Free Republic

EL PASO (AP) - Former POW Shoshana Johnson has signed a deal to write a book about her life and 22 days of captivity after a deadly ambush in the early days of the Iraq war. Johnson, a former U.S. Army specialist with the Fort Bliss-based 507th Maintenance Co., will write "One Wrong Turn" with Paul T. Brown for Dafina Books. The single mother was one of five soldiers captured in the March 23, 2003, ambush that killed nine others in her unit. She suffered injuries to her feet in the attack and has since left the Army with a...

So now we’re told that it doesn’t matter whether or not the Iraqi torture pictures are fakes. What’s important is that British soldiers are mistreating prisoners. And if the phoney photos have drawn attention to this greater evil, then so well and good. Yeah, right. Curious how those putting forward this argument have always been first to scream “fit-up” when police are accused of fabricating evidence against known criminals and terrorists. How many cases have collapsed because detectives have over-egged the case against villains they insisted were guilty? How many guilty men have walked free because their “confessions” have been...

The revelations about US soldiers' sadistic behavior toward Iraqi prisoners cannot be taken lightly. No upstanding democracy can tolerate such behavior, and we are confident that America won't. Still, such abuses should, if anything, remind us what has been achieved in Iraq and how important it is that that success be consolidated rather than discarded for lack of patience or perspective. The prisoner-abuse photos have rightly stimulated nothing but disgust throughout American officialdom, yet they have generated waves of claims of moral equivalence and loss of the high moral ground. Anthony Lewis, for example, writing in the International Herald Tribune...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Seven Iraqi prisoners being transported for release were wounded Saturday when a roadside bomb blasted their U.S. military convoy west of Baghdad, the U.S. Marines said. Soldiers from the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division pursued the attackers, killing one and capturing another, the Marines said. The 1st Infantry soldiers are serving alongside the 1st Marine Division. The convoy was traveling between the western Iraqi towns of Ramadi and Habbaniyah when the blast occurred. The wounded prisoners were treated at a military hospital for shrapnel wounds, the Marines said