global South once the movement extends its purview to encompass these concerns and begins to challenge inequality between nations as much as within them.

We cannot rely on “development” to accomplish this. Not only does development serve as a façade for the global extension of neoliberalism, it also rests on a purely absurd premise. The notion that everyone in the world should enjoy the equivalent of Western middle-class living standards ignores the fact that the planet simply does not contain enough resources for each person to consume as much as, say, the average American. Instead of “developing” the global South, we need to un-develop the West; we need to subvert and dismantle the flows of tribute that underpin Western affluence.

Occupy must realize that even huge wins at home will not necessarily translate into changes in the world-system or even changes in the U.S. role in it. Given that neoliberal capitalism is organized on a global scale, any real change will require a movement that is global in scope. Never has there been a better time to challenge the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF’s policies on trade, debt, austerity, structural adjustment, resource extraction, and sweatshops.

Targeting these institutions is crucial because they determine Western access to labor and resources in the global South. The United States controls the levers of this system, since voting power in the World Bank and the IMF is apportioned according to each nation’s level of financial ownership. With about 17 percent of the shares, the United States has enough to single-handedly block major decisions, which require 85 percent of the vote.

At the WTO, market size determines bargaining power – so rich countries almost always get their way. On top of this, rich countries control key decisions by using exclusive “green room” meetings to circumvent the consensus process. If poor countries choose to disobey trade rules that hurt them, rich countries can retaliate by using the WTO’s courts to impose crushing sanctions.

Change in the world-system can only happen once these institutions are democratized and de-corporatized. This will require building alliances with the global justice movement and anti-globalization campaigns in postcolonial countries that have been working on these issues for decades (such as La Via Campesina, an organization of 200 million peasants worldwide). Neoliberalism was crushing people there long before it hit white, Euro-American youth.

Alliances with the Global South

Another reason that Occupy has not caught on outside the West is that the leaderless, consensus-based horizontalism that has made the movement so popular in North America and Europe doesn’t work as well where most people can’t network through the Internet. Instead of fetishizing this tactic for its own sake, we need to be pragmatic about reaching out to established parties, unions, and other institutions – even if hierarchical – that actually have the ability to organize the rallies that an international movement needs. We reject traditional tactics at our own peril.

It’s easy enough to explain why the global South hasn’t joined Occupy. But why should we care? First, because the extractive processes that underpin Euro-American affluence cannot be fully understood from within the “core.” Our goals need to be informed by conversations and alliances with activists in the global South. Second, because challenging these powerful and deeply entrenched interests will require serious pressure from all corners of the world-system. If we want to bring about “World Revolution,” we have to be able to mobilize the world.

Occupy might do well to glean a few lessons from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Like the world-system in microcosm, apartheid capitalism allowed a white minority to accumulate massive wealth by extracting cheap labor and resources from a non-white majority. A number of white people rejected this system and became key activists in the anti-apartheid movement. But their efforts would have come to naught without their African counterparts, who mobilized mass resistance by going door-to-door in the townships, building the capacity for the strikes and boycotts that brought the apartheid state to its knees.

A truly global movement is not out of reach. Indeed, it has never been more possible than it is today. This is our opportunity to occupy the world. We dare not miss it.

Dr. Jason Hickel teaches at the London School of Economics‘ Department of Anthropology.

In the News: Militarized Academia, Human Terrain System

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:40:00 +0000

"Mapping the Human Terrain"

The following is a list of articles and key extracts that deal specifically with the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, and more broadly with "human terrain" applications of social sciences to military missions. The larger phenomenon of interest to AJP has to do with the militarization of academia. Emphases in bold have been added.

The reports cover areas that include news that a social scientist in Human Terrain Analysis assisted in interrogations, as may have one belonging to the Human Terrain System, even while the program officially insisted it was not involved with "intelligence" gathering; related to the last point, we also learn about Eric Rotzoll, former CIA, also involved with HTS; we learn about the further development of human terrain mapping technologies; in addition we read about the use of HTS data that is uploaded to databases which are then used to create extensive, detailed simulations of actual Afghan villages; we have more notes on military funding for university research aligned with national security goals, and counterinsurgency; we catch glimpses of retired military professionals joining the private sector, and boasting in part about their "human terrain" expertise; we see more discussion on anthropology as a "useful" and "practical" discipline to the powerful; and, lastly, a few funny and even bizarre videos about the Human Terrain System.

NEWS REPORTS

Counterinsurgency Adviser to Speak at VMI
Dec. 5, 2011

Dr. Martin Scott Catino, a counterinsurgency adviser and specialist in U.S. foreign and security policy, will speak at Virginia Military Institute Wednesday, Dec. 7. The talk, “Counterinsurgency and Culture: A Report from Afghanistan,”....Currently a counterinsurgency adviser for DevelopMental Labs Inc., Catino has served in the United States, Iraq, and Afghanistan in intelligence, supervisory, and advising posts for the U.S. government. In 2009-2010, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, he served as the deputy team leader and lead social scientist of the Human Terrain Analysis Team at Multi-National Division-South, Basra, Iraq. This past year, in Operation Enduring Freedom, he worked as the acting senior intelligence officer for a Defense Intelligence Agency unit at Camp Julien, Kabul, Afghanistan. This past spring he was embedded with a platoon of the 34th Infantry Division conducting operations in Kabul province.

CSTs face combat to ‘give Afghan women a voice’: Danger often lurks for female Cultural Support Teams
Army Times, Friday Dec 2, 2011
By John Ryan

...a new program that selects and trains female soldiers to embed with special operations teams across Afghanistan to cultivate relationships with local women and children, who make up about 70 percent of the population....The program is designed to assist counterinsurgency operations by tapping into a reservoir of female voices that have largely gone unheard because of local customs that frown upon American men and Afghan women interacting....Baldwin assessed schools and health clinics, facilitated meetings between village elders and nongovernmental organizations and participated in three women’s shuras From those meetings, she discovered many women wanted to learn how to read and write or sew. She was able to map “the human terrain,” like piecing together family trees, from her interactions with the Afghan women.

Defunct War Strategy Program May Still Overshadow University of Wisconsin-Madison's History of Dissent
Truthout, November 29, 2011
By Steve Horn and Allen Ruff

...Eric Rotzoll, a military man with intelligence community connections. As a deputy commander of a "provincial reconstruction team" (PRT) in Zabul Province, Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, he planned and led civil affairs operations in support of counterinsurgency in the region. From 2006 to 2010, he worked as an "all source analyst" for Defense Department intelligence subcontractor Northrop Grumman. Still with the military at that time, he also served from July 2008 to July 2009 as a Human Terrain Team (HTT) leader in Afghanistan. The HTTs, ostensibly comprising privately contracted civilian anthropologists and other social scientists, have been assigned to each Army brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan since late 2005. Armed on patrol, such "academic embeds" have worked to provide cultural and social "human intelligence," or "Humint," on various "locals" as part of the counterinsurgency effort in both countries. In January, 2009, an embedded journalist moving with an HTT unit on the ground in Afghanistan identified Rotzoll as "the man in charge" and "a former analyst for the CIA...." No mere enlisted man, but an academically trained intelligence warrior, Rotzoll apparently brought a particular added expertise to the "Grand Strategy Workshop." His name also subsequently appeared on the UW JASONs roster for 2009-2010, his affiliation listed simply as "US Army."

Afghanistan: What the Anthropologists Say
The New York Times, November 18, 2011
By Alexander Star

As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in “Human Terrain Teams” that engage in “rapid ethnographic assessment” — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to “operationalize” the Pashtun tribal code. The military, in short, demands local knowledge. But what kind of local knowledge is in supply, and what does it indicate? Though the chief purveyors of such insight, academic ethnographers, have balked at working with the military — the American Anthropological Association issued a report condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of professional ethics — they have not ignored the country.

Morgan State wins $1.8M grant to start national security program
Monday, November 14, 2011
Alexander Jackson - Baltimore Business Journal

Morgan State University has been selected to receive a five-year, $1.8 million federal grant to begin a degree program in national security. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence Program chose Morgan and the University of South Florida to be awarded with grants to establish programs in National Security Studies. The National Security Studies program will be aimed at honing skills needed in the intelligence community such as international relations, foreign language and cultural immersion, scientific and technical programs of study, including cyber security....Under its five-year grant deal, Morgan will establish a consortium of historically black schools in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina to do research in human terrain systems and bio-systems with specific applications to South Asian countries such as Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. The National Security Studies Program was established during 2005 in response to the nation's increasing need for professionals in the intelligence community who are educated and trained with the unique knowledge, skills and capabilities to carry out America's national security objectives.

UAH Research head calls for greater DoD to university collaboration

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

By Mike Kelley

For decades, the Army's Aviation and Missile Command, Space and Missile Defense Command, NASA, and other institutions have turned to UAH [University of Alabama, Hunstville] in the search for solutions to complex technical issues. But Horack [Dr. John Horack, UAH Vice President for Research] thinks there is an element they're missing. The Department of Defense, he says, is "transforming in ways that aren't fully predictable," facing new threats in a highly-charged political environment and constrained budget situation. And while the military has always looked to America's universities for help in solving complex technical issues, Horack thinks they should also look for help with what he terms "the human terrain." University faculty, he says, can take a fresh look at problems and issues, and bring insights and perspectives to problems facing America's military planners. "There is a need for improved socio-economic awareness. But there is no place to go on the GSA schedule to get this type of information." The military, he says, have underutilized America's universities, failing to get from them vital information that could aid strategy and operations in missions around the globe. "We're not using university muscle as well as we could," he says.

Interrogation is not a social science
Financial Times, November 4, 2011
By Gillian Tett

....when the anthropology “tribe” assembles this year, it will have a new topic to discuss: its links with “power” – or, at least, the US military. Last month, the AAA posted an article from Nature on its website that claimed that the US military has been employing the services of anthropologists in Afghanistan to improve its data-gathering techniques. In particular, during the past five years, it has apparently run so-called “human terrain analysis” programmes, to make its Afghan operations more culturally sensitive....But what has made this latest revelation so controversial is that Julia Bowers, the anthropologist named by Nature, was not just writing tomes about Afghan marriage rituals, she was aiding interrogations too. Or as Nature reported her telling a conference: “Typically human-terrain analysis is more of a human data-gathering and mapping approach…” but cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”. While, crucially, it is unclear how widespread this practice might be, the revelation has reawakened the debate about just how far social scientists should allow themselves to aid the elite....“Advising people on how to extract information from people who don’t want information extracted, that is the antithesis of what the anthropological encounter is supposed to look like,” Hugh Gusterson, a network leader, has observed. But the pressures will not die away soon; not when budgets are being cut, jobs are scarce and governments (and corporations) are desperate to get better information about culture. To put it another way, precisely because anthropologists are good at analysing cultures and power structures, their research is of interest to people in… er… power. It is a bitter irony; even – or especially – in Afghanistan.

Neah Appoints Colonel Lamont Woody as Defense Advisor to the Board of Directors
Market Watch, October 26, 2011

NEAH Power Systems, Inc. announced today it has appointed Col. Lamont Woody, US Army (Retired), most recently a principal of the Laconia Group, as its defense advisor to its Board of Directors. In this role, Col. Woody will advise the company in international defense and government relations and various potential collaboration, partnership and business development opportunities....Col. Woody [in his military career] also implemented human terrain, social networking systems, and law enforcement systems and programs.

Strategic Paradigms » Blog Archive Perspectives on the C4ISR Conference – October 2011
October 28, 2011
By Ehsan Arari

Even the panel on the Human Terrain System (HTS) – a topic of great interest and personal involvement for me – was too tactical in its focus....My own take as an outsider (i.e., a person who does not tow any party line) is that our Achilles heel related to intelligence is the ever-growing complexity of our Intel bureaucracy and the mountainous nature of Intel data. We collect a lot, but have no clue as to what to do with it. I heard the evidence of that during the panel on HTS.

GEOINT 2011 summary | Open Geography
October 24, 2011

The panel (video link) speculated on socio-cultural intelligence as a new facet of intelligence, ie SOCINT. Sharon Hamilton provided a lot of information about the HTS (now over 40 in total, with 31 teams in Afghanistan). It has now been given permanent funding (rather than through Supplementals). She said they use the NGA 12 human geography standards of data to make a baseline dataset (video 1:49’50″), and that 55% of their products are unclassified at the moment. Hamilton claimed that HTS does not have to “convince” the social science community (of the value of HTS) because they (the Army) fill their HTS classes (video at 1:34’00″). You can take that statement with a pinch of salt, no doubt.

New Mission for Military’s ‘Human Terrain’ Experts: Interrogation
Wired, October 19, 2011
By Sharon Weinberger

Cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”, said Julia Bowers, principal senior analyst for human terrain at SCIA, a company based in Tampa, Florida, that provides socio-cultural services for the military and intelligence community....Bowers worked with the U.S. Central Command’s human terrain analysis branch, which is separate from the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), a better known program that embeds social scientists in combat units. Both, however, are designed to provide the military with better cultural understanding and expertise....The interesting question is whether anyone associated with the HTS, which has been dogged with controversy over its five year existence, has been involved with interrogations. An internal memo — dated March 16, 2009 and signed by then-HTS program manager retired Col. Steve Fondacaro — notes that “HTS does not have DoD [Department of Defense] approval to conduct interrogation operations.” “HTS personnel are not trained and certified in interrogation methodology and as a result will not conduct interrogations,” the memo continues. Nevertheless, one former employee me that this is precisely what appears to have happened in 2009; but when the employee complained to the program’s senior leadership, they did nothing. When asked about this, Fondacaro replied in an email that “all the units we supported ran interrogations, just like they ran mess halls, vehicle maintenance, medical support ops, civil affairs etc. and HTS supported the unit.”....“Our team members may have been asked to help or advise in any or all of these areas where it related to greater insight and understanding of the population,” he told Nature. “But it did not result in any of these operation becoming core mission capabilities HTS focused upon.”

Pentagon Cultural Analyst Helped Interrogate Detainees in Afghanistan: 'Experiment' raises alarm among social scientists.
Scientific American, October 18, 2011
By Sharon Weinberger of Nature magazine

So far, the HTS has been involved in interrogations in just one experiment. A former employee of the HTS, who asked not to be identified, says that they learned in 2009 that HTS personnel were involved at one point in interrogations in Afghanistan. "I sent it up the chain at Fort Leavenworth; they knew about it," the employee says. "It struck me as blatantly unethical. I didn't want anything to with it." The employee, who describes the work as "the exact opposite of what the program says it is", left the HTS shortly after voicing their concerns. Retired Army Col. Steve Fondacaro, who headed HTS until he was ousted in a management shakeup last year notes that all the units that HTS teams support are involved in interrogations.

First They Came for the Anthropologists
The Atlantic, October 12, 2011
By Edward Tenner

The real irony of Governor Scott's remarks [about anthropology being an impractical degree area that is not useful for finding employment] is that anthropology can be so practical that it even makes many anthropologists uneasy, as in the Defense Department's Human Terrain Program, condemned as unethical by a commission of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2009.

ISEBOX Fuses Geospatial Data: New Methods of Human Terrain Analysis
Imaging Notes Magazine, Fall 2011, Volume 26 Number 4
By By Abe Usher, CTO and Altaf Bahora, Vice President The HumanGeo Group

To enable the military to fuse together the data at its disposal and make better decisions, faster, the HumanGeo Group developed ISEBOX (Integrated Socio-Cultural Environment for Behavior Observation Exploitation), a geospatial threat-forecasting application that allows data with different spatial resolutions to be intermixed while preserving the original data. ISEBOX identifies friendly forces, trends, geo-political activity, and threat indicators to provide operations planners with critical access to data required to perform Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB). ISEBOX uses variable precision data encodings of location to facilitate non-obvious pattern detection and predictive analysis in the geospatial domain....ISEBOX ingests the widest range of open sources of geospatial data (such as social media, civilian government sources, NGO data, and community-driven data collections) and provides a means of combining the sources to enable analysts to detect non-obvious patterns in the data in order to “tip and cue” planners, collectors, and analysts to points on the ground defined by geography, time, function, and analytic discipline.

