"The end may be nigh for the US military's controversial and sometimes fatal attempt to embed hundreds of anthropologists and social scientists into military units under the "Human Terrain Program" or HTS. Yesterday saw two major releases from Wikileaks and the journal Nature relating to the effort.
Wikileaks released the unpublished, "bible" of the program, the 122 page "Human Terrain Team Handbook", dated Sep 2008. The contents confirm allegations made by the American Anthropological Association last year that the teams helped in "identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of US military operations".
Nature, the international science journal, called for the program to be scrapped, saying that it was "plagued by deadly mistakes," and "needs to be closed down". HTS contractors and employees stand accused, variously, of murder, dousing each other in petrol, and spying. Additionally, social scientist Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan in May and Nicole Suveges, a doctoral student from John Hopkins University was killed in Iraq the following month.
The US military has attempted to paint the teams as assisting military "cultural sensitivity", but it is clear from the handbook that the teams report to military unit commanders and are used to map family, political and other relationships for general operations and irregular warfare."
ORIGINAL SOURCE: Infoshop News
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2 comments:
How does this support the AAA's position..or yours? "Conduct operationally-relevant, open-source
social science research, and provide commanders and staffs at the BCT/RCT and Division levels with an embedded knowledge
capability, to establish a coherent, analytic cultural framework for operational planning, decision-making, and assessment." There now question HTS supports the brigade commander in better understanding the culture in which the brigade operates. That's no surprise. Your points weak to include the claim that "HTS contractors stand accused of dousing each other in petrol." Completely off the mark. Gets your facts straight. An Afghan national doused an HTS field team member with fuel...and ignited her. Suggest you get your facts straight before you make such weak and unsubstantiated claims.
We haven't made any claims, the text was an excerpt of an article published at Infoshop News.
The significance of the study is the fact that the U.S. military has been hiring social scientists to help organize counterinsurgency operations in their colonies... Which, needless to say, is an absolute disgrace to what a social scientist is supposed to be doing.
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