Nagl's response shirks the central points raised in my article. My primary aim was not, as he falsely claims, to continue an "assault on social scientists assisting national efforts to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan," it was to examine how the University of Chicago Press's republication of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual was part of the Pentagon's efforts to convince the American public that victory in Iraq would occur with a new academic approach to counterinsurgency. That some of this scholarship turns out to be fake scholarship exposes the hollowness of this sales pitch.
Lt. Col. Nagl wants it both ways. He was the Manual's public spokesman on the well oiled media circuit where he claimed that the new Manual was the product of high scholarship in the service of the state; yet when it became apparent that somewhere along the line in the production of the Manual the most basic of scholarly practices were abandoned, he now pretends that these rules do not apply in this context. He has to choose how he wants to pitch the Manual: scholarship or doctrine. He can't have it both ways anymore. I read U.S. Army Spokesman Major Tom McCuin's statement as military doublespeak declaring a mistakes-were-made-but-the-messages-remains-true admission that passages were indeed used in an inappropriate manner, so I guess what we have here is doctrine.
Also see, Army Counterinsurgency Manual Plagiarized
* Core Chapter a Morass of "Borrowed" Quotes
* University of Chicago Press Badly Compromised
* Counterinsurgency Anthropologist Montgomery McFate's Role Under Attack
Editors' note: This expose of the stolen scholarship in the Army's new manual on counterinsurgency to which General David Petraeus has attached his name also runs in our current newsletter sent by US mail or as a pdf to our newsletter subscribers. Normally material in our newsletter does not run on the CounterPunch website. In the belief that David Price's 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 we re making an exception in this case.
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