Most American Anthropologists = CIA Hacks

by **proldic** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 1:53 pm

The Nation 11/00 Anthropologists as Spies by David Price (David Price is assistant professor of anthropology at St. Martin's College in Lacey, Washington. He is completing a book on the impact of McCarthyism on American anthropology.) The FBI decided to test the reliability of Lothrop's key informant by assigning him to collect information on nonexistent events and individuals... What is now known about Lothrop's long career of espionage suggests that the censure of Boas by the AAA (Amercan Anthropological Association) in 1919 sent a clear message to him and others that espionage under cover of science in the service of the state is acceptable. In each of the wars and military actions that followed the First World War anthropologists confronted, or more often repressed, the very issues raised by Boas in his 1919 letter to The Nation. While almost every prominent living US anthropologist (including Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, Clyde Kluckhohn and Margaret Mead) contributed to the World War II war effort, they seldom did so under the false pretext of fieldwork, as Lothrop did. Without endorsing the wide variety of activities to which anthropological skills were applied in the service of the military, a fundamental ethical distinction can be made between those who (as Boas put it) "prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies" and those who did not. World War II did, however, stimulate frank, though muted, discussions of the propriety of anthropologists' using their knowledge of those they studied in times of war, creating conditions in which, as anthropologist Laura Thompson put it, they became "technicians for hire to the highest bidder." Although the racist tenets of Nazism were an affront to the anthropological view of the inherent equality of humankind, Boas (who died in 1942) would probably have condemned anthropologists who used science as a cover for espionage during World War II. Approximately half of America's anthropologists contributed to the war effort, with dozens of prominent members of the profession working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Army and Navy intelligence and the Office of War Information. In the following decades there were numerous private and public interactions between anthropologists and the intelligence community. Some anthropologists applied their skills at the CIA after its inception in 1947 and may still be doing so today. For some of them this was a logical transition from their wartime espionage work with the OSS and other organizations; others regarded the CIA as an agency concerned with gathering information to assist policy-makers rather than a secret branch of government that subverted foreign governments and waged clandestine war on the Soviet Union and its allies. Still other anthropologists unwittingly received research funding from CIA fronts like the Human Ecology Fund. The American Anthropological Association also secretly collaborated with the CIA.  In the early 1950s the AAA's executive board negotiated a secret agreement with the CIA under which agency personnel and computers were used to produce a cross-listed directory of AAA members, showing their geographical and linguistic areas of expertise along with summaries of research interests. Under this agreement the CIA kept copies of the database for its own purposes with no questions asked. And none were, if for no other reason than that the executive board had agreed to keep the arrangement a secret. What use the CIA made of this database is not known, but the relationship with the AAA was part of an established agency policy of making use of America's academic brain trust. Anthropologists' knowledge of the languages and cultures of the people inhabiting the regions of the Third World where the agency was waging its declared and undeclared wars would have been invaluable to the CIA. The extent to which this occurred is the focus of ongoing archival and FOIA research. When the CIA overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, an anthropologist reported, under a pseudonym, to the State Department's intelligence and research division on the political affiliations of the prisoners taken by the military in the coup. During the Korean War linguists and ethnographers assisted America's involvement with little vocal conflict of conscience. Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung's revelations in 1965 of Project Camelot, in which anthropologists were reported to be working on unclassified counterinsurgency programs in Latin America, ignited controversy in the AAA. During America's wars in Southeast Asia the AAA was thrown into a state of upheaval after documents purloined from the private office of UCLA anthropologist Michael Moerman revealed that several anthropologists had secretly used their ethnographic knowledge to assist the war effort. As a result of inquiries made into these revelations, the 1971 annual meeting of the AAA became the scene of a tumultuous showdown after a fact-finding committee chaired by Margaret Mead maneuvered to create a report finding no wrongdoing on the part of the accused anthropologists. An acrimonious debate resulted in the rejection of the Mead report by the voting members of the association. ...the unresolved ethical issue of anthropologists spying during the First and Second World Wars provided a backdrop to the 1971 showdown. Almost two decades later, during the Gulf War, proposals by conservatives in the AAA that its members assist allied efforts against Iraq provoked only minor opposition. Today most anthropologists are still loath to acknowledge, much less study, known connections between anthropology and the intelligence community. As with any controversial topic, it is not thought to be a good "career builder." But more significant, there is a general perception that to rake over anthropology's past links, witting and unwitting, with the intelligence community could reduce opportunities for US anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in foreign nations. In the course of research in this area I have been told by other anthropologists in no uncertain terms that to raise such questions could endanger the lives of fieldworkers around the globe. This is not a point to be taken lightly, as