Free Republic

National and local political activist, decorated veteran, POW advocate, businessman and master potter Ted Sampley passed away Tuesday. He was 62. Sampley, who was recovering from heart surgery a week earlier, was experiencing difficulties from the surgery at the Veteran's Hospital in Durham on Tuesday. He died while being rushed to surgery. His sudden passing surprised many in Kinston. "This is a shock to me," said master shipbuilder Alton Stapleford, the architect of the CSS Neuse II, which Sampley helped bring to fruition. "It's really hard to comprehend right now." Sampley served several tours of duty in Vietnam in the...

WATCHING MSNBC IS TORTUREMay 6, 2009 The media wail about "torture," but are noticeably short on facts. Liberals try to disguise the utter wussification of our interrogation techniques by constantly prattling on about "the banality of evil." Um, no. In this case, it's actually the banality of the banal. Start with the fact that the average Gitmo detainee has gained 20 pounds in captivity. There's even a medical term for it now: "the Gitmo gut." Some prisoners have been heard whispering, "If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls." In terms of "torture," there was "the...

Prisoners of war suffer in ways most veterans don't, enduring humiliating forced marches, torture or other trauma that may haunt them long afterward. In partial recompense, the government extends them special benefits, from free parking and tax breaks to priority in medical treatment. Trouble is, some of the much-admired recipients of these benefits apparently don't deserve them. There are only 21 surviving POWs from the first Gulf War in 1991, the Department of Defense says. Yet the Department of Veterans Affairs is paying disability benefits to 286 service members it says were taken prisoner during that conflict, according to data...

A former CIA officer tells Fox News its ridiculous that the Bush administration didn't execute numerous prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, regardless of whether they have had a trial, when it had the chance.

In a recent article posted at truthout.org, Phillip Butler makes a case for the arrest of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for crimes against the U.S. Constitution. Butler is a veteran military pilot and was a POW in Vietnam for 2,855 days. Since his repatriation in 1973, he has earned a PhD in Sociology and according to his author bio, "he mentors business and organization leaders and is a community activist." His article is well-written and thorough, using the Third Geneva Convention and its rules regarding the interrogation of POWs as the basis for his assertions. In...

Just a month after President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he must tell the Supreme Court where he stands on one of the most aggressive legal claims made by the Bush administration — that the president may order the military to seize legal residents of the United States and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime. The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy...

I am posting this for any Florida readers who might want to attend one of these events. Please spread the word to friends or relatives who might be interested. VETERAN VICTORY 2008 BUS TOUR HITS FLORIDA! The Victory 2008 Bus Tour arrives in Florida on Monday for a three day tour. Events include rallies in Sarasota, Pasco, Ocala, Gainesville, Tallahassee, Panama City, and Pensacola. John McCain’s friend and former cellmate, Lt. Col. Orson Swindle, USMC (Ret), will speak about why John McCain is ready to lead this country. Also speaking will be Col. Tom Moe, USAF (Ret), a former POW...

Death, disease and injury were the fate of thousands held at sea More Americans died in British prison ships in New York Harbor than in all the battles of the Revolutionary War. There were at least 16 of these floating prisons anchored in Wallabout Bay on the East River for most of the war, and they were sinkholes of filth, vermin, infectious disease and despair. The ships were uniformly wretched, but the most notorious was the Jersey. Following the Battle of Long Island in August, 1776, and the fall of New York City soon after, the British found thousands of...

It is my opinion that we need to pray for our leaders this election. Many Conservative are disappointed with the selection of Senator John S. McCain. But in one sense, he is the true conservative in values -- he has fought for campaign finance reform -- getting big money out of politics. This should allow the little guy (or gal) more voice in what this country is doing. In some religions, it is part of the church service to pray for the leaders of a country (Ukrainian Catholic, for example). We must pray for our leaders and pray that the...

3/31/2008 - CANNON AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. (AFPN) -- "Sand, hills and pain," an elderly marcher said, describing the 26.2 mile Bataan Memorial Death March, held March 30 at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. The annual march, in its 19th year, honored the men and women forced to march 60 miles by Japanese soldiers, and in thousands of instances died, in the Bataan Death March during World War II. More than 4,400 Airmen, Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and civilians participated in the march and experienced, in small part, what many thousands of American and Filipino soldiers went through after surrendering to...

