Gen. Petraeus, Plagarist? [View All]

Danger Room is reporting that Prof. David Price has looked a little more closely at Dave Petraeus's COIN manual and found a lot of theft cribbing has been going on:

While some in this group are producing interesting quality studies of the military and intelligence community, the Manual shows the sort of low quality work that can pass as "innovative" uses of anthropology for the military. Chapter three reads like the work of lazy C students, taking phrases and sentences promiscuously from various sources, cobbling them together into a sort of Cliffs Notes version of anthropology, which the University of Chicago Press has now laundered into a book posing as an object of academic respectability.


It seems the General "Integrity" Petraeus copied a whole bunch of other peoples' work and printed it up. Like I said before, I wondered who the hell asked him to rewrite the thing anything. Its not like he was an expert. Hell, now its clear he didn't know enough about it to actually come up with anything original in the first place!

The Manual's PR campaign has been extraordinary. In a Daily Show interview, John Nagl hammed it up in uniform with Jon Stewart, but amidst the banter Nagl stayed on mission and described how Gen. Petraeus collected a "team of writers produced the strategy that General Petraeus is implementing in Iraq now." When Jon Stewart commented on the speed at which the Manual was produced, Nagl remarked that this was "very fast for an Army field manual; the process usually takes a couple of years";
-- counterpunch.com

More:


http://www.groupnewsblog.net/2007/11/gen-petraeus-plagarist.html