Knowing the enemy, one avatar at a time: As military crafts virtual Afghan villages, some scientists raise ethical concerns
The Boston Globe, May 30, 2010
By Farah Stockman

The villagers are bits of software code, and the Americans who “visit’’ are players in a videogame-like program designed not only for training purposes but for intelligence analysis. The program, which loosely resembles the game SimCity, is part of a US government effort to develop sophisticated computer models of real Afghan villages — complete with virtual people based on actual inhabitants — in an attempt to predict their reaction to US raids and humanitarian aid. The project, spearheaded by a University of Pennsylvania engineer at the behest of an undisclosed US government agency, straddles the line between research and intelligence as part of a wider US effort to design software capable of forecasting human behavior in war zones. This type of research, often referred to as “human terrain mapping,’’ has attracted increased funding in recent years from US military planners who believe it will become a crucial tool for combating terrorism and insurgencies....“Are we going to detain someone if a computer predicts that he will become an insurgent?’’ asked Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist at George Mason University. “The real danger of models is their seductiveness. They can be so realistic and powerful that it is easy to forget they are just a model, and they start to rely on them more and more.’’ The concerns were so great that the US Department of Energy, which controls the national laboratories that own some of the most sophisticated computers in the country, has pushed back against recent efforts to enlist its scientists in the work. Citing uncertainty about how the military will use this research, Energy Secretary Steven Chu issued a memo late last year barring employees from working with data about individuals, citing fears that it could violate a federal law mandating that human research subjects never be harmed. “The lack of full disclosure of the purpose and the potential repercussions to subjects recruited for participation . . . undermines any . . . ability to review such work against federal requirements for the protection of human research volunteers,’’ Chu wrote in December. The project also adds fuel to an ongoing debate over whether social scientists should ply their trade for the military, since some virtual villages are created using surveys taken by embedded social scientists known as human terrain teams....Silverman believes that one day, the whole of southern Afghanistan will be recreated in a vast computer model....Shortly after the human terrain teams were launched in 2005, the Marines paid Silverman to study what could be done with data they had collected. He published a paper arguing that it should be fed into simulators to help forecast events. Since then, the human terrain teams have shifted their data collection methods from open-ended reports toward more rigid questionnaires that can easily be uploaded into a database, according to former terrain team members. John Allison, an anthropologist who began training as a team member last November but has since resigned, said the teams were taught to upload the data into a classified Pentagon database known as SIPRNet, where is it distributed to a host of US agencies, some of whom pass it on to analysts like Silverman. Steve Fondacaro, the project manager for the Army’s human terrain system that oversees the data-collection teams, said the information is primarily used by commanders on the ground to design effective development projects. He said the data are not used to harm anyone. But he also acknowledged that he does not know what other agencies do with the information. “I don’t spend a lot of time tracking down what the government people are doing with the data that we access on the ground,’’ he said, adding that he did not know about Silverman’s project.

VIDEOS

The University of Hawaii at Manoa and its Department of Anthropology plays host to the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, and in particlar its own graduate, Dr. Christopher A. King, social science director for HTS (as King's presentation slides show [see slide 6], that Department produced five of HTS' anthropologists). Apparently, Dr. King is happier with this version of his presentation, as it has not been censored or deleted, as happened recently. Dr. King makes less than credible assertions in taking questions from the audience, toward the end, that HTS staff have total control over their information--please review the article extracts above for contrary evidence. He has also fails to address how a current HTS trainer, former intelligence analyst and former team member in Afghanistan, pilfered confidential fieldnotes and passed them on to military intelligence, as evidenced in the WikiLeaks releases.

And finally, on an utterly bizarre note, what appears to be an insider's video of a HTS graduation ceremony:

Decolonizing the Occupations

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:04:00 +0000

In line with our previous report on "Decolonize Wall Street," from an American Indian perspective, we present the following commentary, from an African-American perspective:

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by editor and columnist Jared Ball

White privilege, the legacy of 500 years of European military and economic suppression of the rest of the planet, is manifest even in movements that purport to be transformational, like Occupy Wall Street. Beneath the politics of economic reordering lie notions that the “new” and overwhelmingly white movement somehow supersedes the centuries-old aspirations of Europe’s primary victims.

Decolonizing Our Occupations A Black Agenda Radio commentary by editor and columnist Jared Ball

“Radical voices from the world’s majority are simply not welcomed even in spaces that each previously occupied.”

In two different settings and for two different reasons both the All Peoples Revolutionary Front and The Cornel West Theory made similar statements in response to this international moment of occupations. The APRF, from their perspective in San Diego and CWT from theirs, this week in Amsterdam, both spoke to still powerful blind spots which often prevent real coalition building. In each instance Black and Brown voices pierced a few White bubbles to at least momentarily address an important reality – the experiences and history of the world’s majority is often suppressed beneath the organized whims of a much smaller and Whiter minority.

As their show this week in Amsterdam was wrapping up Cornel West Theory front man Tim Hicks took a minute to vibe directly with the crowd. He wanted an audience new to his band’s music to know just how hard it is for such an unorthodox hip-hop group to be heard. Their beats are dope concoctions of traditional Black-laced samples and bass lines with White drumming and guitar riffs. Their fiercesome foursome of Black female and male lead vocalists deliver powerfully out-of-the-ordinary political lyrics whose content speaks as often and more easily to Frantz Fanon or Assata Shakur than the band’s actual namesake. And all of this creates a delightfully complicated problem for genre-based thinkers and corporate playlist arrangers. So Hicks took to the mic and thanked the crowd at the Live On The Low weekly hip-hop spotlight at the Winston Hotel and then let them know that despite endorsements from leading intellectuals like Cornel West, rap legends like Chuck D, and world renown soul sisters like Erykah Badu, groups like his still have to struggle to reach an audience.

“They speak to longer struggles still incomplete that cannot be forgotten or marginalized by these more recent and mostly White uprisings.”

And from San Diego All Peoples Revolutionary Front representatives had taken to the mic more than a week ago to remind the current and mostly White occupiers that theirs is late and not necessarily conscious of its own complicity in the previous occupation of the world’s majority. "Our minds have been occupied by colonialism," said one speaker. And the group’s previously published open letter to the occupation calls attention to the very “colonizing language” of these occupations, with calls like “taking back our country,” with which many First Nations people simply cannot unify. Other speakers reminded of the imperial process that decimated existing communities, nations, identities and created new ones in permanent and hostile distinction from the West, from the White. Their calls for self-determination and an appropriate concept of "occupation" differ importantly from but remain in basic solidarity with those of the mainstream occupations. But they speak to longer struggles still incomplete that cannot be forgotten or marginalized by these more recent and mostly White uprisings. The differences are important and, as Greg Tate wrote recently, speak to the fact that this country remains more segregated by race than class.

And what each speak to in their own space and way is that radical voices from the world’s majority are simply not welcomed even in spaces that each previously occupied. White corporate dominance over hip-hop has largely wiped out space for group’s like the Cornel West Theory, just as now White liberal dominance over social unrest continues to limit space for other world majority radical voices from being heard. And if you continue to doubt that this latter point is an issue, just look at last week’s aired panel from The Nation magazine in all its Whiteness and ask if those in the occupy movement who are worried about corporate co-optation need to look more carefully at the liberal takeover currently being carried out.

We all have indeed been occupied by colonialism and hip-hop and the occupation movement are no different. I am glad though that in their own ways each occupation suffered these small interventions. May many more soon come.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Jared Ball.

On the web visit us at BlackAgendaReport.com.

Dr. Jared A. Ball is an associate professor of communication studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. He is also the author of I Mix What I Like! A Mixtape Manifesto (AK Press, 2011)

AAA 2011: A Review of Some Presentations on Military, Security, and Intelligence Topics

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:21:00 +0000

Report and commentary by AJP member Maximilian C. Forte:

For those who could not make it to the recently concluded conference of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal, or who were there but found themselves compelled to attend/participate in any of a number of other important sessions, here is a summary and review of some of the highlights of presentations made around topics dealing with the military, national security, and intelligence. Originally, I was invited by five different session organizers to present papers on their panels, and after some vacillation, I agreed to present on two, dealing with WikiLeaks and secrecy, and the other dealing with research about the covert and military operations. I attended a few other sessions that had similar themes, and this is the substance of this report. Hopefully, and in the spirit of "accessibility," more people in the future will produce blog reports of the contents of sessions for those who might otherwise miss out completely.

Sharing some of the ideas, details, and interactions that came out of the recently concluded conference meets with a couple of limitations: a) I cannot reproduce entire papers received, because in most cases these are intended for publication; b) in other cases I did not take detailed notes, and so some presentations are not even mentioned here; and, c) there is always the risk that I may not be accurately representing what was said, especially in those instances where I am relying on memory (I have tried to minimize those).

Deployment Stressed

The first session I attended at the AAA conference was "Deployment Stressed: Legacies of the War on Terror in Home Front Communities," organized by Jean N. Scandlyn of the University of Colorado at Denver. (Here I should point out that the University of Colorado had a prominent presence in this conference in particular where military and intelligence topics were the focus.) Recently I came across "Deployment Stressed" which is also the title of this related project blog at the University of Colorado. Christopher King, anthropologist and social science director of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System also attended this event as a member of the audience, as well as the other events discussed below.

Andrew Bickford (George Mason University) presented an extremely insightful and incisive paper titled "Super Soldiers and Super Citizens: Armored Life in the United States." Bickford described how in the U.S. (and this could be applied to Canada, and elsewhere), soldiers have been constructed by the state as almost mythical creatures, with the role of myth helping to render soldiers unquestionable. These are the agents of violence, where violence created and sustains the state, which is always prepared to use violence--in that order, the soldier is cast as "the best possible citizen" that the state can produce. Again, it is worth noting how in Canada we also hear government ministers declaring soldiers to be our most special citizens, our most valued citizens, as if their work was the most productive and useful, and as if their "sacrifices" (they volunteer, and get paid) were more important than the sacrifices of others made on a daily basis in the non-violent sectors of society. From there, Bickford began to focus a great deal on medicine and health technology, as a means he argued of mitigating the effects of war, not to end war, which of course would be the clearest solution to preventing the harmful effects of war. The role of advanced medicine, applied to soldiers' bodies, is to create an illusion that they are "superhuman" and thus eminently deployable. Medicine makes war palatable, and makes war seem clean. An array of drugs and psychotherapies are administered in order to shield, enhance, and prolong the life of the soldier, and to demonstrate the inherent superiority of the American soldier. Bickford reconnects these medical procedures and rationales to what he calls "the military imaginary"--which involves the processes and tropes by which states make soldiers. The internal regulation of the soldier becomes the external regulation of the state--the soldier is the state in action. Militarized medicine becomes part of the production of an "armored life" (we can see the influences of both Hegel and Agamben in Bickford's theorizing). The internal armouring of the body of the soldier is the armouring of the state. Bickford ended with some much needed, provocative questions: if the specialists and authorities can banish the fear of warfare, what else can they banish? He asks how the impact of killing, who matters most, why some are killed, etc., are the kinds of questions that are held away by the processes of making medically enhanced super soldiers.

David Bayendor (University of Colorado Denver) presented his work under the title of "Human Terrain Redux--A 'Halfie' Talks Anthropology and the Army," which was also quite unusual for being a presentation by someone both in the military, and anthropology, who is critical of militarist ideology but not without some reservations. While acknowledging the fetishizing of warfare, and the heroizing of the masculinity, "courage" and "sacrifice" of soldiers that forms part of "the military normal" (an idea he credited to Catherine Lutz, involving the militarization of social institutions, values, etc., shaped by and prepared for war), he added that he did not view the military as a total institution. He thus devoted some time to describing the military as an intermediate institution, between the military and the civilian, yet still forming a world that is largely off limits to civilians. As Bayendor noted, quoting from Laura Nader, powerful groups are notorious for resisting being studied. (Throughout the presentation, Bayendor quoted repeatedly from the works of anthropologists critical of militarism/militarization, adding his own perspectives as someone who is also part of the military.) Speaking of powerful institutions, Bayendor who is apparently no fan of HTS, noted how HTS members appear to be very excited about being in a powerful institution, suggesting that whatever their original intent for joining HTS, their perspectives became altered by being in close proximity to high-ranking officers, on bases, and so forth. Speaking of ethnic and generally marginalized minorities who make up a large part of the U.S. fighting force, including foreign citizens from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, Bayendor made the point that often it is the victims of the power system that are drawn into service to support the system, participating in their own oppression in effect. Bayendor also commented on how "support our troops", "thank you for our service" and what I would call the yellow ribbon industry, work to keep critical questions at bay. He ended his presentation in speaking of the military's appropriation of anthropological knowledge by means other than HTS, and showed a slide featuring a list of key texts in anthropology from the U.S. Army's own online database--a list he had accessed as late as three days prior to the conference and which featured a number of prominent titles, including Malinowski's Practical Anthropology and Gluckman's Rituals of Rebellion.

Sarah J. Hautzinger (Colorado College) further explored some of the themes raised above, in her presentation titled "Battle-Speak on a Domestic Homefront." (I noted how choosing to term the local and the domestic as the "home front" is itself an example of "battle-speak," which the title of the session seemed to reinforce, though the irony may have been intentional.) Hautzinger discussed the domestication of war metaphors in the U.S., with the adoption of terms such as "battle buddies" and "deployment" among those not militarily deployed abroad, or in any actual armed conflict. Among the facets she raised were "battle" as metaphor, as metonymy, and as synecdoche. The effect is to reinforce war as a paradigm for symbolically ordering understandings of the world, even as those adhering to this paradigm are involved in trying to aid those suffering from war. Hautzinger also raised the point that in talking about the losses suffered from war, the focus is almost always on U.S. losses alone. This was an interesting paper for addressing issues of cultural militarization and hegemonization (her word), in how individuals can become complicit in their own subordination, as they buy into paradigms that sanitize and euphemize war, even when they directly face its bloody consequences. Her work, as I suggested, took some of the panel's themes on language a bit further, speaking in terms of civilian-military code-switching and the use of insider argot to build solidarity across civilian-military lines.

Jean N. Scandlyn (University of Colorado Denver) in her presentation, "Promises, Promises: The Military and Opportunity Structures for American Youth," was clearly pressed for time--and in a long session, my own attention began to wane. As a result, I came away with just three particularly interesting arguments made in this presentation, but which I present in a disjointed fashion given the state of my notes: 1) that those motivated to join the military in pursuit of economic and/or educational benefits (these are often the same), are also those suffering from higher rates of PTSD; 2) most recruits come from southern states--the south-east and south-west--from economically disenfranchised conditions, where there is also a long tradition of military service...and she suggested that the relationship between the two is not merely incidental; and, 3) practices that depersonalize "the enemy," beginning with the use of silhouette targets used in weapons training.

Christopher King, Human Terrain System:

Originally, seven papers were scheduled for this session, with no time at all for discussion--as was strangely common at this AAA conference, remarkably not what one would expect in a conference if there is no room for actually conferring. With one cancellation, we had about 10 minutes of discussion that was dominated largely by a very talkative Christopher King from HTS. He was not presenting any papers at the conference, but was present at almost all of the events of direct relevance to military, security, and intelligence themes, and I had the chance to converse with him on several occasions, especially as we tended to sit together or very close. I am not sure if King was aware that he raised some eyebrows when--speaking as someone representing a program that for a long time stressed that it was not about "gathering intelligence"--said that he could put a number of the panellists in touch with people he knows in the "Department of Intelligence". He seemed to be eager to get the panellists to communicate with the military, which of course they already were since their research was grounded in that communication. When he began to say that one of the "nice things" about the military is that it can "really be self-reflective"--thereby missing the point of evidence to the contrary--he seemed to wear some patience thin and the moderator interjected to move on to someone else. On the other hand, King is neither an abrasive nor aggressive person, so the panel could have suffered much worse.

It was at this event that I overheard one young woman approach King, who stood in front of me, to ask him about working for the military--and he gave her his card. Interesting move, that of choosing a session critical of militarization in the hope of finding someone from the military in the audience so as to market oneself. One of the panel participants later asked me what King was doing at the conference, and if the AAA had not censured HTS.

Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic

I had the great pleasure of finally seeing James Der Derian's now well-circulated film, Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic. And who better to sit next to for the whole film and discussion, if not HTS' Christopher King? At this event, King did not take part in the discussion--it would not have been a welcoming crowd. I stayed silent, as it was important for me to observe American anthropologists, whom I have never heard from before, weigh in on these topics, only to discover that if they were in any way a representative sample then HTS meets with fairly wide condemnation among AAA members.

The room was packed with people, many standing, and the discussion afterwards was quite animated, in-depth, and intelligent. During the film, members of the audience got quite loud on occasion, either laughing at some of the speakers (the Marine officer who proudly boasts, "we are not killers...we are professional killers," or the suggestion that Arabs, because of their inherent cultural difference, yes, really would fear being stripped naked, jeered at by women, and having angry dogs barking at their crotches--"unlike American men," as one audience member joked), or even hissing at Montgomery McFate, quite sinister and dark by way of contrast to the man sitting next to me. Overall, King, who said that he too had never seen the film before, seemed to think it was fair and liked it. I also thought it was a remarkable film from which I even learned a few "new" details (that is, new to me).

