Free Republic

Appearing on the January 29 "Rachel Maddow Show," fellow MSNBCer Chris Matthews compared Republican conservatives to the Khmer Rouge, the murderous Communist regime that racked up a body count of some two million during its reign of terror: What's going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of a frightening, almost Cambodia re-education camp going on in that party, where they're going around to people, sort of switching their minds around saying, if you're not far right, you're not right enough. Matthews was on the program to discuss President Obama's live televised exchanges with Republican Congressmen earlier in...

IN late November 1978, in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, a 35-year-old Sydney pub and club worker Ronald Keith Dean signed a confession that he was an operative for the CIA. Three weeks later, another Australian, David Lloyd Scott, signed a similar statement detailing years of anti-communist activity and a long career with the premier US spy agency. Dean and Scott, two knockabout Aussies, who had embarked on a Southeast Asian yachting adventure and strayed into contested waters, thinking they were in Thailand, were, of course, nothing of the sort. Captured by the Khmer Rouge and undoubtedly terrified in Pol...

Conservatives are taking too much solace in the precipitous drop in Barack Obama's approval ratings, and too many of us are overconfident that his administration is merely a replay of the hapless presidency of Jimmy Carter that was easily swept out in a landslide election. Today's situation is far different, far more conducive to our political adversary's political power, than that which faced Carter. And Obama is an entirely different breed of cat. He's more ruthless, more tactically savvy, and has far more dangerous objectives... In short, the wonderful conservative success in August should not hide the reality that our...

Will the long-awaited trial of Khmer Rouge leaders ease Cambodians' trauma, or stir painful memories? A Cambodian psychiatrist has testified at the trial of a confessed Khmer Rouge torturer that up to 40 percent of Cambodians suffer psychological trouble as a result of the faction’s brutal four-year rule. “According to research conducted after the Khmer Rouge period, two out of five Cambodians have [suffered] mental problems and psychosocial crises. This figure is high—up to 40 percent” of the population, Chhim Sotheara said. Studies this year also found that some 14 percent of Cambodians aged 18 and older have suffered post-traumatic...

A groundbreaking documentary sheds new light on atrocities committed in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-1979. The regime killed a greater proportion of their own people - more than 1.7 million men, women and children - than any other regime in the 20th century. Five Khmer Rouge leaders are now in court facing justice, including Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who was head of Security Prison 21 (S21). But prison interrogator Ta Chan continues to live in a remote Cambodian village. While he has not been charged with any crime, survivors say Ta Chan played a...

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA (AP) - The man who ran the Khmer Rouge's notorious S-21 prison in Cambodia accepted responsibility Tuesday for torturing and executing thousands of inmates and expressed "heartfelt sorrow" for his crimes. Kaing Guek Eav (pronounced "Gang Geck Ee-uu"), better known as Duch ("Doik"), told the U.N.-backed genocide tribunal he wanted to apologize for his actions under the Khmer Rouge, whose radical policies while in power from 1975 to 1979 left an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians dead. Duch, 66, who commanded the group's main S-21 prison, accepted responsibility for the crimes committed there, "especially the torture and execution...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A former teacher accused of carrying out the murderous policies of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge will finally face trial Monday, as prosecutors launch their first case against the hardcore communists who turned the country into a killing field three decades ago. A U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal has charged Kaing Guek Eav, 66, with committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well as torture and homicide. The tribunal is seeking to establish responsibility for the brutal 1975-79 misrule of the group, when an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died of starvation, medical neglect, slave-like working conditions and execution. "Cambodians...

Pol Pot’s 76-year-old sister-in-law, Ieng Thirith, pleaded with a Cambodia court to grant her mercy and not find her guilty of contributing to the deaths of the at least the 1.7 million who perished in that country’s "killing fields." The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, and, under Pol Pot, a Marxist leader, and the support of China, the Khmer Rouge forced millions of people to work on communal farms, and ultimately contributed to families dying of starvation, overwork and disease — not to mention execution. Nearly all of Cambodia’s lawyers, doctors, artists and intellectuals were killed. Most...

Prosecutors and defense attorneys have clashed in Cambodia over evidence at a pretrial hearing for the man who once ran a notorious Khmer Rouge prison. Defense lawyers for Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, argued Wednesday against using a film documenting torture as evidence before a genocide tribunal. Prosecutors insisted on introducing the film shot by Vietnamese soldiers shortly after they drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979. The pre-trial hearing has ended with an official trial date yet to be announced. The United States on Wednesday expressed strong support for bringing to justice senior leaders responsible for the...

