As to what to do with it – I think the answer is, foreground it, explain how I’m filling in the gaps, be clear on what’s not there, as best as possible. All any of us can do is muddle along.

I can see how redactions must make your work difficult, but on one level they might make explicit what goes unnoticed in other ethnographic research. People don’t always give you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in any ethnographic encounter for a variety of reasons – you might be treading on sensitive subjects, or people could edit out information that puts them in an unfavorable light.

When I’ve given incomplete and inaccurate answers in an interview I’ve tended to try to hide that fact, obviously. You talk around things, leave things out, etc. The whole idea is to not let the questioner know that they are not getting the whole truth.

So, it might not be that your information is less complete than some ideal of typical research. Rather, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s phrasing – whereas many of us have unknown unknowns in our work (things we don’t know that we don’t know) you’ve got known unknowns (things that you know that you don’t know).

As far as what to do with it, not a clue.

Don’t apologize for sharing information. Kilcullen has been working with David Petraeus for some time, I believe. He’s one of a handful of anthropologists who are publicly working with the “Coalition of the Willing,” or whatever the euphemism is for the multinational force currently occupying Iraq. I think the New Yorker ran a profile on him? I can’t remember exactly when, but I believe it was written by George Packer. You will probably be able to find it on the web. Cheers. Laura

“His chief adviser on counterinsurgency is an Australian Lieutenant Colonel named David Kilcullen who has a PhD in anthropology with Islamic extremism in Indonesia his research topic.”
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/

Sheldon

One of the things I was going to talk about in my next post was the fact that the BAU-1 documents detailing FBI tactics are blank. However, there are other places, and other sources, where there’s more information on how the FBI’s behavioral experts work. They seem to be psychologists, primarily. Alfred McCoy’s book, A Question of Torture, does a nice job differentiating between FBI and other agencies’ approaches to interrogation – as he points out on page 207, “While the Army, Navy, and CIA are now mired in painful internal inquiries over torture, the FBI has emerged from four years of the war on terror with no charges of human rights abuse.”

I’ll get a lot of flack for saying this, but in the spirit of Tom’s comment above – about practical alternatives – if you want to point to the least of evils, FBI’s interrogation style is probably the best alternative. But then again, I think that the Army’s Field Manual 34-52 also emphasized building rapport, and certainly emphasize the importance of not violating the Geneva Conventions. They’ve also rewritten their HUMINT (Human Intelligence) collection procedures as a result of the AG scandal.

My sense is that all of these agencies – all of which grew up during the Cold war – were caught when 9/11 occurred without a set of interrogation practices that spoke to what they perceived as the particular challenges of this category of Other. This starts to get into the institutional culture question, and how the entire national security community is reorienting itself to deal with what what they perceive as new threats, quite different from the old Soviet enemy they were trained to deal with. As Lagouranis points out in his memoir, his formal training focused on things like getting information about Soviet troop formations and tank numbers. This implies that interrogation techniques, at least a few years ago, underwent a rapid reorientation to post Cold war realities – which could be another reason why there was such a proliferation of “new” techniques, particularly among DoD.

In establishing the BAU, FBI seems to have been marshaling its existing resources to better address its new Muslim interrogees. In this particular collection, for example, you’ll find a couple of memos (e.f., 2743) detailing BAU-1’s establishment as a part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, talking a bit about the NCAVC’s history in investigating everything from serial murders to child abductions, and listing its capabilities, and talking about the importance of getting new understandings of what motivates terrorist groups.

As for context, there’s an entire collection of emails in there that indicates who the FBI is working with at GTMO – namely, DoD and DHS. Emails among FBI personnel, as the FBI was collecting its own agents’ allegations of detainee abuse among DoD and DHS personnel, are striking in the way they illustrate the FBI agents contrasting their agency’s ethos of interrogation to what they’re seeing among DoD and DHS personnel.

Lastly, the transcripts have headers that indicate they were circulating in the interagency world – which, at a gross level of detail, would mean DoD (and most of the FBI interviews do have a DoD person present) and DHS, and probably CIA, too, and maybe even State. But it’s hard to tell.

Check out 3912-3914 – the interactions in that interview are particularly interesting.

