Last night I was reading the brief piece in last week's Economist about the persisting challenges behind how to solve the Guantanamo problem. The article described how a recent panel of 60 lawyers and experts from the State Dept., the Pentagon, Homeland Security, etc. finished their review and are still at a loss for how to handle the 50 or so detainees who are deemed to "too dangerous to release" but also - for whatever reason - are unable to be put on trial.
I don't know nearly enough about the laws being applied, misapplied, denied... but from a citizen's perspective I find it troubling that we've committed ourselves to a goal of closing this up - and we've devoted some pretty smart folks to try to figure out how to get that done - and still we're here a year later with a lot of collective head-scratching.
I may be taking too simplistic of a view here... but if the argument being sold to us right now is that "it's a really complex thing we haven't figure out yet".... then maybe we should look to recent examples of crowd-sourcing solutions to really complex things, like X-Prize or the Netflix prize.
I suppose the argument could be that the lawyers who should know the most about this are already working on it. But in an era where it's never been easier to connect people to problems, I want to see us get really aggressive about seeing the results we care about. And to that point, I'd even be willing to donate to this in a kickstarter-type model... but that donation should be tax deductible, since solving this is sort of what we're paying our taxes for already.
If you're reading this, let me know whether there is already something awesome like this that I'm missing, or if you have other ideas for how we can cast a broader net to help solve some of our more vexing civic woes.
