Today's Stories

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

Weekend Edition
December 12 / 14, 2008

First Read of a Leaked Handbook

The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

By DAVID PRICE

Human Terrain Systems, one of the U.S. military’s key counterinsurgency efforts to stabilize the occupation of Iraq, appears to suddenly be under serious attack by groups that once offered it support.  This latest round of attacks comes not from progressive anthropologists like me or my fellow members of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists; these attacks come from groups with far more centralized power and access to documents and media than any of us  academic critics.  I don’t know who is behind these attacks but they may be coming from within the belly of the Pentagon or within Human Terrain itself.

On Thursday December 11, two apparently separate attacks were launched.  One attack came in the form of publication of a fierce editorial in the pages of the British scientific journal Nature. It declared that the “the US military's human-terrain programme needs to be brought to a swift close.”  This position is all the more devastating when contrasted with an editorial supporting the principles of Human Terrain and other forms of military-funded anthropological work published by Nature just five months ago.  A second attack came the same day with the leak and web distribution on Wikileaks.com of the UNCLASSIFIED Human Terrain Systems Handbook.  These two attacks, whether coordinated or independent, further destabilize  already shaky support for the poorly designed Human Terrain Systems program.

I don’t pretend to understand why these attacks are now converging now, but it is no secret that some divisions in the Pentagon oppose the “hearts and minds” strategy of counterinsurgency, and it is possible that some of these actors are working to undermine Human Terrain by leaking this document and sewing seeds of discontent in public discourse for their own reasons; reasons quite separate from my own and having to do with their favoring the use of brute military force over soft counterinsurgency. 

The Human Terrain program is the brainchild of anthropologist Montgomery McFate, whose longtime interest in supporting the suppression of insurgent groups through the adoption of counterinsurgency tactics led to the formation of Human Terrain Systems based at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas and run through BAE Systems contractors.  Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are designed to supplant or complement roles that Civil Affairs units have traditionally played in assessing the needs and conditions of occupied populations.  As the recently leaked Handbook states, “Human Terrain Teams bring another aspect of the population: the average persons’ perspective, when the HTT incorporates the “grass-roots” perspective with government and tribal perspectives.”  These Human Terrain Teams are designed to incorporate military-embedded anthropologists and other social sciences who interview members of local populations in war zones, often with armed Team members, sometimes wearing uniforms. 

Because of the complex ethical issues involved in conducting ethnographic fieldwork for occupying military forces in war zones, the Human Terrain Program is viewed by most anthropologists as being  highly problematic. In November 2007, the American Anthropological Association’s Executive Board produced a statement condemning the Human Terrain program for its inattention to basic anthropological ethical concerns for voluntary informed consent and the well-being of studied populations.

In the last half year, American journalist John Stanton has written a series of damaging exposés published here on the CounterPunch site, in Pravda and elsewhere detailing a failures of Human Terrain management and the program’s overall inefficiency in the field.  Stanton’s work draws largely on unidentified disgruntled Human Terrain personnel and paints a picture of fiscal mismanagement, poor field supervision, lack of training before sending social scientists into life-threatening situations, and a non-working “reach-back system” that was supposed to connect deployed field Human Terrain personnel with personnel located at HTS headquarters at Ft. Leavenworth. 

Nothing seems to be working right at Human Terrain.  During the past year two Human Terrain social scientists have been killed and last month saw an attack on,  and severe burning of, a third Human Terrain social scientist. Murder charges were recently filed against Human Terrain Team member Don Ayala. Ayala is accused of executing a detained  man believed to have attacked and burnt his Human Terrain Team colleague).  Many have tried to dismiss John Stanton and his work because it appears in alternative press sources but bastions of mainstream journalism have been giving the Human Terrain program a free ride since its inception, so I would not look to these sources to publish critical reports.  That Nature has turned against Human Terrain is big news.

Inside the Leaked Handbook

The recently leaked (unclassified) Human Terrain Team Handbook (September 2008) reflects Human Terrain’s vision that by aiding in the more sensitive occupation of populations, Human Terrain Teams are reducing violence.  The Handbook states that, “the end-state of Human Terrain Team support is to provide the unit the reasons why the population is doing what it is doing and thereby providing non-lethal options to the commander and his staff.”  This statement expresses the Handbook’s internal logic that: anthropologically based non-lethal subjugation = good; lethal subjugation = bad.  The Handbook ignores more traditional political and ethical considerations of anthropologists’ responsibilities following a logic more aligned with notions that subjugation of other cultures = bad.  Such traditional anthropological considerations are outside the logical scope of the Handbook; it takes anthropologically aided subjugation as an acceptable goal from the outset.

