The Use of Torture: Ethics, the Military and the Use of Anthropology
(CSU, Long Beach)
This paper seeks to explore ethics within the military, especially in relation to the use of anthropologists and anthropological knowledge. It is now known that the military has utilized ethnographic accounts (c.f., Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind) to devise humiliating forms of interrogation. This should give anthropologists grave concern about how the research that we conduct will be used. These concerns will be explored in my paper through a discussion of recent events, such as the admission by Susan Crawford, a former judge who reviewed interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay, that the United States had tortured prisoners in its custody. The use torture on terror suspect Mohammed al-Qahtani will be discussed in detail.
Considering the lack of regard that the Pentagon has shown the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Convention, I question whether anthropologists can trust that the information they give to military institutions will be used ethically. As a discipline can we assume that we will not be compromised if our colleagues engage in operations that are later known to be associated with torture? Does the treatment of detainees destroy the trust that anthropology can have military applications without endangering human rights?