They don’t call him the Maverick for nothing. Its not inconsistent with what he has believed in the past. Its certainly in opposition to President Bush’s statement that the U.S. does not torture. Its quite an uncomforting statement to be saying of our own military. Most surprisingly, its the “Republican” candidate saying this stuff. Maverick… because he supported the President’s veto of the a bill banning it. That support may have been on technicalities, but still mavericky. Quite a statement for someone that should be trying to win over the conservative base. I don’t think he is too worried about...

HAVANA - Ailing leader Fidel Castro on Monday denied U.S. presidential hopeful John McCain's claim that Cuban agents helped torture American prisoners of war in Vietnam in the 1960s, calling the assertion "a strange legend." "Let me remind you, Mr. McCain: the commandments of the religion you practice prohibit lying," Castro wrote in an essay published by the Communist Party newspaper Granma. "The years in prison and the wounds received because of the attacks on Hanoi do not excuse you from the moral obligation of the truth," the essay added. McCain, Republican front-runner for the November presidential contest, was a...

The award-winning documentary film, "Missing, Presumed Dead: The Search For America's POWs" narrated by Ed Asner backs up allegations that John McCain repeatedly thwarted attempts by U.S. Senate investigators to examine the abandonment of American POWs in Southeast Asia and North Korea. "Missing Presumed Dead," which won two film festival "Best Documentary" awards, explores McCain's successful attempt to pass a stealth bill in the Senate which effectively keeps his POW records sealed in perpituity and provides insight into why he does not want these records ever to be made public - including the revelation of the many propaganda radio broadcasts...

TOKYO - Warren Nobuaki Iwatake's family has seen more than its share of calamity. When he was still a child his father was lost at sea off Hawaii. With no breadwinner, his family was forced to move to Japan, where Iwatake was drafted during the war. He lost a brother when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. But through it all one thing has remained constant. The tree. His parents bought it in 1937, and his family has brought it out every Christmas since, without fail, even when that meant risking arrest. "This tree was a shining light, because it was...

The Korean War has been called “the forgotten war,” and “Missing in MIG Alley,” on PBS on Tuesday night, illustrates a little-known chapter. It describes the rivalry in the sky between two types of fighter jets then on the cutting edge of military aviation: the Soviet MIG-15, used by the North Koreans, and the F-86 Sabre, flown by the Americans and the British. -snip- The program, an installment of the “Nova” series, reveals that Soviet airmen were actually fighting on behalf of the North Koreans, a fact concealed by the Soviet and American governments at the time for fear of...

Beheaded at whim and worked to death: Japan's repugnant treatment of Allied PoWs22:59pm 18th September 2007 The sheer brutality of the battle for the Far East defies imagination. And in a new book, historian Max Hastings argues that Japanese intransigence made it far worse.  Yesterday, he explained why America had to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Here, in the final part of our exclusive serialisation, he reveals how the West was stunned when it emerged how cruelly their prisoners of war had suffered...As the men of the victorious British 14th Army advanced through Burma on the road to Mandalay...

The Vietnam analogy looms ever larger in the debate over Iraq, but the U.S. military has memories of that conflict that the public doesn't. In 1943, at the age of 18, George Everette "Bud" Day of Sioux City, Iowa, enlisted in the Marines. He served in the Pacific during World War II, and later became a fighter pilot. He flew the F-84F Thunderstreak during the Korean War and the F-100F Super Sabre in Vietnam. Bud Day, a legendary "full-blooded jet-jock" as one recent account dubbed him, would see service in all three wars as a sanctified whole: For him the...

Every American needs to see "Rescue Dawn," in theaters nationwide today. If it's the only movie you see this year, you've done yourself a service at the box office. It is the best movie of the year. The silver screen story of Dieter Dengler--a Navy pilot shot down over Laos and imprisoned in a Vietcong POW camp--is not only a great movie. It is patriotic and uplifting. It is the story of survival against all odds, and the story of a man who refused to denounce his adopted country, the United States of America. And it is the story of...

WASHINGTON, June 22 (AP) - (Kyodo)— In talks with his Vietnamese counterpart Friday, U.S. President George W. Bush praised the developing nation's growing economy and expressed gratitude for its help in recovering the remains of soldiers captured or missing during the Vietnam War. During what Bush described as a "frank and candid discussion" with Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet, the two leaders also discussed U.S. concerns with Vietnam's apparent backsliding on democracy and human rights. "I explained my strong belief that societies are enriched when people are allowed to express themselves freely or worship freely," Bush said after the meeting....

