Free Republic

A new study of images apparently from the Syrian attack last month concludes that the rockets delivering toxic sarin gas to neighborhoods around Damascus held up to 50 times more nerve agent than previously estimated, a conclusion that could solve the mystery of why there were so many more victims than in previous chemical attacks. The study, by leading weapons experts, also strongly suggests that the mass of toxic material could have come only from a large stockpile. American, British and French officials have charged that only the Syrian government and not the rebels was in position to make such...

The Egyptian government acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamists in its custody Sunday, as the military leaders and the country’s Islamists vowed to keep up their fight over Egypt’s future. The news of the deaths came on a day in which there appeared to be a pause in the street battles that have claimed more than 1,000 lives in recent days, most of them Islamists and their supporters gunned down by security forces. The Islamists took measures on Sunday to avoid confrontations, including canceling several protests of the military’s ouster of a democratically elected Islamist-led government. While...

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier. Vive la révolution! There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous...

Is there any doubt about Osama bin Laden’s position on the not-at-ground-zero mosque? Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism. It’s striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a “clash of civilizations.” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who recruits jihadis from his lair in Yemen, tells the world’s English-speaking Muslims that America is at war against Islam. You can bet that Mr. Awlaki will use the opposition...

Well, the new York Times has finally done it! They want to register all welfare recipients to vote, and every single reader comment is against their position. Some samples: "Well this is just wonderful Maybe everyone should quit trying to find employment and just go down to the blasted welfare office so government can give you a check to make sure you vote for corrupt and incompetent Democrats "I don't understand why the federal government doesn't just pay welfare recipients for voting. If you vote Democrat, you get a check. If you vote Republican, you get nothing. Why not just...

Israel has created an inquiry commission to probe all the circumstances of a deadly raid on a Turkish ship trying to breach the blockade of Gaza.  But before the commission has even begun to do its work, the New York Times already has dismissed it as a worthless "farce" -- and in the paper's news section no less. Any fair, impartial observer would wait until the commission performs its task and releases its findings.  But not the New York Times, which in its superior wisdom already divines that the Israeli commission is a government tool to divert blame elsewhere.  Never...

May 11, 2010 — HERSH: The purpose of my [Abu Ghraib] stories was to take it out of the field and into the White House. It's not that the President or the Secretary of Defense Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush, or Cheney, it's not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib. It's that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen. And I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They're...