Why Data Mining is Useless Against Terrorists

Originally posted by dr_strangecraft
Bachelor's in History from Yale.
MBA from Harvard

How about you?

Just a law degree, thanks, not that it's your business. And MY daddy didn't have to buy my way in, or ensure that I evaded the draft.

And I'd be careful with the phrase "gloats over other's misfortune." I've seen some pretty snide comments emanating from your keyboard.

Being snide is NOT the same as gloating over someone's death for whom you are directly responsible... if you can find anything remotely comparable in my posts, feel free to come up with it.

Oh, yeah, you never did respond with the exact ratio of innocent detainees at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. But hey, why let a dearth of data get between your rhetoric and a paranoid screed, right?

OOOOH! Talk about being SNIDE, baby! L - O - bloody - L!

Well, it was out of boredom, frankly, but since you bring it up I'm happy to comply.

I think our best source here is a fairly recent interview between Andrew Marr of the BBC and US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Collen Graffy. Oh, if only US interviewers were as trenchant or as well-briefed. And Marr is one of our more polite interviewers. I'd love to see Jeremy Paxman have a go at this woman.

Following are some suitable stats from the transcript of this interview.

And there were all, a maximum of, well over 10,000 people who were picked up on the battle field. From those less than 800 were brought to Guantanamo, that's less than 490 now.

ANDREW MARR: ...of which 55% have never been a threat to America according to the Pentagon... I mean, that's extraordinary...

COLLEEN GRAFFY: ..I don't know that I agree with that because they are individuals...

ANDREW MARR: These are official figures that came out through the National Law Journal...

That was back in March. Releases continue.

More than 10.000, down to fewer than 800 (futile to expect the a Secretary of State to know the difference between "less than" and "fewer than"), down to 490, over half of those not even worth putting on trial... the collapse continues. I could provide links to subsequent releases, but I'm bored. So, what, maybe one in four is even worh putting on trial - and having seen the quality of US evidence in the past (as in The Road To Guantanamo, where one of the British guys was accused of being at a meeting with Bin Laden when he'd been working in Curry's and had the payslips to prove it), I very much doubt that many of them are guilty.

Are those really stats that you're happy with? Would you want your local police to have that kind of hit rate? If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, the point of the original article I posted here has been proved: you are paranoid.

[edit on 2-6-2006 by rich23]