Anti-Semitism and The Human Terrain Program (HTS)
Wikicommons Image - Human Terrain Program Class "Cycle" - screenshot
Setting the Record Straight
Recently an editor at a psychologically oriented journal asked me to write about my experience of antisemitism in the Human Terrain Program (HTS) in Leavenworth, Kansas 2008-2009. This was because I had requested a correction to my profile which was incorrect. The passage contained misinformation and I felt it minimized my work as well as what I managed to accomplish despite the fact that the program was antisemitic. I wrote this short piece to be published but the journal asked for revisions. Since I don’t have no time to do that, I am posting it here at my website with some further minimal editing – names have been removed. The following is what I wrote up on this subject.
The controversial HTS program trained interdisciplinary teams to be embedded in U.S. Army brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Before moving to discuss the antisemitism, it is important to set the stage as to how I became involved in HTS. Here is a partial list of my work with military and police which led up to me being accepted into the Human Terrain Program. If deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, the program paid $250,000 per year for five years through the U.S. Department of Defense for a social scientist holding a doctorate. As you will read, I was denied access to such employment.
Prior Work with Military and Law Enforcement – A Partial List:
The United Stated Army Fort Leonard Wood Missouri 2005 Psychology of Suicide Bombing
The Hennepin County Sheriff Deputies Summer 2005 - 25 Lectures on Radical Islam and prison interviews
ICT, Herzliya Israel September 2005 – Psychology of Suicide Bombing
Sri Lanka, Columbo, the Military and the Tamil Tiger – Suicide Bombing
Middle East Orientation Course – Special Ops, Hurlburt Field, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida 2006
NATO Cambridge, UK 2006 Seminar Suicide Bombing
Rand, Santa Monica 2008 Seminar Suicide Bombing
HTS and Antisemitism
There had been reports and lawsuits about sex discrimination and physical harassment in the Human Terrain Program but to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever written about antisemitism. I even debated now to write this but have decided that I wanted to be more explicit about what happened even though it happened years ago.
Since HTS focused on Iraq and Afghan cultures, Islam was central to its teaching core. My doctorate is in Islamic Hadith literature and I had studied Arabic and its ajams i.e. languages written in Arabic script such as Pashto and Dari, which were central to the HTS program. Being a published scholar of Sephardic studies as well, I had an intimate knowledge of Islam since the Prophet Muhammad had borrowed extensively in order to convert the Jews of Saudi Arabia to his project. This fact is well known. Judaism has the longest and most intense experience with Islam by virtue of the fact that it is the first Abrahamic Faith. It was striking to me that there were virtually no Jews in the Human Terrain Program, most especially, because there were many Jewish academics who were involved in counter terrorism even before 9/11. Why was that?
By 2008 I found myself advancing in the network of counter-terrorism experts. My first book The Banality of Suicide Terrorism had been accepted for publication by Potomac Press. (A Hebrew translation also exists)
I decided that I wanted to apply to the Human Terrain Program. I was subsequently hired as a social scientist. I was on an interdisciplinary team of seven as part of the counter insurgency effort of the US Army to connect with the local population. In short, I was to be a kind of cultural interpreter for the brigade leader.
Since the U.S. Army had been using my work, I felt compelled to see what was actually going on down range in the war theater. I am a big believer in that, a person has to see it on the ground, first hand in order to really understand what is happening. There is no substitute for this kind of experience.
In addition, I had developed a special interest in how terrorists unconsciously use
objects, in particular improvised explosive devices (IEDs). (Cf. my The Jihadi Dictionary) Afghanistan was the arena in which they were being used the most when I entered in 2008. I had prepared myself by studying some Dari (Eastern Persian) and Pashto. I met General M. C. Meigs , the founder of JIEDDO—the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Office (for roadside bombs). HTS was a part of JIEDDO. Meigs lectured at the Interdisciplinary Center for Counterterrorism in Herzliya, Israel in 2007 where I was in attendance. In 2008 the HTS program was run by the private contracting company BAE Systems in conjunction with the U.S. Army. BAE is said to be the fifth largest military contracting company in the world, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland.
