Nov 14, 20070
How To Bury A Muslim at Guantanamo Bay
From the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, which first appeared at Wikileaks and are now available here (PDF).
Oct 7, 20070
Anthropology and the Army
Tracey Rosen forwarded me her very smart response to an article in last week’s NYT that reports the U.S. Army’s use of anthropologists in Afghanistan. (It should be obvious, but Tracey is not the Tracy of the article.) Her response was originally addressed to her colleagues (of whom the B. in the last paragraph is one), but she’s agreed to let me post an excerpt below.
+++++++
I’d like to bring up a couple of articles that have stuck with me as I begin to encounter my own political/existential dilemmas that get raised by fieldwork because I think that they are also relevant to this discussion.
The first is by one of our (controversially) activist brethren, David Graeber, who wrote a piece in last January’s edition of Harpers. The title: “Army of Altruists: on the alienated right to do good,” and the link.
His basic point can be gleaned from the title: viz., the “right” for Americans to engage themselves in the socially oriented “good” has been alienated from most of the population. [Read more]
Jul 17, 20070
How to Calibrate the Infliction of Harm
the [insult] slap will be initiated no more than 12–14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee’s face … to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut.
From “JTF GTMO ‘SERE’ Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” a five-page document that tells interrogators how to apply the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training tactics to enemy combatants. The reverse engineering of the methods described by the document was accomplished by CIA consultants James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Katherine Eban writes,
Mitchell and Jessen’s methods were so controversial that, among colleagues, the reaction to their names alone became a litmus test of one’s attitude toward coercion and human rights. Their critics called them the “Mormon mafia” (a reference to their shared religion) and the “poster boys” (referring to the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” posters, which are where some thought their activities would land them). The reversed SERE tactics they originated have come to shatter various American communities, putting law enforcement and intelligence gathering on a collision course, fostering dissent within the C.I.A., and sparking a war among psychologists over professional identity…
Read the whole story at Vanity Fair.
,