Der Derian definitely deserves all of the praise he has received for this film, for the complex questioning, editing, and narrative structure. There was some debate about "balance" in the film--yes, we hear from almost all sides (the Afghan side is, of course, once again mute...a little more than a small omission from almost all debates about anthropologists joining the military, or even in debates about the occupation of Afghanistan). Some felt that, nonetheless, the film clearly, and on balance, swings the argument against HTS. Even those closest to one of the featured protagonists, the late Michael Bhatia (HTS' first fatality), are clear in saying they argued against his joining HTS in the first place. Others instead feel that the film kicks a bit of sand in the eyes, dulling anti-militarist perspectives by encouraging identification with, and sympathy for Bhatia, while raising "good intentions" of "helping to improve" (improve what? war? conflict?) by aiding the military in becoming more "culturally aware"--not that HTS serves to offer classes in hand signals, or the etiquette of drinking tea, which by now surely have been abundantly learned anyway.

Perhaps the sharpest and most memorable part in the whole film for me came from Hugh Gusterson when he explained that the U.S. military, and politicians, make the fundamental mistake of thinking that the continuing conflict facing occupation forces is simply the result of "cultural miscommunication," rather than resistance against foreign domination and social engineering at the point of a gun. The assumption, he noted, is that if U.S. troops could better understand local cultures, then there would be less conflict, which ignores the totally separate motivations for resistance. Invasions and occupations are not the result of some sort of "cultural" mishap, so that the turn to culture--and particularly static and outmoded, functionalist conceptions of culture at that--can only deceive U.S. military practitioners that programs like HTS are a solution, a way of winning the war. As Gusterson said, when you ask the wrong questions, you can only come up with the wrong answers.

As for Bhatia, there was some discussion about how he could delude himself into thinking that by going from being a researcher to a practitioner, he could change the world, and yet remain unchanged himself.

Anthropologies of the Covert

Organized by Carole McGranahan (University of Colorado Boulder), "Anthropologies of the Covert: From Spying and Being Spied Upon to Secret Military Ops and the CIA," was a very long session lasting four hours, on which I served as a discussant.

HTS' Christopher King attended this event also, that is until Roberto González finished his presentation.

David H. Price (St. Martin's University), led the session with his historically dense investigative research into CIA ties in funding the AAA via a front organization called the Asia Foundation. His paper, "The CIA, the Asia Foundation, and the AAA: How the AAA Linked Asian Anthropologists to a CIA Funding Front," is part of a larger work in progress. Price demonstrated the significant extent to which anthropologists, like other social scientists, were linked to military and intelligence agencies throughout the Cold War period, even if unknowingly. As he indicated, if we exclude foundations such as the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations, the CIA was involved in nearly half of the research grants offered in the 1960s. Not seeing the case of the Asia Foundation in isolation, Price reminded us that, "the CIA approached the AAA in 1951 and established a covert relationship with the Executive Board through which the AAA secretly gave the CIA the raw information it collected for its detailed roster with the understanding that the CIA would keep information from this roster for its own uses."

Carole McGranahan followed with "Sympathy for the Devil: The CIA, Tibet, and the Humanity of Empire," in which her stated intention was to "humanize" the CIA by two routes, one being by highlighting their affective ties to Tibetan resistance fighters, symbolized by tearful embraces, and two, by arguing that the CIA engaged in covert humanitarianism. Another stated goal was to challenge what in her spoken version she called the "knee jerk reactions" of critics of the CIA, and what in her written version she referred to as "leftist critiques." It was a fairly interesting and controversial paper that seemed to provoke mixed reactions, especially when viewed in contrast with some of the presentations that followed, like the next one.

Anna Roosevelt (University of Illinois Chicago), in "THE HEART OF DARKNESS IS WHITE: The role of the NATO countries in the chaos and killings in Central Africa," presented a shocking litany of a very long history of intense, and often grotesque, Western interventions in the Congo and Rwanda, while also featuring some of her own investigative documentary research that uncovers and exposes the identity of a leading military intelligence agent behind numerous local plots. As I said in my discussion after these three papers, Anna Roosevelt does not write like any Roosevelt I know--and yes, she is related to all of the prominent Roosevelts that readers will know.

Briefly, in my discussant's remarks I said: 1) that I would like to see David Price theorize his work more, and that the case he features seems to contain a lot of ambiguities; 2) that Carole McGranahan ought to explain how an affective approach to some CIA agents can in any way become an anthropological theory of empire, and why in opposing herself to unnamed leftists, she creates the kind of binary that she disdains; and, 3) that Anna Roosevelt's work might be useful as part of a critical dialogue with "responsibility to protect" and other forms of "humanitarian interventionism" that call for foreign military intervention in the Congo--as if more such intervention will fix the problems caused by foreign military intervention in the first place.

One productive coincidence came when both Roberto González and I discussed various research methods for gaining information about military and intelligence agencies. I listed documentary research (such as Price using Freedom of Information Access); interviews and participation in public events; the role of deception as in covert ethnographic research to penetrate state agencies; the use of leaks; and, antagonism. In his excellent presentation, "Methodological Notes on Researching Military and Intelligence Programs," Roberto J. González (San Jose State University), spoke of documents, followed by interviews (with public writing about the contents of documents prompting some from the military and intelligence communities to come forward), and self-analysis (which, in part, involves reflecting on reactions to one's research). Interestingly, a former geospatial intelligence agent on the panel, Nate Keuter, said that he saw the work being done by González as similar to that of an intelligence analyst--and this tied in with his own presentation that argued we could look at the CIA as a research organization (except it's one that kills).

An exceptional paper, with a long-term view of anthropological research of secrets going back to James Mooney and Franz Boas, my favourite passage in González's paper came toward the end when he explained, ever so politely, that, "...this kind of anthropology often requires the use of theoretical concepts or hypotheses to make sense of certain phenomena. An example of this might be the use of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which can help explain how terms like human terrain lead to the treatment of humans as dirt (or at best, as territory to be conquered) by those who have uncritically adopted the phrase." I believe that it was on this note that HTS' Christopher King, whose presence was indirectly noted by González in his talk, left the room.

Students Take Anthropology Back Into the Streets: A Report on Off-AAA

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:23:00 +0000

Report and commentary by AJP member Maximilian Forte:

From Questions, to Critique, to Protest

Students took Anthropology into the streets on Saturday, 19 November, 2011, in an action that was (in part) designed to protest the exclusive nature of the recent American Anthropological Association conference held inside the Palais des Congrès, with exorbitant registration fees that barred the attendance of most Montreal students. Students occupied the park outside the Palais and took the initiative to mobilize against what some of them called "bourgeois 'science'," and the commodification of knowledge that turned anthropology into an elitist fetish. As natives and residents of this city, they emphasized that this is their space, and the time is one of global ferment against capitalism, inequality, and elitism. Hence, the Occupy Montreal camp sent its banner in solidarity to be put on display at this event, dubbed Off-AAA. As the students questioned in announcing their initiative and inviting participation by faculty, "shouldn't we be generating critical thinking on our own institutional dynamics? Is research only an interest or a tool for social change?"

At the event, while some of the students suggested that they wished they had organized it better, the fact is that the numbers in attendance (on a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon as the semester nears its hectic finale) ranged between 30 and 50, and several faculty made presentations at the event and engaged in debate, including myself, David H. Price (St. Martin's University), Rob Hancock (University of Victoria), and Terence Turner, and others. The students organized in advance using Facebook and Indymedia Quebec, among other sites. They brought coffee for all, chairs, mats, a table, a megaphone, and later even a microphone that seemed to serve no function other than to be passed around to mark the next speaker. There were at least two persons recording the event with video cameras on tripods--but I don't know if their videos will be made available. The students were animated, speaking mostly in French (with simultaneous translation), with a passion for ideas for an alternative anthropology. At different points, some passers-by stopped to hear what was going on--behind us instead, within the multi-coloured glass walls of the Palais, I was stopped on two occasions and asked for my conference badge...the excuse being that the attendants were trying to block access to homeless persons (I was in a suit and tie on one of those occasions).

This was anthropology in public, but with frequent calls by the students for more public anthropology, for more activism, for more research that is undertaken for more than just communicating it to colleagues in closed sessions hidden behind pay walls. Far from the hackneyed, right wing stereotype of students "brainwashed" by their allegedly "radical" professors, here were the students radicalising faculty and drawing the latter out from the enclosure of pay-per-view anthropology, conducted safely and quietly, away from the public's ear.

The Geopolitics of Anthropology: As Seen from the Canadian Periphery

Indeed, we should question the logic behind the AAA locating its event here, as if Canada had no Anthropology association of its own. After some quiet protest by the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), the local association was given the grand gift of a booth at the AAA event, and allowed to organize a reception. While this assertion of U.S. hegemony is troubling--and one of the main reasons for why I have not travelled to the U.S. to take part in AAA conferences--we have to admit that "Canadian" anthropologists (many of whom are actually American, and many of whom obtained their PhDs in the U.S.*) are part of the problem. Some of these nominally Canadian anthropologists tell their graduate students that if they wish to obtain academic employment in Canada, they should earn their doctorates in the U.S. (thereby invalidating their own positions, and the responsibility to train the next generations of Canadian academics). It seems that our job is to locally produce the part-time sessional instructors, and to import the full-time tenure-track faculty. Many others enforce a dependency on U.S. texts and other assigned reading materials written by their U.S. colleagues. Some departments are even structured on the U.S. "four-field" model, thereby establishing themselves as beachheads of American academic exceptionalism in Canada. Each year, entire departments are vacated in November as faculty make their annual pilgrimage to the AAA, travelling to the U.S. conference venues of their intellectual masters, massaging the ego of the monster as they pay tribute to the U.S. dominance that they reinforce.

This year the CASCA conference in Fredericton, at which AJP launched a symposium and gained new members, was thinly attended by less than a third of CASCA's regular members, most of whom were holding out for the AAA conference in Montreal. The AAA did not cause that, but it did enable it, and the result was a huge plunge in revenues for CASCA. Virtually none of the representatives of Canada's largest Anthropology departments, organized according to the U.S. four-field model, were in attendance in Fredericton. The event became an unintended celebration of our peripheral status, within the Canadian periphery that are the Maritime provinces. So if the AAA event was exclusive and occupied our attention, it is also our fault. We had Montreal anthropology faculty on the AAA's Executive Program Committee--and none of us thought that, as a basic courtesy, the invading association should at least offer free access to students bearing local ID cards--and a public explanation for why the AAA thinks that Quebec comes under its umbrella as a U.S. body.

It is interesting to observe such a phenomenon displaying itself at the same time as some tout the value of "world anthropologies" (as published in dominant U.S. journals). Perhaps the potential for irony is limited by the fact that much of what constitutes itself currently as "world anthropologies" is fashioned by anthropologists based in, trained in, or oriented toward the dominant American centre and its UK counterpart.

[* In a recent survey published by CASCA--Demographics and Opinions of Canadian Anthropologists--it was found that out of 306 respondents with a PhD, 168 (55%) have Canadian PhDs, 77 (25%) have U.S. PhDs, and the remaining 61 (20%) have degrees from other parts of the world--I am included in the latter category, though I did not know of the survey when it was being undertaken and thus did not respond. Narrative responses to the survey tellingly included calls for developing more "Boasian" graduates, and for getting our journal into Anthrosource, which is the AAA's publications database.]

The Speakers: From Corporatization to Militarization to Free Knowledge

I asked David Price to accompany me to the event, since it followed a AAA session in which we both participated, and since my comments would dovetail into subject matter of which he is a leading expert, yet expertise that might not have been familiar to the assembled students. So we performed what I called a duet.

"I am here under an alternate identity," I said, "in there [where the AAA was meeting] I am an associate professor in anthropology at Concordia University...but out here I speak in my capacity as a member of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace." I began by speaking about the increased pace by which private business interests were appropriating the university as a common, public good--in some cases, very directly, with the university hiring individuals from the private sector (in crisis) who had as little as a BA and four years of working experience, and getting paid more than a full professor, for performing obscure and minimally useful administrative tasks. Indeed, the inflation of administration, and the bloating of its operating costs at the expense of the core missions of the university, represents a hidden bailout package for the private sector by essentially handing them lucrative university positions and contracts. Regardless of the current track record of massive corporate failures, the university has adopted corporate management models, led by CEOs of private corporations who sit on our Board of Governors. From there I took the students into research done by a student in my New Imperialism seminar, Laura Beach (see this and this), who shows that several of the members of the Board of Governors of Concordia University are also defence contractors. In addition, it was one of them who pushed through Project Hero, with little in the way of discussion or advance notice. Having established a corporate presence with militarist leanings, I spoke of how the university--while not yet interfering in dictating what we should research, and thus directly curbing our academic freedom--has nonetheless gradually altered the university's reward structure to publicly favour and promote only specific kinds of projects--those funded by the Department of National Defence's Security Defence Forum, for example, to engineering projects dedicated to developing UAVs, better known as drones. (There is no "Canada Research Chair in Studies of Imperialism" nor any Anti-War or Peace Research Institute in Montreal.) Those students who had been to Concordia had not seen any of the drone prototypes suspended from the ceilings in public areas. I also spoke of how the university markets certain "signature areas," one of which is the interventionist, private- and military-funded "Will to Intervene" project (students recoiled at the very name). I noted how the university administration had, seemingly overnight, rewritten its mission statement, from one that emphasized the role of the university as social critic, engaged in public debate, and valuing academic freedom--to one that made no mention at all of any of these, instead emphasizing "harmony" and "strengthening society." From there I proceeded to remark to students that in being faced with limited job prospects, they would be tempted to apply their anthropological knowledge toward well-remunerated, imperialist ends, and I advised them to pay close attention to what David Price would tell them about the Human Terrain System (HTS). I mentioned how just a few blocks away from where we stood, a Montreal head-quartered company, CGI, was doing the recruiting for the U.S. Army's HTS. This is a reminder of how porous is the border between the U.S. and Canada, and how blurred are the lines between the two--making us as susceptible to U.S.-funded and U.S.-inspired militarist projects as we were to the AAA meeting in the edifice that formed my backdrop. Finally, I congratulated the students for their imagination and initiative, and reminded them that without their leadership, little would change, as even tenured faculty for the most part are trained into fearful silence and many are demoralized and thus unlikely to spearhead any movement for change. To date, this Off-AAA assembly is perhaps the most remarkable, encouraging and productive "conference" experience I have had.

David Price then stood up in the circle of assembled students, cold wind blowing, and remarked--using the metaphor of the drones hanging from our ceilings, which are there and which we do not see--about the insidious spread of war corporatism in the university. He spoke of his work in uncovering the CIA connections to anthropologists, and of the use of anthropologists in counterinsurgency, giving a brief history of HTS. It's not over, he noted, as we had just come from a panel where some of the papers were about creating sympathy for the CIA or its local agents, and casting the CIA as a "humanitarian" actor. David Price also remarked on the fact that just because the students are in Canada, not to think that they are immune from the current wave of university militarization, which has proceeded apace in the U.S. (and, in fact, he is right--not least because some of our military research in universities, such as in fuel air explosives at McGill, is directly funded by the Pentagon, with the university's code of "ethics" revised to suit). David added that many students like those assembled, faced limited academic employment prospects, especially with the tendency toward hiring only temporary and part-time faculty, and that many such individuals are motivated to join programs such as HTS for monetary reasons. When David mentioned how much HTS employees get paid when deployed, circa $225,000 U.S., there was a loud gasp of disbelief from the students, some laughing at how extraordinary the salary appears. An American student in Montreal (from Ohio, if I recall), asked to interject--and told David that in the town where he came from, the sole source of employment, a mine, had shut down, so that really the only available employment presenting itself is to join the military. David concurred, noting the same is true of the town he came from. In fact, a number of the Montreal students assembled are themselves from the U.S., and tend to be both highly critical of U.S. foreign policy and very much committed against militarism--so that David somehow managed to speak to what was partly a "home crowd" even in Montreal, and a home crowd as well for sharing his concerns about militarization. David was very well received, but unfortunately had to leave soon after his talk.

Rob Hancock then stood up and made the point of welcoming those assembled to traditional, unceded Mohawk territory. In this welcome, noting that we are on Aboriginal land, Rob made the point that this land has been "occupied" by settlers for too long, and he took some issue with the naming of the "Occupy" campaign currently spread across North America. This was not an incidental point, as Rob then proceeded to talk about how he and others worked to make accessible anthropological knowledge around Indigenous rights in Canada. In this vein Rob outlined an absolutely remarkable project in which he is engaged, known as the Free Knowledge Project (also see their Facebook page), with at times many dozens of members of the wider public taking their free classes offered at local cafes in Victoria, BC. This is the kind of public, and very open access anthropology (open in cyberspace, and open in physical space), which met with very obvious approval from the assembled students.

Unfortunately, in the cases of the remaining speakers, I have forgotten the name of one (from Vermont) who made some very profound comments about being a fully embodied anthropologist and activist, and Terence Turner who spoke at the very end, after I had already left.