BAE also hired different “sub-contracting companies which provided specific lectures on Iraq and Afghanistan. Those teachers commuted to Leavenworth. One member of such a contracting company included the leading Israeli expert on Iraq, Professor Amatzia Baram, Haifa University.
I applied and was accepted to the program. I found myself to be the only Jewish woman out of thirty in my cycle which is what class groups were called. There was one other Jew. He was originally from New York and had become a flight surgeon and had moved to Wyoming. He told me that he felt that Judaism was irrelevant and that the worst thing that had ever happened to the Middle East was the creation of the State of Israel.
He and I went out to dinner one night with Prof. Baram who asked him if he had ever been to Israel? He said “no.” Prof. Baram retorted with “Gee, what did we do wrong?” In addition, HTS students expressed outrage that an Israeli was teaching them about Iraq.
The Creator of HTS and the Initial Antisemitic Comment
Antisemitism reared its ugly head during the first week of the program. A chill ran
down my spine when the head of the program came and welcomed our cycle. In her opening remarks she bragged about all the different the religions who were participating in the program. She recited a long list – I kept waiting and waiting and then I heard her say at the very end of this drawn out list . . . “and we even have Jews.” Yet there were virtually no Jews to be seen.
Refused Permission to Observe Yom Kippur
Several months later I then had to report that I would be away for the weekend since I wanted to observe Yom Kippur with my children. We were required to inform our commanders and team leaders if one had to leave on the weekend. I put in an email request and received an email reply stating that I could not leave for Yom Kippur. They said if they did this for me that they would have to do it for the Muslims for Ramadan and lo and behold they turned around and let the Muslims observe. I knew that their response was against the law.
I did meet another Jewish woman from Brazil who was a naturalized U.S. citizen. She was in a different cycle ahead of me. We spoke a bit in Portuguese. She told me that she was dropping out of the program because she did not feel safe.
Nonetheless, I continued on and was sent to the University of Nebraska, Omaha to attend a special Afghan Studies Program for those deploying to Afghanistan. The British were also sending their officers to the Center for Afghan Studies, University of Nebraska. Omaha had the first large Afghan population in the U.S.
Physical Abuse and the Abandonment of a Jew at Fort Irwin
A couple of weeks later I was sent out to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin for war games. Fort Irwin is a desert camp the size of Rhode Island where 1500 troops were routinely trained for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. Every six months the camp switched its signage and buildings to resemble either Iraq or Afghanistan. When I was there, it was made to look like Iraqi villages. Many of the young soldiers whom I met, had never traveled outside of their home towns let alone the United States. Like these young men, I was required to wear 65 lbs. of ceramic body armor. Fortunately, I had trained to do this ahead of the war games. In addition, we were trained on weapons. I had also been previously trained on weapons in Washington, D.C. by a former FBI agent who worked extensively in Latin America.
One day while in the headquarters tent at Fort Irwin, two HTS personnel whom I did not know came in and started screaming at me. They grabbed me, shook me and threw me into a pick-up truck claiming that I was a “problem.” They thrusted a paper in my face and said – “sign this.” I refused. They then drove me to the outskirts, a transitional space of the training camp where there were large warehouses for the 1500 soldiers to prepare to go into the camp for war games. I was literally abandoned as nightfall was approaching. The place was completely desolate. We had been told to never be in the warehouse area while empty because of a history of women being accosted and raped.
In retrospect I had come within inches of being beaten up and seriously injured. As my HTS “cyclemate,” a former US Army helicopter combat pilot who had seen service in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, told me – you never ever abandon a soldier. When I got back to Kansas the next day, he went with me to the BAE office and tried to persuade them to look at what they had done. It was to no avail. I also spoke with the Jag officer at Fort Leavenworth which was useless.