The Handbook claims that Human Terrain personnel produce “expert human terrain & social science advice based on a constantly updated, user-friendly ethnographic and socio-cultural database of the area of operations that leverages both the existing body of knowledge from the social sciences and humanities as well as on the ground research conducted by the team.”   But as John Stanton’s reporting clarifies,  the needed software and the “tactical overwatch reach-back links” at the Ft. Leavenworth Reachback Research Center has never worked as planned with failed software systems and personnel reportedly unable to use the system. 

The Handbook describes how a Human Terrain “toolkit” can be used to make subjects living in military occupied areas understandable to the U.S. military forces occupying them.  This toolkit is used in ways designed to make populations (to borrow from James Scott’s Seeing Like a State) “legible” and thus controllable.  The Handbook states that:

“HTTs will use the Map-HT Toolkit of developmental hardware and software to capture, consolidate, tag, and ingest human terrain data. HTTs use this human terrain information gathered to assist commanders in understanding the operational relevance of the information as it applies to the unit’s planning processes. The expectation is that the resulting courses of actions developed by the staff and selected by the commander will consistently be more culturally harmonized with the local population, which in Counter-Insurgency Operations should lead to greater success. It is the trust of the indigenous population that is at the heart of the struggle between coalition forces and the insurgents.”

Human Terrain social scientists’ mission is thus expressed in terms of engineering the “trust of the indigenous population.”  The Handbook clarifies how Human Terrain Systems envision its role as a tool by occupying military forces:, “the HTT will research, interpret, archive, and provide cultural data, information, and knowledge to optimize operational effectiveness by harmonizing courses of action within the cultural context of the environment, and provide the commander with operationally relevant, socio-cultural data, information, knowledge and understanding, and the embedded expertise to integrate that understanding into the commander’s planning and decision-making processes.”  Like many other contemporary articulations of anthropologists’ working with the military, the Handbook acts if its project is somehow separate from larger neo-imperial missions of invasion and occupation.

Consistent with claims by McFate and others supporting Human Terrain Systems, the Handbook insists that Human Terrain Teams should not engage in “Lethal Effects Targeting.” 

But the Handbook remains silent on how the supposedly non-classified collected Human Terrain data will be protected from the “unintended” uses by others. It does state that “the commander has an intelligence section for lethal targeting; what they require is a section that can explain and delineate the non-lethal environment (e.g. tribal relationships and local power structures), as well as the second and third order effects of planned lethal and non-lethal operations.”  Human Terrain Systems appears to naively believe that it can control the uses to which its data is put by others.  In a similar state of denial, the Handbook includes the admonition that personnel should: “avoid direct involvement in tactical questioning. Tactical questioning is a function of the intelligence world and designed to elicit primarily lethal-targeting information. It would also endanger relationships with the local population if HTTs are seen being involved with the “interrogating” of friends/family.” This statement pretends that the world of the intelligence community is neatly compartmentalized and could not possibly have access to HTT reports, and that by insisting that HTT personnel avoid “direct involvement” with the intelligence community somehow means that whatever passive involvement they have is acceptable.  The Handbook does not address the possibility that as Human Terrain Personnel collect information reporting identities of cooperative and compliant individuals or groups as “not” Taliban or “not” sympathetic to al-Quaida, those occupying the negative space of these composite pictures risk becoming targets. 

The academic lineages exposed in the leaked Handbook are enlightening.  In particular, the Handbook draws heavily from and cites the work of American anthropologist and research methods guru H. Russell Bernard (Disclosure: I have known Russ Bernard for over twenty years, he was a member of my doctoral dissertation committee, I consider him a friend.) and anthropologist James Spradley—both highly regarded anthologists and research methodologists. The Handbook recommends several specific ethnographic tools, some of which are found in many anthropologists’ toolkits including: “The core software components (Analyst Notebook, ArcGIS, Anthropac, UCINet and NetDraw) allow the team to conduct network analysis, Modeling and Pattern analysis and geo-spatial analysis that place those people and events in place and time.” The Handbook includes sample interview forms that can be used to catalog members of occupied populations in remote databases.  There are discussions of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis written at a high school or middle school level of sophistication, describing such techniques as producing ethnographic field notes or conducting structured and unstructured interviews.  James Spradley’s 1979 “Taxonomy of Ethnographic Questions” and his “Elements in the Ethnographic Interview” are cited and reproduced in full. The Handbook includes a list of an interesting knowledge-tree of local concerns that military occupiers should be aware of—this list includes such items as knowledge of local archaeological resources, hand gestures, shortages of water, electricity and other resources.  The list provides a matrix to be used by anyone wishing to inventory items needed when attempting to establish full spectrum dominance over a given occupied people.  

