The DoD’s Human Terrain 2-year-old program has reported its third death: a researcher by the name of Paula Lloyd who has been hospitalized since early December. The Nature editorial on Lloyd’s attack in December states:
Nature is not opposed in principle to academics working with the military; we have said before that social science can and should inform military policy (see Nature 454, 138; 2008). We continue to believe that the insights of science have much to offer strategies in a war zone — not least through training combat troops to understand the local cultures within which they operate.
Good for the American Anthropological Association, though, which has opposes Human Terrain despite the $41 million up for grabs, because:
[The Human Terrain] project violates the AAA Code of Ethics, a code which mandates that anthropologists do no harm to their research subjects.
War between states always means violence against civilians. Scientists face strict guidelines at the ethical, organizational, and state and federal levels for how they treat human subjects, and it is hard to see why Nature does not see an inherent conflict between these guidelines and aiding the military in their assaults on civilian liberties and lives.
2:04 pm on January 12, 2009
