22 Dec 2007
American academics have been strongly criticized for collaborating with US military forces in the wars waged on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some Harvard faculty members are concerned that the university's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy helped revise the counterinsurgency field manual, the New York Times reported.

"Universities are not that innocent. In the era of Abu Ghraib, such cooperation does damage the university's credibility and autonomy," said Harvard Professor Richard Parker.

"How could Harvard sit there and put the imprimatur of a human rights center on counterinsurgency? It lends an Ivy League cloak of legitimacy to counterinsurgency, which is inherently secret," said Vietnam War-era activist Tom Hayden.

Members of the American Psychological Association have also come under fire by anthropologists who rail against a Pentagon program that uses these social scientists in war zones.

Although the association has passed bans on participating in any form of torture, some psychologists argue that the association should forbid psychologists from even being at Guantanamo or in locations where secret CIA interrogations take place

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