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Fieldwork reveals: Bush administration is lying about the “war on terror” in the Sahara

Published on December 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, journal articles / papers, poverty, University / Academia, Us and Them

“The US is sending troops to the Sahara desert of west Africa to open what it calls a new front in the war on terror”, the Guardian reported three years ago. “The ‘official truth’ about the ‘war on terror’ on the Sahara-Sahel is a ‘lie’”, anthropologist Jeremy Keenan writes in Anthropology Today December and argues that in this situation, anthropologists have to act as independent witnesses and have to refuse collaborating with intelligence agencies and government bodies.

Keenan has been – according to himself – the sole ‘external’ or ‘foreign’ witness to a sequence of events associated with the US administration’s ‘global war on terror’ that many Tuareg believe has irreversibly transformed the central Sahara and Sahel, as well as their lives and livelihoods. Keenan has done research in the central Sahara for more then 30 years. He writes:

As a result of more or less continuous and at times microscopically detailed field research, much of which has been undertaken by and in collaboration with local Tuareg in Algeria, Niger, Mali and Libya, and with Toubou in Chad, we now know that all the incidents used to justify the launch of this new front in the ‘war on terror’ were either fiction, in that they simply did not happen, or were manufactured by US and Algerian military intelligence services.

(…)

How and why did such a monstrous deception take place? The ‘how’ is simple. First, the Algerian and US military intelligence services channelled a stream of disinformation to an industry of ‘terrorism experts’, conservative ideologues and a compliant media, whose prevailing ‘cut and paste’ culture has made them the perfect mouthpiece for an administration that operates through the Orwellian concept of ‘reality control’ and ‘proof by reiteration’. The result is that several thousand articles have turned the great ‘lie’ into the ‘official truth’.

Second, if a story is to be fabricated, it helps if the location is far away and ‘beyond verification’. The Sahara is the perfect place – larger than the United States and effectively closed to public access.

As we know, the CIA has started sponsering anthropologists to gather sensitive information in their so-called “war on terror”.

Here, anthropologists have a key role to play, Keenan writes:

The role of the anthropologist in such situations (as in all his/her work) must be to provide field-based information that can counter the propaganda emanating from the ever growing (and now increasingly privatized) intelligence and other war agencies. At the very least, the anthropologist must be the witness, the recorder, perhaps the interpreter and, where necessary, the author of the ‘truth’.

In the present critical juncture, anthropologists have a key role to play in the ‘war on terror’: to remain located outside the corrupting sphere of intelligence agencies and government bodies and to act as independent witnesses and reporters. This requires considerable courage, not necessarily because of dangers in the field situation, but because access to the field, on which the anthropologist’s professional career often depends, is likely to be terminated.

Even more serious for anthropologists in American universities is that such actions, especially in the prevailing‘McCarthyist’ climate of the Bush-Cheney administration, may increasingly lead to self-censorship as the result of threats to employment prospects.

The risks are not so high in ‘old Europe’. But there is no certainty that similar pressures as those in the USA will not be brought to bear on anthropologists and other academics in the UK. After all, it was only in October that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s offer of £1.3 million to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)45 attempted to inveigle academics, anthropologists in particular, to help it in ‘combating terrorism by countering radicalisation’.

In this duplicitous incident, the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) played a key role in getting the project cancelled, at least for the time being. With such potential threats to anthropologists greater now than at any time in the past, it is imperative that our professional associations publicly recommit themselves to the protection of all anthropologists from any such pressures and threats.

The text is not available online (for subscribers only. But Keenan has written on this issue here as well:

Jeremy Keenan: Bush’s Imaginary Front in the War on Terror (AlterNet, 28.9.06)

More information:

Saharan peoples are falsely accused of terrorist acts (ESRC Science Today, June 2004)

Jason Motlagh: The Trans Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative: U.S. takes terror fight to Africa’s ‘Wild West’ (Global Research, San Francisco Chronicle, 30.12.05)

Anthropology Today editor Gustaaf Houtman comments:

If anthropologists, as a particularly exposed branch of academia, are to have any value at all in the ‘war on terror’, we must, to adopt a Quaker maxim coined in Nazi Germany, ‘talk truth to power’. But talking truth is clearly not enough. We must, first, be wary of ‘spin’ and find new and more appropriate ways to converse with government agencies without compromising our academic independence. And second, we must ensure we are actually heard. So let us engage the world of popular communications to our best ability on issues that matter.

