When a military judge ruled last month that Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could be tried for war crimes, the first footnote in his July 14 opinion (pdf) was to a Congressional Research Service report. (Hamdan was convicted yesterday for material support of terrorism.)
But Military Judge Keith J. Allred, lacking an official source for the CRS analysis by Jennifer K. Elsea (with which he ultimately differed), provided a link instead (see footnote 1 on page 3) to a copy of the document on the Federation of American Scientists web site.
By doing so, the Judge simultaneously highlighted the centrality of such CRS analyses to public discourse and the strange fact that these official documents are still not approved for direct release to the public.
Perhaps he also implicitly affirmed that FAS and other public interest publishers of CRS collections are helping to compensate for that continuing policy defect by providing the online access to CRS reports that Congress has denied.
What if low trust was not a given? Or, said another way: what if we had the power to improve trust in government – what would that world look like?
“One in three Americans report being personally affected by extreme weather in just the past two years – illustrating that extreme weather has become extremely common,” said Dr. Hannah Safford.
Datasets and variables that do not align with Administration priorities, or might reflect poorly on Administration policy impacts, seem to be especially in the cross-hairs.
One month of a government shutdown is in the books, but how many more months will (or can) it go? Congress is paralyzed, but there are a few spasms of activity around healthcare and the prospects of a continuing resolution to punt this fight out until January or later.