Monthly Archives: August 2005

Canadian Court Treats Gitmo Like Cesspool

Posted on August 10, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Via JURIST – Paper Chase: Judge orders Canada to stop questioning Gitmo teen:

A Canadian Federal Court judge has ruled that intelligence authorities must stop interrogating Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainee Omar Khadr [CBC Khadr family profile]. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein’s decision also slammed Canadian counterterrorism agents for gathering information at a place where he claims Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms [text] has been violated. Khadr has admitted killing a US medic [JURIST report] while fighting with the Taliban. He was captured when he was 15 years old and transferred to Guantanamo Bay after turning 16. The US never clarified Khadr’s legal status or charged him but agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service [official website] and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade [official website] have interviewed him at Guantanamo at least three times. Von Finckenstein’s ruling prevents further interviews from occurring. The Globe and Mail has more.

Posted in Guantanamo | 2 Comments

Dreamhost.com Gets Cocky

Posted on August 10, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

This blog is hosted at dreamhost.com. On the whole I've been happy with its low prices, although as this blog grows I chafe more an more at the limits on processing times imposed by the virtual host controller on my shared machine. I am no longer able, for example, to kill off more than a few spams at a time via mt-blacklist; I can't rebuild the site without having a crash except on the dead of night on federal holidays. It can get frustrating. But it is cheap. And the real problem is that movable type and some of my favorite plugins are rather resource-intensive.

Nevertheless, I do find it a little worrying to see the management at DreamHost crowing about how easy it is to make money off folks like me. So much money that they are going to hire a bookkeeper.

PS. If you are looking for very cheap and on the whole reliable blog hosting, tell them “froomkin” sent you and I get a kickback.

Posted in Discourse.net | 5 Comments

What Does It Take To Fire a 4-Star General

Posted on August 10, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

We know that four-star generals — or indeed any general officers other than one female reservist who claims to be a scapegoat — do not get disciplined, much less cashiered, over little things like presiding over very substantial quantities of torture by their subordinates. (We used to claim to adhere to command responsibility, so one would have accepted responsibility to flow upwards, not curdle down at the level of NCOs.)

One could even be forgiven for thinking that if having your troops stringing prisoners up with mock electrodes or beating them to death in sleeping bags wasn't the sort of thing that got a general in trouble, nothing would.

Well, it seems there is something. Some unspecified “personal misconduct,” that can get a 4-Star General Dismissed.

What could it be? Fiddling the accounts, or sleeping with the wrong person perhaps. But not torture, even if he did run the Army Training and Doctrine Command. We don't go after ranking officers for that—got to save something for the war crimes tribunals.

Update: Yup. The Washington post reports that the great crime was “an extramarital affair with a civilian.”

I suppose, in all fairness, this hierarchy of military offenses is consistent with our impeachment priorities. That said, I do find this part of the Post story more offensive than sad,

The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.

“We all swear to serve by the highest ideals, and no matter what rank, when you violate them, you are dealt with appropriately,” said one Army officer familiar with the case.

Posted in Torture | 2 Comments

The Phantom Prof Offers a Free Writing Class

Posted on August 10, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Lots of people offer free congealed work product online, be it articles or software. But how many people offer free personalized classes? The Phantom Professor is thinking of doing it:

Here's the offer: The Phantom Professor's Online Writing Workshop. Open admission. Free tuition.

Using all the exercises, reading lists, quizzes and other tricks I have developed during 15 years of teaching, I will offer you, the blogistas, the benefit of my experience and expertise. I will also incorporate new things I learned at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Workshop, the most creative and inspiring haven for writers in America. You can find most of what we'll read on the Internet or in a library, so you don't even have to buy books. (Though some of them you will want to own.)

If you need help getting that novel or screenplay started, this four-month workshop will kickstart you into a creative mode that will get that sucker under way. If you're interested in journalism, here's where you can start. If you have just never felt confident putting words on paper, step right up. You don't have to be college age. My techniques work whether you're 12 or 92.

I will post short exercises to help you improve grammar, punctuation, spelling and style. You will do them at your own pace and grade them yourself.

Every couple of weeks, you'll have a short assignment (no more than 300 to 500 words) due. You can email them to me or post them in the comments section for everyone to read. We can “workshop” your output together. With positive but honest critiques to work from, you will rewrite these assignments until they are polished. You can even drop in and out as your schedule permits or your interest waxes and wanes.

Why am I doing this? Why not? As I watched my professor friends head back to classes, I just thought, “Why waste all the good stuff I've accumulated? Why not make it available for anyone who wants to do it?”

Even my agent likes the idea. Even though I'm doing it gratis.

So let me know what you think. Would you join this “class”? If enough of you do, we'll start a week from today. I always did like the Tuesday-Thursday schedule best.

I imagine there will be a stampede.

Posted in Internet | 7 Comments

Safari/Mac Rendering Woes

Posted on August 9, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Something is messing up this page on Safari, and (not having a Mac to test with) I can't figure out what on earth it could be.

The problem pre-dates the addition of the clustermap in the right margin (which will start functioning tomorrow, if all goes well). As far as I can tell, it also seems to be unrelated to the previous change, the addition of the Google page rank graphic in the right margin. I've seen a screenshoot and both of the outside columns are overlapping the center one, leaving a wide swath of blank stuff where the two outside columns should be.

I know that my HTML isn't completely standards compliant; some day I'll move to wordpress and do a better job. In the meanwhile, if anyone has a suggestion as to what might be the cause of this problem, I would be grateful for advice.

Posted in Discourse.net | 7 Comments

Edgy Thinking

Posted on August 9, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

This query at Nicholas Weaver's Random Thoughts is the sort of thing you see first at the edges, on smaller blogs, and then, sometimes, a few days later you see it everywhere.

Except that I just spent a chunk of Monday morning in the car repair waiting room, which was playing one of the local TV stations, I think the NBC affiliate.

In the hour and a half I was there, the news covered the following topics (that I can recall):

  • The weather (the sun rose this morning — illustrated with lovely pictures of Miami)
  • Anchorman Peter Jennings dies
  • Yoga for dogs (actually, they didn't cover this — they produced a lengthy promo for the upcoming story on the nightly news).
  • Space shuttle landing delayed due to weather
  • The weather (the sun is in the sky, illustrated with lovely pictures of Key West)
  • Extensive interview with a mother who had to take her kids to the first day of school today.
  • What to do about the “problem” of curly hair
  • The world's smallest ice cream
  • Interview with Barbara Walters about Peter Jennings [note that he anchored for a different network; this wasn't an internal ABC promotional thing]

There were probably other stories, but I can't remember them. I can, however, assure you that the following topics were never mentioned at any time:

  • The war in Iraq1
  • The economy
  • Any foreign countries
  • Any other states (except in the weather report) (update: and possible landing sites for the shuttle)

Which is why some of this edgy thinking stays at the edge….

1 Update: I forgot one: the war did get mentioned during a segment on four singing grannies who were interviewed wearing their silly costumes. The grannies write and sing anti-Bush protest songs, and they called the war illegal and immoral. The segment didn't actually make fun of them, although one had the sense the interviewer was struggling between a desire to mock and a desire to respect the aged.

Posted in Econ & Money, The Media | 3 Comments