UPDATE:

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information / see also debate on this on Savage Minds

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Bush, “war of terror” and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

USA: Censorship threatens fieldwork – A call for resistance

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Embedded anthropology? Anthropologist studies Canadian soldiers in the field

“Tribal Iraq Society” – Anthropologists engaged for US war in Iraq

"The US is sending troops to the Sahara desert of west Africa to open what it calls a new front in the war on terror", the Guardian reported three years ago. "The ‘official truth’ about the ‘war on terror’ on…

San Jose: American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq

Published on November 21, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, politics, University / Academia

In San Jose, the members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) approved resolutions condemning the occupation of Iraq and the use of torture. The events of Saturday’s meeting do represent a “noteworthy democratic moment in the history of American anthropology and in higher academia’s struggle to retain some control over the knowledge it produces”, anthropologist David Price writes in The Counterpunch:

The first resolution condemns the American occupation of Iraq; calls for an immediate withdrawal of troops, the payment of reparations, and it asks that all individuals committing war crimes against Iraqis be prosecuted. This statement passed with little debate or dissent.

The second resolution condemns not only the use of torture by the Bush administration, but it denounces the use of anthropological knowledge in torture and extreme interrogations.

The AAA’s statement stands in stark contrast with the American Psychological Association’s ambivalent policies which provides psychologists working in military and intelligence settings with some cover should they wish to assist in extreme interrogations or torture.

One of the concerns underlying this resolution comes from reports by Seymour Hersh that CIA interrogators consulted anthropological works such as Raphael Patai’s book, The Arab Mind, to better design culture-specific means of torture and interrogation. This resolution passed unanimously with little debate.

The resolutions were co-written by Roberto González, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, and Kanhong Lin, a graduate student in anthropology at American University.

>> read the whole story in the Counterpunch

UPDATE 2 (11.12.06

Press Release: Anthropologists weigh in on Iraq, torture at annual meeting (pdf)

UPDATE:

Savage Minds: Discussion about AAA democracy

SEE ALSO:

First news from the AAA-conference?

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information

Bush, “war of terror” and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Blogging and Public Anthropology: When free speech costs a career

Published on September 25, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, politics, University / Academia

As many of us know, Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been fired for his anarchist activism. He’s not the only one who was punished for leaving the academic ivory tower. More and more academics have started blogging, exposing their personal opinions to the world. The Yale Herald has an interesting story about “how profs’ political advocacy outside academia can threaten their success within it”:

The recent explosion of professors using their academic bully pulpits to expound on everything from federal sentencing law to the need for a Palestinian state raises questions of responsibility and consequence. Every year, more professors join the blogosphere, expanding into a medium that lets them write anything about anything and makes them advocates as well as teachers.

Mazin Qumsiyeh for example was hired by the Yale School of Medicine:

He had advocated locally and nationally for Palestinian rights under his title as a Yale professor. Five years later, he was looking for a new job.

Qumsiyeh is the editor of Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web.

Last year, Yale decided to woo Professor Juan Cole away from Michigan. Then it changed its mind:

The provost’s office refused to comment on the reasons for his rejection; Dr. Cole refused to comment on this story. But many eyes turned toward Cole’s blog as a factor in the decision, one that may have raised his profile and polarized opinion on his candidacy. On his site, “Informed Comment,” Cole has provided commentary on the news coming out of the Middle East since 2001.

And the popular anarchist anthropologist David Graeber was invited to give this year’s Malinowski lecture, an honor given only to the world’s most promising young anthropologists. His contract went up for renewal last year:

He had been a controversial figure, but now finds sleeping on couches in his friends’ New Haven apartments after giving up his lease.
(…)
When Graeber returned from a one-year sabbatical in 2002—having joined forces in the interim with anti-war and anti-globalization groups such as the Direct Action Network and Ya Basta — he said he found his welcome back much colder than his farewell. “I thought a ‘hello’ would have been reasonable,” he said. “All of the sudden, no one was talking to me.” He continued to be a prolific writer and researcher, but his future no longer looked so rosy.

