“Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Manual” by David Price delivers the news that the widely lauded Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24), published in December ’06 by the US Army and Marine Corps and promoted as a strategy for victory in Iraq, is an amalgam of unacknowledged quotes. Price wonders how it ever passed “so briskly through the well-guarded gates” of Chicago University Press.
Counterpunch editors, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, have decided to publish the report online despite its inclusion in the current edition of their subscriber-only newsletter, because as they put it, the “story merits the widest and swiftest circulation, not only as regards the “borrowings” from unacknowledged sources but also the prostitution of anthropology in evil military enterprises.”