Free Republic

Sometimes it seems that the only people not being criticized by certain U.S. citizens are the people who are killing U.S. citizens. The not so subtle message is that if you want to free yourself from being ostracized by the angry pens and lenses of ultra-liberal writers, filmmakers and the wealthy anti-rich, then go practice barbarism on some Americans. This will allow said writers and "artists" to sharpen their skills at rooting out the guilty from a thicket of the innocent, just so they can alert the killers to whom exactly is at fault. The latest attempt to garner the...

Scenes in Fahrenheit 911 of U.S. soldiers taunting and sexually humiliating Iraqi civilians following the successful invasion were shot by Urban Hamid, an embedded Swedish-Iraqi journalist who is presently a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, the university's student newspaper Camera disclosed today (Tuesday). Moore has declined to respond to questions from interviewers about whether he resorted to subterfuge in order to embed photographers among U.S. forces and has been criticized for not showing footage of the abuses to U.S. military authorities earlier. But Camera reported that the controversial footage by Hamid was actually shown at a theater in...

BAGHDAD (AFP) - A US soldier has told how a senior military intelligence commander at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison was present when a detainee died during questioning. Speaking as a witness at a two-day preliminary hearing at a military court in Baghdad for a female soldier embroiled in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, Captain Donald Reese said a "Colonel Pappas" was one of a number of people present during the interrogation. Colonel Thomas Pappas was commander of the 205 Military Intelligence Brigade at the prison near Baghdad. He is now deployed in Germany, a US military spokesman said. On...

GENEVA (Reuters) - United Nations human rights investigators on Friday called for access to prisoners held by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay to check that international standards are upheld. In a rare joint statement, they said that key U.N. special rapporteurs on torture, the independence of judges and lawyers, the right to physical and mental health as well as independent U.N. experts on arbitrary detention should undertake a joint mission as soon as possible. The appeal was issued after U.N. rights investigators held closed-door talks in Geneva on Wednesday on the effects of counter-terrorism measures on human...

The Washington Post apparently found itself unable to run its page one story on the beheading murder of South Korean Kim Sun Il by terrorists in Iraq without spending four paragraphs of the story on the prisoner abuse that took place in Abu Ghraib. A well-edited, objective paper would have run the beheading murder and the Abu Ghraib update as separate stories. The story about Kim Sun Il's beheading belonged on page one. The minor update on judicial proceedings against U.S. soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal belonged deep inside the paper, assuming it belonged in the paper...

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- The White House released several hundred pages of documents Tuesday that showed how the administration developed its policies for the interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. White House Counsel Judge Alberto Gonzales said the unprecedented declassification and release was necessary to correct misperceptions created by the leak of a few of the documents that were obtained and published by the Washington Post. Gonzales began the briefing at which the ream of documents was released to the press with a reminder of the nature of the enemy America faces in the war on terror. He said that...

<p>Soldiers photographed apparently abusing Iraqi prisoners will invoke the "just following orders" defense when courts-martial convene this summer and fall.</p> <p>Military prosecutors already got a glimpse of that strategy this week at a pre-trial hearing in Baghdad. Defense attorneys for two accused military policemen said they were ordered to abuse Iraqi detainees by military intelligence officers who conducted interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison.</p>

Yet another innocent American civilian has been slaughtered at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Here was a man who never hurt a soul, had nothing but admiration and respect for Moslem culture, murdered in cold blood with his decapitated head propped grotesquely atop his lifeless body. Savage is too kind a word to describe the perpetrators of this act. Savage is a word you apply to human beings. If anything good can be said to have come from the death of Paul Johnson, it is that perhaps it will be a moment of epiphany for the American people on all...

*****WARNING***** Real torture of ABU GHRAIB http://www.aei.org/audioLib/200406182_vts_01_0.mpg.avi.mpg

Wow, I just watched the 4 minute video that Hannity was talking about last night and that has also been mentioned elsewhere - just not in the main press.While it is very graphic, I can not understand why the media does not show this. Today's Hollywood horror is far more graphic. That it is real? Is that the reason Americans can not handle this? Or is it true the liberal media simply does not want to show it as charged by some, that the lib media thinks it will take away from the Abu Ghraib horror of images of panties...

