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BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The young American decapitated on a videotape posted by an al-Qaida-linked Web site was never in U.S. custody despite claims to the contrary by his family, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. Statements by American officials in Iraq leave many unanswered questions, including why Iraqi police jailed Nicholas Berg for nearly two weeks and why U.S. officials repeatedly questioned him in custody. Also unknown is where and under what circumstances Berg disappeared. He was last in contact with U.S. officials in Baghdad on April 10, and his body was found Saturday in Baghdad. Staff members at the...

Senator James Inhofe's comments seem to have exercised many on the left. In their lead editorial The New York Times is astounded that Inhofe is "more outraged by the outrage." Josh Marshall opines that "I don't think I can remember a more shameful spectacle in the United States Congress, in my living memory." I guess Josh can't remember back to Monday, when Senator Kennedy announced to the world that our troops in Iraq had reopened Saddam's torture chambers under U.S. management. So what exactly did Inhofe say that so upset the left? Read for yourself: First of all, I regret...

<p>May 13, 2004 -- IMAGES are important. That's why America's major TV networks and newspapers have a responsibility to show the full Nick Berg video. Forget Abu Ghraib: Those are the words I've heard most often since the tape of militant Islamists cutting off Berg's head was made public Tuesday - though the first word was seldom forget.</p>

Some questions nobody's asking... yet. If Nick Berg was killed to avenge the honor and dignity of Iraqi prisoners, why was it done by a non-Iraqi-- Jordanian terrorist Abu Al-Zarqawi? Why didn't the Abu Ghraib abuse story cause millions of Iraqis to riot in the streets? There were a few hundred that protested for one day. Maybe most Iraqis realize who these prisoners were-- the same Saddam goons that made THEIR lives miserable! Some media "geniuses" (Sy Hersh, Chrissy Matthews, Dan RAther) say the photos were taken so the prisoners could be threatened with balckmail. Then why are the prisoners...

Outrage at obscene photos would be a little easier to take from liberal senators if they didn't have a history of financing them. Had Robert Mapplethorpe snapped the photos at Abu Ghraib, the Senate might have given him a government grant. Jesse Helms would certainly be surprised at the moral horror on display these days in the Senate. In 1989, he asked his fellow senators to stop funding degrading photography coming out of the National Endowment for the Arts. They refused. "I'm going to ask that all the pages, all the ladies and maybe all the staff leave the chamber...

Hugh Hewitt has posted a letter from a Marine in Iraq that everyone in America should be forced to read. It's a fascinating look at circumstances our forces are operating under and the psyche of the Iraqi people. The part about Abu Ghraib stopped me cold: As for the Abu Garayb atrocities, that is exactly what they are. I have been inside this prison several times. I never saw anything like what is now on the news but we did see a general lack of discipline among the service members in there when we arrived. We are horribly ashamed that...

It's time to put up or shut up. Last week I wrote a column saying that CBS should have thought twice before showing the photos from Abu Ghraib prison. The response from readers and even some journalists was like I'd proposed banning the printing press. Numerous e-mailers said I'm no different than a Holocaust-denier who'd ban photos from Auschwitz. Well, now we have the horrible news that Nick Berg, an American contractor, was beheaded by an al-Qaida affiliated group explicitly in response to the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. I say in response to the release of the photos...

Why is there so much more congressional outrage and demands for answers and immediate ACTION over the Abu Ghraib prison than there is over the horrific beheading of an innocent American citizen at the hands of our enemies or the inhuman mutilation and ghoulish display of American corpses in Fallujah? Why is there so much more congressional attention, grandstanding and partisan, election-year rhetoric over what amounts to basically stupid or obscene college-fraternity hazing-pranks conducted on enemy combatants and terrorists than there is over the REAL inhuman atrocity waged against Mr. Nick Berg who was savagely beheaded by these very same...

ROME - The scandal of prisoner abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq has dealt a bigger blow to the United States than the Sept. 11 attacks, the Vatican foreign minister told an Italian newspaper. In an interview published Wednesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo described the abuses as "a tragic episode in the relationship with Islam" and said the scandal would fuel hatred for the West and for Christianity. "The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than Sept. 11. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves,"...

''Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!'' -- William Shakespeare, ''Julius Caesar'' America. We are a great and good nation. We defend our allies, we defend ourselves, we live in peace and prosperity. We do not conquer, we do not subjugate, we do not annex or colonize. But we’re not perfect, either. This issue is never far from the mainstream media. Our lack of perfection. Our flaws, our vulnerabilities, our faults. They too are a part of us as a nation, as a people. We are not all darkness, nor are we all light. We are mostly light,...

May 12, 2004 The Abu Ghraib Spin he administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the...

<p>It's time to put up or shut up. Last week I wrote a column saying that CBS should have thought twice before showing the photos from Abu Ghraib prison. The response from readers and even some journalists was like I'd proposed banning the printing press. Numerous e-mailers said I'm no different than a Holocaust-denier who'd ban photos from Auschwitz.</p>

May 11, 2004, 8:47 a.m. Abu Ghraib & Us Don’t judge us by those photos. By Rich Lowry Donald Rumsfeld assures us that the abuses at Abu Ghraib are "un-American." Indeed they are, but the perpetrators of these acts were Americans. That is not an incidental fact. Soldiers always reflect their societies. In the first weeks of World War I, the story goes, a young British officer in Belgium was reprimanded for not having put a guard at a certain point. His response reflected the genteel assumptions of the time: "Oh, the Germans wouldn't come that way, Sir, it's private...

Donald Rumsfeld spent most of Friday listening to Republicans and Democratic senators alike, asking questions about what the secretary knew and when did he know it. Now, for the most part, Rumsfeld smiled, and he was a lot more polite with them than I would have been.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army general under investigation for anti-Islamic remarks has been linked by U.S. officials to the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, which experts warned could touch off new outrage overseas. A Senate hearing into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was told on Tuesday that Lt. Gen. William Boykin, an evangelical Christian under review for saying his God was superior to that of the Muslims, briefed a top Pentagon (news - web sites) civilian official last summer on recommendations on ways military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners. Critics have suggested those recommendations amounted to a...

In some of the most incendiary criticism yet of the Iraqi prison abuse scandal, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is comparing U.S. mistreatment of detained Iraqi terror suspects to the kind of tactics employed by Adolf Hitler's "Gestapo" police. Warning against taking the scandal too lightly, McCain told radio host Don Imus on Tuesday, "If you go down that slippery slope, OK - you decide, OK, well, this torture is OK - then what's the difference between us and the Gestapo?" Before invoking the specter of the Third Reich's brutal police units, the Arizona Republican denounced the notion that some of...

Experts say justices may be less inclined to favor administration WASHINGTON - The Abu Ghraib prison abuse furor may have a significant impact on one highly select audience with power over the president’s anti-terrorism effort: the nine justices of the Supreme Court. The court is now deliberating in the cases of al-Qaida suspects held at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba and two American citizens, Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, held in the United States as enemy combatants. Decisions are expected in those historic cases before the court ends its term in June. At issue: whether Padilla, Hamdi, and the...

The photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse were disturbing, but they were not scenes of torture. Torture is how Saddam and his thugs ruled Iraq. They cut out people’s tongues, cut off limbs, crushed feet, raped and killed children in front of their parents, lowered people feet-first into vats of acid and plastic shredders, and filled graves with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The pictures from Abu Ghraib were of humiliation and abuse. The guards who committed these acts should be punished to the full extent of the law, but these abuses should never be equated with the torture ordered...

Time is out of joint. The miniscule percentage of American soldiers and officers implicated in prisoner and detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere confront charges, trials and punishment that earmark the rule of law. That incriminating photographs and videos will be manipulated to aid the enemy in the Arab and Muslim worlds has been no deterrent. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld elaborated last Friday before Congress: "We know what the terrorists will do. We know they will try to exploit all that is bad and try to obscure all that is good. That's their nature, and that's the...

Saddam's chambers of horrors By MARGARET WENTE Saturday, November 23, 2002 Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, is Iraq's biggest prison. Until recently, it held perhaps 50,000 people, perhaps more. No one knows for sure. No one knows how many people were taken there through the years and never came out. For a generation, Abu Ghraib was the centrepiece of Saddam Hussein's reign of torture and death. Yahya al-Jaiyashy is one of the survivors. Mr. Jaiyashy is an animated, bearded man of 49 whose words can scarcely keep up with the torrent of his memories. Today he lives in...