many anthropologists work in remote settings controlled by hostile governmental or guerrilla forces. Suspicions that one is a US intelligence agent, whether valid or not, could have fatal consequences. As Boas prophetically wrote in his original complaint against Lothrop and his cohorts, "In consequence of their acts every nation will look with distrust upon the visiting foreign investigator who wants to do honest work, suspecting sinister designs. Such action has raised a new barrier against the development of international friendly cooperation." But until US anthropology examines its past and sets rules forbidding both secret research and collaboration with intelligence agencies, these dangers will continue. Over the past several decades the explicit condemnations of secretive research have been removed from the AAA's code of ethics--the principles of professional responsibility (PPR). In 1971 the PPR specifically declared that "no secret research, no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or given" by members of the AAA. By 1990 the attenuation of anthropological ethics had reached a point where anthropologists were merely "under no professional obligation to provide reports or debriefing of any kind to government officials or employees, unless they have individually and explicitly agreed to do so in the terms of employment." These changes were largely accomplished in the 1984 revision of the PPR that Gerald Berreman characterized as reflecting the new "Reaganethics" of the association: In the prevailing climate of deregulation the responsibility for ethical review was shifted from the association to individual judgments. As anthropologist Laura Nader noted, these Reagan-era changes were primarily "moves to protect academic careers...downplaying anthropologists' paramount responsibility to those they study." The current PPR may be interpreted to mean that anthropologists don't have to be spies unless they want to or have agreed to do so in a contract. A 1995 Commission to Review the AAA Statements on Ethics declared that the committee on ethics had neither the authority nor the resources to investigate or arbitrate complaints of ethical violations and would "no longer adjudicate claims of unethical behavior and focus its efforts and resources on an ethics education program." Members of the current ethics committee believe that even though the AAA explicitly removed language forbidding secretive research or spying, there are clauses in the current code that imply (rather than state) that such conduct should not be allowed--though without sanctions, this stricture is essentially meaningless. Archeologist Joe Watkins, chairman of the ethics committee, believes that if an anthropologist were caught spying today, "the AAA would not do anything to investigate the activity or to reprimand the individual, even if the individual had not been candid [about the true purpose of the research]. I'm not sure that there is anything the association would do as an association, but perhaps public awareness would work to keep such practitioners in line, like the Pueblo clowns' work to control the societal miscreants." Watkins is referring to Pueblo cultures' use of clowns to ridicule miscreants. Although it is debatable whether anthropologist intelligence operatives would fear sanctions imposed by the AAA, it is incongruous to argue that they would fear public ridicule more. Enforcing a ban on covert research would be difficult, but to give up on even the possibility of investigating such wrongdoing sends the wrong message to the world and to the intelligence agencies bent on recruiting anthropologists. Many factors have contributed to the AAA's retreat from statements condemning espionage and covert research. Key among these are the century-old difficulties inherent in keeping an intrinsically diverse group of scholars aligned under the framework of a single association. A combination of atavistic and market forces has driven apart members of a field once mythically united around the holistic integration of the findings of archeology and physical, cultural and linguistic anthropology. As some "applied anthropologists" move from classroom employment to working in governmental and industrial settings, statements condemning spying have made increasing numbers of practitioners uncomfortable--and this discomfort suggests much about the nature of some applied anthropological work. The activities encompassed under the heading of applied anthropology are extremely diverse, ranging from heartfelt and underpaid activist-based research for NGOs around the world to production of secret ethnographies and time-allocation studies of industrial and blue-collar workplaces for the private consumption of management. As increasing numbers of anthropologists find employment in corporations, anthropological research becomes not a quest for scientific truth, as in the days of Boas, but a quest for secret or proprietary data for governmental or corporate sponsors. The AAA's current stance of inaction sends the dangerous message to the underdeveloped world that the world's largest anthropological organization will take no action against anthropologists whose fieldwork is a front for espionage. As the training of anthropology graduate students becomes increasingly dependent on programs like the 1991 National Security Education Program--with its required governmental-service payback stipulations--the issue takes on increased (though seldom discussed) importance. It is unknown whether any members of the AAA are currently engaged in espionage, but unless the scientific community takes steps to denounce such activities using the clearest possible language and providing sanctions against those who do so, we can anticipate that such actions will continue with impunity during some future crisis or war. Many in the American Anthropological Association are frustrated with its decision neither to explicitly prohibit nor to penalize secretive government research. It is time for US anthropologists to examine the political consequences of their history and take a hard, thoughtful look at Boas's complaint and the implications implicit in the association's refusal to condemn secret research and to re-enact sanctions against anthropologists engaging in espionage. <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001120/price/2">www.thenation.com/doc/20001120/price/2</a>