Student speakers took turns to build ideas for a more public, activist anthropology. One of the event organizers, devoted particular attention to the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at Concordia--QPIRG-Concordia--and to its sponsorship of Community University Research Exchange (CURE), as concrete examples of already existing projects that students could support and carry forward. Indeed, in some respects QPIRG appears as the embryo of a new university, growing within the shell of the old university, one deemed "corrupt" by one of the speakers.

I left the event feeling both inspired and very proud of our students here in Montreal, and I am looking forward to more such events.

First Nations Under Surveillance in Canada

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:00:00 +0000

In our continuing coverage of reports of surveillance and domestic forms of counterinsurgency in Canada, we present this material, first aired on the CBC's radio program, The Current, from Thursday, 17 November, 2011. It demonstrates the state's continuing efforts to spy on the public sphere and to treat Aboriginals as if they were a potential insurgent threat, a domestic implementation of espionage techniques that tie in with the "return investment" on Canada's participation in foreign counterinsurgency wars, as first demonstrated by the inclusion of First Nations in the draft counterinsurgency manual of the Canadian Forces. For more background, see the prior reports we published on these topics:

Domestic Surveillance in Canada: Suspicious Incident Reporting -- 22 November 2011
Militarization, Decolonization, and Indigenous Sovereignty -- 19 October 2011
For the Sake of Mining Interests and "Security": Canadian and U.S. Surveillance and Suppression of Indigenous Communities in the Americas, as Revealed by Wikileaks -- 29 June 2011
Domestic Counterinsurgency in Canada -- 13 June 2011
First Nations Under Surveillance: Harper Government Prepares for First Nations “Unrest" -- 08 June 2011
Counterinsurgency: From Afghanistan to First Nations Resistance in Canada -- 03 July 2010

From the CBC:

Why is the govt spying on Cindy Blackstock? Cindy Blackstock is an advocate for First Nations children and youth. She has an email trail that shows bureaucrats from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs are tailing her, showing up at more than 70 speeches and appearances, taking notes, following her Facebook page and sharing what they find with their Dept and the Dept of Justice. She calls the surveillance, chilling and politically motivated.

Canada spends millions of dollars each year monitoring and tracking individuals and groups thought to threaten national security. Law abiding citizens aren't typically under the government's microscope. But when Cindy Blackstock applied for access to government documents, she received a fat folder that showed she was being watched. Cindy Blackstock runs The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society.

In 2007, her organization filed a human rights complaint against the federal government, alleging under-funding of child welfare services on reserves. Her Access to Information request revealed, the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development has amassed a large file on her activities, much of it based on first-hand accounts from government employees who tailed her at public appearances. Cindy Blackstock joined us from our studio in Ottawa.

Martin Papillon is a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa. Among other things, his research focusses on Aboriginal self-determination and he was in our Ottawa studio.

For his take on whether and when the federal government should monitor native groups and why it might be keeping tabs on Cindy Blackstock, we were joined by Tim Powers. He's the Vice President of Summa Communications and a Conservative Party strategist. He also worked in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the mid 1990s. Tim Powers was in Ottawa.

The Current asked to speak to someone from the Prime Minister's Office. We did not receive a reply. We asked to speak to Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan. Neither he nor anyone else from the department was available this morning, but Minister Duncan's spokesperson did provide us with this statement. It reads:

I can tell you that our government takes Canadians' privacy very seriously. The Minister has asked the Deputy Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to report to him on whether privacy rules were respected.

We also asked to speak to someone from the Department of National Defence. We received no response. The Government's Leader in the Senate, Conservative Senator Marjory LeBreton, was not available to speak to us this morning.

Libya: The Lies of "Humanitarian" War

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:07:00 +0000

From The Humanitarian War, a documentary by Julien Teil:

Overview written by the videographer:

This document makes it possible to understand how international law and justice works, but mostly how its basic principles can be bypassed. The resolutions passed against Libya are based on various allegations: notably on the statement claiming that Gaddafi had led jet attacks on his own people and engaged in violent repression against the uprising, killing more than 6,000 civilians. These allegations were spread before they could have been verified. Yet it was on the basis of this claim that the Libyan Jamahiriya government was suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council, before being referred to the United Nations Security Council. One of the main sources for the claim that Gaddafi was killing his own people is the Libyan League for Human Rights, an organisation linked to the International Federation of Human Rights (the FIDH). On the 21st of February 2011, the General-Secretary of the LLHR, Dr. Soliman Bouchuiguir, initiated a petition in collaboration with the organisation UN Watch and the National Endowment for Democracy. This petition was signed by more than 70 NGOs. Then a few days later, on the 25th of February, Dr. Soliman Bouchuiguir went to U.N. Human Rights Council in order to expose the allegations concerning the crimes of Gaddafi's government. In July 2011 we went to Geneva to interview Dr. Soliman Bouchuiguir. Soliman Bouchuguir is an unheard of figure for the most part....Soliman Bouchuiguir, former president of the Libyan League for Human Rights with symbiotic ties to the National Transitional Council, generated the pack of lies that justified NATO's war allegedly to protect the Libyan population. He is currently the new Libyan ambassador to Switzerland.

Comment:

It is important to understand that this video document provides proof about the fabrication of evidence of Gaddafi attacking protesters with planes, as alleged by the Libyan League for Human Rights, in order to get UN Security Council Resolution 1973 passed. In this video, those who voiced these allegations at the UN, confirm that they in fact had no evidence. Moreover, we discover that the membership of the Libyan League for Human Rights--which had unchallenged influence and prominence in the deliberations of the Security Council--is itself composed of many of the same people who make up the opposition National Transitional Council. The UN Security Council completely failed to question or verify the supposed "facts" being presented to it by those who had a vested interest in regime change. Humanitarianism was thus a false cover for military intervention to back the overthrow of the government of a UN member state, in direct violation of the UN Charter. This year saw the 10th anniversary of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine--at the young age of 10, R2P has apparently already entered a state of advanced senility.

Tax Dollars at War

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:54:00 +0000

The video above is a good companion to the useful resource developed by several anthropologists, titled Costs of War, and co-directed in particular by Catherine Lutz, a specialist in the anthropology of militarism and militarization, with certain caveats: (i) that the full damage of war, and the militarist ideology and processes of militarization that make imperial wars thinkable and available, can ever be assessed numerically; (ii) that interventionist wars are still immoral, inhumane, and usually legally, even if conducted at a low financial cost, and even if resulting in few civilian deaths; and, (iii) that war does considerable damage to the politics and culture of the imperial societies that launch it. Having said that, here is a compelling analytical summary from the Costs of War project:

While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.
At least 138,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.
The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 236,000.
Indirect deaths from the wars, including those related to malnutrition, damaged health infrastructure, and environmental degradation, may far outnumber deaths from combat. While these deaths are difficult to count due to factors such as lack of comparable baseline mortality figures, a 2008 survey by The Geneva Declaration Secretariat estimates that assuming a ratio of four indirect deaths to one direct death in contemporary conflicts would not be unreasonable.
Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The current number of war refugees and displaced persons -- 7,800,000 -- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.
The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.
The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed. For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.
As with former US wars, the costs of paying for veterans’ care into the future will be a sizeable portion of the full costs of the war.
The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been under-appreciated.
While it was promised that the US invasions would bring democracy to both countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, both continue to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and Iraqi communities more segregated today than before by gender and ethnicity as a result of the war.
Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the U.S.

Domestic Surveillance in Canada: Suspicious Incident Reporting

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:58:00 +0000

From AJP member Craig Proulx:

I am wondering if this tattletale site will be used against Aboriginal peoples in Canada. They are already under surveillance by the Canadian security state and have been labelled in the past as "terrorists" by the Canadian Military. The government gets reports on Aboriginal "hot spots" each week. I wonder if some of their information comes from (SIR)? Certainly a lot of these "critical infrastructure" companies must be terrified at the thought of blockades and protests interfering with their right to make cash for the settler elite. This sounds like just the tool to keep the market "free".

Privacy Impact Assessment - Suspicious Incident Reporting (SIR): Executive Summary
http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/pia-efvp/sir-ris-eng.htm

The RCMP works in partnership with domestic and foreign agencies to strengthen prevention measures against the threat of terrorism in North America and elsewhere. The RCMP has primary law enforcement responsibility under sec. 6(1), *Security Offences Act* for investigating threats to the security of Canada, as defined in sec. 2, *Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act.*

Within this mandate, the RCMP is a national partner in protecting Canada’s critical infrastructure (CI). The Emergency Management Framework for Canada defines CI as “the essential underlying systems and facilities upon which our standard of life relies”. It includes physical and information technology facilities, networks, services and assets essential to the health, safety, security or economic well-being of Canadians and the effective functioning of government.

A significant proportion of Canada’s CI is managed and protected by private owners and operators. As per the Participant list in Section 3.5 .The National Security Criminal Investigations ( NSCI) of the RCMP has launched a Suspicious Incident Reporting (SIR) project to collect information on suspicious incidents that could have a nexus to national security. The information provided by external CI Stakeholders is voluntary. Therefore, CI stakeholder handling of their data prior to its submission to the SIR system is not addressed in this privacy impact assessment (PIA)

The collection, handling, storage, dissemination and disposal of personal information for the SIR system conforms to Government of Canada policies and procedures and is consistent with CMP PPU-025 (National Security Investigations Records) and CMP PPU-005 (Operational Case Records) in www.InfoSource.gc.ca. A separate PIA details any privacy issues associated to SPROS our main records system where all SIR incidents will be recorded. Retention and disposal of the SPROS/SIR record will correspond to the Occurrence Classification Table (OCT) as detailed in the SPROS PIA.

Only authorized Critical Infrastructure Stakeholder employees, Police of Local Jurisdiction, or Government agencies may be given access to the SIR system. The Web-based accessed SIR system will be composed of two secure environments: the first is Protected B and the other is a Classified Environment (CE).

Access to the Protected “B” SIR System for external users will be granted through the use of the RCMP Internet Presence Environment (IPE), a secure common web hosting environment where authentication is made through the employment of ePass. Public Works and Government Services (PWGSC) maintains and updates a separate PIA for ePass. CI Stakeholder users will be designated as points of contact through MOUs or formal agreements with participating organizations. In order to be allowed rights to be assigned to their profile prospective users will be screened for at least a Level II Secret RCMP clearance. RCMP Personnel will gain access through the use of NPSN and PMI Secure Access Portal. The Classified Environment ( CE) is an RCMP internal one with no connection to the Protected B SIR system. SIR data received will be manually transferred to the CE systems.

The external facing SIR system application has roles that assign rights to the user and dictates what information they can view at the time of submission. The complete un-vetted SIR containing personal information will be made available to RCMP and POJ for national security criminal intelligence purposes. The originator of the report can also select other participating and RCMP security cleared organizations, with a need to know, to receive a SIR submission that has been vetted of personal information.

The Classified Environment (CE) is an RCMP internal one with no connection to the Protected B SIR system. SIR data received will be manually transferred to the CE systems.

Data matching and profiling will not occur within the SIR System.

Reference section 5 (3)b of the *Privacy Act*, persons identified as being involved in suspicious incidents will not be notified about the collection of their personal information as it would defeat the purpose of collecting that information for criminal investigative purposes

This Executive Summary will be available to all stakeholders, including the general public, via the RCMP web site. Current participants in the SIR project and key government stakeholders will be notified that the PIA has been filed with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC). New participants in the SIR project will be advised that a PIA has been filed with the OPC. Communications surrounding the SIR project, including presentations and briefings, will reference key messages on privacy. A vetted version of the PIA will be available if requested under Access to Information. At the upcoming Annual Revision of Info Source, the applicable PIBs (CMP PPU 005 and 025) will be updated to mention the SIR Project.

Treasury Board is responsible for the annual creation and dissemination of a publication that provides a description of government organizations, program responsibilities and descriptions of records with sufficient clarity and detail to enable the public to exercise its rights under the *Access to Information Act*.

Treasury Board is also responsible for the annual publication of an index of personal information that will both serve to keep the public informed of how the government handles personal information, as well as facilitating the public’s ability to exercise its rights under the *Privacy Act*.

The Accessible Anthropological Assembly: An Alternative for Montreal 2011

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 02:37:00 +0000

Message from anthropology students at the Université de Montréal:

You are invited to an

Accessible Anthropological Assembly

(Voir plus bas pour le message français)

Hello,

Firstly, it should be highlighted that the American Anthropological Association arrives in Montreal in the midst of massive student mobilizations against tuition fee hikes planned for 2012 in Quebec; but also at a time when Montreal is promoting itself as a cosmopolitan city built on a knowledge-based economy. Hence, it is in a context of commodification of knowledge and of increasingly exclusive access to knowledge that the American Anthropological Association is hosting an overly expensive event in one of the most prestigious establishments of Montreal.

In a period of global resistance (Occupy Together, student movements, Arab Spring), shouldn't we be interested in global struggles and be questioning neoliberalism? Similarly, shouldn't we be generating critical thinking on our own institutional dynamics ? Is research only an interest or a tool for social change?

The anthropology students of the University of Montreal are inviting you to participate in an Accessible Anthropological Assembly. During this event, students, professors and researchers will gather and discuss different themes related to the contradictions mentioned above. Your presence would certainly be an asset to make of this assembly a success.

Where? In the Riopelle park, in front of the Palais des Congrès (1001 Place Jean Paul Riopelle, Montréal)

View Larger Map

When? Saturday, November 19th, 2011, from 1:00pm to 3:00pm (Student Fair day)

What? A discussion/debate by everyone for everyone

We will orient discussions based on themes like the fallowing: the commodification of knowledge, the accessibility of knowledge and education and access of anthropology to public debate.

What we would want from you:

Each theme will be the object of a discussion animated by a student. Depending on your interests, we invite you to choose one of these themes to introduce the discussion with a short presentation of 5-10 minutes. We will then assume facilitation of the ongoing debate and you will be invited to contribute as a participant.

In addition:

To make the debate more accessible, we will offer simultaneous translation (french and english)
Hot beverages will be served
The event is, of course, free

In order to plan the event in advance, we ask you to respond to this message before Thursday November 17th if you are available to participate. Please indicate your time of arrival (preferably 1pm) and the theme you would like to discuss. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Students from the Off-AAA

Send messages to: accessibleanthropology@gmail.com

*Vous êtes cordialement invité à une*

*A**ssemblée **A**nthropologie **A**ccessible*

*Bonjour,*

*Tout d'abord, il est opportun de souligner que l'American Anthropological Association débarque à Montréal dans la foulée des mobilisations étudiantes résistant à la hausse des frais de scolarité prévue pour 2012 au Québec ; à une période aussi où Montréal cherche à dorer son image sur la scène internationale comme ville cosmopolite construite sur une économie du savoir.*

*Ainsi, c'est dans un contexte de marchandisation du savoir et d'accès de plus en plus exclusif à ce savoir que l'American Anthropological Association organise un événement aux coûts exorbitants dans un des établissements les plus prestigieux de Montréal.*

*Dans cette période de résistance globale (mouvements des Occupy Together, mouvements étudiants, printemps arabe), n'est-il pas primordial de s'intéresser aux luttes sociales et de questionner le néo-libéralisme? Dans cette même lancée, ne devrions-nous pas nous livrer aussi à une auto-réflexion et une critique de nos propres dynamiques institutionnelles?*

*Ne devrions-nous pas, de plus, dépasser le simple intérêt de recherche et mettre la main à la pâte?*

*Les étudiants d'anthropologie de l'Université de Montréal vous invitent à participer à l'Assemblée d'Anthropologie Accessible. Lors de cet événement, des étudiants, professeurs et **chercheurs** se rassembleront autour d'un débat-discussion abordant des thèmes reliés** aux contradictions ici mentionnées.** Étant donné que vos travaux de recherche engagés ont inspiré plusieurs d'entre nous, votre présence serait **un atout certain au succès **de cette assemblée.*

*Où? **Au parc Riopelle (en face du Palais des Congrès; *1001 Place Jean Paul Riopelle, Montréal*)*

*Quand? Le samedi, 19 novembre 2011, de 13h00 à 15h00*

*Quoi? Un débat-discussion par tous, pour tous.*

*Successivement, nous allons **orienter les discussions à partir de certains des thèmes suivants **: la marchandisation du savoir, l'accessibilité au savoir et à l'éducation et l'ouverture de l'anthropologie au débat public.*

*Ce que nous aimerions de vous :*

*Chaque thème fera l'objet d'un débat et sera animé par un étudiant. Selon vos intérêts, nous vous invitons à choisir un sujet lié aux thèmes mentionnés plus haut afin d'introduire, lors de l'évènement, le débat avec une courte présentation de cinq à dix minutes. Le débat sera lancé et vous pourrez par la suite partager vos réflexions à titre de participant.*

*Autres modalités :*

*afin de rendre l'évènement accessible, le débat-discussion sera bilingue. Un service de traduction simultané sera fourni au besoin.*

*Des boissons chaudes seront servies.*

L'événement, comme il se doit, sera gratuit.*

*Afin de mieux planifier l'évènement, nous vous demandons de confirmer votre présence avant le jeudi 17 novembre. Veuillez indiquer l'heure de votre arrivée (préférablement 13h00) et le thème que vous aimeriez aborder. N'hésitez pas à nous poser vos questions.*

*Merci,*

*Sincèrement,*

*Les étudiants de l'off-AAA*

accessibleanthropology@gmail.com

Case Western Breakdown, by David H. Price

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:49:00 +0000

Published today in CounterPunch:

CASE WESTERN BREAKDOWN: Why I’m through with sitting down at academic conferences with military scholars who won’t go on the record.

