Militarizing the Social Sciences

[Judi Lynn]

Militarizing the Social Sciences
by Tom Burghardt / August 8th, 2008

Since World War II’s Manhattan Project, the above-top secret program that built the atomic bomb subsequently dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. national security state has transformed scientific research into a branch of weapons development.

The quest for atomic arms and chemical/biological warfare agents led physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists and physicians ever-deeper into the dark heart of a secretive and far-flung U.S. weapons complex. Indeed, many of these dubious programs were hidden in plain sight at prestigious American universities and corporate laboratories.

This trend accelerated during the Cold War when many psychologists and social scientists became witting and unwitting partners in the CIA and Army’s illegal and ethically-challenged MKULTRA program.

Under the cover of “national security,” CIA and Army researchers sought to create magic bullets they hoped would provide Cold Warriors a leg up over their Soviet rivals in the development of “mind control” technologies.

While that quixotic mission ended in failure, other discoveries in behavioral psychology and psychiatry–such as illicit experiments in sensory deprivation and conditioning–led to the development of today’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques (torture) at Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and the CIA’s transnational network of secret prisons.

More:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/militarizing-the-social-sciences/