Laura – Don’t let the idiots get you down! The emperor has no clothes and apparently has forgotten how to do any research.

Michel Foucault answers: “The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power.”

From Laura–

Oh good lord. That comment about PDAs and decentralized surveillance was taken completely out of context. We were brainstorming themes of technology and security in public spaces, and my point was that just because something is technologically feasible (like putting sensors on PDAs) doesn’t mean it’s socially desirable. The first part of my sermon made it into the press release, but the second half didn’t. The guy writing the story missed about 9/10ths of the conversation, and a lot of the people present in that workshop were really irritated with him.

So, no, I am NOT an advocate of decentralized surveillance – quite the opposite, in fact.

a. was that really tony lagouranis
sending that email confirming that
interrogators used the arab mind,
or was this a cyber phony?

b. did icemole make up this insane
quote above, or does dr. laura really
have these sort of surveillance
goals in mind?

“…strain her credibility as a reputable scholar seeking real answers, and raise questions about the politics of her work. i do not understand the link between her writing on torture and her work for sandia weapons lab, but this raises questions about why she continues with her claim.”

“has any of your research on this been published in peer reviewed journals?
What is the exact number of (real, not imagined) current or former interrogators that have you interviewed and asked about the uses of The Arab Mind in their training?”

They may seem like innocent questions, but they are framed as attacks on one’s credibility (or “suspect” politics– what would that be exactly?).

Perhaps one other thing that should be made clear is that Savage Minds is not a venue for the publication of peer-reviewed scholarship, it is a venue for discussion of ongoing research and topics relating to anthropology. As such, I would expect commentators to be critical, yes, but to demand that every assertion be backed up by peer reviewed research and interview is simply disingenuous.

II. I also wish the military would read anthropology, but doesn’t everyone know that Patai’s narratives of arab others are so essentiallized deappropriations that only reified tropes of abusive othering could ever emerge from using such a misleading orientalist anthropological text?

If you have the uncontrollable desire to attack someone, attack me, I’m the one who invited Laura, and I’m the one insisting that even if Patai’s book was required reading for every member of the armed forces in America, it still doesn’t mean that anthropology is being used to develop torture techniques. In fact, I wish contemporary American cultural anthropology was required reading for everyone from grunts to generals… rather than some irrelevant and outdated work. I’m naive enough to think that it would have helped prevent such atrocity rather than perpetrate it.

If you want to read what I’ve done, google me on the web and check out my vita. I do publish in peer reviewed journals, but probably not in fields that you’re familiar with. I do mostly interdisciplinary work in computational science.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say that Americans are more protective of “these topics” than Europeans. I don’t think any of us in this discussion are “protective” of torture or interrogation.

I am fully, one hundred percent supportive of resolutions condemning torture. Torture is ALWAYS wrong. I don’t even buy the “ticking time bomb” scenario – it’s a red herring (all the guy would have to do is hold out until the bomb goes off, right?). However, I don’t see a need for specifically calling out any particular method or discipline. It’s like saying, “I’m opposed to the use of electricity in torture.”

Secondly, I’ve never said that the Arab Mind wasn’t used in training interrogators. Read what I’ve written. It’s on a lot of military reading lists, but it’s one of many sources on those reading lists. I can send you lots of examples if you want them.

Now, I did say that the documents I’ve reviewed show no evidence if a link between anthropology and Abu Ghraib. I stand by that. Nor do the documents reveal evidence that anthropology was systematically used in torture or interrogation during the time period that they cover (roughly 2003-2005) – unless you equate a few mentions of Patai’s book with “anthropology” as an entire discipline, and you count that as systematic use of anthropology. I don’t.

If you want a quick confirmation, go to the ACLU’s website and search for keywords like Patai, anthropologists, anthropology, Arab Mind. Last time I looked, I got handful of hits about of over 100,000 pages of documentation. I think ‘Patai’ comes up once in an email between a couple of FBI personnel on their way to GTMO exchanging ideas for reading, ‘anthropology’ about 4 times (and in the vitas of psychologists, mostly) and ‘anthropologist’ just once – when a military medic, I think, describes himself as an “anthropologist, a student of human behavior,” or something like that.

