Free Republic

Former college professor Sami Al-Arian may have won in court this week, but his future is still murky as he awaits the U.S. government's next move, which could include deportation. Al-Arian was acquitted Tuesday of eight of the 17 federal terrorism-conspiracy charges against him, with the jury deadlocking on the rest. The verdicts were a stunning defeat for federal authorities who had been assembling the complex case against him for a decade. Al-Arian, 47, remains in jail, where he's been since his February 2003 indictment, while the federal government decides whether to retry him on the deadlocked charges, which include...

What's wrong with Americans today? Practically everything, according to Justin Webb, the debonair Washington correspondent for Bush Bash Central — whoops, I mean, the BBC — who shared his views of us last Saturday on Radio 4 on the eve of the President Bush's arrival in Europe. For starters, we are "strait-laced and earnest." Our "heads are in the clouds." And, worst of all, we tend "to hold firm to a principle even when practicalities get in the way." So that, one might assume, is not the virtue that an Englishman named Churchill once so nobly displayed, but nowadays is...

MALAGA, Spain -- I have been tooling around the south of Spain in search of anti-Americanism and the perfect bullfight. The anti-Americanism does not seem to be much in evidence. There was a homuncule waiter in Seville who became unpleasantly abrupt when my tip did not live up to his expectations -- expectations that perhaps become a bit elevated when a yank swaggers in. Yet, that is about it. Of course, I have been in the company of ordinary Spaniards, not university professors or parlor intellectuals, and those are the types that incubate such brilliant ideas as anti-Americanism. In a...