Thirty years after the fall of Cambodia's "Killing Fields" regime, 78-year-old Chum Manh will finally see his torturer stand trial. Nearly every Cambodian family lost loved ones during the 1975-79 period of Khmer Rouge rule that claimed an estimated 1.7 million lives. Despite their role in one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, none of Pol Pot's surviving henchmen ever faced justice. Until now. The U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal opens its first trial on Tuesday when 66-year-old Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, faces charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and homicide while he ran...

Trials of five brutal leaders will begin next monthFinally, at everlastingly long last, someone is to answer for the atrocities of the Khmers Rouges - in particular, the savagery of 1975-79, when they ruled all of Cambodia. Agence France-Presse reports from Phnom Penh that Feb. 17 is the day the regime's torturer-in-chief will go on trial in the capital for crimes against humanity. Kaing Khek Iev, better known as Duch, is the first of five scheduled to go before a UN-sponsored tribunal for one of the great crimes of the 20th century. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians out of a...

THE kumbaya crowd which pressed for East Timor's independence must shoulder much of the blame for the failure of its dysfunctional Government. But while the collective of liberation theologists and civil rights lawyers cheered Fretilin's Portugese-educated Marxist guerrilla leaders, the same candle-wavers protested against the toppling of the mass murdering Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Yet East Timor, with a population estimated at about one million, whose independence was internationally recognised on May 20, 2002, is now arguably in proportionately worse shape than Iraq, population 26 million, where the first election under its new constitution took place just last December. The...

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Thousands of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" marked 30 years Wednesday since the fall of Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist regime, blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people. Up to 80,000 people packed into the capital's Olympic stadium for a rally organized by the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), descendant of the puppet government installed by Hanoi after its troops ousted Beijing-backed Pol Pot on January 7, 1979. "We have always remembered those who sacrificed their lives to save us from genocide," aging CPP President and former guerrilla Chea Sim told the cheering crowd....

Introductory note from church friend telling others of Suzie's upcoming trip Please be praying for Suzie as she makes the monumental trip back to the land of her birth to share the Story with her family. If you haven't met Suzie, you sure need to make a point to seek her out. She is an amazing young woman with tremendous resiliency and a true testament to the power of God over you even when you don't know who He is quite yet. Suzie came to the US speaking very little English....became a US citizen and a college grad. She is...

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (AHN) - The former social welfare minister and the most powerful woman in the Khmer Rouge, Ieng Thirith, 76, on Wednesday appeared for the first time at a U.N.-backed genocide court in Cambodia. Thirith is facing charges of crimes against humanity during Khmer Rouge's brutal four-year reign in Cambodia in the late 1970s that had killed an estimated three million people from torture, starvation and forced labor. She has filed for bail on the charges, but the court has yet to decide on her petition. Earlier, the genocide court denied the petition for bail of three of...

The death of Pol Pot, 23 years to the day after he and the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, occasioned long backward glances at one of the 20th century's most horrific genocides. It was noted everywhere that the communist reign of terror in Cambodia lasted nearly four years and that at least 1 million human beings -- by some estimates as many as 2 1/2 million -- were murdered in an orgy of executions, torture, and starvation. "In the name of a radical utopia," The New York Times recalled in its long obituary, "the Khmer Rouge regime had turned...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday, his former colleague said. Dith Pran founded an awareness project dedicated to educating people about the Khmer Rouge regime. Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago. Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg...

CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia (Reuters) - The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims. Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979. "I saw Duch kneel in front of the trees where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed children to death," a policeman told reporters...

UN-Backed Genocide Tribunal Arrests Former Khmer Rouge Head Of State Khieu Samphan In Cambodia The U.N.-backed genocide tribunal in Cambodia arrested the former Khmer Rouge head of state Monday following his release from a hospital in the capital, officials said. Khieu Samphan, 76, was the fifth senior Khmer Rouge official to be detained by the long-delayed tribunal ahead of trials that are expected to begin next year. The arrests come almost three decades after the group fell from power, with many fearing the aging suspects might die before they ever see a courtroom. Police escorted Khieu Samphan from the hospital...

Ieng Sary, who served as foreign minister in Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime, was brought before the country's U.N.-backed genocide tribunal with his wife on Monday to face charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith, who was minister for social affairs in the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge government, were served with arrest warrants at dawn...the communist Khmer Rouge are widely blamed for the deaths of some 1.7 million people from starvation, disease, overwork and execution. None of the group's leaders has faced trial yet.