The police detective works often in Boston's Vietnamese community, so he didn't raise an eyebrow when a tipster approached him furtively. But the detective, a Vietnam War veteran, was riveted by the man's tale -- that he had bones and he believed they might belong to American prisoners of war from Vietnam. On June 7, police said yesterday, the informant dropped off two containers of bones bundled in several layers of wrapping. He wanted nothing in exchange. Police say they contacted the state medical examiner and the district attorney's office and were told to process the evidence as they would...

. . . Everyone in D.C. and Arizona knows of the mean-spirited side of John McCain. But on no issue has John McCain been meaner than the question of the hundreds of U.S. POWs who did not come home in 1973 when McCain came home. He has used his unique and hard-earned status as a former POW not to help the cause of the un-returned POWs, but rather to attack POW activists, demean POW family members, and to bolster the Pentagon's long-term strategy of debunking credible sightings of POWs.

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that an electronic database listing the names of servicemembers still unaccounted for from World War II is now available for family members and researchers. This new listing will aid researchers and analysts in WWII remains recovery operations. Prior to this three-year effort, no comprehensive list of those missing from WWII has existed. This database, listing nearly 78,000 names, was compiled by researchers from DPMO and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. They used hard-copy sources including “The American Graves Registration Service Rosters of Military Personnel Whose Remains were not Recovered” from...

An Enormous Crime is nothing less than shocking. Based on thousands of pages of public and previously classified documents, it makes an utterly convincing case that when the American government withdrew its forces from Vietnam, it knowingly abandoned hundreds of POWs to their fate. The product of twenty-five years of research by former Congressman Bill Hendon and attorney Elizabeth A. Stewart, An Enormous Crime brilliantly exposes the reasons why these American soldiers and airmen were held back by the North Vietnamese at Operation Homecoming in 1973 and what these men have endured since. Despite hundreds of postwar sightings and intelligence...

Members of the Egyptian army killed ''dozens, if not hundreds'' of captured Israeli soldiers in the 1973 Mideast war, according to an Israeli TV documentary screened Sunday. Channel 10 TV screened interviews with Israelis who served in the 1973 conflict, relating cases in which they said Egyptian forces killed soldiers who had surrendered or been taken prisoner. The Israeli commercial TV channel said that the documentary was a response to the Egyptian outcry over another program shown earlier this month on Israeli state TV about the 1967 conflict. Egyptian media claimed that the program confirmed Israeli forces executed 250 captured...

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die. Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials. Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during...

This was a paperback book with the picture of a white POW on its cover. He has reddish-blond hair and with a desperate expression is staring out through coils of barbed wire in a Communist concentration camp in Korea.

Clarence Lee of Shallowater, a veteran with four tours in Vietnam to his credit, completed 15 years in the Marine Corps the hard way. "The last tour was 14 months long, because that's when I got captured," he said. Lee can stand with a crutch, and moves about with a wheelchair or motorized scooter because of permanent injuries inflicted when he was a prisoner of war. He attributes his survival of nine months of torture to help from God. Lee, now in his 60s, was a helicopter pilot during the war and received five Purple Heart medals while fighting the...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15, 2006 -- Military and defense leaders, former prisoners of war and families of missing servicemembers gathered here today to commemorate National POW/MIA Recognition Day and to reaffirm their commitment to ensuring a full accounting of those missing in action. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks at an armed forces full honor review in honor of National POW/MIA Recognition Day Sept. 15. Photo by Helene C. Stikkel  '(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called today’s observance an opportunity to honor...

As a Nation, we look to our service men and women as examples of courage and sacrifice. When our country and the world have needed brave Americans to advance the cause of freedom, our men and women in uniform have proudly stepped forward and selflessly endured hardships to defend liberty. We are grateful to all who have served, and on National POW/MIA Recognition Day, we give special honor to the extraordinary patriots who have been prisoners of war and to those who are still missing in action. We take inspiration from...

The cartoon depicting the Great Escape was drawn ten days after the breakout from Stalag Luft III Prison camp art that escaped guardsBy Jack Malvern PoW's scrapbook of the Great Ecape is to be auctioned A CARTOON of the prison break depicted in the film The Great Escape has emerged in a prisoner’s war diary. The cartoon — drawn ten days after the event and accompanied by a poem lamenting the shooting of 50 of the escapees — appears in a scrapbook that belonged to Clive Nutting, a prisoner who was involved in the two most celebrated escapes of...

