CBS' 60 Minutes had two fascinating stories tonight. The first about a German citizen wrongly imprisoned for five years, the second about baseball data wunderkind Bill James. The first demonstrates the combustible mix you get when "intelligence gathering" is led by people passionately out for facts that will fit a truth, even when no facts can be found. The second story shows the wondrous possibilities of information gathering when the same amount of passion is balanced with equal commitment to how facts do or don't add up to a truth.
Murat Kurnaz is a German Muslim citizen whose parents had emigrated from Turkey. In 2001, he was a 19 year old, about to get married to a woman more versed than him in Islam. Kurnaz decided to get a more formal religious education for himself. "Bad luck" is an understatement to describe the timing and choice of learning, as he left for a Pakistani Islamic school right after 9/11, where on the way back home he ended up getting picked up as a terror suspect by authorities.
Even though the FBI, as well as the German government, found and gave testimony that nothing tied Kurnaz to terrorism, he ended up spending the next four years in Guantanamo, where those holding him there refused to listen. More, he lived in conditions best described as purgatorial. His story shows what happens when those who claim intelligence have none. In this case, it led to a vicious search for data that didn't exist, but allowed them the ability to brutalize those who come under their control.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Kurnaz, now only 27 years old, looks like a much older man. Whether his psyche has been scarred beyond repair, I have no idea. In the interview, he also comes across as a man of both dignity and gentleness. Regardless, his story is chilling. And unfortunately, he's probably only the first of many such people who will share with us similar tales in years to come. When the history of this presidential administration gets written, indeed the last seven years of much of what our lawmakers have sanctioned (Democrats as well as Republicans), it's likely that we will look at Sept. 11th as having sent this nation into deep trauma, if not collective psychosis. Really crazy.
The second piece on 60 Minutes focuses on something also deeply American, but also revealing about this country: our imagination, our gift for play, the genius of our individualism, and our delight in baseball. It's a portrait of the statistician Bill James, now working for the Boston Red Sox.
As the 60 Minutes web site reports, James studied economics in college, turning everything they taught him about statistics into exploring his love for baseball. After graduation, he ended up using his economics education in an interesting capacity, as a night watchman at a pork and beans factory in Lawrence, Kansas. He spent his evenings passing the time playing with statistics as he analyzed box scores of past games. Toiling at the plant didn't exactly shift the nature of how pork and beans got made, but it had a whopping impact on opening up baseball to the power of wisely analyzed statistics.
I won't chance butchering the elegantly produced story. It's a doozy. And a great tale of what happens when someone with a genuine love for something, along with deep intelligence, makes room in his life to apply it to his passion. It's the exact opposite of what happens when terrified people, especially those with ammunition, look to create knowledge out of thin air.
What hit me watching the stories back to back was this: Guantanamo, and the terror inflicted on poor Murat Kurnaz is an instance of data run amuck. And those in power looking at "intelligence" as a creation myth. You will it, so it comes to be. Bill James' story is the opposite. A commitment to find some truth. All to say that data, information, it's a thing of tremendous power. And beauty. But it demands a discipline and commitment to create something enduring. Hopefully as we continue to use information technology that creates even more data, we have more individuals like Bill James helping lead us to decipher its riches... whether we're playing baseball, working Wall Street, or making and overseeing laws that govern our freedoms.
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