Free Republic

The widow of the first British soldier to be killed in Iraq has accused anti-war campaigners of exploiting the grief of the relatives of dead servicemen for political purposes.Samantha Roberts, 32, who rose to prominence after she accused the Government of misleading the public over her husband's death, said that some critics of the conflict had sought to "take advantage" of her own grief and she feared that the same was now happening with other families. Mrs Roberts' husband, Steven, 33, a sergeant and tank commander, was killed after he was shot in the chest and stomach. Hours earlier he...

Who are the most important judges of the investigation of what went wrong before September 11? The media elite have provided one consistent answer on who is in the political driver's seat: the relatives of the victims. But not all of them. In recent weeks, the networks have interviewed a selected set of 9-11 widows and other relatives, and most have focused the lion's share of their outrage at the Bush administration. Viewers at home might assume that a poll of 9-11 families would find they almost uniformly blame Bush more than the terrorists and want him to lose in...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--The Bush administration has extended a program that provides prescription drug benefits to 50,000 retired coal miners and miners' widows through Medicare. President Bush signed an administrative order Thursday keeping the pilot program going beyond its scheduled June 30 expiration until December 2005, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts said. Under the plan, the Department of Health and Human Services will increase its Medicare reimbursement to the miners' health care fund by $190 million, said Dr. Larry Fields of the federal agency. The additional funding also boosts the government's share of the beneficiaries' drug costs from 34 percent...

Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush by Gail SheehyIn mid-June, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III and several senior agents in the bureau received a group of about 20 visitors in a briefing room of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. The director himself narrated a PowerPoint presentation that summarized the numbers of agents and leads and evidence he and his people had collected in the 18-month course of their ongoing investigation of Penttbom, the clever neologism the bureau had invented to reduce the sites of devastation on 9/11 to one word: Pent for Pentagon, Pen for Pennsylvania, tt for...

<p>WASHINGTON — A group of women who lost their husbands in the collapse of the World Trade Center are beginning to change some minds about the need for an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. Their next target: President Bush.</p>