Science & Justice Working Group Meeting with Jeffrey Bussolini (CUNY)
Rap Report > Jeffrey Bussolini: Ethnicity and Security – The Wen Ho Lee Case
The treatment and legal case of Taiwanese-American physicist Wen Ho Lee is a remarkably instructive account of the troublesome intersecting dynamics of ethnicity and security in US national security institutions on the eve of the September 11th transformations. Perhaps most shocking is that some of the same techniques that became notorious after 9/11 (sensory deprivation, techniques of humiliation through shackling and temperature control) were previewed in Lee’s treatment. In this respect, and in the mechanics of the case itself which are still poorly understood, the Lee case serves as an invaluable instance of what Foucault would call “the history of the present” in which the techniques of the post-9/11 security state were not simply created out of whole cloth, but were the amplifications of practices that had already been developed within US security and justice systems. Another prominent aspect of the Lee case is that it highlights the role of immigrants within the US national security infrastructure (which has been crucial at least since World War II), and the way in which treatment of individuals of given ethnic groups (or perceived ethnic groups) can change suddenly and dramatically in terms of shifts in government and media portrayal of threats to the nation. This project draws upon extensive ethnographic research in Los Alamos, and in related sites like Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Washington DC (Department of Energy). It includes extensive interviews including with Wen Ho Lee, attorneys involved in the case, civil rights activists (from Asian-American and scientific organizations), journalists covering the case, and members of the staff at Los Alamos and other institutions.
Jeffrey Bussolini, is Associate Professor at CUNY and Director of the Center for the Ethnographic and Historical Study of Los Alamos and National Security. He has conducted ethnographic and historical study of Los Alamos and the nuclear-weapons infrastructure since 1991. During that time he has done participant observation as a security-cleared laboratory employee in Classification and Nuclear Technology, has conducted archival work on the history of Los Alamos and related institutions, and has interviewed hundreds of informants ranging from Manhattan Project participants like J. Carson Mark, Stanislaw Ulam (a friend of his grandparents), and Berlyn Brixner, to town residents (shopkeepers, teachers), to current laboratory staff members. He is interested in Los Alamos as a site through which to understand aspects of US national security, and as one among a set of locations for multi-sited ethnography. In addition, he is also interested in animal-human relations and in using and extending the methods of the social sciences to address them.
October 9, 2012 | 4:00pm – 6:00pm | Engineering 2, Room 599