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.”
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.