Hammer Mill Days

Where do we sign again? Here? Right.... Now, we're done. We're not done? Freaking hell! You've already got our signatures sixty-seven times. Just copy the fuckers. Everything by the book, that's how these legal types are. Anyway... greetings and welcome to Big Green -land. We're finalizing the terms of our forthcoming CD release (actually, it's our second -coming release... we've got two more to go before we get to our fourth) entitled International House , and it's important to get all the details straight. Except when it comes to really shmeensy details of the sort lawyers love to dive into. (They're like hippos who joined a flee circus and are trying to dive into the little swimming pool.) Appendix this and codicil that; refer to paragraph 97, section vii; subsection 7a; insofar as the party of the second part shall render unto the party of the first part said sums as designated in paragraph 43 .... Damn! I'll tell you, it's all we musi...

In case the power's been off in your neighborhood this week, I should mention that the first American war crimes tribunal since the end of World War II has been in session. Who's the first accused war criminal to take the stand, the Herman Goering of the global war on terror? Well, it's some dude who drove Bin Laden's car. Or so they say. Actually, the evidence about that is a little thin, and some of that is testimony extracted under torture (or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the dark comedians of the Bush administration term it). Another problem: a lot of the folks at Gitmo (Hamdan included) were handed over by surrogates in exchange for a bounty, so you tend to get a high error rate on your collars (e.g. a lot of people who owed a neighbor money or just got on the wrong side of somebody). Happily, the tribunal doesn't rely on the same standard of evidence as one might expect in, say, a mainland American court of law. I suspect many of these cas...