Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[marct]

Refuting Colonel John Nagl
Army's Prime Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship

By DAVID PRICE
Counterpunch, Nov 3/4, 2007

I will note that there is at least one quote included in DP's article that, while attributed, lists no source, id est

By this I mean people like the recently retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez who know that the Iraq war is now "a nightmare with no end in sight".

[SteveMetz]

I will note that there is at least one quote included in DP's article that, while attributed, lists no source, id est

Well, my theory is that Dr. Price has stumbled on a way to get the attention that his normal work doesn't bring. My recommendation to him is that instead of writing silly essays, he follow the lead of Chris Crocker and do a YouTube video called, "Leave Anthropology Alone!!"

[selil]

Anybody else notice that Counterpunch is in the middle of a fundraising drive, and Dr. Price's book is listed on each of his posts?

[marct]

Anybody else notice that Counterpunch is in the middle of a fundraising drive, and Dr. Price's book is listed on each of his posts?

Yup. Need more be said on that ?

On a different note, and back to an earlier question, does anyone know if eminent domain applies to copyright?

[selil]

Yup. Need more be said on that ?

On a different note, and back to an earlier question, does anyone know if eminent domain applies to copyright?

Copyright law in the United States is a strange creature. Especially the government. It's not necessarily a fifth amendment issue (eminent domain) but a "superseding interest" issue. Library, records, sunshine laws, etc.. all make copyright a different issue. Especially when the government and even more importantly the military violates what we would expect of it.

I am not a copyright attorney but have a specific interest from a different perspective. When dealing with digital evidence we seize copyrighted material then publish that material as evidence and that is protected. I've seen arguments of fair use, and law enforcement use that supersede normal copyright law


The government does claim fair use exception fairly often which can be challenged. Government works can be challenged for copyright violation. The government can be sued for monetary damages, but has sovereign immunity rights. The ideas in a work are not copyrighted but the words are. Already in this thread the concept of 250 words maximum from a work has been discussed, but that is an academic standard not a legal standard. Also the idea of citation is an academic standard not a legal standard. If the use is NOT substantive there is no violation of copyright. See hyper links (THE INTERNET WAY OF CITING WORK) for a more substantive discussion of most questions answered here.

[Ken White]

than that I thought J. Wolfsberger and thus by extension Steve Metz, Selil and a couple of others had a valid point; an FM is not an academic work regardless of who outside DoD elects to publish it for whatever reason and some of the modficiation suggested to dress the sow's ear seem rather pointless.

However, with this from Marc:

"I will note that there is at least one quote included in DP's article that, while attributed, lists no source, id est"

By this I mean people like the recently retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez who know that the Iraq war is now "a nightmare with no end in sight".

I'm moved to comment that Professor Price is building significant credibility problems in my mind. Not from the lack of a source for the quote, rather from his choice of quote and its originator...

[wm]

I'm moved to comment that Professor Price is building significant credibility problems in my mind. Not from the lack of a source for the quote, rather from his choice of quote and its originator...

With regard to Dr. Price's credibility in his latest Counterpunch posting, it matters less to me whom he chooses to quote (appropriately documented or otherwise) and more that he chooses to make allegations for which he has presented little or no evidence. A representative example of the case in point is as follows:

Nagl knows full well that Chicago's republication of the Manual was part of a public relations campaign to bury the views of those like Sanchez who recognize that President's Bush's policies have led us into a quagmire. Selling America a war with fake scholarship won't get us out of this mess.

(Price, http://www.counterpunch.org/price11032007.html)

I have seen nothing in either of his two Counterpunch pieces to substantiate the conclusions drawn in the above quotation, viz., that "Nagl knows full well that Chicago's republication of the Manual was part of a public relations campaign to bury the views of those like Sanchez who recognize that President's Bush's policies have led us into a quagmire" and that "[s]elling America a war with fake scholarship won't get us out of this mess." (ibid.) Good scholars do much more than just document their research sources. Good scholars provide good reasons for the conclusions that they draw in their research. In his latest effort, I submit that Price has not done either at the level one would expect from an associate professor with a Ph.D.