by **proldic** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 2:04 pm

Counterpunch 3/12/05 Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program The CIA's Campus Spies By DAVE H. PRICE The secrecy surrounding the current use of university classrooms as covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies now threatens the fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines. A new test program that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university classrooms for now operates without detection or protest,. With time these students who cannot admit to their true intentions will inevitably pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now enrolled. There have long been tensions between the needs of academia and the needs of the National Security State, and even before the events of 9/11 expanded the powers of American intelligence agencies, our universities were quietly being modified to serve the needs of the intelligence community in new and covert ways. The most visible of these reforms was the establishment of the National Security Education Program (NSEP) which siphoned-off students from traditional foreign language funding programs such as Fulbright or Title VI. While traditional funding sources provide students with small stipends of a few thousand dollars to study foreign languages in American universities, the NSEP gives graduate students a wealth of funds (at times exceeding $40,000 a year) to study "in demand" languages, but with troubling pay-back stipulations mandating that recipients later work for unspecified U.S. national security agencies. Upon its debut in the early 1990s, the NSEP was harshly criticized for reaching through an assumed barrier between the desires of academia and state. Numerous academic organizations, including, the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association, and even the mainstream Boards of the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies expressed deep concerns over scholars' participation in the NSEP. And though the NSEP continues funding students despite these protests, there was some solace in knowing so many diverse academic organizations condemned this program. But while many academics reacted with anger and protest to the NSEP's entrance onto American campuses, there has been no public reaction to an even more troubling post-9/11 funding program which upgrades the existing American intelligence-university-interface. With little notice Congress approved section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act which appropriated four million dollars to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP). Named after Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas, Chair, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), PRISP was designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other agencies. PRISP now operates on an undisclosed number of American college and university campuses, and if the pilot phase of the program proves to be a useful means of recruiting and training members of the intelligence community then the program will expand to more campuses across the country. Currently, PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled fulltime in graduate degree programs with a minimum GPA of 3.4, they need to "complete at least one summer internship at CIA or other agencies," and they must pass the same background investigations as other CIA employees. PRISP students receive financial stipends ranging up to $25,000 per year and they are required to participate in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and individuals from their administering intelligence agency. Less than 150 students a year are now authorized to receive funding during the pilot phase as PRISP evaluates the program's initial outcomes. Beyond a few articles in a Kansas newspaper praising Senator Roberts, as well as University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos' role in lobbying for the PRISP, there has been a general media silence regarding the program. The few guarded public statements issued describing PRISP stress supposed similarities between existing ROTC programs and the PRISP. For example, the Lawrence Journal World (11/29/03) published claims that, "Those in the program would be part of the ROTC program specializing in learning how to analyze a variety of conditions and activities based on a thorough understanding and deep knowledge of particular areas of the world." Beyond the similar requirements that participants of both programs commit to years of service to their sponsoring military or intelligence branches there are few similarities between ROTC and PRISP. ROTC programs mostly operate in the open, as student-ROTC members register for ROTC courses and are proudly and visibly identified as members of the ROTC program, while PRISP students are instructed to keep their PRISP-affiliations hidden from others on campus. PRISP is an open secret, and the CIA apparently prefers that it stay more secret than open-as the CIA's website does not maintain an active link with detailed information on PRISP. Currently PRISP limits its advertising to intelligence recruiting web sights (such as www.intelligencecareers.com or the National Ground Intelligence Center) and to small, controlled recruiting sessions. PRISP recruits scholars with "advanced area