By David H. Price

Social scientists and other scholars critical of the rapid cooption of our disciplines by military and intelligence agencies face increasing problems engaging in critical academic discourse with colleagues working in militarized settings. The biggest obstacle to these interactions is the rising prevalence of conditions of non-transparency unusual for academic exchanges.

Because I write about historical and current interactions between anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies—for CounterPunch and academic books and journals—I am regularly asked to make a presentation at conferences addressing current efforts to militarize the social sciences. Throughout the last decade I have developed my own standards governing whether or not I interact with military anthropologists or military and intelligence personnel at such conferences or other settings. My chief condition is to insist on normal standards of academic transparency and accountability. Because accountability is a foundation of academic discourse, I do not attend events governed by non-disclosure agreements, or non-attribution agreements. Sometimes symposia are able to meet these simple standards and I engage with individuals from military or intelligence agencies; sometimes they are cannot, in which case I chose to not participate.

Here’s one of many examples of how I work through, whether or not I will attend an event. In 2007 I was approached by Stuart Brand’s GBN Group with an invitation to join a panel GBN was facilitating at a national conference of intelligence analysts from a variety of U.S. intelligence agencies held at Ft. Meade. The panel was slated to discuss issues relating to open source intelligence and problems with intelligence agencies using anthropological information. As a vocal critic of the CIA, FBI and NSA’s history, current methods and politics I was extremely skeptical, but not being one to shy away from opportunities to engage with those I criticize, I did not outright reject the invitation so long as basic conditions of normal academic transparency could be maintained.

I told the organizers that I was willing to participate so long as there were no restrictions on what I said, that I was not required to sign nondisclosure or non-attribution agreements, that I could post my remarks online, and could likewise freely report what had transpired at the conference. I made it clear that my remarks would probably sound like a spanking to those in attendance and would be talking about the damaging and blinding features of our intelligence agencies fetishization of classified sources. I was told by the organizers that they knew this and they were looking for the sort of honest critique that could only come from the outside. Discussions moved forward, but in the end, intelligence agency officials could not abide by my insistence that if I were going to engage with these intelligence agencies I needed to be able to write later about what was discussed at this conference, and as those hosting the conference could not meet my requirements I chose to not participate in this event.

During the last decade I have withdrawn from invitations at several universities where I would have had opportunities to talk with or debate military and intelligence personnel, but the presence of non-attribution policies (such as the Chatham House Rule) governing interactions prevented my participation. These non-attribution policies are generally pitched as providing increased “freedom of exchange,” but functionally they provide participants with levels of non-accountability that should be shunned from normal academic environments. At these academic and military exchanges, these military-aligned anthropologists often have a tendency to represent themselves as marginalized victims or as needing unusual assurances of non-attribution.

I reject such special protections for those who are part of the largest, most lethal, military force on the planet; I have a difficult time conceiving of people aligned with such power as marginalized or needing special protections. They need to be on the record, and their words need the same distribution as those of everyone else in the room. I see any agreement that shields participants from public accountability as lending a helping hand to powerful military or intelligence organizations that want to avoid public accountability. Whatever the arguments supporting these practices, non-attribution, non-disclosure policies and other practices that reduce disclosure of military-aligned scholars’ statements become means for military scholars to duck under normal standards of academic transparency and accountability.

While it is common for most anthropologists to avoid interactions with military and intelligence agencies requiring non-disclosure agreements, not all anthropologists, even progressive or radical anthropologists, adopt my standards opposing non-attribution agreements. In instances where scholars are studying the military, it may make sense for them to adopt the sort of non-attribution standards that any anthropologists would use with a community they are studying, but I always undertake these interactions not as instances of study, but as academic enterprises requiring people to be accountable for what they say.

I have not shied away from engaging or debating anthropologists and other social scientists working with military or intelligence agencies in open settings, but I am increasingly skeptical about the use and value of such engagements—and as I increasingly encounter special treatment or nonacademic expectations surrounding these interactions, I wonder about the propriety of these interactions. My most recent experience in trying to engage in an open discussion with militarized anthropologists, discussed below, pushes me closer to advocating that I and my colleagues should stop wasting our time talking with those working in these constrained environments.

On September 23, 2011, I participated in Case Western Reserve University’s Law School symposium on “The University and National Security after 9/11.” This was a small daylong symposium that included a continuing legal education session featuring a chilling talk by Joseph Margulies on post-9/11 shifts in abuses of public framing of concepts of the rule of law, and an outstanding keynote address by AAUP President Cary Nelson, on “How the Culture of Surveillance and Security Has Saturated The Culture of Higher Education.” Over a month before the event, all participants were asked to sign and submit a standard media release waiver allowing taping and posting online of the symposium. The event had large cameras filming and streaming the symposium (lawyers could get continuing legal education credits for attending some of the sessions in person or online) and we were all told the sessions would be available online. I checked a week after the event and all the sessions were available online.

Two weeks ago I received an email inquiry from my friend and colleague, anthropologist Maximilian Forte, asking me if I knew anything about the removal of the online video from my symposium session. When I looked online, I found that the session in which I had presented my critique of the military’s Human Terrain program was the only one of three sessions and keynote address which were not up and running on Case Western’s website.

I emailed my hosts at Case Western to ask if they knew why this video was removed, and the reply from Alice Simon, Manager, Communications, informed me that the video had been removed by the University. Ms Simon wrote that,

“while we prefer to webcast all of our programs live and archive them on our website, our guests have the choice to opt out if that is necessary for any reason. A member of Panel II did opt out of webcasting. It was my error that the panel was webcast live and posted online. I should have had our A-V department stop webcasting during that panel. Further, I should have let you and the other panelists know it would not be webcast after all. When I corrected the situation and had the webcast taken down, the panel had already been up on the website for a brief time, so some visitors might have viewed it. It is no longer available.”

According to Maximilian Forte, the video was uploaded by Case Western to YouTube on September 23, and was marked on YouTube as having been removed a week later, after Forte published a critique of Christopher King’s symposium performance on the website of the group, Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.

I replied to Ms Simon, explaining that the removal of this video had implications beyond the participant refusing to sign the release, writing that over the last decade I have been involved in policy discussions among anthropologists and other scholars considering the ethical, moral, political and academic freedom issues raised when anthropologists and other scholars engage, even critically engage, directly with military and intelligence agency personnel or subcontractors for these agencies. I wrote Ms Simon that,

“I have long been an advocate of anthropologists continuing to engage with the military and with anthropologists working in military settings so long as such exchanges are open and not bound by restrictions not normally found in academic settings. Transparency and accountability is a central ethical value in my work. I regularly do not accept interesting invitations from organizations ranging from the CIA to prestigious Universities where the event carries either non-disclosure or non-attribution restrictions as both of these are counter to normal academic forms of inquiry or discussion. In accepting to engage in this session at Case Western I had understood that our remarks would be available online so that normal levels of transparency would occur. I would not have participated had I known that unlike all of the other sessions at this symposium, the one that I participated in would not be available for others to see online.”

Neither Ms Simon nor anyone at Case Western bothered to reply to my email.

My panel only consisted of three people: me, George Lucas, (professor of Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy), and Christopher King (Director, Social Science Directorate of the Army’s Human Terrain Systems Program). I wrote Drs. King and Lucas asking what happened, and Lucas soon replied that he had not requested the removal of the video. Eventually, Christopher King replied that he was blocking the posting of the session on the web because he

“was not comfortable with posting my session online given that I have not taken part in my tape presentation before [sic.]. I still feel however that military and anthropologists were engaged in the conversation. Your presentation should be available for all to see. I was only concerned about my presentation. If yours is not there then CWU is being lazy in their editing.”

To be clear, Dr. King has the right to not sign this media release that all the other scholars at this event signed, but if he is not going to sign it, those impacted by his decision against transparency should have been notified so that they could choose whether or not they wanted to enable Dr. King and the Human Terrain System’s efforts to remain publicly unaccountable for their activities.

I wrote Dr. King and urged him to rethink his decision to keep what participants had assumed was a public discussion private, writing him that,

“insofar as my remarks, the context in which they were made, and the discussion that followed have been removed from public access, your decision to have this removed impacts my academic freedom and undermines general efforts to get university based academics to engage with military anthropologists.”

I warned King that:

“Your decision to withhold your remarks from the public record will also negatively impact your fellow anthropologists working in military and intelligence settings. When the AAA issued its 2007 Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities report on engagement it took steps to try and contextualize some military anthropologists’ work within the larger frame of normal anthropological activities, yet your steps to remove your remarks from public view highlights one of the significant ways that military anthropology is removed from normal anthropological and academic practices at a mundane academic conference. Your predecessor at HTS became well known for publicly decrying military anthropologists’ marginalization even while refusing to engage in normal academic discourse or answer criticisms from academic colleagues, and your move to withhold your remarks appears to be a furtherance of this practice. Your decision will inevitably lead anthropologists like myself (who signed off on CEAUSSIC’s 2007 Report) to disengage from any interaction with anthropologists working in military settings because of the conditions of non-transparency and non-accountability that you bring to these encounters.

If you and other anthropologists working in military and intelligence circles want the respect of your mainstream colleagues, you need to act under normal standards of academic transparency and accountability. If you are unwilling to act by such normal standards of academic behavior (as measured in this instance by you being the only person at the symposium to demand this treatment), you need to accept your own contributions to your own marginalization.”

Obviously Case Western should have told the participants in this session what was going on, and they should not have censored my and Lucas’ remarks (both in our presentation and in the discussion that followed) by removing them from the web. Dr. King and Human Terrain Systems needs to stop pretending they are engaged in normal academic discourse when they won’t adapt normal practices of accountability.

I don’t know why Dr. King insisted that this video be taken offline. It may simply be that he went a half-hour past the recommended ten minute time limit we had been given and presented an awkward non-academic military-type-briefing briefing full of busily-cluttered PowerPoint slides, or he might not understand the responsibility to the public for being responsible for reporting on where the funds for his expensive program are going, or it may have been some other reason. Dr. Forte believes King’s decision was made because of how foolish he looked during the question and answer session when I gently turned his own words against him.

After Dr. Forte was told by Case Western University Law School to withdraw the original video from YouTube, the Canadian group Anthropologists for Justice and Peace posted a four-minute video that included a brief excerpt from this symposium session. In this short video clip, a member of the audience asks the following question:

“I have a little bit of background in anthropology, linguistics, and Middle East Studies, and my question may be a little unfair because it doesn’t relate to human terrain mapping and what not, . . .in the counterinsurgency context, but actually right here at home. Because it seems like there is now a domestic civilian application for this program abroad, in that The New York Times and the Associated Press over the last three weeks have talked about an extensive and detailed human terrain mapping of the Muslim, Arab, Pakistani, Moroccan community in New York, with dossiers on 250 mosques, studying coffee shops, barber shops, bookstores, street vendors, mosques, hookah bars, and the Moroccan community has recently basically said, “Look, this is our hair salon. We cut hair all day.” But, . . .this has now come home. So what are the ethical considerations–the “do no harm,” the voluntary consent, you know, the accessibility to these records? All these issues are now facing us square at home with our American Muslim community. And this is just very important to our community. Thank you.”

Dr. King replied to this question saying that all he knew about this program was what had been reported in the New York Times, but he added that he found this domestic application to be “scary.” The video shows that when I was given a minute to respond, I turned King’s words against him saying, “I’ll just quickly respond to the question about the reports in The New York Times, which I would urge you all to hunt down, they are pretty disturbing. You know, Christopher said he also (turning to Dr. King)–I don’t know if you used the word “disturbing” within, or ‘troubling.’” King can be heard on the video saying, “Yes, troubling, that’s for sure.”

I continued, saying:

“I think the meaning of this, though, is that we’re having the same techniques that we’re doing to the Other, that we’re doing in another culture, are hitting us in the face when we do them here at home. You have essentially a parallel situation that’s going on, where domestic counterinsurgency is going on here in the United States, using many of these tactics that I and others are reacting to that are happening abroad. Roberto Gonzalez, in his book on Human Terrain, shows that the term itself actually comes from the 1960s in domestic. . . counter-radical activities that were going on, monitoring the Black Panthers and other internal groups. So it’s really come full circle. So I, I thank you for that question.”

Someone in the audience then commented that “nobody mentioned COINTELPRO,” and a confused Christopher King asked, “the what?,” and I can be seen explaining to King that COINTELPRO was a FBI program and still looking confused he can be heard to say “Oh, I don’t know about it, OK.”

I have no idea if the video record of this performance is why Dr. King wanted the video removed from public view, but I do know that this ongoing pattern of publicly funded militarized scholars refusing to engage in transparent discourse with colleagues (even while complaining about being marginalized in their disciplines) is leading me to consider adopting a position where I will stop trying to carry out such discussions with my militarized colleagues.

This shift has been some time coming. In 2008 I delivered remarks on the poor academic performances—and the all too typical failure to even show up or send an academic paper—by most (but not all) of the military anthropologists in what was to be an academic session at the 2008 American Anthropological Association’s annual meetings. I wondered if the inherent silences dominating these interactions rendered them near worthless. I opened my remarks saying that,

“I appreciate the restraints anthropologists working for the military face, I suppose we all face some sort of restrictions, but there is a point where these restrictions not only overly-constrict transparency, but they limit the public analysis and conversations that can publicly be had with the external world. When these narratives are shared with us on the outside, there are patterns to the silences and unaddressed elements that are informative, even if their presence is mostly marked as empty or “negative spaces”—that is: things not said whose absence defines everything surrounding them.”

My remarks focused on the ways that the military papers present or absent from that session were united by the ways that these absences and silences became their own message. I ended by critically questioning what is gained by these interactions and anthropology’s inability to confront recurrent formations of militarized power relations. After this session a friend who is a fellow critic of anthropology’s militarized turn approached me saying words to the effect that, “well I guess we can finally stop having this same old conversation with military anthropologists.” At the time of these comments, I hadn’t reached this position — if nothing else I’ve always seen such exchanges as a compelling opportunity to publicly illustrate the academic, ethical, and political shortcomings of much of militarized anthropology—but the cumulative toll of a decade of these odd and often stilted public exchanges (and a long trails of non-transparent declined invitations), is such that I have grown increasingly skeptical of efforts to hold academic exchanges with those coming from institutions whose anti-transparent practices undermine normal academic exchanges.

Dr. King has every right to not sign his media release, but my reaction is simply the cumulative effect of frustration and weariness of a decade of efforts to try and engage in an academic conversation with representatives of a group insisting they have been unfairly marginalized by mainstream academics, yet whoseactions repeatedly undermine explicit and implicit standards and practices of academic openness.

DAVID PRICE is a professor of anthropology at Saint Martin’s University. His book, Weaponizing Anthropology, has just been published by CounterPunch Books. He will be presenting a paper this week at the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual meetings on a newly disclosed historical relationship between the AAA and CIA. He can be reached at: dprice@stmartin.edu

Human Terrain Mapping: It's Still Scary and Troubling

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 08:02:00 +0000

In line with what we laid out in our last article, we have prepared for the public the relevant video clips, audio clips, PowerPoint slides, and transcript involving remarks made by Dr. Christopher A. King, Social Science Director of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, at a public conference hosted by Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Institute for Global Security Law and Policy, on September 23, 2011, along with comments made in response by Dr. David H. Price.

We would like to remind readers of the following:

First, "U.S. Copyright Law Title 17 § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use":

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include — (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

[The complete, full-length copy of the original webcast of the session as a whole was taken offline on November 7, 2011]

Second, that Dr. Christopher A. King was performing in his official capacity as a government official, in the employ of the U.S. Army, at a public event. No expectations of either confidentiality or privacy attach to a public official speaking in public as part of his duties, and no “media release” whether signed or unsigned, agreed to or retracted, can serve as a gag order against the entire public.