Another issue, I imagine, is establishing context for the documents. FBI 1329-1333 for example is pretty interesting, but I would want to know who this was written for, and how far it was disseminated, before I could draw firm conclusions. It is fascinating though that the FBI’s discursive style of interrogation seems to attempt to mirror the imagined native viewpoint in providing rationales for co-operation – appeals to logic through parables and the like.

I do feel like I’m somewhat clumsy at this, but if all I do in this blog experience is set off a richer and more vibrant debate about interrogation, torture, and anthropology than, “Patai is being used in torture! Interrogators are reading Patai!” then I’ll be satisfied.

By the way, I think I’m going to start my own blog on anthropology and torture. This has been quite an experience, and it’s only been a couple of weeks.

BTW, I asked you in a previous post if you’d done much research on this topic, and I’m still waiting for an answer. You seem to pose a lot of questions, but answer few.

Answer: Count down exactly 14 lines from where you ask this were you say, “…I guess that counts as improving interrogation? I’m not sure.”

These are good questions, actually, maybe the best I’ve gotten so far.

It’s easy to handle the FBI one: rapport building seems to be the FBI’s own construction of its approach to getting information from people, and they seem to contrast this to the blatantly coercive stuff that other agencies do (like hooding people, or locking them in rooms with strobelights and loud music for hours on end, or worse). Believe me, when you read about how the FBI handles interrogation, and compare that to some of the stuff that other agencies have done, it does start to look like “rapport.” But I rush to add that, just because they call it “rapport building,” doesn’t mean that this is some kind of an equal process of relationship building. It’s very manipulative, as I note above. But what would any of us expect? This is the FBI, after all.

As for the culture part, you’re right – the arguable to profound continuum doesn’t work. Good point. I had to work fast to summarize this.

I see a couple of interesting things for anthropologists here:

Firstly, as I pointed out above, there’s no reason to assume that people can’t develop their own “cultural” understandings of the Other, without the involvement of anthropologists or even with ethnography. Actually, you make my point better than I do: interrogation isn’t anthropological, but interrogators do seem to be developing what we might call instrumental “folk theories” about the Other. So despite our worries about anthropologists getting involved in interrogation, our thinking about culture might actually be far too nuanced for application in this kind of setting. And – I’ll make what some are going to say is an extreme statement here – why would anyone need anthropology for torture? Anthropology might be able to understand torture in interesting ways, but torture isn’t exactly applied anthropology.

Secondly, I’m interested in the way narratives of US empire and the GWOT being enacted in this setting. I couldn’t get into all of this in such a short entry – a blog entry is only 1000 words, and this article I’m working on is upwards of 10000 words now. But if we’re to develop an anthropological approach to empire, and get beyond the small-scale village kind of ethnography of the past (PATAI!), I think we need to figure out ways to connect these really big macro structures and processes – like an ostensibly “Global” war on terrorism – to the microdynamics of individual interactions in settings like interrogation, so that we can better understand how individuals enact and communicate empire, and how this might vary across institutional settings (i.e., FBI vs. DoD).

As for the redactions, that’s a tricky one. It is possible to get some sense of what might be missing in the narratives. Each redaction gets a code attached to it – you can look at the documents and see these – so it’s possible to guess very generally at what’s being withheld. Identifying information is always removed. You’ve hit on one of the methodological challenges of working with this kind of a collection. If you’re game, you might take a look at some of the documents and see what you think. I’ve provided a link above and would love to know what you see in them. So far, I don’t know of anyone who’s gone through these, so – as I said in my first post – this is somewhat lonely work.

Also, another question! How do you consider the redaction of specific parts of the documentation affects the representativeness of your work?

How do you get from “arguably cultural” in paragraph 9 to “profoundly cultural” in paragraph 12? Personally I would say ‘vaguely cultural’ with your descriptions pretty much falling into line with what many of us would expect. Othering, obviously, is begun prior to interrogation, and so I for one would certainly expect to see it performed there. But analytically I am not sure dressing up this stuff in fancy anthro-speak gets us very far.

Also, how is your second case an example of FBI interrogators “strongly emphasiz[ing] rapport-building over coercion”? It reads almost the exact opposite to me!