expertise in China, Middle East, Korea, Central Asia, the Caucasus," with a special emphasis given to scholars with previous linguistic expertise in "Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashtun, Dari, Korean, or a Central Asian or Caucasian language such as Georgian, Turkmen, Tajik, or Uzbek." PRISP also funds Islamic studies scholars and scientists with expertise in bioterrorism, counterterrorism, chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering. Inquiries made to Senator Roberts' staff concerning the current size and scope of PRISP yielded little useful information and Roberts' staff referred me to Mr. Tommy Glakas at the CIA. Mr. Glakas was reluctant to discuss many specific details of PRISP, but he did confirm that PRISP now funds about 100 students who are studying at an undisclosed number of American universities. When asked if PRISP was up and running on college campuses Glakas first answered that it was, then said it wasn't, then clarified that PRISP wasn't the sort of program that was tied to university campuses-it was decentralized and tied to students, not campuses. When pressed further on what this meant Mr. Glakas gave no further information. He said that he had no way of knowing exactly how many universities currently have students participating in PRISP, claiming he could not know this because PRISP is administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID, or Naval Intelligence. He stressed that PRISP was a decentralized scholarship program which funds students through a various intelligence agencies. Mr. Glakas said he didn't know who might know how many campuses had PRISP scholars and he would not identify which campuses are hosting these covert PRISP scholars. The Intelligence Scholars Program did not spring forth out of a vacuum. Like the Patriot Act, the germs of PRISP were conceived years ago and were waiting for the right rendez-vous of fear with opportunity to be born. PRISP is largely the brainchild of University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos-a longtime advocate of anthropological contacts with military and intelligence agencies. During the Vietnam War Moos worked in Laos and Thailand on World Bank-financed projects and over the years he has worked in various military advisory positions. He worked on the Pentagon's ARPA Project Themis, and has been as an instructor at the Naval War College and at the U.S. Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth. For years Moos has taught courses on "Violence and Terrorism" at the University of Kansas. In the months after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon Moos elicited the support of his friend, former CIA DCI, Stansfield Turner to curry support in the senate and CIA to fund his vision of a merger between anthropology, academia, intelligence analysis and espionage training. Professor Moos initially proposed that all PRISP students be required to master two foreign languages and use anthropology and history classes to learn the culture history of the regions they are studying. Moos's vision for PRISP was more comprehensive than the current pilot program and it included classes on topics such as bioterrorism and counterterrorism. Moos proposed having an active CIA campus presence where PRISP students would begin training as freshmen and, "by the time they would be commissioned, they would be ready to go to the branch intelligence units of their choice." If the pilot phase of PRISP goes well, this may be the direction in which this program develops-though it is doubtful that PRISP would expand in any way which openly identified participants. It is tempting to describe Moos as an anachronistic anthropologist out of sync with his discipline's mainstream, but while many anthropologists express concerns about disciplinary ties to military and intelligence organizations, contemporary anthropology has no core with which to either sync or collide and there are others in the field who openly (and quietly) support such developments. Moos is a bright man, but his writings echo the musty tone and sentiments found in the limited bedside readings of Tom-Clancy-literate-colonials, as he prefers to quote from the wisdom of Sun Tzu and Samuel Huntington over anthropologists like Franz Boas or Laura Nader. Two years ago at an interesting and confrontational panel examining anthropological connections to intelligence agencies at the annual American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings, I watched an angry Moos strike an action pose and rhetorically ask, "Have anthropologists learned so little since 9/11/2001, as to not recognize the truth-and practicability, in Sun Tzu's reminder that: 'unless someone is subtle and perspicacious, he cannot perceive the substance in intelligence reports. It is subtle, subtle." From the dais I could see not so subtle anthropologists in the audience employed by Rand and the Pentagon nodding their heads as if his words had hit a secret chord. Moos was clearly onto something. Felix Moos' notion of scholar-spies in part draws upon an imagined romantic history of anthropologists' contributions to the Second World War, which, while this is a widespread notion, it is one increasingly undermined by FOIA and archival-based historical research of the complexities (both ethical and practical) of anthropologists plying their trade in even