I think you’re confusing interrogation with torture, and the two are different. It’s possible to conduct an interrogation without resorting to force. As Alfred McCoy points out (pp 158-159), FBI techniques for interrogation are noncoercive and emphasize rapport building – and I think that Comet Jo makes the same point above when s/he references Sahlins’ work. That doesn’t make places like GTMO any more palatable to me, but at least there are US agencies that realize force is counterproductive.

People all over the world, literally, have taken Hersh’s writing to imply that Patai’s book was used as a “torture manual,” but Hersh NEVER says this. Morever, the people that Hersh says were reading Patai were NOT the people doing interrogations. Hersh is talking about Neoconservative policymakers, not MI or MPs at Abu Ghraib. Read “The Gray Zone” and see for yourself.

But since Hersh published that piece, a lot of others have pointed to Hersh’s article as evidence that Patai was used “in torture,” as a “torture manual,” even as a source of techniques… Yes, it is very easy to read this into Hersh, but he never makes this leap. So in my mind, Hersh’s article simply doesn’t count as a logically consistent, or even credible example of ethnographically informed torture. All he says is that a bunch of guys read a book, and that’s it.

And, for the third time now, I’ll repeat what I’ve said about Lagouranis: until his blog entry above, I’ve never seen him say that Patai was a source for torture techniques. I’ve read a large selection of Lagouranis’s written work/interviews/public statements, which I listed above. Let’s take Fear up Harsh: on pages 16-19, he talks eloquently about stereotyping, and Patai appears in that context. But he doesn’t ever say, “Patai’s book informed how we approached torture,” or “We used Patai to justify this torture technique” or anything like that. Maybe he’s said so elsewhere, and I’ve missed it – but in any case, I’d be quite curious to know how a 36 year old ethnography generates torture techniques, particularly given a) the many other sources for coercive techniques, like SERE and KUBARK, and b) the fact that what happened at Abu Ghraib wasn’t that different from what’s happened in Algeria, the Gulag, the British in Ireland, even among Chicago police… torture seems to be pretty standard. So what, exactly, came from Patai?

That said, I agree with Comet Jo that stereotyping is critically important as a step towards the dehumanization that’s necessary for torture to occur.

Lastly, you want methodology, here it is: I have been doing archival research. I’ve gone through all the DoD investigation reports, the legal memos, the ICRC and HRW reports, and a lot of the background documentation for these reports. I’ve read a number of books on torture – GWOT, Algeria, and the Holocaust, mostly (and it’s interesting how the more things change, the more they stay the same… not much creativity in torture, really). I’ve only recently re-discovered EndNote (yeah, pathetic, I know) and I’m assembling an annotated bibliography from my notes. When it’s finished, hopefully before the AAA meetings, I’ll happily share it with anyone who wants it.

As for interviews, that’s what I’m doing all the archival research for. As you can imagine, I’d like to go a little deeper than, “Did you or did you not read Raphael Patai?” That requires doing homework to develop interview schedules. So far, I’ve exchanged emails with a two psychologists involved in interrogations, one of whom was a developer of SERE, and who told me explicitly that there weren’t anthropologists involved in developing SERE, and he hadn’t heard of any getting involved since. I’ve spoken twice to Sy Hersh, and I’ve tried twice now to get in touch with Tony Lagouranis so that I can interview him and some of his fellows, if they’ll talk to me. So far, no dice. I am also trying to set up a visit to Fort Huachuca, too. But this is methodologically tricky work. As you can imagine, it’s hard to get people involved in interrogations to participate in interviews.