Had I received the latest piece of Price's invective, which was published by Counterpunch in its November 3/4 weekend edition, from one of my Freshman Composition, Introduction to Philosophy or Advanced Composition students, I would have had little trouble awarding it a failing grade. At the post-secondary educational institutions where I have studied and taught, the standards for post-doctoral work were much higher than those applied to undergraduates in their freshmen, sophomore, and junior years. I would expect, as a mimimum, that Price (or my English Comp freshman for that matter) provide evidence to show what Nagl "knows full well" about the government's motivation with regard to allowing the publication of the FM by a university press.

One might object to my criticism with a variant of Nagl's defense (found at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/200...-with-limited/). Just as Nagl defended the lack of citations on the grounds that FMs have a different standard for sourcing, one might argue on Price's behalf that an op-ed piece has a different standard for acceptable argumentation. This leaves us with at least three options:
1.) Accept the claim, which entails that we also dismiss Price's "poor scholarship" attack on the FM because "sholarship" standards are relative to their publishing venue.
2.) Equivocate on the claim and shift blame to the editorial staff of Counterpunch for allowing such shoddy work to be published, as has been suggested with regard to the Chicago U. Press and the FM.
3.) Deny the relativism claim and expect high standards from Price simply because he is a member of Academe.

I happen to opt for the third choice. Teachers have a positional duty: they are role models for reasoned discourse. As such, members of academe must be held to a higher standard when expressing their opinions. That standard is a Platonic standard, one that requires academics to state their opinions with an account that rationally justifies the assertion of those opinions as true.

[SteveMetz]

I don't mean this as a slam on anyone here, but one reason I divorced myself from academia was what was, in my opinion, a pervasive ignorance about the way the American security policy and armed conflict in general really works. I remember going to major conferences with panels on these topics and sitting in the back of the room thinking how utterly clueless the presenters were. And these were well known academics. I

was particularly taken aback at the absence of primary source material in so many refereed publications (and I'm talking here mostly about political scientists). A few years ago I evaluated a book manuscript by a well known scholar that had not a single primary source citation in it. Even when the author was talking about things like the National Security Strategy, he would refer to descriptions of it in other academic articles rather than the original. I literally went to one of his sources, and found no primary sources in it either. It was like the kids' game of "gossip" where information gets passed from person to person and eventually is almost nothing like the original.

I realize there are scholars and even programs that are exceptions to this. But it is still my impression that it is common.

What all this rant is about is my belief that Price is truly ignorant about the way doctrine is made, what its designed to do, the way government works, and the nature of armed conflict. But he is not aware of how little he knows, therefore speaks with the certitude of the ignorant.

I apologize, but this whole issue has really gotten my dander up.

[Rex Brynen]

I realize there are scholars and even programs that are exceptions to this. But it is still my impression that it is common..

On this we absolutely agree, Steve (and it applies not only to the military and national security policy, but to the broader conduct of diplomacy, aid policy, and government in general).

Of course, the world is also full of politically naive aid workers, undiplomatic soldiers, and all sorts of policy-doers who aren't aware of existing research in their areas of responsibility. However, I think there is a particular burden on scholars to actually understand the things they purport to research/analyze/write about.

In some ways it ought to be easy enough to do: summers with no teaching and sabbaticals every seven years provide ample opportunity to involve oneself in the policy world as resource, consultant, or even practitioner. However, most social science disciplines view such activity as less worthy than the more traditional research-and-publish activities, and university reward systems (tenure, promotion, salary increments) reflect this.

In my own case, I suspect that everything I've done in the policy world (policy advisor at the Department of Foreign Affairs, a decade on the Interdepartmental Experts Group on Middle East Intelligence, World Bank and UN consultant, second track diplomatic negotiation) collectively count for less than an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. I'm not complaining about my personal situation--after all, I'm full professor at a great university, full of great students--but to get there you do rather have to burn the candle at both ends. More importantly, it results in a discipline that often seems to be preoccupied by abstract theorizing and to have little intrinsic grasp of the actual nature of politics and policy processes.

The odd (and even tragic) thing is that many, perhaps most graduate students usually come into the system wanting to not only study the world, but to engage with it too. We put then put them through a series of disciplinary tribal rituals that emphasize the theoretical at the cost of the actual, and in the end reproduce the discipline's own weaknesses. (Or we put them off graduate school altogether--which is a shame, since there is a lot that is useful to learn too.)