Extraordinary Hearing on Extraordinary Rendition
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing last April on the policy of “extraordinary rendition,” referring to the seizure of suspected terrorists and their transfer to a foreign country for detention and interrogation.
The record of the hearing, which has just been published (pdf), features the volatile Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official involved in the rendition program. It is exceptionally nasty and occasionally funny.
Mr. Scheuer, veering from outrageous to absurd and back again, attacked John McCain, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and quite a few others in remarkably offensive terms.
See “Extraordinary Rendition in U.S. Counterterrorism Policy: The Impact on Transatlantic Relations,” House Foreign Affairs Committee, April 17, 2007.
“Oftentimes,” Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) delicately observed, “people aspire to a higher percentage of their thoughts going unspoken than this hearing has demonstrated.”
The clearinghouse will also neutrally mediate the assignment of auditors to audits—strengthening independence, trust, and ethical governance across the AI ecosystem.
The potential implication of these evidence gaps becomes more consequential when you look at how institutions actually make decisions day to day.
Every new institution inherits something – existing incentives, existing staff, decades of prior investment that shaped what’s possible.
This is not the first time Google has agreed to censor imagery at the behest of governments, but be warned: obfuscation at this broad level poses a direct threat to the public’s ability to monitor and scrutinize government operations.