Years ago, when I was researching Western Magic, I came across a then-obscure book called the Kybalion (my copy is from the 1940’s).  It is a masterpiece of the esoteric genre; a genre designed to hide information in “plain sight”.  Reading the comments on Wired in response to Steve Featherstone’s recent Harpers article brought the other side of the genre coin into focus: the purposeful rejection of what is in plain site in order to see an esoteric conspiracy.

When I read Steve’s article, I thought that it was a really good critique of the problems inherent in US foreign policy and strategic communications being handed over, almost by default, to the military.  It was not, IMO, so much about how the Human Terrain System (HTS) operated as it was about why the HTS had become necessary.  This certainly seemed straighforward, and I am flabergasted at some of the comments showing up and, most especially, at the inability of some people to read plain English.

Human Terrain - what a silly name. That used to be called intelligence. You need to have covert people to know what the local society thinks, who they support, whet do they say and do when they are not observed by troops.

I agree, it is a silly name, and somewhat misleading, but the HTS is neither “intelligence” nor is it covert.  I mean, let’s get serious for a minute; how possible is it to be “covert” when you are wearing a full uniform kit?  Neither is it “intelligence” - a closer analog would be a “mapping system” for invisible “terrain” (i.e. human interactions).  Indeed, from what I have been hearing, the HTS caused massive confusion when first deployed simply because it did not fit into any of the military categories.

The next criticism of the article moved beyond ingnorence into the realm of stupidity.

I read Featerstone’s article and was unimpressed, mostly because it was old news (why did such a straight forward piece take so long to come out?), it ignored all the criticisms of Human Terrain, and he only spent a few days with the teams. Can this really be the most in depth story out there? Given all the controversies surrounding Human Terrain it was very odd to read this piece without any discussion at all about the problems that professional anthropologists and other have with it.

Steve’s response to this was, I though, quite masterful in the sense of keeping his cool

I was with the team for one month, not a few days. Not sure where you’re getting that timeline. As for the criticisms of the HTS, it really wasn’t in the scope of my article. Rather, my goal was to show what, exactly, an HTT does from first-hand experience. That hasn’t been done yet. Furthermore, I tried to put the HTS in a broader context (controversies you refer to are a narrower context), to explain how it is both an improvement on old ‘kinetic’ ways of waging war and a sign of increasingly militarized foreign policy. But maybe that didn’t interest you. Personally, I’m interested in the ‘controversies’ surrounding the program, and I’ve read everything on the subject, but I feel much of that controversy is manufactured, and it’s been covered in great detail by other media.

As one might imagine, things went downhill from there with accusatuons that the critiques of the HTS were “manufactured by people trying to keep the the US military from better using its troops” and counter-accusations that “you are a nutjob if you think academic critics of Human Terrain want to harm the troops”.  The comments move into the realm of paranoid farce a little later on

News is something someone with power wants to suppress, everything else is advertising. The Harper’s story fawns over the military and by removing all criticism, it reads like advertising.

I am reminded of the old quote

And, like Alice, one commentator responds with

What are you talking about? How does my post do that? Your clarification makes even less sense. Is your post News or advertising? You seem to be suppressing coherence.

In actuality, the poster wasn’t “suppressing coherence” but, rather expressing a paranoid, Manichean worldview in which if some perception does not match his perception of reality (or, as I certain he would say “Truth!”), then it is all the fault of a conspiracy.  Thos. Paine had it right, when he wrote that

It is as useless to argue with those who have abandoned the use of reason as it is to administer medicine to the dead.

The effect of having these paranoid, Manichean worldviews coming out inside such a debate is deadly.  Most people with two neurons to rub together start shaking their heads in baflement and wondering if the loonies have taken over the asylum.  The problem, of course, is that this has completely derailed any chance to have a decent conversation and to consider the real problems with the HTS, however you choose to define them.

Now, I have some major concerns with the HTS, most of which surround the lack of any real, publicly available data.  Steve’s article didn’t give me all of the data I need to resolve those problems, but it certainly filled in some of the holes.