this "good" war. Back in 1995 Moos testified before a commission modifying the AAA's code on anthropological ethics that anthropologists should be allowed to engage in secretive research, arguing that, "In a world where weapons of mass destruction have become so terrible and terrorist actions so frightful, anthropologists must surrender naïve faith in a communitarian utopia and be prepared to encounter conflict and violence. Indeed they should feel the professional obligation to work in areas of ethnic conflict.But, as moral creatures so engaged, they would of course have to recognize the necessity of classifying some of their data, if for no other reason than to protect the lives of their subjects and themselves." It is this devotion to secrecy that is the root problem of the PRSIP's presence on our campuses as well as with Moos' vision of anthropology harnessed for the needs of state. Moos' fallacy is his belief that the fundamental problem with American intelligence agencies is that they are lacking adequate cultural understanding of those they study, and spy upon-this fallacy is exacerbated by orthodox assumptions that good intelligence operates best in realms of secrecy. America needs good intelligence, but the most useful and important intelligence can largely be gathered openly without the sort of covert invasion of our campuses that PRISP silently brings. The claim that more open source, non-classified intelligence is what is needed is less far fetched than it might seem. In Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 historian Robin Winks recounts how in 1951, the CIA's Sherwood Kent conducted an experiment in which a handful of Yale historians used nothing but declassified materials in Yale's library to challenge CIA analysts (with access to classified data) to produce competing reports on U.S. military capacities, strengths and weaknesses focusing on a scale of detail down to the level of military divisions. This written evaluation of this contest was known as the "Yale Report," which concluded that over 90% of material in the CIA's report was found in the Yale library. Kent further estimated that of the remaining 10% of "secret" materials, only half of this could be expected to remain secret for any length of time. President Truman was so furious with the results of the Yale Report that he suppressed its distribution, arguing that the press needed more restrictions governing the release of such sensitive materials, while Republican pundits joined the furor claiming that Yale liberals were trying to leak state secrets. Evidence of the power of open intelligence is close at hand, consider only how American scholars' (using publicly available sources) analysis of the dangers for post-invasion Iraq out-performed the CIA's best estimates. As one who has lived in the Middle East and read Arabic news dailies online for years while watching the expansion of American policies that appear to misread the Arab world I wonder if a repeat of the Yale Report experiment focusing on the Middle East might not find another 10% intelligence gap, but with the academy now winning due to the deleterious effects of generations of CIA intellectual inbreeding. Perhaps the Agency has become self-aware of these limits brought on by the internal reproduction of its own limited institutional culture, and in its own misshapen view it sees PRISP as a means of supplying itself with new blood to rejuvenate under cover provided by public classrooms. But such secrecy-based reforms are the products of a damaged institutional mind trying to repair itself. Some might misread my criticism of the CIA's secret presence on our campuses as contradicting my critique of the need for more outside and dissenting (even informed hairbrained dissenting) input in intelligence circles, but such a reading would misunderstand the importance of openness in academic and political processes. The fundamental problems with American intelligence are exacerbated by secrecy-when intelligence agencies are allowed to classify and hide their assumptions, reports and analysis from public view they generate self-referential narrow visions that coalesce rather than challenge top-down policies from the administrations they serve. Intelligence agencies do need to understand the complex cultures they study, but to suggest that intelligence agencies like the CIA are simply amassing and interpreting political and cultural information is a dangerous fantasy: The CIA fulfills a tripartite role of gathering intelligence, interpreting intelligence, and working as a supraconstitutional covert arm of the presidency. It is this final role that should give scholars and citizens pause when considering how PRSIP and other university-intelligence-linked programs will use the knowledge they take from our open classrooms. The CIA makes sure we won't know which classrooms PRSIP scholars attend, this is rationalized as a requirement for protecting the identities of intelligence personnel. But this secrecy shapes PRISP as it takes on the form like a cell-based covert operation in which PRISP students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects (creating serious ethics problems under any post-Nuremberg professional ethics code or Human Subject Review Board) knowing that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies. In a decade and a half of Freedom of