A controversial documentary titled Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, about Sen. John F. Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War activities in the 1970s that was released just before the 2004 presidential election sparked at least five politically charged lawsuits. Now there’s only one. In recent weeks, lawyers for the plaintiffs have dropped three libel suits brought by anti-war veterans who said they were falsely portrayed in the film made by journalist Carlton Sherwood. Sherwood was also hit with a copyright infringement suit in New York that accused him of unfairly including clips from another film and photos from a book. But that...

COLONELS Klink and Hogan and Sgt Schultz of the sitcom Hogan's Heroes have done real PoWs of the Nazis no favours, a federal minister says. (Australian) Veterans' Affairs Minister Bruce Billson said that thanks to Hollywood, those in German and Italian prison camps in World War II were wrongly perceived by many as having had a fairly easy time. Mr Billson, 40, said after launching this year's Weary Dunlop Medical Research appeal that he watched repeats of Hogan's Heroes as a child. But he had a totally different view as he now considered whether European PoWs should be given a...

Pentagon investigators threatened the death penalty and used other coercive techniques to obtain statements from some of the seven Marines and a Navy corpsman jailed for the shooting death of an Iraqi civilian, two defense lawyers say. Attorney Jane Siegel, who represents Marine Pfc. John Jodka, 20, said Naval Criminal Investigative Service officials spoke to her client three times after he was taken into custody May 12. Jodka was questioned for up to eight hours at a time and was not offered water or toilet breaks, Siegel said. "They used some really heavy-handed tactics to extract the information," Siegel said,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - About 594 prisoners were released in Iraq on Wednesday, state television reported, a day after new Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said a total of 2,500 would be freed to help foster national reconciliation. More than 100 of them were freed in the capital, a Reuters reporter said. About 110 detainees had been gathered at the capital’s main bus station, where prisoners are taken before they are set free, he said from the scene. They were later released.

Associated PressLUBBOCK, Texas - The trail to finding soldiers still missing from the Vietnam War is beginning more and more at Texas Tech University. An Internet archive of decades-old documents from the school's Vietnam Center has provided Defense Department researchers dozens of leads in the cases of 1,805 American soldiers who never returned from Southeast Asia. The growing online collection, launched in 2004, led Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Robert Newberry to send a recent letter informing the center that POW-MIA analysts have uncovered 41 leads from the archive. And many more new clues are likely on the way: of the...

HANOI (AFX) - The government here and the US have reached an agreement in principle that should enable Vietnam to join the WTO, staterun news media reported at the weekend. The state-owned Vietnam News Agency (VNA) said Hanoi had 'technically concluded the 12th round of negotiation with the US' on WTO accession Saturday after a week of 'intense discussions'. But the VNA report also said: 'Several issues remain unsolved'. The Tuoi Tre daily newspaper quoted Minister of Trade Truong Dinh Tuyen as saying: 'The talks reached agreements in principle.' He reportedly added: 'The official signing will take place in the...

/5/2006 - WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFPN) -- More than 120 former prisoners of war continued a 33-year layover of freedom by reliving the flights that carried them home from North Vietnam. The Hanoi Taxi -- the last C-141 Starlifter still serving in the Air Force -- made two of its final three flights May 5. Former POWs gathered in Fairborn, Ohio, for a reunion and to take part in a weekend of activities created by the Air Force Reserve’s 445th Airlift Wing here that includes the retirement of the famed aircraft. The Hanoi Taxi was the first of...

Translated Text of an Iraqi Document Concerning Kuwait POWs As the opening date of Operation Freedom neared, Qusai Saddam Hussein-one of Saddam’s bloodthirsty sons, made arrangements to move captured Kuwaiti prisoners into critical locations, to serve as “human shields”. There were 448 Kuwaitis, captured during the First Gulf War ,when Saddam made his infamous incursion into Kuwait. By the terms of the UN Cease Fire agreements –signed by Iraq on 3/03/91- all Kuwaitis were supposed to have been freed and repatriated without delay. Clearly,this never happened ; and sadly,the ultimate fate of these 448 helpless captives is unknown. CMPC-2003-012666 Republican...

Page 28, 32 and 33 of this April/1/2003 document IISP-2003-00026588 discuss how the Iraqis are going to treat the dead American and British soldiers as well as the Coalition POW to serve their regime propaganda. It is infuriating to read such a thing, but it is important to reveal how evil this Saddam regime had been. Partial translation of page 28 which a meeting of the Military Sector Commanders of the Iraqi Army where they discussed the issue of dead Coalition troops and POWs Beginning of partial translation of page 28 F. Study the subject of the dead criminals Americans...

