Notes on an Ethnographic Scandal

Seymour Hersh, Abu Ghraib and The Arab Mind

Laura A McNamara
Albuquerque, NM

At the AAA business meeting in San José in December 2006, a rare quorum voted to adopt twin resolutions condemning a) the war in Iraq and b) the “use of anthropological knowledge as an element of physical and psychological torture.” Both of these resolutions were adopted by the membership who voted in the spring 2007 election.

Were Sources Corroborated?
There were two different motivators behind the torture resolution: ongoing debates in the American Psychological Association concering the level of involvement of psychologists in interrogation, coercive and otherwise, and “early evidence of using culture as a weapon,” an allegation made by Robert Gonzales in a January 29, 2007, Chronicle of Higher Education article, one largely derived from a Seymour Hersh article published in the New Yorker on May 24, 2004.

In case you’ve been living on another planet, one of Hersh’s informants described anthropologist Raphael Patai’s ethnography, The Arab Mind, as the “bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” Do a Google search and you will quickly appreciate how thoroughly the idea that Patai’s book underpinned ethnographically-informed sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib has permeated popular and academic culture. Interestingly, Hersh never formally connects Patai to Abu Ghraib, though he implies that the book provided intellectual justification for formal interrogation policies involving sexual humiliation and photographic blackmail.

Given Hersh’s formidable narrative powers, it is perhaps not surprising that anthropologists have repeatedly cited his article as evidence of culturally-informed torture. What is surprising is the lack of systematic effort to identify and analyze corroborating sources that we can use to deepen our understanding of Hersh’s account, even critique it. At this writing (August 2007), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain over one hundred thousand pages of Global War on Terror-related interrogation and detention documentation. The ACLU Torture FOIA database included classified reports released with little redaction. This corpus is available to anyone with a computer, an Internet connection and some patience.

Analyzing the Available Data
I’ve downloaded and read roughly 4,000 pages of Abu Ghraib-related documentation, and in doing so I have become increasingly skeptical of the connection between Raphael Patai and the torture events that occurred between October and December 2003 in Abu Ghraib. Of course, Hersh’s account was an early one—but many of its themes don’t stand up so well to information that the agencies involved have since released. (For example, none of the 13 detainees who testified for the Taguba investigation mention photographic blackmail in their sworn statements, which are otherwise quite graphic.)

In addition, ACLU has converted most of the torture documents into searchable text, and the site provides a nice search function for browsing the collection. Keyword searches for such terms as Patai, The Arab Mind, anthropology, anthropologists produced the following observations:
Patai’s book appears once, as recommended reading in a 2003 memo to Department of Justice FBI interviewers on their way to Guantánamo. The word “anthropology” appears 4 times: in three cases, anthropology is mentioned in the curriculum vita (undergraduate degree) of psychologists evaluating soldiers accused of detainee abuse—for example, in the court martial record for Ivan “Chip” Frederick. In the fourth case, in 2004, an Army team interviews 25 soldiers on their experience with military interrogators in Samarra. One of the soldier interviewees says that the interrogators he watched had little understanding of Iraqi culture and recommends a course in anthropology be added to their training.

An “anthropologist” appears as a character witness for Specialist Armin Cruz, one of the soldiers convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib. The unnamed Army reservist—who served with Cruz in Iraq and worked in military intelligence at Abu Ghraib—describes himself as a parent, Army reservist, rehabilitative massage therapist, professional rescuer, and “ … anthropologist by degree. I have studied human nature and found my way naturally to all that I’ve done in my career which involves people.”

Of course, I’ve read through less than 5% of the ACLU database, and quite a bit of documentation likely remains unreleased, so future research could reveal documented evidence of a clear connection between torture and anthropology.

Even so, there is no reason to assume that the sexual humiliation depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos was informed by ethnography. As psychologist Philip Zimbardo famously discovered in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, institutional conditions in prisons establish a power dynamic that can quickly degenerate into torture. Indeed, graphic sexual humiliation occurred on the last two days of Zimbardo’s experiment, as he notes in The Lucifer Effect published this year. By the end of the fifth day, Zimbardo’s guards were forcing semi-naked prisoners to line up stomach-to-back and play “camel,” because camels have humps . . . Get it?

Where is the Empirical Research?
Which brings us back to the resolution: considering the very public manner in which it was introduced and passed, we should probably be far more empirically informed about interrogation and detention in the Global War on Terrorism than we are currently. As a baseline comparison, lawyers and psychologists have relied on academic research and FOIA to develop sophisticated critiques of the legal and policy decisions, institutional conditions, and the interrogation practices that feed into a human rights disaster like Abu Ghraib. There is a massive amount of primary documentation available on the Internet, so it’s hard to understand why anyone would stop at Seymour Hersh as a basis for claims about anthropologically-informed torture.

Hersh is a journalist, not a scholar, and we seem to have (temporarily, one would hope) forgotten the difference between the two. Here’s a reminder: as part of my research, I wrote Seymour Hersh a letter asking him to clarify the implied connection between Raphael Patai and Abu Ghraib. On July 25, 2007, after a couple of rounds of phone tag, I caught him at his desk.

“Look,” he told me, “I wrote what I wrote, but there was nothing formal about Patai in torture.”
As scholars, we should keep questioning.

Laura A McNamara is a member of the AAA Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropologists with US Security and Intelligence Communities. She is an organizational anthropologist who currently works at Sandia Labs, a government lab run by Lockheed Martin.