A federal court awarded $88 million to an Iraqi who said he was tortured at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s leadership. Abdullah K. Alkhuzai, 33, of Pittsburgh’s Overbrook neighborhood, sued Saddam, his two sons, and eight other Iraqi leaders because, he said, he was starved, beaten, stabbed and shocked while at the Iraqi prison in 1991. In May, U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Hardiman granted a default judgment for Alkhuzai since none of the defendants responded to the suit. “I feel really great, I feel the USA got my justice for me. I feel grateful to the...

Hideously gruesome photographs and videotapes of Saddam Hussein's police torturing innocent Iraqis held at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison are said to be in the hands of the new Arab-language television network Alhurra, which is culling through the material deciding what to broadcast.Novelist and screenwriter Roger Simon reports on his Web Site that the images include: * Photographs of actual live castrations of Kurds.* Video tapes of two beheadings, with one featuring the executioners singing "Happy Birthday, Saddam" in Arabic as they carry out the grisly murder. * More video of a detainee whose hand his tied to a board...

BAGHDAD, June 21 -- A U.S. Army judge on Monday agreed to a request by attorneys of soldiers accused of abusing detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to question the commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, as well as several other top commanders and their subordinates. The order by Col. James Pohl effectively compels the commanders to submit to interviews unless they invoke their constitutional rights against self-incrimination. It names Gen. John P. Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command and supervises operations in the region; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq;...

• Did you see, read or hear about the horrific and graphic Saddam torture tape made public last week? If not, you are not alone. Why would the media ignore such a despicable documentary? Michael Ledeen, resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, provides details. Don't miss this!

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should take the witness stand at the trial of a U.S. soldier charged with abusing prisoners in Iraq, the soldier's lawyer said on Monday. Policies adopted in Bush's "war on terror" created a climate encouraging cruelty, said lawyers for U.S. soldiers accused of subjecting detainees to sexual humiliation and physical abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. "No one can suggest with a straight face that the MPs (military police) acted alone," said defense lawyer Guy Womack, representing Specialist Charles Graner, who faces the most serious charges of the soldiers...

Judge Declares Abu Ghraib a Crime Scene Monday, June 21, 2004 BAGHDAD, Iraq — A military judge Monday declared Abu Ghraib (search) prison a crime scene and ordered that it not be destroyed — a move President George Bush (search) had offered to help remove the stain of torture and abuse from Iraq.

Meanwhile, a class action filed in California on behalf of former detainees raises the specter of brutal physical abuse. One plaintiff, identified only as Neisef, claims that after he was taken from his home on the outskirts of Baghdad last November and sent to Abu Ghraib, Americans made him disrobe and attached electrical wires to his genitals. He claims he was shocked three times. Although a vein in his penis ruptured and he had blood in his urine, he says, he was refused medical attention. In another session, Neisef claims, he was held down by two men while a uniformed...

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Chaplain Unger is from MCCDC Doctrine Division. He's been in Iraq for the past four months. 30 May 2004 Dear Friends, This is my third letter from Iraq. I have been working myself into the right mood to do this. Today is the day. In my last two letters I have leaned toward being as upbeat as possible. This time will be different; today I want to talk about Memorial Day, but I will start off by giving my perspective on the Abu Ghraib prison problem. First off, the investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib began back...

<p>Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday said his review has revealed no evidence that a senior civilian or military officer ordered the abuse of Iraqi detainees in the war on terrorism.</p> <p>The military has started a series of investigations into the maltreatment of Iraqi insurgents and criminal suspects last fall at the Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities. One major question has been whether the physical, and in some cases, sexual abuse was ordered by senior commanders.</p>

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan denied that the White House had a role in keeping a gruesome video of atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein's regime from the media. When asked by Talon News on Thursday to explain the virtual news blackout of the horrific images of Iraqis being beheaded, tongues being cut out, and fingers being chopped off, McClellan said that he'd "leave it to the media to address those issues." McClellan pointed out that Saddam Hussein has a long history of brutal crimes against his own people and his neighbors. "It is important to...