Page 221: "From 1965 to 1969, China's aid to Vietnam took three main forms: the dispatch of Chinese engineering troops for the construction and maintenance of defense works, airfields, roads, and railways in North Vietnam, the use of Chinese antiaircraft artillery troops for he defense of important strategic areas and targets in the northern part of North Vietnam; and the supply of large amounts of military equipment and other military and civilian materials." "On 17 April 1965, the North Vietnamese General Staff cabled the Chinese General Staff, requesting that Chinese engineering troops be sent, etc. Page 223: "Beginning in early...

Perhaps the most difficult tour of duty is not done on the battlefield as we know it from films and documentaries. Facing the enemy in combat, the American soldier has always had at least a fighting chance. But what about the soldiers captured or surrendered by their commanders on the battlefield? Frank DeVivo doesn't like to talk about it, but he knows what it means to be a POW. DeVivo was serving in the U.S. Army on Corregidor when the Japanese attacked. The tiny, fortified island guarding the entrance to Manila Bay was a key, strategic site and had been...

SIERRA VISTA — It was in December 1941 when Benjamin Franklin Williams was a private first class, serving with a New Mexico National Guard unit in the Philippines. Japan struck what was then a U.S. territory. A few months later, Williams found himself a prisoner of war. Like many captured in the Philippines, he would spend World War II in Japanese POW camps, where he was forced to work on starvation rations and abused. Some of his teeth were knocked out by a Japanese guard who used the butt of his rifle on Williams after knocking him to the ground...

Dear Americans... This wasn't easy to write (I'm alternately sad and furious), but it's crucial to our soldiers today to know. When is it too late to keep asking??? Are There Still American POWs In SE Asia?We should never let ourselves get past the point of caring. Or worse...forgetting. "The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation." - George Washington

Dear Patriots... This wasn't easy to write (I'm alternately sad and furious), but it's crucial to our soldiers today to know. When is it too late to keep asking??? Are There Still American POWs In SE Asia?We should never let ourselves get past the point of caring. Or worse...forgetting. "The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation." - George Washington

Photo: GERRY PATE More than 100 people march down St. John Street toward Barnet Park Saturday morning during the "Walk As One" rally in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. that was sponsored by the city of Spartanburg. Sen. John McCain has been invited to attend MLK festivities on Monday. POW eager to meet McCain JANET S. SPENCER, Staff Writer Published January 15, 2006 Ret. Lt. Col. Ted Ballard lived in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war cell next to Sen. John McCain for two years. On Monday, McCain, a Republican who served as a Navy captain, will be...

Essay Contest on POWs of the Japanese US-JAPAN DIALOGUE ON POWS, INC., a California non-profit organization, is pleased to announce that it will hold its first essay writing contest. The purpose of this contest is to promote understanding and dialogue among/between college students in Japan and the United States on the history of American POWs of the Japanese during WWII. We look forward to receiving many submissions from both countries. Two winners, one from Japan and the other from the United States, will win a free trip to Phoenix, Arizona, where the annual convention of American Defenders of Bataan and...

<p>DURING THE LAST FEW WEEKS in Washington the pieties about torture have lain so thick in the air that it has been impossible to have a reasoned discussion. The McCain amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any prisoner by any agent of the United States sailed through the Senate by a vote of 90-9. The Washington establishment remains stunned that nine such retrograde, morally inert persons--let alone senators--could be found in this noble capital.</p>

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, in a few minutes we are going to send a message to our troops. And for our last speaker, we have a gentleman who knows a lot about freedom. He knows a lot about a lack of freedom. He knows a lot about American resolve and sometimes the lack of American resolve. He has been awarded two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star with valor, two Purple Hearts, four air medals and three outstanding unit awards. He is one of our real heroes, Sam Johnson of Texas. Mr. SAM...

Senate Approves Limiting Rights of U.S. Detainees By ERIC SCHMITT Published: November 11, 2005 WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts. The vote, 49 to 42, on an amendment to a military budget bill by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, comes at a time of intense debate over the government's treatment of prisoners in American custody worldwide, and just days after the...

North Korea admitted yesterday that it was still holding prisoners from the Korean War as well as South Koreans it had abducted since. Ten PoWs are still in the North, 52 years after the war ended, the South Korean ministry of unification was told in response to inquiries about 103 missing people. Another 11 people who had been abducted were also being held. Six PoWs and 10 abducted prisoners whose existence was previously unknown had died in captivity. The rest were unaccounted for, the ministry said. Pyongyang said the 21 would be included in the next re-union for relatives separated...