Thursday 1 April 2010

More on US Army Human Terrain Teams

The US Army's controversial Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), which use anthropologists and social scientists to collect information in Iraq and Afghanistan, are dysfunctional and corrupt, according to John Stanton, a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security matters, who has written a series of highly critical articles on the HTTs and published on the Cryptome website.
I have written on this subject before, noting the uneasiness within the US academic anthropology community about the Human Terrain System, but Stanton goes much further, alleging both incompetence and graft.
His latest article quotes one source saying: "Honestly, the Human Terrain System is just a good old boy system of retired colonels who care only about punching the time-clock and financial gain. They don't give a rat's ass about the people downrange. They only care about selling the program."

1 comment:

WASVL said...

I thought he's been writing about this consistently for a LONG time by now, more or less since the start of the programme, no?