The U.S. government acknowledges that U.S. military forces were involved in “armed conflict” this year in Libya, but it does not acknowledge that they were engaged in “hostilities.”
Earlier this year, State Department legal advisor Harold H. Koh attempted to parse these distinctions, which have significant legal consequences, and to deflect some pointed questions from members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His responses to Senators’ questions for the record (pdf) from a June 28 Committee hearing were published last month. The full hearing volume is here (pdf).
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.