Audio file of the above video:

Complete audio file for Dr. King's Presentation:

PowerPoint slides used by Christopher King:

TRANSCRIPT of the remarks in question:

Starting at 1 hour, 8 minutes, 24 seconds in the conference session:

QUESTIONER

I have a little bit of background in anthropology, linguistics, and Middle East Studies, and my question may be a little unfair because it doesn't relate to human terrain mapping and what not, in...in the counterinsurgency context, but actually right here at home. Because it seems like there is now a domestic, civilian application for this program abroad, in that The New York Times and the Associated Press over the last three weeks have talked about an extensive and detailed human terrain mapping of the Muslim, Arab, Pakistani, Moroccan community in New York, with dossiers on 250 mosques, studying coffee shops, barber shops, bookstores, street vendors, mosques, hookah bars, and the Moroccan community has recently basically said, "Look, this is our hair salon. We cut hair all day." But, um...this app...this has now come home. So what are the ethical considerations--the "do no harm," the voluntary consent, you know, the accessibility to these records--all these issues are now facing us square at home with our American Muslim community. And this is just very important to our community. Thank you.

1 hour, 9 minutes, 34 seconds:

DR. KING (HTS)

On that topic there, yeah, yes, I don't know all the...I pretty much only know what you know on the use of that. But I actually find that pretty, uh, almost scary lines as well. The type of...the fine line that's being walked on there, and who's doing that work, for what purposes, is...yeah it is...it's pretty troubling, based on what we know and what I know from that New York Times article.

...[Dr. King answers another question about Instiutional Review Boards, ethics, etc;]

1 hour, 12 minutes, 56 seconds:

DR. DAVID H. PRICE

I'll just quickly, I'll just quickly respond to the question about the reports in The New York Times, which I would urge you all to hunt down, they are pretty disturbing. You know, Christopher said he also (turning to Dr. King)--I don't know if you used the word "disturbing" within, or "troubling"...

DR. KING

Yes, troubling, that's for sure--

DR. PRICE

I think the meaning of that, though, is that we're having the same techniques that we're doing to the Other, that we're doing in another culture, are hitting us in the face when we do them here at home. You have essentially a parallel situation that's going on, where domestic counterinsurgency is going on here in the United States, using many of these tactics that I and others are reacting to that are happening abroad. Roberto Gonzalez, in his book on Human Terrain, shows that the term itself actually comes from the 1960s in domestic, you know, counter-radical activities that were going, monitoring the Black Panthers and other internal groups. So it's really come full circle. So I, I thank you for that question.

1 hour, 14 minutes, 4 seconds:

(somebody in the audience says: "Nobody's mentioned the COINTELPRO...")

MODERATOR

The what?

AUDIENCE MEMBER AND DR. KING

COINTELPRO

DR. KING (turning to Dr. Price)

The what?

DR. PRICE (turning to Dr. King and silenltly yet audibly explaining)

The FBI's COINTEL Program

DR. KING

Oh. I don't know about it. Ok.

Case Western Reserve University: Proxy Censor for the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:27:00 +0000

Regarding two of our previous articles, Anthropology at War: Human Terrain Social Science Director Admits Human Terrain Mapping is Scary, Troubling and Human Terrain Mapping at Home is "Scary": The Video the Human Terrain System Does Not Want You to See, Case Western Reserve University is acting to block copying and republication of its own deleted video, given pressure from the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System and in particular its Social Science Director, Dr. Christopher A. King. The claim is that Case Western Reserve University's School of Law by "mistake" published the video to YouTube, a "mistake" since "one of the participants" had not signed a "media release" and apparently did not want the video online. AJP has confirmed that neither of two of the three featured participants--Dr. George Lucas and Dr. David H. Price--has asked Case Western Reserve University to take down the video, and in the case of David Price, he is adamantly critical of the move. The third participant was Dr. King. (Update: Dr. King has himself confirmed that he was the one who wanted the video taken down.)

Case Western Reserve University's School of Law has since contacted AJP member, Dr. Maximilian C. Forte, demanding that the video be removed from YouTube. This came within hours of our last article going online. This demand came from Nancy M. Pratt, Associate Director at the School of Law, in an email dated November 3, 2011.

Case Western Reserve University, by its own admission, made a "mistake" in releasing an edited video exceeding an hour (and nearly a gigabyte in size) and uploading it to YouTube, where it continued to remain for at least one week, that is, until Anthropologists for Justice and Peace publicly commented on the contents. There are in fact two "mistakes" that deserve further scrutiny.

First, Case Western Reserve University's School of Law, in emails to both Drs. Price and Forte, claimed that two of three participants on the panel in question had signed "media release forms" and a third did not. Case Western somehow managed to make its mistake right through a process that took a lot of work and time, such as that which went into recording, editing, and uploading the video, all work that was undertaken while supposedly losing sight of a lack of "permission" to do so. Indeed, even the objecting participant spoke without any sign of being perturbed as he was being recorded without any protest on his part (and there appear to have been at least two cameras in operation, filming from different angles). There was apparently no recognition of any mistake at all, until AJP decided to comment on the video.

Case Western Reserve University's School of Law decided to act once its video had already been seen, and once it had already been the subject of commentary, which makes the move as pointless as it is a malevolent attempt to "cleanse" the public record, which is thus also a restriction on freedom of speech and freedom to publish.

However, even if we take Case Western Reserve's assertion at face value, the fact remains that it is its mistake, not ours. It is a mistake that cannot be remedied, as the video has already been seen by numerous persons, copied, and commented upon by numerous persons--and that cannot be reversed. It is a mistake for which they can only apologize (not that they should, more on this below) to the party that feels wronged, and the matter is entirely between them. That the video was untintentionally "leaked" to the Internet is not our problem.

The second mistake made by Case Western Reserve University is to assume that a "media release" is some legal rule of ultimate and absolute value that outweighs all else, and can be used as a gag order against the entire public. Participants in the conference all knew they would be speaking at a public event. Their words are intended for the record. Moreover, a media release form should not act as an unfair restriction on free speech, and the freedom to publish. It is especially disconcerting that a University would undertake the role of censor, against academics, regarding a public event, and in the context of a conference that it chose to host that dealt precisely with the restrictions placed on universities by the national security state.

Case Western Reserve University's School of Law has decided to privilege the interests of one person against those of the public good, in an attempt to cover up what was said and to remove the physical evidence of the utterance. It is entirely dishonest and worthy of contempt: it amounts to telling all of us that because one person could not take care with what he was saying, the rest of us should not be allowed to speak about it (and in speaking about it, we refer to the physical evidence in question, of course, that dealing with the speech act itself).

Case Western Reserve University's School of Law has also advanced its demand on the grounds of copyright. In this it is seeking to take advantage of the fact that YouTube only rarely, in practice, ever recognizes the legally established right of Fair Use, with which a School of Law would presumably be familiar. Let us look at what the law actually provides:

U.S. Copyright Law Title 17 § 107.
Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include — (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Therefore, the fact that Case Western Reserve University's School of Law has withdrawn the video, rendering it "unpublished" does not bar us from using it under Fair Use provisions. Our doing so does not infringe on any market value of the work; it is used for nonprofit educational purposes; and, it is used for criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship and research.

However, Case Western Reserve University's School of Law could argue that by republishing the entire video, rather than just a portion (which we also intend to do), that we are exceeding what Fair Use allows. Yet, by its own admission, two of the three participants agree with such publication, and therefore the real element in question is a third, dealing solely with the portion featuring Christopher King's presentation. It is absolutely wrong for the School of Law to equally banish publication of the presentations by Drs. Price and Lucas, when they specifically approved such publication.

What is especially troubling, however, is that Case Western Reserve University's School of Law is acting against academics and the wider public as a proxy censor for the U.S. Army, using whatever argument is conveniently at hand. Please remember that Dr. Christopher A. King is a government official, performing in his public capacities as a representative of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, at an event which Case Western Reserve University's School of Law confirmed in its email to Dr. Forte was a public event. Being a public event, and Dr. King being a public official, performing in an official capacity, it is therefore the case that no expectation of either confidentiality or privacy can be attached to his utterances. Even the very PowerPoint slides shown by Dr. King are all marked with the label: "UNCLASSIFIED" without any qualification (such as "Not for Distribution")--there is your "media release". Not even a mountain of signed or unsigned media releases, however, can change the fact that we are free to publish his statements, without impediment.

Case Western Reserve University should avoid further embarrassing itself by pursuing unjust claims, for the wrong reasons, against the wrong people, purely for the sake of the impossibly retroactive and chillingly Orwellian image management effort of one party, a party that apparently lacks the maturity and intelligence to give a full public account of what was said, and why. We will continue to exercise the right to speak freely and to publish freely.

This should not have been an act of resistance; it should have been a routine performance of what all universities are supposed to value and respect, first and foremost.

Human Terrain Mapping at Home is "Scary": The Video the Human Terrain System Does Not Want You to See

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:56:00 +0000

This is the video (below), ~~back online again~~, that one participant--~~either~~ Dr. Christopher A. King, Social Science Director of the Human Terrain System, ~~or Dr. George Lucas~~ (we have since confirmed that it was King)--wanted Case Western Reserve University to take offline. This video also features Dr. David A. Price, who did not agree to be censored, at what was, after all, an academic conference. AJP was informed by Dr. Price that all of the participants were required to sign media releases. This video is being presented once more, in the public interest, from an event that was neither secret nor classified, for the purposes of research, analysis, and for journalists to use in any possible reporting. The video is available in multiple locations--and to be safe, everyone reading this should make a copy of the video (one option is to download RealPlayer if you have not done so already, and then download a copy of the video to your computer).

The video was removed on November 7, 2011

Regarding Case Western's decision to reverse itself, and remove this video from public view, Dr. Price stated: " I find this lack of transparency to be disturbing and would likely not have attended if I'd known these military spokespersons would not be abiding by the same rules of openness governing others at this symposium." It is probable that the reason the video was removed was in part due to AJP's previous article, "Anthropology at War: Human Terrain Social Science Director Admits Human Terrain Mapping is Scary, Troubling." This level of unguarded honesty, and unintentional accuracy, likely proved embarrassing to the Human Terrain System. As we said in that article (now updated):

Perhaps two of the more stunning, and yet brief, moments to come out of a panel recently held at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, was when the Social Science Director of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), anthropologist Dr. Christopher A. King, essentially condemned his own program with what in hindsight he may call a careless admission. The moment comes in response to comments from an American Muslim audience member, that begins at the 1:08:24 mark. She raises the point about how human terrain mapping has been brought back home, and is applied to Muslim communities in New York City. In response, Dr. King clearly states that he finds this “scary” and then says it is “pretty troubling”, later repeating “troubling, that’s for sure”. As a co-panelist, Dr. David H. Price, anthropologist at St. Martin’s University, noted this (see the 1:12:56 mark), he remarked that it seems to be fine to apply the techniques against “Others” abroad, but suddenly it is not so good when applied domestically. What Dr. King thus leaves open is that locals in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, in their homes, are justified in viewing HTS as scary and troubling, the same way that critics have observed it is scary and troubling. After years of public debate, we owe thanks to Dr. King for finally confirming that what we knew all along was correct, now even from his own perspective.

The second striking moment comes toward the very end of the first video below, when Dr. King admits, audibly, to Dr. Price, that he does not know what COINTELPRO is and has never heard of it before (see the 1:14:07 mark), even though it arguably provides many of the foundations for HTS itself.

The event at which these remarks were made was “The University and National Security after 9/11”--Panel II: “Academics at War: Anthropologists and other Social Scientists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the Framing of Counterinsurgency Doctrine” (Arthur W. Fiske Memorial Lecture, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Institute for Global Security Law and Policy, September 23, 2011).

For more about the collaboration between the New York Police Department, the CIA, and the FBI, in applying "human terrain mapping" back at home see the following news articles and primary documents. Note that the current CIA director, General David Petraeus, actively endorsed HTS as he marshalled the production of the Army's Counterinsurgency Manual.

Blueprints: Mapping US Muslim Communities - Al Jazeera English

Law enforcement is watching the day-to-day activities of thousands upon thousands of Muslims, with focus on mosques and hookah (waterpipe) bars, Pakistani cab drivers and the devout. Relying on informants, undercover cops, and a vast structure for information-sharing and joint policing, the FBI and NYPD - with assistance from the CIA - are working toward a cartography of Muslim communities. This mapping is being done in the name of national security. But on what theory?

....The NYPD’s 2007 report reads as a blueprint for the recent news about the NYPD’s profiles of 250 mosques and Muslim student groups in the NYC area, and its deployment of mosque “rakers” and “crawlers” to listen in on sermons and geo-map Muslim communities.

With CIA Help, New York Police Secretly Monitored Mosques, Muslim Communities Post-9/11 - Democracy Now!

A new investigation by the Associated Press reveals how, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York City Police Department decided it could no longer trust other agencies to prevent terrorism and started expanding its own intelligence gathering. In the process, it became "one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies," targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. The report, titled "With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas," also finds that these operations "benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying." The report details how police used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even without any evidence of wrongdoing. Also falling under NYPD’s scrutiny were imams, taxi cab drivers and food cart vendors — jobs often done by Muslims.

AP Investigates NYPD Spying On Muslims Amid Tabloid Swipes, Scant NYC Media Follow-up - Huffington Post

On Aug. 24, Apuzzo and Goldman broke open the NYPD spying story: the NYPD, in cooperation with the CIA, ran a post-9/11 spying operation targeting Muslims that would “run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government." The CIA can't legally spy on U.S. citizens, but they appeared to help the NYPD do just that. NYPD officers, even without specific leads involving criminal activity, have collected information on people inside restaurants serving halal meat, Muslim student associations, Islamic schools, ethnic bookstores, hookah bars and mosques.

"Mapping crimes has been a successful police strategy nationwide," the AP wrote. "But mapping robberies and shootings is one thing. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods is different, something that at least brushes against what the federal government considers racial profiling."

NYPD Eyed US Citizens In Intel Effort - Huffington Post

A U.S. citizen in Queens, for example, starts work each day at what police labeled "a known Moroccan barbershop." The AP previously revealed the secret operations of the NYPD intelligence division as it mapped the Muslim community in and around New York, monitored life in ethnic neighborhoods and scrutinized mosques. The Moroccan Initiative was one of the division's projects. Such programs began with help from the CIA under President George W. Bush and have continued with at least the tacit support of President Barack Obama, whose administration repeatedly has sidestepped questions about them. It is unclear whether Mayor Michael Bloomberg oversaw the programs. He has refused to comment directly about them.

....The documents on the Moroccan businesses were compiled by a team called the Demographics Unit, which police originally denied existed. After the AP obtained police documents describing the unit as a team of 16 officers with a mission to map and monitor ethnic neighborhoods, the department said the Demographics Unit used to exist but never had more than eight officers.

....No other police department in the United States is known to employ programs like New York's. Police in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city, once considered a program that would have mapped the area's Muslim communities, but it was shut down after news coverage brought wide criticism.

Inside The Demographics Unit, The CIA Spy Team The NYPD Says Doesn't Exist - Huffington Post

The Demographics Unit, a squad of 16 officers fluent in a total of at least five languages, was told to map ethnic communities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and identify where people socialize, shop and pray. Once that analysis was complete, according to documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD would "deploy officers in civilian clothes throughout the ethnic communities."....

Working out of the police department's offices at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the Demographics Unit maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with "American Black Muslim," it considered "ancestries of interest." Nearly all are Muslim countries. Police used census data and government databases to map areas it considered "hot spots" as well as the ethnic neighborhoods of New York's tri-state area, the documents show. Undercover officers known as "rakers" - a term the NYPD also denied existed - were then told to participate in social activities such as cricket matches and visit cafes and clubs, the documents show.

With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas | 7online.com

The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program.

Middle East Online::The Long Life of Profiling, Ten Years After 9/11

According to the report, the NYPD dispatches “rakers,” the NYPD term, into a “human mapping program” to monitor the daily lives of Muslim Americans in the places where ordinary living transpires, such as bookstores, cafés, bars, and nightclubs, without the hint of criminal wrongdoing. The police department also employs “mosque crawlers,” who scrutinize imams and their sermons, and have gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs commonly associated with Muslim workers.

More cases of NYPD ethnic spying exposed - CBS News

How the NYPD Turned Itself Into a Little CIA - Gawker

NYPD and CIA spy on Muslims — RT

Undercover Work Deepens Police-Muslim Tensions - New York Times

CIA Role Within NYPD Raises Eyebrows | NBC New York

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS FROM THE NYPD:

NYPD DEMOGRAPHICS UNIT

Powerpoint presentation obtained from the AP detailing the work of the New York City Police Department's "Demographics Unit," which it previously denied even existed.

Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.

Prepared by: Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, Senior Intelligence Analysts, NYPD Intelligence Division

NYPD INTELLIGENCE COLLECTED ON THE MOROCCAN COMMUNITY

A detailed list, with photos, from the NYPD's files of intelligence collected on the Moroccan community, in its own application of human terrain mapping.

