In 1964, SORO also designed the infamous Project Camelot. According to a letter from the Office of the Director of the Special Operations Research Office, Project Camelot was "a study whose objective [was] to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world." The project's objectives were "to devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal war within national societies; to identify with increased degrees of confidence those actions which a government might take to relieve conditions which are assessed as giving rise to a potential for internal war; [and] to assess the feasibility of prescribing the characteristics of a system for obtaining and using the essential information needed for doing the above two things.
Shortly after the Project Camelot scandal, the issue of clandestine research surfaced again in Thailand. In March 1970, documents that appeared to implicate social scientists in U.S. counterinsurgency programs in Thailand were stolen from a university professor's file cabinet. The documents were given to the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and were subsequently published in The Student Mobilizer. A number of anthropologists and other social scientists were allegedly gathering data for DOD and the Royal Thai Government to support a counterinsurgency program that would use development aid to encourage tribal villages to remain loyal to the Thai Government rather than joining the insurgents. Although anthropologists claimed to have been using their expertise to prevent Thai villages from being harmed, heated debates took place within the AAA's Committee on Ethics.
As a result of Project Camelot and the Thai scandal, government funding and use of social science research became suspect. Anthropologists feared that, were such research to continue, the indigenous people they studied would assume they were all spies, closing off future field opportunities abroad. Many anthropologists also believed the information would be used to control, enslave, and even annihilate many of the communities studied
Regardless of whether anthropologists decide to enter the national-security arena, cultural information will inevitably be used as the basis of military operations and public policy. And, if anthropologists refuse to contribute, how reliable will that information be? The result of using incomplete "bad" anthropology is, invariably, failed operations and failed policy. In a May 2004 New Yorker article, "The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to Abu Ghraib
http://www.army.mil/professionalwrit...05/7_05_2.html
From the mouth of the military....a long read..but very eye opening