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WASHINGTON—The National Archives on Thursday unveiled a handwritten note by Abraham Lincoln exhorting his generals to pursue Robert E. Lee's army after the battle of Gettysburg, underscoring one of the great missed opportunities for an early end to the Civil War. An archives Civil War specialist discovered the July 7, 1863, note three weeks ago in a batch of military papers stored among the billions of pages of historical documents at the mammoth building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The text of Lincoln's note has been publicly known because the general to whom Lincoln addressed it telegraphed the contents verbatim to the...

Historian James M. McPherson's magnificent collection of essays This Mighty Scourge; Perspectives on the Civil War contains an essay on General William Tecumseh Sherman's famous, or infamous, "march through Georgia " that sheds light on the success of his march in bringing victory, and peace, to the United States. ********************************************* Calling such counterterrorist strikes "war crimes," as many who are critical of both America (and Israel) do, is extremely unfair. In fighting an enemy who kills soldiers and civilians without distinction, it is not possible to fight a completely "clean" war, without losing it to the terrorist enemies. No country...

IN SEPTEMBER 1862, Union troops were soundly defeated by Confederate forces led by Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee at Manassas Junction, Virginia. The North called it the Second Battle of Bull Run. President Abraham Lincoln's somber mood afterward was recorded in a diary entry by Attorney General Edward Bates, who wrote that Lincoln "seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish--said he felt almost ready to hang himself." Soon afterward Lincoln wrote out a private musing on a small piece of lined paper. He sought to discern the will of God among the cacophony of voices all around him after news...

In the early years of the Civil War, prisoners from the North and South were rarely held in prison camps. In many cases, they were often exchanged with POWS from the opposing side. As the war dragged on, the North started holding Confederate prisoners in permanent prisons. The South started to do this too. A Confederate general recommended building a prison is rural Georgia in a location far from the front lines. A prison was established near the small village of Andersonville. It was called Camp Sumter. At its height, as many as 33000 Union prisoners were held on the...

Saddam Hussein may be hanged within hours, senior Iraqi officials and the ousted president's defence team said on Friday. One senior Iraqi source told Reuters key legal issues had been resolved and he could go to the gallows shortly. Another official said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was meeting key figures, including the Justice Minister, to agree the details.

The Iraqi government has told U.S. officials that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein could be executed within the next few days, a senior Bush administration official said on Thursday. "I've heard that it's going to be a couple more days, probably," the official said while Bush took a holiday break at his Texas ranch. He said he had heard from U.S. officials in Baghdad that the execution would not be Thursday U.S. time or Friday Baghdad time. "It's going to be maybe another day or so," the official said. He said the government of Iraq would most likely inform U.S....

Ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) leader and reluctant war crimes indictee Vojislav Seselj, "holds the key to his life and health," said a spokesman for the United Nations' Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at the Hague, where Seselj is in his fourth week of a hunger strike. Most of Seselj's demands have been met, Refik Hodzic on Wednesday told journalists. Tribunal president Fausto Pocar has called on Seselj to end his fast and to take an active part in the legal process which has been interrupted due to his health.

The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission was created by Congress to inform the public about the impact Abraham Lincoln had on the development of our nation, and to find the best possible ways to honor his accomplishments. The President, the Senate and the House of Representatives appointed a fifteen-member commission to commemorate the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln and to emphasize the contribution of his thoughts and ideals to America and the world. The official public Bicentennial Commemoration launches February 2008 and closes February 2010, with the climax of the Commemoration taking place on February 12, 2009, the 200th anniversary of...

A defiant Saddam Hussein shrugged off a possible death sentence, saying he would die without fear and the US occupiers of his country would leave humiliated like they did in Vietnam, his lawyers said on Saturday. They said a jovial and highly spirited Saddam chatted with them for more than three hours about the violence in Iraq and mounting US losses just hours before an expected death sentence on Sunday in his trial for crimes against humanity.

Saddam Hussein is to be denied his final wish of an "honourable" death by military firing squad after court officials ruled he should face the gallows as a common criminal if found guilty. The former Iraqi dictator, who is expected to be given the death sentence today when a verdict is delivered in his first war crimes trial, has been demanding execution by the gun rather than the rope, on the basis that he was head of the country's armed forces. But the Iraqi war crimes court in Baghdad has dismissed his request, noting that Saddam failed the entry exam...

A man convicted of atrocities in the Balkans has been living peacefully in Carshalton for years ::nobreak::TO HIS neighbours, Milan Spanovic was an unassuming father of three. Though he had lived among them for 15 years, the best description they could come up with was that he was “remarkably quiet”. Equally, the officers who arrested him for shoplifting found nothing untoward about him. After he protested his innocence, they set about completing the paperwork and prepared to release him with no more than a formal caution. So when a desk officer typed his name into a database as a matter...