I never was permitted to deploy to Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The Human Terrain System program turned out to be a dysfunctional “cult” as well as a supreme boondoggle. No matter how low a profile I tried to maintain in the cycle, the scapegoating mechanism functioned perfectly to target a Jew, especially a female psychoanalyst. No matter how often I was invited to attend training sessions, give lectures or go out into the field, a certain stigma was always attached to me.
My psychoanalytic mentor at that time was Dr. Sander Breiner z”l, author of Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse Across the Ages. He told me how he had almost been murdered by his captain in the army while in boot camp in the Deep South because he was a Jew. Breiner later deployed for the Battle of the Bulge, where he distinguished himself.
I found out later when I met Jennifer Hunt, a psychoanalyst and a professor of sociology who had dropped out of the program because she felt that HTS was so paranoid, she could not trust anyone to watch her “six”, i.e. to have her “back” down range. Hunt is also author of Psychoanalytic Aspects of Field Work (Qualitative Research Method) and Seven Shots: An NYPD Raid on a Terrorist Cell and its Aftermath. Hunt had started to write a book about HTS. She had been conducting extensive investigative interviews. She interviewed me at length about my experience. She was shocked to see that I had earned U.S. Army dog tags as well as JPAS, i.e., U.S. security clearance. She was surprised that I had gotten that far in the program. It seemed to me that it was hard for non-Jews to perceive what I had endured as antisemitism. Even my editor for my second book Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche did not feel that the email telling me that I could not leave because I wanted to observe Yom Kippur was anti-Semitic??? It was unclear to me if Hunt also perceived or did not perceive what I had been through as antisemitism. Hunt subsequently abandoned her book project after Vanessa Gezari (2013) published hers about the Human Terrain Program which in my opinion was ironically title: The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice. The HTS program could have used Hunt’s talent as well. Furthermore, a well-known Jewish psychologist who will remain anonymous told me that surely, I must have done something wrong to be thrown out of the program! I believe this accusation was a defensive envious comment because in fact, I had come very close to deploying, something that this individual could never have achieved.
Even though I had not been permitted to deploy to Afghanistan, my “cyclemate” did. He wrote to tell me from down range that they were using my work in psyops!
Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood Jihadi and Request as An Expert Witness
When I returned to Leavenworth after having been unjustly thrown out of Fort Irwin due to anti-Semitism, there was a message from John Gallagher, Nidal Hassan’s defense attorney for the Fort Hood mass murder. Gallager had read my work. He wanted me to be an expert witness at Hassan’s trial. I had to recuse myself because I was working for the army and I had been at Fort Irwin during the Fort Hood massacre. I had seen the CNN feed of the massacre come into the headquarters television monitors.
To conclude I have provided a mere sketch of the disturbed psychodynamics of antisemitism targeting me. One might think that the difference of a couple of months as described in my "bio" would not be such a big deal but the backstory of antisemitism proves differently. Interestingly enough too one would have thought (and maybe I was looking for empathy and why not?), that the allegedly psychologically oriented editor who read this draft would have at least said something like – gee I am so sorry to read what you went through. Instead, there was nada even though I had extended empathy to him when he told me he felt overwhelmed in a previous email. In Judaism we say Ayn deen ayn dayan i.e There is not Judge and there is no Justice. And concerning the lack of women involved in political psychology and psychohistory, it seems to me that to minimize our work or even a bio tends to worsen the situation and this too constitutes a red flag for sex discrimination.
In 2010 Dr. Kobrin, a graduate of The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, immigrated to Israel where she continues her work www.nancykobrin.org She is involved in citizen diplomacy for Pashtun, Pakistanis, Somalilanders and Somalis along with others including her participation at Sakariya University in a research group as well as an external expert at La Universidad de Granada. Most recently she returned from Hargeisa where she was invited by the Somaliland government to attend the Hargeisa International Book Fair because of her fifth book The Last Two Jews of Mogadishu Living Under AlShabaab’s Fire. While in Hargeisa she had a series of meetings with ambassadors, ministers, educators, health professionals, academics etc. In 2024the French edition of herThe Jihadi Dictionary will be published by David Reinharc, Paris.