Information Act research I have read too many FBI reports of students detailing the deviant political views of their professors (These range from the hilarious: As anthropologist Norman Humphrey was reported to have called President Eisenhower a "duckbilled nincompoop"; to the Dadaist: Wherein former Miss America, Marilyn van Derbur, reported that sociologist Howard Higman mocked J. Edgar Hoover in class; to the chilling: As when the FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of "informal" conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the focus an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy) to not mention the certainty that these PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors and fellow students. Of course I would be remiss to not mention that students are the only ones sneaking the CIA onto our campuses. There are also unknown thousands of university professors who periodically work with and for the CIA--in 1988 CIA spokeswoman Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA then secretly employed enough university professors "to staff a large university." Most experts estimate that this presence has grown since 2001. The quiet rise of programs like PRISP should not surprise anyone given the steady cuts in federal funding for higher education, and the resulting pressures for more mercenary roles for the academy. In the post-World War Two decades, scholars naively self-recruited themselves or followed classmates to the CIA, but increasingly those of us who have studied the languages, culture and histories of peoples around the world have also learned about the role of the CIA in undermining the autonomy of those cultures we study, and the steady construction of this history has hurt the agency's efforts to recruit the best and brightest of post-graduates. For decades the students studying Arabic, Urdu, Basque or Farsi were predominantly curious admirers of the cultures and languages they studied, the current shift now finds a visible increase in students whose studies are driven by the market forces of Bush's War on Terrorism. If the CIA can use PRISP to indenture students in the early days of their graduate training-supplemented with mandated summer camp internships immersed in the workplace ethos of CIA-the company can mold their ideological inclinations even before their grasp of cultural history is shaped in the relatively open environment of their university. As these PRISP graduates enter the CIA's institutional environment of self-reinforcing Group Think they will present a reduced risk of creating cognitive dissonance by bringing new views that threaten the agency's narrow view of the world. Institutional Group Think can thus safely be protected from external infection. But while PRISP protects and intensifies the inbred-limited-thinking at CIA and elsewhere, it threatens the academic integrity of anthropology and other academic disciplines that unwittingly become complicit partners with these intelligence agencies. The CIA has long recognized that anthropology, with its broadly traveled and culturally and linguistically competent practitioners has highly useful skill sets. And while we should not read too much into published reports that the CIA-directed torture techniques at Abu Ghraib were fine-tuned for high levels of culturally specific humiliation by the reading of anthropologist Raphael Patai's book The Arab Mind (Patai's scholarship is stained with Orientalist stereotypes and it doesn't take an insider's knowledge that Arabs generally abhor dogs and sexual humiliation to presume that tormenting bound naked men with vicious dogs would be an effective means of torture), anthropologists have long had their work pilfered by American intelligence agencies. To cite but two documented examples, in 1951, the CIA cut a covert deal with the AAA's executive board providing the CIA access to data on anthropologists' cultural and linguistic specialties as the CIA secretly produced a roster of AAA members for the AAA on the CIA's computers; and, in 1962 the U.S. Department of Commerce illegally translated Georges Condominas' ethnography, We Have Eaten the Forest on highland Vietnamese Montagnards for use as a counterinsurgency tool. Though no scholar can control the uses of information they make public, there does need to be an awareness of how any knowledge can be abused by others--and as awareness of the presence of PRISP spreads, many scholars may find themselves engaging in new forms of self-censorship and doublethink. Healthy academic environments need openness because they (unlike the CIA) are nourished by the self-corrective features of open disagreement, dissent, and synthetic-reformulation. The presence of the PRISP's secret sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage these fundamental processes of academia. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all of academia with a germ of dishonesty and distrust as participant scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the cloaked masters they serve. David Price teaches anthropology at St. Martin's College in Olympia, Washington. His latest book, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists has just been published by Duke University Press. His Atlas of World Cultures has just been republished by the Blackburn Press. He can be reached at: dprice@stmartin.edu