>> read the whole story in The Yale Herald (LINK UPDATED 3.7.2022)

Bush, “war of terror” and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

As many of us know, Yale anthropologist David Graeber has been fired for his anarchist activism. He's not the only one who was punished for leaving the academic ivory tower. More and more academics have started blogging, exposing their personal…

(updated) Embedded anthropology? Anthropologist studies Canadian soldiers in the field

Published on July 6, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ethics, fieldwork / methods, Us and Them

(Links updated 30.7.2020) Anthropologist Anne Irwin has spent years in dangerous places with front line troops to observe how soldiers construct their identities as warriors. She wears the same combat uniform and body armour as the troops when she’s in the field. At the moment, she is researching how Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan bolster their identities by sharing their battlefield experiences through storytelling with their peers:

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.

She says:

“These are tough, hard guys who people think of as being very one-dimensional. I guess what really strikes me is how much they really care for each other. How they can just pick themselves up and keep going.”

Irwin isn’t really “neutral”. She has spent 16 years in the Canadian Forces reserve – not as an academic. She retired as a Military Police officer with the rank of Major.

Irwin’s doctoral thesis at the University of Manchester was entitled: The social organization of soldiering: a Canadian infantry company in the field.

“Scientist studies soldiers ‘outside the wire'” (ctv.ca, 27.8.06)

Her paper “Soldiers Do It in the Field” can be downloaded as pdf.

UPDATE 1:

This story was also covered by the Livejournal Anthropology Community: “It seems like embedded anthropology to me”:

My point is that embedded anthropology would imply certain ethical and methodological problems in ethnography. These aren’t just a bunch of guys being studied, they’re a bunch of guys committing violent acts for highly-contested political goals.

(…)

In a world where journalists and spies are considered one and the same (thanks to even the military’s intel coming in directly from CNN in some cases), and with anthropology’s shadowy history of being used as cover for spying, how are anthropologists regarded in situations like these in general?

UPDATE 2: Similar problems of embeddedness might have occured in the film “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” by anthropologist Sam Dunn. He has been metal-fan and headbanger for years. Of course, his background has influenced the way he presented his findings, according to a review in The Japan Times (Link no longer working):

The film only partly succeeds in its mission, mostly due to Dunn’s dual roles here: an anthropologist, by nature, needs to have a critical distance from the society he puts under the microscope. Dunn, however, displays a missionary’s zeal in preaching the glory of metal, and explaining away its bad image. Dunn (…) appears in the film narrating, interviewing his idols, and headbanging with devil-horn fingers.

SEE ALSO:

Secret rituals: Folklorist studied the military as an occupational folk group

Anthropologist shoots down stereotypes about gun enthusiasts (Book review)

(Links updated 30.7.2020) Anthropologist Anne Irwin has spent years in dangerous places with front line troops to observe how soldiers construct their identities as warriors. She wears the same combat uniform and body armour as the troops when she's in…

Trying to catch up… (notes)

Published on June 6, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, fieldwork / methods, indigenous people / minorities, internal notes

(post in progress) Threatening deadlines prevented me from updating this blog as often as I should/ would like to and I haven’t checked the news for a while. Here are at least some of recent blog posts:

Alex Golub: Article on the Ipili in the Ottowa Citizen

We’re at War: Savage Minds about anthropology and the CIA, discussing a recent article by John Gledhill

Cicilie Fagerlid: Politics in the banlieues… encore

New paper by Mizuko Ito: Kids’ participation in new media cultures

MindSpace: Notes on corporate ethnography

Mindspace: The ethnographer as an outsider and Fieldnotes: Insiders and Outsiders in Ethnography

FieldNotes: Recent News Stories: East Africa and Corporate Ethnography

(post in progress) Threatening deadlines prevented me from updating this blog as often as I should/ would like to and I haven't checked the news for a while. Here are at least some of recent blog posts:

Alex Golub: Article on…