New Book: The New Imperialism, Volume 2: Interventionism, Information Warfare, and the Military-Academic Complex

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:49:00 +0000

Just released, and available in hardcover, paperback, or as a free e-book, this newest volume from Alert Press focuses on humanitarian interventionism, invasion, occupation, information warfare, propaganda operations, and the military-academic complex. The case studies range from Canadian universities, to WikiLeaks, Iraq, Iran, and Libya. We examine topics such as the role of myth in justifying NATO's war against Libya; the attack on civilian infrastructure in Iraq; WikiLeaks and what it tells us about torture in Iraq; relations between the U.S. and Iran, and the role of propaganda; the depth of militarization of university research in Canada; the successes of WikiLeaks in making an impact on world affairs; and the (im)possibility of "humanitarian intervention" under imperialist conditions.

Interventionism

What are the prospects for humanitarian internationalism under imperial conditions?
Which countries does the U.S. select as targets and what are their characteristics?
What can we learn about "hard power" from the two wars against Iraq?
What role did myths play in justifying NATO's war against Libya?

Information Warfare

What impact has Wikileaks had in changing U.S. foreign policy?
Has Wikileaks lived up to its promise of "opening governments"?
What do we learn about torture and U.S. war crimes from Wikileaks' Iraq War Logs?
What is the role of national rhetoric in the mutual antagonism between Iran and the U.S.?
Why does the issue of moral hypocrisy matter when it comes to interventions that some justify on humanitarian grounds?
How does one align torture with the defense of liberal democracy?

The Military-Academic Complex

What are the processes, patterns, and agents behind the militarization of university research in Canada?
What is the nature of the militarization of the academy?
Can academic research be critical and ethical when funded by the military and private defence contractors?

These are just some of the hotly contested questions addressed by the contributors to this, the second volume from our seminar series in The New Imperialism. The contributors to this volume are: Laura Beach, Jessica Cobran, Sabrina Guerrieri, MacLean Hawley, Natalie Jansezian, and Corey Seaton, with an introduction and chapter by the volume editor and several appendices consisting of "classics" in the field by such authors as Randolph Bourne, Smedley Butler, and Mark Twain.

Hugh Gusterson On the U.S. Executing Its Own Citizens with Drone Strikes

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:31:00 +0000

First published as:

Death by drone

By Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 13 October 2011

Anwar al-Awlaki was clearly not a nice person, but the manner in which he was killed on September 30 should trouble us all, regardless of our political orientation. Awlaki, a US citizen who once lived in Northern Virginia, was a Muslim cleric who took up residence in Yemen, where he incited anti-US sentiment -- until he was executed by a drone.

The mainstream media coverage of Awlaki's death barely scratches the surface of the ways this action should trouble patriotic Americans -- from Tea Partiers to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Insofar as US media coverage has been critical, it has largely focused on the disturbing fact that the Obama administration assumed the power to execute an American citizen solely on the basis of a secret process within the executive branch, despite the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantee that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

In 2010, David Barron and Martin Lederman of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel drew up a 50-page memorandum arguing that the United States had the right to kill Awlaki far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan if it was impractical to arrest him. The New York Times cited anonymous officials' assurances that Awlaki's name was put on the death list after "a careful, if secret, review." The Washington Post, also content to give "officials" a free pass to issue bland assurances anonymously, told its readers that "none of the lawyers involved in the process, from across the government, dissented."

Since when does the executive branch, alone, get to decide which American citizens should be put to death? Didn't the United States fight a revolutionary war to put an end to that kind of autocratic abuse of executive power?

The Constitution guarantees the accused -- especially when facing the death penalty -- the right to confront his or her accusers and contest the evidence in a neutral judicial process. Awlaki was denied this right by his government. In the words of the American Civil Liberties Union's Jameel Jaffer (who, unlike Obama administration officials, has the courage and integrity to stand by his words on the record), "This is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without any judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public, but from the courts."

So far, President Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, has refused to explain the legal logic of the 50-page assassination memo or to make even a redacted version of it public. Conservatives quite rightly "accuse Obama of hypocrisy, noting his administration insisted on publishing [George W.] Bush-era administration legal memos justifying the use of interrogation techniques many equate with torture, but refused to make public its rationale for killing a citizen without due process." According to Obama, Republican torture memos have to be made public, but Democratic assassination memos do not.

But this is far from the only problem with the Awlaki execution. First, although media accounts made this a sidebar in their coverage, Awlaki was not the only American citizen killed in the drone attack of September 30. He was accompanied by Samir Khan, an American citizen living in Yemen and editor of Inspire, a magazine for jihadists. According to yet another anonymous Obama administration official quoted in The Washington Post -- why speak anonymously if you have nothing to hide? -- "The CIA did not know Khan was with Aulaqi [sic]."

This claim does not smell right. After all, in other contexts, American officials always stress the extensive surveillance of targets by their drones and the care with which officials determine who will die in an attack. So presumably the CIA knew others were in the car with Awlaki and that they would die with him. According to an eyewitness quoted by The New York Times, the car Awlaki and Khan were traveling in was so badly destroyed that it was hard to identify the bodies of the dead. So, how was the US government able to identify Khan as a dead fellow traveler in time for a US press conference later that same day? In the absence of an answer to this question, I, for one, am left wondering if Khan was knowingly killed by his government -- only without the benefit of even a secret review that resulted in the authorization to kill Awlaki.

Finally, and most troubling of all, there is the question of why Awlaki was put to death in the first place. The Times characterized the threat Awlaki represented to the United States in these terms:

It was, of course, Mr. Awlaki's very American qualities -- his fluency in the language and culture of the country where he spent half his life -- that made him such a dangerous radicalizing force. … His eerily calm religious justifications for violence, recycled across the Web for years, had a profound impact on a small number of young Muslims in the United States, Canada and Britain. In a score of plots since 2006, investigators discerned Mr. Awlaki as an important influence -- his written, audio and video sermons stored on hard drives, e-mailed among conspirators and treated as a clerical imprimatur for their deeds. … [H]e created an English-language Web site, blog and Facebook page that drew tens of thousands of visitors, putting out a message that grew steadily more approving of anti-Western violence. … Unlike Osama bin Laden, whose convoluted Web messages struck many Western Muslims as foreign and strange, Mr. Awlaki's unaccented English, sprinkled with colloquial Americanisms, often hit its mark. I quote this at some length, because these statements leave the ineradicable -- and deeply disturbing -- impression that the Obama administration decided to execute an American citizen for his speech acts. According to this logic, America’s enemies have the right to kill Glenn Beck. But what is more American than free speech? Even the most obnoxious and hateful speech is protected by the Constitution.

The Obama administration has never publicly said that Awlaki was killed because he gave speeches they disliked. In announcing the assassination, Obama called Awlaki "the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" -- the first time any US government official had publicly used that description of Awlaki. So how did Awlaki ascend from Internet instigator to the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda? Once again, unnamed American officials claim that Awlaki's role among the jihadists moved "from inspirational to operational" and that US intelligence had concluded that Awlaki "played a direct role" in the Christmas Day plot to blow up a plane over Detroit. (Of course, this is the same US intelligence that concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.) We are not told the nature of the evidence of Awlaki's "operational" role, though Reuters reports that unnamed officials "acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki's hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy." In other words: not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but executed anyway.

No wonder the distinguished George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley recently said that "the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single-most devastating events in our history for civil liberties."

The assassination of Awlaki and the secret memo used to justify it are to the Obama administration what water-boarding and John Yoo's torture memo were to the Bush administration. Ultimately, both point toward a deeper bankruptcy in America's war against the jihadists. If the Bush administration fantasized that it could torture its way to victory, the Obama administration has fallen prey to the delusion that it can kill its way to victory. In Vietnam, first under Robert McNamara and then Richard Nixon, the United States believed it could win if it just killed enough people. In the Middle East, Obama has updated this delusion with the smart weaponry of the 21st century, seeking victory not through bulk killing but through the refined assassinations of jihadist leaders. The fantasy is that if the United States just kills the leaders -- as though there were only a finite number of leaders -- the rest will simply disappear.

The Obama administration was keen to sweep aside constitutional niceties and kill Awlaki, because they saw him as a root cause of jihadism who could be eliminated. But this is to confuse causes with results. As David Kilcullen, former adviser to General David Petraeus, has warned, the drone strikes recruit as many militants as they kill. New Awlakis will emerge, and the one we killed will live on as a martyr. In the words of yet another anonymous official, quoted in The Washington Post: "They are like bees. How many do you have to kill to get them all?" The answer is that we will never kill our way out of this problem.

Author addendum: Since this column was published, in the kind of action we associate with the mafia rather than disciplined military organizations, the US has killed Awlaki's 16 year-old son, Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, in yet another drone strike. The son was a US citizen and a minor. In its front-page coverage of the strike, The Washington Post repeated, without question, US government disinformation that the son was 21, and this time it did not even give a reason why another US citizen might be executed by his own government. No claims have been made that the 16 year-old was directing Al Qaeda operations. In just over two weeks we have apparently normalized the summary execution of American citizens, moving from some debate about the propriety of the first execution to a situation where The Washington Post and The New York Times can report with matter-of-fact brevity the Obama administration's execution of an American tenth grader without trial.

Militarization, Decolonization, and Indigenous Sovereignty

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:11:00 +0000

(1) Winona LaDuke on the Militarization of Indian Country

(2) More on Domestic Counterinsurgency in Canada: Military Intelligence Unit Keeps Canadian First Nations Under Surveillance

From: "Military intelligence unit keeps watch on native groups," by Steve Chase, The Globe and Mail, 12 October 2011:

The Canadian military is keeping a watch on aboriginal groups through an intelligence unit that is meant to protect the Forces and the Department of National Defence from espionage, terrorists and saboteurs.

The Canadian Forces’ National Counter-Intelligence Unit assembled at least eight reports on the activities of native organizations between January, 2010, and July, 2011, according to records released under access to information law.

When told of the documents, one aboriginal leader said the thought of the military keeping tabs on natives was “chilling.”

The Department of National Defence denies it obtained the intelligence itself, and says the information, which cites confidential sources with apparent inside knowledge of native groups, came from other government agencies.

Referred to as Counter-Intelligence Information Reports, the documents alert the military to events such as native plans for a protest blockade of Highway 401, and the possibility of a backlash among aboriginal groups over Ontario’s introduction of the harmonized sales tax.

Continue reading here

This is an issue that we continue to monitor at AJP--see our previous posts on this subject:

Counterinsurgency: From Afghanistan to First Nations Resistance in Canada - Jul 2, 2010 - Speaking at a senate hearing in May, Canada's top general in Afghanistan suggested that the country's counterinsurgency war in Kandahar and its "whole of government" strategy has helped prepare Canadian forces and its civilian partners for such eventualities. "If Canada were having an issue of insurgency," said Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, "there would be a multi-discipline, multi-department operation with the government managing and directing carefully what its military and police forces would do". "We experienced a little of that ... with the events at Oka." But now, said Vance, "the government is engaged".
First Nations Under Surveillance: Harper Government Prepares for First Nations “Unrest" - Jun 8, 2011 - Internal documents from Indian Affairs and the RCMP show that shortly after forming government in January of 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had the federal government tighten up on gathering and sharing intelligence on First Nations to anticipate and manage potential First Nation unrest across Canada.
Spying on Indigenous Groups, Defending Mining Companies: The U.S. and Peru, What Wikileaks Tells Us - Jun 11, 2011 - A Wikileaks cable reveals the US Embassy in Lima, Peru, identified Indigenous activists and tracked the involvement of Bolivian President Evo Morales, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Bolivia Ambassador Pablo Solon, prominent Quechua activist Miguel Palacin Quispe and community leaders.
Domestic Counterinsurgency in Canada - Jun 14, 2011 - We have previously posted on Canadian counterinsurgency with an article by Jon Elmer--see: "Counterinsurgency: From Afghanistan to First Nations Resistance in Canada." Now we want to feature extracts from the controversial 2005 draft Counterinsurgency Operations manual (leaked in 2007) and the final 2008 version, both produced by the Department of National Defence (and available below). We will also underline some key points of public discussion that have transpired, which we think help us to understand the significance of these documents, and add some further analytical considerations of our own.
For the Sake of Mining Interests and "Security": Canadian and U.S. Surveillance and Suppression of Indigenous Communities in the Americas, as Revealed by Wikileaks - Jun 29, 2011 - How Canada and the U.S. worked globally to undermine indigenous rights, engage in surveillance of aboriginal communities, and protect corporate mining interests, as revealed by Wikileaks.

(3) Decolonize Wall Street

“The ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ slogan has gone viral and international now. From the protests on the streets of WALL STREET in the name of ‘ending capitalism’—organizers, protestors, and activists have been encouraged to ‘occupy’ different places that symbolize greed and power. There’s just one problem: THE UNITED STATES IS ALREADY BEING OCCUPIED. THIS IS INDIGENOUS LAND. And it’s been occupied for quite some time now,” stated Jessica Yee (Mohawk), the executive director for The Native Youth Sexual Health Network, in a blog post originally posted on Racialicious.

“I also need to mention that New York City is Haudenosaunee territory and home to many other First Nations, ” Yee wrote.

Still, Yee clarifies that she supports the mission and integrity of Occupy Wall Street. “I’m not against ending capitalism and I’m not against people organizing to hold big corporations accountable for the extreme damage they are causing,” Yee wrote. “Yes, we need to end globalization. What I am saying is that I have all kinds of problems when to get to ‘ending capitalism’ we step on other people’s rights—and in this case erode Indigenous rights—to make the point.”

Yee goes on to excerpt a blog post from “An Open Letter to the Occupy Wall Street Activist” published by JohnPaul Montano in Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice. Montano describes himself on his Twitter account as a “Nishnaabe-language acquirer naïvely believing that multilingualism, JavaScript and respect for indigenous sovereignty lead to less crabbiness and more peace.”

I hope you would make mention of the fact that the very land upon which you are protesting does not belong to you – that you are guests upon that stolen indigenous land. I had hoped mention would be made of the indigenous nation whose land that is. I had hoped that you would address the centuries-long history that we indigenous peoples of this continent have endured being subject to the countless ‘-isms’ of do-gooders claiming to be building a “more just society,” a “better world,” a “land of freedom” on top of our indigenous societies, on our indigenous lands, while destroying and/or ignoring our ways of life. I had hoped that you would acknowledge that, since you are settlers on indigenous land, you need and want our indigenous consent to your building anything on our land—never mind an entire society.

The blog People of Color details the history of the occupation of Wall Street, in which enslaved African peoples constructed the wall “that barricaded the land white men had seized from native peoples.”

Continue reading here

(4) Indigenous Sovereignty Week

INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY WEEK 2011: November 14-20

Celebrating community victories - standing up to the Harper threat

Indigenous Sovereignty Week 2011, scheduled for Nov. 14-20, will be the third annual week of educational events on Indigenous issues called by Defenders of the Land, a network of First Nations in land struggle. This year we call on communities and supporters to celebrate, remember, and learn from community victories, recent and historic, while looking forward to discuss how best to organize against the threat to Indigenous Peoples posed by Harper’s anti-Indigenous rights agenda.

Read more here

Murray Dobbin: Libya, the Lie

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:21:00 +0000

From Murray Dobbin's blog:

When the U.S. invaded Iraq riding a pack of lies and monstrous manipulation, the entire U.S. elite, including major news services, academics, and politicians from both “sides” of the spectrum, lined up to cheerlead and off they went to war. It was one of the most shameful chapters in the long history of shameful acts of U.S. imperial foreign policy.

But it actually didn’t take too long for dissenting voices to come out of the woodwork. The lies were exposed, the liars identified, the manipulation denounced.

Watching the sorry spectacle of media coverage of the tragic farce unfolding in Libya, one has to wonder if anyone will ever expose the lies and hubris that have run throughout this faux Arab spring.

To be sure, as more journalists, aid workers and human rights representatives arrive in the country the more some of the obvious facts trickle out. The “freedom fighters” — more like soccer hooligans with guns — have looted dozens of arms depots of the Libyan military. According to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, “Every time a city falls, they end up being looted. . . Every facility we go to where there were surface-to-air missiles, they’re gone.”

Just what will these lovers of democracy do with these weapons? The U.S. and E.U. might just start to worry that no matter who buys them on the black market, they will eventually end up in the hands of al Qaeda or other militant groups. As NATO knows full well, some of the so-called rebels have ties to al Qaeda. Or perhaps the missiles will end up in the hands of the Taliban where they will be used to shoot down U.S. helicopters. Talk about blowback. Too bad the Americans have never quite grasped the meaning of irony.

The photos of the revolutionaries give any thoughtful observer pause. Virtually every photo of the victorious rebels show aggressive, undisciplined, young men armed to the teeth holding their guns high in the air (often firing randomly).

