Free Republic

Iran admits detaining US academic Haleh Esfandiari is one of the leading US authorities on Iran Iran's foreign ministry has confirmed that the government has detained a leading Iranian-American academic. Spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari was lawful and she would be treated like other Iranian nationals.Ms Esfandiari, one of Washington's best known Iran experts, was visiting Tehran to see her 93-year-old mother. The incident comes at a time of continuing tension between the United States and Iran. "It is natural if there is any problem, it will be handled by authorities," said the spokesman. Iran...

International Law: Everyone has the right to an attorney. But as Ramsey Clark rushes to the side of Saddam Hussein, this may be a case where both the defendant and his counsel can plead insanity...."Clark has been using and aiding mass murders and other American enemies for the last 30 years," conservative pundit David Horowitz said in 2003 of a Clark trip in Iraq. "He should give it a rest." But that is unlikely. ...Clark has defended the who's who of mass murderers — not just Milosevic, but also Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, also accused of war crimes, as...

WASHINGTON - It was a quarter-century ago this month, April 24, 1980, that the secret American raid into Iran to rescue 53 hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran collapsed in disaster on a make-shift airstrip in the middle of the Iranian desert. The embarrassingly public failure of the raid, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, was a low-water mark for the Carter administration and for our military as well, still struggling to get back on its feet in the wake of the debacle in Vietnam just five years before. Eight American servicemen died when the raid came apart with the fiery...