by **dbeach** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 2:13 pm

<a href="http://www.atlantisrising.com/">www.atlantisrising.com/</a> "Forbiden history" by Doug kenyon shows the Egyptology elites as big insiders with lots of secrets... Remember the ole carton 'secret squirrel"?[we got a 7yr old} Well they all a bunch of secret squirels..the elites in the Egypt studies..science ..archeology

by **robertdreed** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 4:38 pm

Somehow, Price left out any mention of the life and career of Carleton Coon, one of William Donovan's closest colleagues in the OSS- and one of the most credentialed scientific racists of his time- not that long ago, the 1940s and 50s. His thinking is well out of the mainstream of anthropology these days, but the white supremacist "movement" still uses him as a reference from time to time. But Coon is probably worth an article all his own. Of course the CIA recruits anthropologists- although I hope that it's needless to say that it doesn't recruit all of them. I don't know what they would have done with my wild and wooly mentor Aram Yengoyan, for instance. Aram spent half his life going on walkabouts in the outback of Australia with the aboriginal tribespeople. I'm not sure how anything he could have fed the CIA could have done much to tip the balance of power in their favor. My guess is that they undercut Gough Whitlam without requiring his services. I heard the CIA did that, the meddlers. ( Having read The Falcon And The Snowman, I found myself sympathizing with Christopher Boyce. I never would have done what he did, but I think I understand what motivated him. He just didn't know enough about the other side of the coin.) Talking to Professor Yengoyan once, I found out that he was on a first name basis with Alfred McCoy ("Al"), the professor of Southeast Asian History at U. Wisconsin who wrote The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade. That impressed me even more than the fact that he was the only person I know who flouted the smoking regs at UC Davis- smoking his pipe in his private chambers, right next door to the Anthro Dept. office. Renegade. I don't think that was a CIA perk, though. Oh dear, cultural anthropology, another career track I abandoned, or which abandoned me...and as for PRISP, according the Price article, my GPA fell a bit short of their requirements. Perhaps if I'd managed to turn in a single paper on time in my years at University...but that's water over the dam. Anyway, I prefer to keep my amateur status. I've seen how long it takes for people to get a PhD, and you have to (over)specialize. As it happens, I haven't set foot inside a college classroom for years. I regret that, because I love school. But in the unlikely event that I were to resume to pursue graduate work, I'd probably pick History. As an anthropologist, I'm a good cab driver. And as far as my aptitude as a cab driver, I make a middling good writer. I hope. Much to my chagrin, reknowned journalist Robert Parry once referred to me as an "anthropologist" in the bio blurb for the article I wrote for his <a href="http://consortiumnews.com/">consortiumnews.com/</a> website. In some sense he's correct, but anyone trying to look for my name on a roster of professors is destined to be disappointed. I think I'll ask for a correction, to "anthropology student." Which is what I still consider myself to be...you never leave the mob, really. But readers shouldn't take that the wrong way- I assure you all, the CIA didn't set up the discipline as a front group. As for the comment that proldic personally contributed as the headline to Prof. Price's article- "Most American Anthropologists = CIA Hacks"- well, perhaps he ought to check out the next AAA meeting, and leaflet the participants with the sum total of his writings on the subject. I recommend that he use bold print, it's an eye-catcher. That said, it's undeniable that CIA hires anthropology types. Sociologists too, if I don't miss my guess. And psychologists, they hire them...and MBAs, and political "science" grads, and majors in foreign languages...I'm not even sure if they draw the line at English Lit and Phys Ed majors. Fortunately, unless I missed the memo, employment at the CIA is a voluntary choice. Thank heaven for that. Despite their manifest record of unconscionable doings, the CIA hasn't turned into the Stasi just yet. Although some of us worry about that... <a href="http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v10n4p13.htm">www.peacemagazine.org/arc...0n4p13.htm</a> Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 10/15/05 7:15 pm