And while the western media repeatedly imply that the Nation Transitional Council is in control of these dangerous thugs and thieves the truth lies elsewhere. Several rebel groups have denounced the NTC and said they don’t recognize its authority. So not only does the council not represent anyone, it doesn’t even control its own “army.” The NTC is little more than a group of greedy opportunists salivating at the thought of getting its hands on the billions in state funds that NATO is now handing over to them. Only with the constant disciplinary efforts of its NATO handlers does the council manage to maintain a semblance of decorum and credibility.

No one in the media mentions that Gadhafi didn’t have billions of dollars stashed in vaults around the world for his personal use as others such as Mubarak did. To be sure, Gadhafi and his family and closest associates lived in luxury. But the tens of billions illegally seized by Western countries was money belonging to the Libyan state and its national bank. NATO has effectively destroyed the Libyan government — not just Gadhafi’s regime. Tens of thousands of foreign workers have left the country, many of whom were critical to the running of the country. Rebels have been accused of randomly executing blacks, many of them students and workers. The contributions of these foreign workers are likely gone forever.

But none of this bothers the Canadian political elite and its intellectual hired guns. One of the most shameful examples — there are countless — is Lloyd Axworthy, the “highly respected” former foreign affairs minister under Jean Chretien. He penned an op-ed for the Globe and Mail which could have been written on contract for the cabal now in power in Tripoli. A more simplistic and deliberately obfuscating piece is hard to imagine. Axworthy’s article waxes on romantically about how the NATO bombing of Libya is a huge advance for the principle of Responsibility to Protect. This principle is NATO’s ideological weapon that permits it to do whatever it likes. Axworthy was a key figure in getting it established at the United Nations in 1999-2000.

According to Axworthy, “We are seriously engaged in a resetting of the international order toward a more humane, just world.” I predict that NATO’s grotesque manipulation of the UN mandate to impose a “no fly” zone to protect “civilians” (a violation Axworthy doesn’t even mention) will in fact do more damage to the responsibility to protect principle than any similar action to date. It will tarnish the UN, too, which has allowed its mandate to be used for imperial gain. The unseemly rush by France, Britain and Italy in particular, to get their hands on Libyan oil will soon be too obvious to cover up. The revolutionaries are no doubt busy signing deals handing over that previously nationalized resource to the neo-colonialists who put them in power — robbing the real civilians of their birthright.

Who will take the “responsibility to protect” Libyans from this new gang? Who will protect the people of Libya so that they continue to enjoy a literacy rate above 90 per cent, the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy of all of Africa, free medicare and education and the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent? Do the boys firing their guns in the air even have a clue that their living standards — subsidized by nationalized oil — were among the highest in Africa? Who will they blame when medical care disappears and their kids have to pay to go to school? Western, free-market democracy will come to Libya at a very high price when designed and delivered by the neo-colonial powers.

It’s hard to know if the brain trust at NATO actually believed this whole thing would be over in a few weeks, but what they did know, and what the Canadian media refuses to tell us, is that Libya was the biggest obstacle to the continued super-exploitation of Africa and its vast resources. On a whole number of fronts, Libya was using its oil wealth to gradually close the doors to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar in the economic domination of Africa.

If you want to paint a picture of the back rooms of NATO before the genuine Arab spring burst forth, imagine the power brokers sitting around oak tables trying to figure out a way to stop Gadhafi from ruining their decades long — centuries, actually — bonanza. Then imagine the surprise arrival of the Arab spring. What a gift and delivered just in time.

Africa’s role as a giant pool of cheap resources was being threatened just as the U.S. and E.U. faced economic catastrophe because of their own financial deregulation policies. China is investing billions in Africa — and not just in resource extraction. It is helping African countries industrialize, the surest way to economic independence.

There’s nothing NATO can do about China. But the other side of the independence coin was Gadhafi’s determination to sever Africa’s oppressive ties with Western financial institutions. Gadhafi was not only in the process of creating the African Investment Bank (providing interest-free loans) and the African Monetary Fund (to be centred in Cameroon) eliminating the role of the IMF, it was also in the planning stages of creating a new, gold-backed African currency that would seriously weaken the U.S. by undermining the dollar. All the Libyan funds set aside for these Pan-African projects were frozen by NATO and will now be handed over — carefully, no doubt — to the neo-colonial puppets installed in Tripoli.

Gadhafi was also instrumental in killing AFRICOM, a new U.S. military command and control base intended to add military intimidation to American economic domination. Look for that initiative to be revived.

The implications of the conflict in Libya are thus just beginning to unfold. NATO will be mired in Libya for years to come to ensure its oil objectives are met and to manipulate “democratic elections” so its friends on the NTC can maintain control. While there has been a muted response so far from African countries and the African Union it will come sooner or later. They cannot fail to recognize that regime change in Libya was all about sabotaging pan-African unity.

George Monbiot: Out of the Ashes

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:10:00 +0000

Now is the time to start planning for a new economy, not dependent on growth.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd August 2011

How much of this is real? How much of the economic growth of the past 60 years? Of the wealth and comfort, the salaries and pensions which older people accept as normal, even necessary? How much of it is an illusion, created by levels of borrowing – financial and ecological – which cannot be sustained? Go to Ireland and you’ll see that even bricks and mortar are a mirage: the marvels of the new economy, built on debt, stand empty and worthless.

To sustain the illusion, we have inflicted more damage since 1950 to the planet’s living systems than we achieved in the preceding 100,000 years. The damage will last for centuries; the benefits might not see out the year. Ireland, again, points a withered finger at the future. Among other iniquities, the government forced a motorway through the Gabhra Valley, part of a site – the Hill of Tara complex – comparable in its importance to Stonehenge(1). It was both an act of wilful vandalism and a notice of intent: no consideration would impede the economic miracle. The road hadn’t opened before the miracle collapsed.

Once our needs had been met, continued economic growth did most people few favours. During the second half of the growth frenzy, unemployment rose, inequality rose, social mobility declined, the poor lost amenities (such as housing) while the rich enhanced theirs. In 2004, at the height of the longest boom the United Kingdom has ever experienced, the Nuffield Foundation published this extraordinary finding: “Rises in mental health problems seem to be associated with improvements in economic conditions.”(2)

Now, bar the shouting, it’s over. Last week the Wall Street consultant Nouriel Roubini, one of the few who predicted the financial crash, spelt out the fix we’re in(3). Governments cannot afford to bail out the banks again. Quantitative easing can no longer help, nor can currency depreciation. Italy and Spain will be forced, in effect, to default and Germany won’t pay out any more. The successful capitalist reached this striking conclusion. “Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalisation, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labour to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct”(4).

Nor can the current economic system address the environmental crisis. Its advocates promised that economic growth and environmental damage could be decoupled: better technology and efficiency would allow us to use fewer resources even while increasing economic output. Nothing remotely like it has happened. In some cases there has been a decline in resource intensity, which means a lower use of materials per dollar of economic output but higher overall consumption. In some cases – such as iron ore, bauxite and cement – even this hasn’t happened: resource use per dollar has risen(5).

So far governments have responded to the renewed crisis of capitalism by frantically seeking to invoke the old magic again, to start the engine of creative destruction once more. The means to do so no longer exist. Even if they did, they would only delay and enlarge the underlying problems.

But now, in the wake of the English riots and faced with possible collapse, we are at last beginning to talk about the issues ignored while the illusion persisted: equality, exclusion, the feral rich and the discarded poor and, in WH Auden’s words, about “what the god had wrought / To please her son, the strong / Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles / Who would not live long.”(6)

The most hopeful sign that politicians might now be prepared to ask the big questions was the presence, in Ed Miliband’s pile of holiday reading, of Professor Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth(7). It’s a revolutionary text, now two years old, whose time has come(8).

It points out that the financial crisis was caused not by isolated malpractice, but by the systematic deregulation of the banks by governments, in order to stimulate economic growth by issuing more debt. Growth and the need to encourage it is the problem, and in the rich world it no longer bears any relationship to prosperity.

Jackson accepts that material well-being is a crucial component of prosperity, and that growth is essential to the well-being of the poorest nations. But in countries like the UK, continued growth and the policies which promote it undermine prosperity, which he defines as freedom from adversity or affliction. This means, among other blessings, health, happiness, good relationships, strong communities, confidence about the future, a sense of meaning and purpose.

But how do you escape from growth without tanking the economy – and our prosperity? Under the current system, you can’t: when growth stops, it collapses. So Jackson has begun developing a macro-economic model which would allow economic output to be stabilised. He experiments with raising the ratio of investment to consumption, changing the nature and conditions of investment and shifting the balance from private to public spending, while staying within tight constraints on the use of resources. He finds that the redistribution of both income and employment (through shorter working hours) is essential to the project. So is re-regulation of the banks, enhanced taxation of resources and pollution, and measures to discourage manic consumption, such as tighter restrictions on advertising.

His system is not wholly different to today’s: people will still spend and save, companies will still produce goods and services, governments will still raise taxes and spend money. It requires more government intervention than we’re used to; but so does every option we face from now on, especially if we try to sustain the growth illusion. The results, though, are radically different: a stable, growthless economy which avoids both financial and ecological collapse.

From now on, as the old dream dies, nothing is straightforward. But at least we have the beginning of a plan.

References:

1. See http://www.savetara.com/

2. The study was later published in the academic press: Stephan Collishaw, Barbara Maughan, Robert Goodman, and Andrew Pickles, November 2004. Time trends in adolescent well-being. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 45, Issue 8, pages 1350–1362. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00335.x http://bit.ly/oa4c0M

3. Nouriel Roubini, 18 August 2011. Is capitalism doomed? http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011816104945411574.html

4. As above

5. Tim Jackson, 2009, Prosperity Without Growth. Sustainable Development Commission. http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/data/files/publications/prosperity_without_growth_report.pdf

6. WH Auden, 1952. The Shield of Achilles.

7. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2021735/Ed-Miliband-prepares-summer-holiday-reading-pile-books-leadership.html

8. I read the online version, published by the Sustainable Development Commission in March 2009: http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/data/files/publications/prosperity_without_growth_report.pdf The book of the same title was first published in October 2009, by Earthscan.

George Monbiot: A Great Depression Is All But Inevitable

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:57:00 +0000

Sounding the Deeps

If this analysis is correct, a Great Depression is all but inevitable.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 10th October 2011.

I stumbled out into the autumn sunshine, figures ricocheting around in my head, still trying to absorb what I had heard. I felt as if I had just attended a funeral: a funeral at which all of us got buried. I cannot claim to have understood everything in the lecture: Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theory and the 41-line differential equation were approximately 15.8 metres over my head(1). But the points I grasped were clear enough. We’re stuffed: stuffed to a degree that scarcely anyone yet appreciates.

Professor Steve Keen was one of the few economists to predict the financial crisis. While the OECD and the US Federal Reserve foresaw a “great moderation”, unprecedented stability and steadily rising wealth (2,3), he warned that a crash was bound to happen. Now he warns that the same factors which caused the crash show that what we’ve heard so far is merely the first rumble of the storm. Without a radical change of policy, another Great Depression is all but inevitable.

The problem is spelt out at greater length in the new edition of his book Debunking Economics(4). Like his lecture, it is marred by some unattractive boasting and jostling. But the graphs and figures it contains provide a more persuasive account of the causes of the crash and of its likely evolution than anything which has yet emerged from Constitution Avenue or Threadneedle Street. This is complicated, but it’s in your interests to understand it. So please bear with me while I do my best to explain.

The official view, as articulated by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is that both the first Great Depression and the current crisis were caused by a lack of base money. Base money, or M0, is money that the central bank creates. It forms the reserves held by private banks, on the strength of which they issue loans to their clients. This practice is called fractional reserve banking: by issuing amounts of debt several times greater than their reserves, the private banks create money that didn’t exist before. Conventional economic theory predicts that when the central bank raises M0, this triggers a “money multiplier”: private banks generate more credit money (M1, M2 and M3), boosting economic growth and employment.

Bernanke, echoing claims by Milton Friedman, believed that the first Great Depression in the US was propelled by a fall in the supply of M0, which, he said, “reinforced … declines in the money multiplier.”(5) But, Keen shows, there is a weak association between M0 money supply and depression. There were six occasions after World War Two when M0 money supply fell faster than it did in 1928 and 1929. On five of these occasions there was a recession, but nothing resembling the scale of what happened at the end of the 1920s(6). In some cases unemployment rose when the rate of M0 growth was high and fell when it was low: results which defy Bernanke’s explanation. Steve Keen argues that it’s not changes in M0 which drive unemployment, but unemployment which triggers changes in M0: governments issue more cash when the economy runs into trouble.

He proposes an entirely different explanation for the Great Depression and the current crisis. Both events, he says, were triggered by a collapse in debt-financed demand(7). Aggregate demand in an economy like ours is composed of GDP plus the change in the level of debt. It is the sudden and extreme change in debt levels that makes demand so volatile and triggers recessions. The higher the level of private debt, relative to GDP, the more unstable the system becomes. And the more of this debt that takes the form of Ponzi finance – borrowing money to fund financial speculation – the worse the impact will be.

Keen shows how, from the late 1960s onwards, private sector debt in the US began to exceed GDP. It built up to wildly unstable levels from the late 1990s, peaking in 2008. The inevitable collapse in this rate of lending pulled down aggregate demand by 14%, triggering recession(8).

This should be easy enough to see with the benefit of hindsight, but what lends weight to Keen’s analysis is that he saw it with the benefit of foresight. In December 2005, while drafting an expert witness report for a court case, he looked up the ratio of private debt to GDP in his native Australia, to see how it had changed since the 1960s. He was astonished to discover that it had risen exponentially. He then did the same for the United States, with similar results(9). He immediately raised the alarm: here, he warned, were the conditions for an economic crisis far greater than those of the mid-1970s and early 1990s. A massive speculative bubble was close to bursting point. Needless to say, he was ignored by policy-makers.

Now, he tells us, a failure to address these problems will ensure that this crisis will run and run. The “debt-deflationary forces” unleashed today “are far larger than those that caused the Great Depression.”(10) In the 1920s, private debt rose by 50%. Between 1999 and 2009, it rose by 140%. The debt-to-GDP ratio in the US is still much higher than it was when the Great Depression began(11).

If Keen is right, the crippling sums spent on both sides of the Atlantic on refinancing the banks are a complete waste of money. They have not and they will not kickstart the economy, because M0 money supply is not the determining factor.

President Obama justified the bailout of the banks on the grounds that “a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that’s a multiplier effect”(12). But the money multiplier didn’t happen. The $1.3tn that Bernanke injected scarcely raised the amount of money in circulation: the 110% increase in M0 money led not to the 800 or 1000% increase in M1 money that Obama predicted, but a rise of just 20%(13). The bail-outs failed because M0 was not the cause of the crisis. The money would have achieved far more had it simply been given to the public. But, as Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy demonstrated over the weekend(14), governments have learnt nothing from this failure, and seek only to repeat it.

Instead, Keen says, the key to averting or curtailing a second Great Depression is to reduce the levels of private debt, through a unilateral write-off, or jubilee. The irresponsible loans the banks made should not be honoured. This will mean taking many banks into receivership(15). Otherwise private debt will sort itself out by traditional means: mass bankruptcy, which will generate an even greater crisis.

These are short-term measures. I would like to see them leading to a radical reappraisal of our economic aims and moves to develop a steady-state economy, of the kind proposed by Herman Daly and Tim Jackson(16). Governments and central bankers now have an unprecedented opportunity to learn from the catastrophic mistakes they’ve made. It is an opportunity they seem determined not to take.

References:

1. Professor Steve Keen, 6th October 2011. Alternative theories of macroeconomic behaviour: a critique of neoclassical macroeconomics and an outline of the alternative Monetary Circuit Theory approach. Nuffield College, Oxford.

2. Ben Bernanke, 20th February 2004. The Great Moderation. http://www.360doc.com/content/11/0402/23/67028_106822017.shtml

3. Jean-Philippe Cotis, May 2007. Achieving further rebalancing. OECD Economic Outlook. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4456/is_81/ai_n27271380/

4. Steve Keen, 2011. Debunking Economics: revised and expanded edition. Zed Books, London.

5. Ben Bernanke, 2000. Essays on the Great Depression, page 153. Princeton University Press. Quoted by Steve Keen, as above.

6. Steve Keen, page 302.

7. Page 300.

8. Page 341.

9. Page 336-337.

10. Page 349.

11. Page 348.

12. Barack Obama, 14th April 2009. Remarks on the economy. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-economy-georgetown-university

13. Page 306.

14. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/09/france-germany-agree-plan-banks

15. Page 355.

16. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/22/out-of-the-ashes/

Beyond Public Anthropology

noreply@blogger.com (AJP) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:25:00 +0000

Keynote address by Maximilian C. Forte delivered by video to the 8th Annual Public Anthropology Conference, “(Re)Defining Power: Paradigms of Praxis,” American University, Washington, DC, 14-16 October, 2011.