After a court issued a ruling last spring that a Yemeni detainee held in U.S. custody should be released, the opinion was briefly published in the case docket and then abruptly withdrawn for classification review. When it reappeared, reporter Dafna Linzer discovered, it was not only redacted but had been significantly altered.
“The alterations are extensive,” she found. “Sentences were rewritten. Footnotes that described disputes and discrepancies in the government’s case were deleted. Even the date and circumstances of [the detainee’s] arrest were changed.”
Yet in what seems like an insult to the integrity of the judicial process, no indication was given that the original opinion had been modified — not just censored — as a consequence of the classification review. ProPublica obtained both versions of the ruling and published a comparison of them, highlighting the missing or altered passages. See “In Gitmo Opinion, Two Versions of Reality” by Dafna Linzer, ProPublica (co-published with The National Law Journal), October 8.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
Investing in interventions behind the walls is not just a matter of improving conditions for incarcerated individuals—it is a public safety and economic imperative. By reducing recidivism through education and family contact, we can improve reentry outcomes and save billions in taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.