Free Republic

Long after the guns fall silent in the Georgia-Russia conflict, the two countries' legal artillery is still likely still be firing away in an attempt to have the each other publicly judged guilty of war crimes, even genocide. On September 8th, the International Court of Justice begins hearings in a case filed by Georgia.The case seeks to halt Russian military action in Georgia, and accuses the Kremlin of conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing there.Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, has called the Russian forces in his country "21st century barbarians."Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, has had even harsher words...

A map of President Bush's motorcade to Camp David was found last week in the possession of a teenager accused of stockpiling weapons and bomb-making materials, according to prosecutors. With the possibility that the motorcade was a target, federal authorities have joined police in investigating Collin Matthew McKenzie-Gude, 18, who allegedly was storing the weapons and materials just outside Washington, D.C., at the Bethesda, Md., home where he lives with his parents. MyFOXDC.com reports that Assistant State's Attorney Peter Feeney disclosed the discovery of the map of Camp David during a court hearing on Tuesday in Rockville, Md. The map...

Excerpt - Loud jeers and howls accompanied President Robert Mugabe's address to Zimbabwe's newly convened parliament, leaving ruling party members fuming. Such uncouth behaviour from the opposition, one Zanu-PF insider said, was uncalled for. But after gaining control of parliament, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) clearly wanted to make its mark. The opening of parliament had started with the usual pomp and ceremony. ~ snip ~

US government refuses to pay damages for Ferrari F50 destroyed during an FBI joy ride. The US Department of Justice is deploying all of its legal muscle to avoid paying the price after an FBI agent destroyed an exotic car during a joy ride. After nearly two years of trying to recover the money owed by the government, Motors Insurance Company filed a lawsuit against the government seeking the full $750,000 value of the wrecked 1995 Ferrari F50. The vehicle originally had been stolen in 2003 from a Ferrari dealer in Pennsylvania. Motors paid the $630,000 insurance claim, giving the...

Excerpt - Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case. ~ snip ~

Developing story...

A brother of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and local Democrats who backed her unsuccessful presidential campaign socialized privately Monday with a top surrogate of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain. The private gathering featured Carly Fiorina, Mr. McCain’s top economic adviser, and took place at the Dunmore home of political consultant Jamie Brazil, a longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton’s family who has signed on as paid national director of Mr. McCain’s Citizens for McCain Coalition. The attendees included Tony Rodham, Mrs. Clinton’s youngest sibling, his wife, Megan, and their two children; attorney Kathleen Granahan Kane, who...

Dinesh D’Souza says in his new book that Barack Obama is an anti-colonialist. Stanley Kurtz has a new book, Radical-in-Chief, which says Obama is a socialist. The new book Dupes by Paul Kengor tells the unvarnished truth. And that’s because he makes use of material we started releasing back in February of 2008 about Obama’s communist mentor, Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis. New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon broke that story and we confirmed it. I hate to say, “We told you so,” but Herb Romerstein and I held a briefing in May 0f 2008 in Washington, D.C. releasing...

The release of over 250,000 diplomatic cables has revealed a lot about the intricacies of U.S. diplomacy. However, one aspect of the WikiLeaks release that has been much under the media's radar is what the leaked cables have said about Russia and its surrogate-state sponsorship of what would most accurately be described as an international terrorist network. In a diplomatic cable dated August 6, 2008, regarding a meeting between U.S. and Russian experts on the export of Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) from Russia, the State Department expressed its concern about "Russian ammunition, sold to Venezuela ... found in possession...

If you googled “Invasion of South Ossetia” on Monday of this week one of the sites near the top of the list was the vitriolic anti Georgian propaganda web site “war.georgia.su” which detailed Georgian atrocities and planned atrocities against the peace loving people of South Ossetia. When I first saw it, the first thing that caught my eye (other than the over the top blood dripping pro anti Georian propaganda) was that the domain name itself. It did not end in “ge” as in Georgia but “su”, the domain name of sites in the former Soviet Union. This made me...

Recently the Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 decision, extended constitutional rights to enemy aliens captured on the battlefield and held outside the United States. As a result of this case, Guantanamo Bay detainees now have more rights than do prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. This has never before been the policy of the United States, nor has the court ever before granted such rights to those detained outside of U.S. jurisdiction. The activities of a released prisoner, Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, discussed in the following report written by the sister of the pilot killed on Flight 77...

Anthony J. Russo, a Rand researcher in the late 1960s who encouraged Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers and stood trial with him in the Vietnam War-era case that triggered debates over freedom of the press and hastened the fall of a president, has died. He was 71.

The disappearance of the CEO and president of a Shariah-compliant investment firm has left many in West Ridge's Indo-Pak community wary and in turmoil. Concerned when monthly profit checks from Sunrise Equities stopped arriving in August, no one has seen or heard from the firm's CEO, Salman Ibrahim. Ibrahim has not returned investors' phone calls. Phone calls to the firm's office at 6355 N. Claremont, and its downtown affiliates, Sunrise Development Inc., have also gone unanswered, leaving many of the firm's mostly Muslim investors wondering where Ibrahim and other corporate officers have gone. "[Ibrahim] stopped paying the monthly installments," said...

A military jury gave Osama bin Laden's driver a stunningly lenient sentence on Thursday, making him eligible for release in just five months despite the prosecutors' request for a sentence tough enough to frighten terrorists around the globe.

The military tribunal verdict convicting Salim Hamdan of providing material support to terrorism was eminently just. The guy was, after all, Osama Bin Laden's driver, and he was, after all, arrested with two surface-to-air missiles in the back of his car. And there was, after all, the video of a 1998 Al Qaeda news conference for Pakistani journalists that at one point showed Hamdan with a machine gun and at another juncture captured him smiling at Bin Laden. And there were, after all, the undisputed facts that Hamdan fell in with Bin Laden in 1996 and worked with him through...

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick's Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects. Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins's former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed...

Kiriakou, 47, was a source for stories by The New York Times and other news organizations in 2008 and 2009 about some of the agency’s most sensitive operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. ......... that the information Kiriakou supplied to journalists ... enabling defense attorneys there to obtain photographs of CIA operatives suspected of being involved in harsh interrogations. Some of the pictures were subsequently discovered in the cells of high-value detainees.

Buried in that 8,000 (!) word NYT magazine article about Obama’s economic plan that I mentioned yesterday, is this bit flagged by Geraghty at Campaign Spot: “If you talk to Warren [Buffet], he’ll tell you his preference is not to meddle in the economy at all — let the market work, however way it’s going to work, and then just tax the heck out of people at the end and just redistribute it,” Obama said. “That way you’re not impeding efficiency, and you’re achieving equity on the back end.” He continued by saying that he thought there was some merit...

Jean Duley testified that she was "scared to death" of Bruce Ivins after he left her a string of harassing phone messages, according to an audio recording taken during a July 24 peace order hearing. Duley, 45, told Judge Milnor Roberts that Ivins planned to "go out in a blaze of glory," had bought a bulletproof vest and a gun and planned to kill his co-workers. The audio recording was obtained by The Frederick News-Post on Monday. Duley told the court she got to know Ivins while running group and individual counseling sessions at the Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick...

The White House insists President Obama is "outraged" by the "inappropriate" targeting and harassment of conservative groups. If true, it's a remarkable turnaround for a man who helped pioneer those tactics. On Aug. 21, 2008, the conservative American Issues Project ran an ad highlighting ties between candidate Obama and Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. The Obama campaign and supporters were furious, and they pressured TV stations to pull the ad—a common-enough tactic in such ad spats. What came next was not common. Bob Bauer, general counsel for the campaign (and later general counsel for the White House), on...