Thursday, May 06, 2004

Some military heroes Good New York Times story on some of the military officers defending terror-war detainees in upcoming military tribunals. It takes a lot of courage, and belief in what are often termed basic American values, to fight the system: Last month, an audience at Oxford University in England was stunned,witnesses said, when two of the lawyers, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift of the Navy and Maj. Mark Bridges of the Army, said the tribunals were not capable of producing a fair and just result. The several hundred people who had gathered for a talk about the Guantánamo detention facility did not expect to hear the American officers' objections. Murray Wesson, a Rhodes Scholar from South Africa who attended, wrote on his Web log: "What I was unprepared for, given that these were, after all, military lawyers, was how critical of the process they were. Indeed, they went so far as to describe the tribunals as `fundamentally flawed' and insinuated that they would not amount to fair trials." 2:05:34 PM    comment []

I was going to say ... .... something funny earlier this morning. But then I, and just about everyone else at TechTV, got laid off. It's not a shock -- the station was sold several weeks ago and it was clear from the grapevine that the new owners (Comcast) wasn't too interested in continuing our programming. Anyway, it's actually a relief to know what's happening and that our office will be shut down. The down side -- maybe it's this way every time a shutdown or layoff happens, though we upper-middle-class types might not think about it when the closure involves a can factory or poultry processors -- is the hurt among all the people here who really have given their best to do something good The up side is that under the WARN Act, the federal law governing plant closures, we got 60 days' notice plus a severance package. It could be a lot worse. More later. 1:14:13 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.