Free Republic

The same liberal media outlets that took weeks, if ever, to report on a sleazy scandal at Air America now can't get enough of Pat Robertson-bashing. That's after he seemed to call for Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez's extermination on his 700 Club television program: "...You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

The liberal media is delighted with Cindy Sheehan. This is the woman who lost a son in Iraq and has camped outside President Bush's Crawford Ranch, intending to stay until the President speaks with her or returns to Washington. For the reporters waiting around in the dusty heat of West Texas, Ms. Sheehan is a godsend, a dramatic, heart-wrenching story that gives the media both a telegenic drama and another opportunity for indulging their dislike of Bush and the war in Iraq. No one should trivialize Ms. Sheehan's grief, nor fail to understand why she is angry and wants to...

Wherein your correspondent corrects some misconceptions.Why aren't the major newspapers running editorials calling for Karl Rove's resignation? The Washington Post is silent. So is the Los Angeles Times. Maybe they're waiting for more information. But what more do they have to know? The White House deputy chief of staff revealed the identity of an undercover CIA employee to Time magazine. He did this solely for the purpose of attacking the credibility of an administration critic. He did not check first to find out whether said CIA employee was undercover. Or perhaps he knew and didn't care. Either way, such reckless...

A newspaper investigation into the veterans' group behind the controversial TV ads about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam war record has found a "web of connections" to the president and his family and many inconsistencies in the veterans' public statements on the matter.

As hundreds of detainees were released from Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, a senior U.S. official Friday confirmed that a previously undisclosed U.S. military interrogation facility at or near Baghdad International Airport does indeed exist. The official said the site was run in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and all detainees were afforded their rights under that international document. "That's not to say somebody didn't get their head dunked in the water," he said. U.S. Special Forces participated in running the site, he added. Two other intelligence experts have confirmed the existence of a secret interrogation facility as well. It...

The documents show that MPs staged the photographs to discipline the prisoners for acts ranging from rioting to an alleged rape of a teenage boy in the prison. On Oct. 24, the MPs decided to punish three detainees suspected of raping a teenage boy at the prison. To make the men confess, the MPs stripped them and handcuffed them together. "They started to handcuff the two rapist together in odd positions/ways," England told investigators. "Once the two were handcuffed together, the third guy was brought over and handcuffed between the other two. Then they were laying on the floor handcuffed...

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Rumsfeld must go 05/06/2004 DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD should resign and take his top deputies with him. That includes Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith.

First there was denial, then a sluggish response — and now irrational fear out of proportion to the danger. The denial was in China, where the disease appears to have originated, the sluggish response was by Hong Kong, and the fear has spread worldwide. Advisories from the World Health Organization, governments, airlines and trade fairs warning against traveling to Hong Kong and Guangdong have combined with intense news coverage to make the recent outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, seem more dramatic than it really is. To be sure, there was reason for major concern when it was...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Ordinary Americans are struggling with the same quandary facing President Bush and his military commanders: In the war to oust Saddam Hussein and transform Iraq, how many casualties are too many?</p> <p>That question has taken on new urgency as early developments in the 11-day-old war have many in the public bracing for a longer conflict than they first anticipated. And it is all the more difficult to answer because the goal of limiting U.S. military casualties conflicts with the desire to limit deaths of Iraqi civilians.</p>

I see my column on Monday flushed the late Tariq Aziz out of hiding. No sight of Saddam, though Baghdad's leading taxidermists have now had a week to patch him up. Nevertheless, Mr. John Black writes to chide me for my quaintly passé optimism: "Your column," he says, "seemed so out of date with developments over the weekend, so seemingly out of touch with the current situation, so, as you would say, so September 10th. You see Mark, as you well know, the story of the day was not precision weapons but the growing bluster and embarrassment of the U.S....

<p>"Some senior U.S. military officers are now convinced that the war is likely to last months and will require considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait, senior defense officials said today," wrote Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks Thursday. The gloom and doom in his piece, War Could Last Months, Some Military Officers Say, was so thick you could slice it with a knife.</p>