SARAJEVO, Oct 6 (Reuters) - Bosnian state prosecutors have launched an investigation of Bosnian Muslim wartime general Atif Dudakovic for suspected war crimes against Bosnian Serbs in 1995, Chief Prosecutor Marinko Jurcevic said on Friday. Serb Republic Prime Minister Milorad Dodik and President Dragan Cavic requested an investigation after local broadcasters aired footage apparently showing Dudakovic, a wartime hero for Muslims, giving orders to burn Serb villages. "We have officially opened the investigation against Atif Dudakovic and other persons based on the grounds of suspicion they committed some criminal acts regarded as war crimes," Jurcevic told reporters. "The investigation is...

The American Council for Kosovo Protests Washington Visit of Terrorist and War Criminal Agim Ceku –Kosovo Serb spokesman: Ceku should be standing trial, “not being received with honors in the capital of any civilized democracy.” The American Council for Kosovo protests the official visit to Washington, DC, of Agim Ceku, an indicted war criminal and former commander of the jihad terrorist organization, the so-called “Kosovo Liberation Army.” According to the Associated Press, Mr. Ceku is scheduled to meet today with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and with officials at the White House, before proceeding to New York for a...

The chief judge presiding over Saddam Hussein's war crimes trial shouted down the former Iraqi leader Monday, reminding Saddam he no longer had supreme power. "You are a defendant now, not a president," Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman told Saddam as the defence stage of the trial began. The altercation came after Abdel-Rahman threw a defence lawyer out of the heavily guarded Baghdad courtroom. Bushra Khalil had just returned to the proceedings after being ejected in early April. The judge ejected her again Monday for disregarding his orders by trying to make a statement. As guards took hold of the Lebanese-born lawyer...

U.S. Lawmaker Blasts Yasukuni Visits MAY 15, 2006 03:10 by Young-A Soh (sya@donga.com) U.S. political leaders voiced strong concerns over the Japanese prime ministerfs paying respects at the Yasukuni Shrine. Thus, it is expected that the controversies over the Yasukuni Shrine will heat up in Japan with its election of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) president slated for this September. Stop Paying Visits to the Shrine If to Give an Address at the U.S. Congress – The Asahi Shimbun reported on May 13 that the U.S. House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (Republican, picture) demanded that Japanese Prime...

UN urges West to ignore Serbia's arrest warrant for Kosovo PM PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro-Kosovo's top U.N. official has urged Western powers to ignore an international arrest warrant issued by Serbia against the province's prime minister, in a letter obtained Wednesday. Soren Jessen-Petersen, the chief U.N. official in charge of running the province, said that his mission did not recognize the validity of the warrant issued in Serbia against Agim Ceku, a former rebel commander who became Kosovo's prime minister earlier this month. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Jessen-Petersen cited the U.N.'s sole legal jurisdiction over Kosovo and said...

"No one now disputes that stopping Slobodan Milosevic was the right thing to do,” wrote the Wall Street Journal this week, several days after the deposed Serbian strongman expired in his cell in The Hague. It’s an appealing sentiment, suggesting as it does that the man who presided over the deaths of 250,000 people in Yugoslavia in the 1990s died unsung and unmourned. In reality, however, even Slobodan Milosevic had his defenders. What is more, they are the same voices--largely on the far Left but also on the isolationist Right--who have now taken up the cause of Saddam Hussein. Many...

I was one of the last western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic. Having been called to The Hague as a potential witness, I spent an hour in his cell in January last year. Like most who met him, I found him polite and intelligent. "We will win," he told me. "Freedom is a universal value. They have no evidence against me." If the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were a proper court of law, the charges against him would have been dismissed long ago. Unfortunately, it is a highly politicised organ, created on the initiative of the very...

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - A Socialist Party aide of Slobodan Milosevic said Saturday that the ex-president was defiant just before his death. "He told me, 'Don't you worry: They will not destroy me or break me; I shall defeat them all,'" said Milorad Vucelic of the Socialist Party, recounting a phone conversation with Milosevic late Friday. "But it was obvious he was very ill." Milosevic, who was found dead Saturday in his cell at the Netherlands-based war crimes court near The Hague, was daily in contact with Socialist party officials in Belgrade as he carried out his own defense before the...

The U.N. war crimes tribunal hopes an autopsy on Slobodan Milosevic on Sunday will clear up the cause of his death in his cell only months before a verdict was due in his four-year-old trial. Milosevic, branded the "Butcher of the Balkans" for conflicts that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, was found dead on Saturday, prompting some world figures and relatives of war victims to say they had been robbed of justice. As questions were raised as to why the trial had dragged on for so long, a tribunal spokeswoman said there was no indication the 64-year-old former Yugoslav...