Did you catch this letter in yesterday’s New York Times? Titled “Scientists Speak Out About Guantánamo” the letter was signed by 19 scientists who identified themselves as members of the National Academy of Sciences, and as 4 Nobel laureates.

I pretty much agree with their politics on this issue, but I can’t figure out what it has to do with science or science in policy. They write,

Although this is not a scientific issue in the usual sense, we feel that to ignore it would be to abdicate our responsibility to the truth.

Well, I can’t imagine a better example of both the linear model (i.e., that truth dictates a particular course of action, see this PDF) and Brad Allenby’s concerns about “nightmare science,” from his recent essay of that title which included this passage:

In short, the elite that has been created by practice of the scientific method uses the concomitant power not just to express the results of particular research initiatives, but to create, support, and implement policy responses affecting many non-scientific communities and intellectual domains in myriad ways. In doing so, they are not exercising expertise in these non-scientific domains, but rather transforming their privilege in the scientific domains into authority in non-scientific domains. Science is, in other words, segueing back into a structure where once again authority, not observation, is the basis of the exercise of power and establishment of truth by the elite.