The inclusion of these specific methodologies, toolsets, interview and inventory sets is an artifact of  Human Terrain Systems’ focus on neo-positivist notions that social control of the human landscape can be achieved by the recording of, and then manipulation of key variables in these environments.  At a theoretical level, the Human Terrain project is reliant on a form of social engineering where the anthropologists working inside the program seem to believe they are reducing harm for the studied occupied populations, but the program itself is designed to manipulate these populations as studied objects—objects to be controlled for what has been determined as “their own good.”

The most startling methodological revelation in the Handbook comes when the current Human Terrain project connects itself to past anthropological efforts to catalog disparate cultural traits in George Peter Murdock’s Human Relations Area File, a project with financial roots firmly planted in anthropologists’ efforts to catalog cultures during the Second World War.  The Handbook states that,

“As part of the research, we will eventually use the Organization of Cultural Materials schema in order to contribute our research results to an existing database of cultural practices and social systems known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) housed at Yale University. This practice allows us to provide significant, abundant, and contemporary socio-cultural information that others around the world may use in their own research. This practice will also allow us to tie into the HRAF database and compare the existence of one social practice, symbolic system, or historical process in our area of operations with others elsewhere in the world. Such cross-cultural analysis enables us to get closer to explaining causation and make weak assertions of what will likely happen in the population in the near future.”

With this statement Human Terrain comes full circle and connects to World War II projects using anthropological data to inform military interactions with occupied peoples, yet there is no expressed awareness of the many failures of the HRAF project, or of the problems faced by World War Two users of Murdock’s data.  Instead, the Handbook blindly marches towards a high-modern world of imagined social engineering where handheld data units provide occupiers with the sort of specific data readings that Captain Kirk, Science Officer Spock and their red shirted human terrain ensigns had in the original Star Trek series.  But this project isn’t exploring where no [hu]man has gone before, it is only a broken high tech version of colonial projects that many anthropologists hoped had become part of a shameful disciplinary past.

In a few places the Handbook makes fleeting suggestions that issues of research ethics are being dealt with by someone or something else.  Without explanation, the Handbook states that “an accompanying document is written outlining how the research will comply with the protection of human research subjects according to 45 CFR 46 to ensure the research falls within accepted ethical guidelines.”  The Handbook also claims that, “the results of our research provide non-target data that suggests Courses of Action to the commander and his staff. Our research is performed in the same manner in which academic social scientists conduct their research and is similarly rooted in theory and complete with ethical review boards.”  It is difficult to evaluate the claims of non-targeting.  In his forthcoming book American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, anthropologist Roberto González quotes U.S. Army, Lt. Colonel Gian Gentile, scoffing at suggestions that such cultural data would not be used for targeting in active war situations, responding to similar claims by Human Terrain anthropologist Marcus Griffin: “Don’t fool yourself. These Human Terrain Teams whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy in the Civil War in Iraq.”  That the Handbook claims HTT’s research is “complete with ethical review boards” is news to me, and I await further clarification for how this claim is actually being implemented. I remain skeptical that this has in fact been implemented in any meaningful way. 

Human Terrain Systems is a failed attempt to approach problems of subjugation or occupation with tools and understanding of cultural nuance and culturally appropriate manipulation.  Many anthropologists like myself oppose these methods on ethical and political grounds. The ethical problems of voluntary informed consent, and protection of  research participants in such battle settings are ignored by Human Terrain, as is the political reality that anthropology is being used to aid and abet the forced occupation and subjugation of others.  Human Terrain supporters like McFate argue that it represents a nonviolent alternative to the use of force, but these supporters fail to address the larger political context of supporting conquest and subjugation, instead choosing poses in which they present themselves as if it is they who are actually “insurgents” working within and against the military as they try and teach the military to use less-lethal means of achieving conquest.  The leaked Handbook shows that this is not insurgency against the military; it is a betrayal of what might have been anthropology’s promise to represent those we study in ways that reflect not only who they are, but their own self interests. 

David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.  He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, just published by Duke University Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu

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