by **banned** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 5:14 pm

When I graduated from college in 1977, the Placement Office had books containing sign up sheets for interviews, divided by academic department. It was a heavily tech and biz school so those binders were big, bigger than all of liberal arts. History had one sheet in it. The employer was some outfit out of Langley, Virginia--Something Intelligence Agency. Had a nice letterhead and seal and all. Seriously, they REALLY wanted history majors. It was flattering, because no one else did. Getting a job in 1977 with an undergraduate degree in history in a dying rustbelt burg was not easy--a half day gig walking people around a radio station for minimum wage drew hundreds of applicants, including people with advanced degrees. I ALMOST signed up for an interview just for shits and grins (as a writer it's all material) but truthfully I did not want to be on their radar a-tall, no way, Jose. Hmm. With that new "candlestein" agency that phrase has a whole new meaning, no?

by **robertdreed** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 5:29 pm

My personal guess for the identity of "Jose"- Felix Rodriguez. Okay, maybe that's a bit too obvious... But that was something that hit me after some time spent studying this shit- the Bush syndicate keeps the same folks in the line-up, and they rely on them over and over again.

by **banned** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 5:47 pm

...which one would think would make them easier to defeat, because like the Nazis in the early years, if you cut off the head, there's not much left in the way of dedicated and knowledgeable leadership. I bet you could take out a dozen people and BushCo would be like this great quote from "The Return of the King" (book): "As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and feebly die, so the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless... " Dubya of course is ahead of the curve because he's already witless, purposeless, feeble and mindless.

by **robertdreed** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 5:55 pm

...therefore, I refrain from the business of "taking people out."

by **banned** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 5:58 pm

...could refer to voting them out, recalling/impeaching, inviting them to resign one step ahead of a treason indictment. Not necessarily 'wet work' <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)">

by **robertdreed** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 6:03 pm

who's willing to settle for not executing them. I think the proper phrase is "taking them down."

by **banned** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 6:10 pm

...I didn't say it COULDN'T refer to 'wet work.' To me, that kinda depends on them, doesn't it? You give a group like BushCo a chance to accept that the machinery of democracy has decided that the people don't want them in power anymore. Unfortunately, history shows that tyrannical cults rarely say "Oh, OK--let me get my coat and hat and I'll be outa your way in a jif!" History shows you generally have to hang 'em or shoot 'em if they won't go willingly. That's not me, mind you. That's Clio talkin', the Muse of History. She's one tough bitch.

by **robertdreed** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 6:14 pm

Yeah, Clio... In the USA, the annual awards they give out for the best advertisements are named the "Clio Awards". That ought to tell you something, right there. What ever happened to traditional values, is what I'd like to know. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 10/15/05 4:15 pm

by **banned** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 6:40 pm

...'traditional values.' Which tradition? 1950s WASP suburban America? !Kung bushmen prior to contact with whites? "The 'hood" in a depressed rustbelt inner city in the 1990s? Horse-mounted Central Asian nomads in the 1100s? Which type of values? Moral values as exemplified by religion? Or what people actually valued in their daily lives?

by **robertdreed** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 6:48 pm

In the case to which I was referring, the classical values of learning, scholarship, and the artistic disciplines signified by the Nine Muses, of which Clio was the Muse of History. To have that debased into who makes the best commercial...you don't have to be an ancient Greek to be offended by that.

by **glubglublugb** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 7:21 pm

I suspect the enlightened beings of the future will view our casual acceptance of mass marketing with the same disgust that we today view the casual acceptance of slavery amongst pre-Emancipation slavery. Somewhat OT, but I'd like this on the record so people of the future will know where I stood on it.

Most American Anthropologists = CIA Hacks

Most American Anthropologists = CIA Hacks

CIA Disinfo Infiltrates All Aspects of American Life

Re: CIA Disinfo Infiltrates All Aspects of American Life

Professor Price's articles

Join the Agency and see the world!

No way, Jose...

Yeah, they do, don't they....

Heat draws heat...

Merely a figure of speech, my good man...

Oh, a fellow moderate...

Well, ackshully...

Clio

Depends what you consider...

Re: Depends what you consider...

in my book of predictions

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