I started doing this in earnest in mid-April, so I think I’m on track to get a first cut at an article describing the document reviews sometime in October/November. I don’t think that’s bad progress. As far as the blog goes, I’m planning to do three or four more posts that will draw on archival documents. Right now, for example, I’m working on a blog entry that dives into a set of primary documents in which FBI and the DoD are arguing about what constitutes “good practice” in interrogation at GTMO. That should be up sometime in the next couple of days.

Et vous? You seem very passionate about this topic. Have you done any research on it?

Dr. McNamara says she was studying these interrogations, and I have read her claim that there is no evidence that The Arab Mind was not used in to train interrogators, but now Lagouranis complicates her narrative. She says she is studying interrogations, so I thought it is a responsible question to ask her how she knews what she is talking about. This is why I am asking her how many interviews with interrogators she has done before claiming that the Arab Mind wasnt used.

Dr. McNamara is wanting to complain against the lack of scholarship behind fears of anthropology and tortures. OK, OK, but has her scholarship been interviewing interrogators, and found they used no anthropology? What is her data seems the most scholarly question to ask one claiming to only be using scholarship and no politics to answer these questions.

If there was no evidences of anthropology being read by armys interrogationists then it would be wrong to be concerned, but we have this evidence in Lagouranis.

On the other hand, many have suggested that that torture isn’t a good interrogation technique. Anthropological knowledge might conceivably be useful in establishing the sort of solidarity that good interrogation implies, but the ethics of that are not so clear cut: is all interrogation bad? Its also possible that even if torture isn’t about info but is about humiliation, some anthropological knowledge could contribute to that, or some torturers could imagine that it does. This is a conundrum, since such knowledge is also necessary to the communication that could turn into a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity on the schism known as the GWOT. Here, I guess I am inclined to say we should still get the knowledge: I think it is probably possible to break people without knowing that much about them, but less possible to communicate with them in that state.

Mostly all this seems like a distraction from the more important questions, like why is the US doing all this torture? Here I think it would be useful to look at public discourse on torture: things like “24” and some of the comments in republican presidential debates suggest that “being OK” with torture is (among other things I’m sure) part of a performance of a certain sort of masculinity that has been at stake in foreign policy at least since the Rambo films.

I’d also like to chime in here in support of Laura’s interesting work: she seems to be getting slammed here for saying there is something to try to understand about torture and torturers as well as the role of anthropological writings in the projection of U.S. power.

Reading her as an “apologist” simply because she is trying to figure HOW exactly anthropology might figure in the GWOT, seems deeply misguided. A useful analogy might be with Peggy Sanday’s analysis of the way fraternity initiation rituals make it possible for people who might be likable enough in other context to participate in gang rape—trying to understand something rather than simply calling it evil is not saying its OK.

A similar question arises around both Abu Ghraib and officially sanctioned uses of force in interrogation (and one can see a need to discuss these separately without buying the Bush administration’s claim that they are unrelated). What motivates/lets people participate in these? In this respect the “distancing” and “objectifying” that Laura cites as the effect of books like “The Arab Mind” might be a more pernicious effect than the identification of any supposed “cultural vulnerabilities” to specific forms of torture.

It might also be worth putting what’s going on now in the context of other anthropological writing about torture, such as Sahlins’s “The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam.” If the interrogators Sahlins talked to knew what they were talking about (which seems reasonable) one thing that is striking is how different their approach (where the key is to overcome distance) is to the one taken in Abe Ghraib or Guantanamo. It seems likely that at the level of intelligence gathering and propaganda the GWOT is being conducted with the kind of spectacular incompetence that marks the effort at nation building in Iraq. Indeed, given that the Army knows this (there’s an older interrogation manual that makes points similar to the guys Sahlins talked to about what’s effective and why), a question we need to ask about torture (in addition to how do people come to do it and what effects does it have) is WHY people (or the state does it. Here again, I think an anthropology of turture might be useful, and that we need to think about torture in the way we think about ritual–not because it is not real or horrible, but because why people do it and what it does are questions about semiotics not physics or biology.