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Dith Pran... used to say: "I'm not a hero - I'm a messenger." ...[He was] a tenacious survivor of the 1975-79 Cambodian holocaust, when the communist Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1 million people- nearly a third of the nation's population- while the world looked on. He devoted the rest of his life to telling the story- best known through the 1984 film "The Killing Fields." Dith, a translator-photographer for Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, remained behind after the fall of Phnom Penh to help report the Khmer Rouge takeover. But when Western journalists were forced to leave, Dith became a prisoner, spending...

"He was 'the most patriotic American photographer I've ever met, always talking about how he loves America,' said Associated Press photographer Paul Sakuma, who knew Dith through their work with the Asian American Journalists Association." "The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people."

Dith Pran, a Khmer Rouge survivor whose experiences in Cambodia were adapted into the award-winning movie The Killing Fields, died early on Sunday at the age of 65, his friend and former New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg said. Dith, who had been battling pancreatic cancer since January, died in the early hours at a hospital in New Jersey, with his ex-wife at his side. "Pran was a special person, a very special person. Messages are pouring in from people who met him only once saying that he made a deep impression on them. And he did, on everybody," Mr...

'Killing Fields' survivor Dith Pran dies By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday, his former colleague said. Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago. Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when...

CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia (Reuters) - The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims. Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979. "I saw Duch kneel in front of the trees where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed children to death," a policeman told reporters...

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Pol Pot's right-hand man, Nuon Chea, appeared before Cambodia's "Killing Fields" tribunal on Wednesday to request bail, arguing he was not a flight risk and would not try to influence potential witnesses. The octogenarian former Khmer Rouge guerrilla, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, also said fears for his safety were overblown as he had been living for years in "peace and harmony" at his home in the jungle along the Thai border. "I have no desire to leave my beloved country," he told a courtroom packed with reporters. "No one is worried about...

UN-Backed Genocide Tribunal Arrests Former Khmer Rouge Head Of State Khieu Samphan In Cambodia The U.N.-backed genocide tribunal in Cambodia arrested the former Khmer Rouge head of state Monday following his release from a hospital in the capital, officials said. Khieu Samphan, 76, was the fifth senior Khmer Rouge official to be detained by the long-delayed tribunal ahead of trials that are expected to begin next year. The arrests come almost three decades after the group fell from power, with many fearing the aging suspects might die before they ever see a courtroom. Police escorted Khieu Samphan from the hospital...

In a “Web-exclusive” commentary posted Thursday, Newsweek Senior Editor Michael Hirsh ridiculed President George W. Bush's warning that a precipitous pull-out from Iraq could lead to the humanitarian horrors that followed the American pull-out from Vietnam. Recalling a trip he made to Vietnam in 1991, Hirsh reported that he found a nation looking to the West and capitalism, adding that “today Vietnam remains” only “nominally communist.” He then snidely asserted: “This was the 'harsh' aftermath that George W. Bush attempted to describe this week when he warned against pulling out of Iraq as we did in Vietnam.” James Taranto, in...

2004 Volume 4The Greatest Killer The 20th Century has been the bloodiest century in all of history. And humanism has proven to be the most destructive religion of all time. Far more people have been killed in the name of atheism than by all other religions combined. Historian Paul Johnson has observed that ”the 20th Century state has proved itself the great killer of all time.” The 20th Century has seen the worst atrocities ever committed. The word ”genocide”, a new term coined in the 20th Century, describes what has occurred repeatedly in secular humanist states - which had...

Military historians seem to be converging on a consensus that by the end of 1972, the balance of forces in Vietnam had improved considerably, increasing the prospects for South Vietnam’s survival. That balance of forces was reflected in the Paris Agreement of January 1973, and the (Democratic) Congress then proceeded to pull the props out from under that balance of forces over the next 2 ½ years — abandoning all of Indochina to a bloodbath. This is now a widely accepted narrative of the endgame in Vietnam, and it has haunted the Democrats for a generation.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The former chief of a Khmer Rouge prison is willing to testify about the communist regime's atrocities that led to an estimated 1.7 million deaths in the 1970s, Cambodia's genocide tribunal announced Wednesday. Duch, 64, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, on Tuesday became the first top Khmer Rouge figure to be indicted for offenses committed when the Khmer Rouge held power from 1975-79. He was charged and detained by order of the U.N.-backed international tribunal's foreign and Cambodian judges. Duch headed the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where some 16,000 suspected enemies of the regime...

BANGKOK, July 31 — A tribunal in Cambodia charged the commandant of the main Khmer Rouge torture house with crimes against humanity on Tuesday, bringing the first charge in a long-delayed trial in the deaths of 1.7 million people in the late 1970s. The commandant, Kaing Guek Eav, 64, known as Duch, was the leader of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh where at least 14,000 men, women and children were tortured and sent to killing fields. Only a handful survived. Two weeks ago, prosecutors announced that they had submitted to the tribunal a list of five potential defendants...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Cambodia's international genocide tribunal charged the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center with crimes against humanity on Tuesday, a historic first indictment against a top figure in the communist regime that created Cambodia's infamous killing fields. The suspect, Kaing Guek Eav, has acknowledged heading the S-21 prison, where the Khmer Rouge's suspected enemies were tortured before being taken to killing fields near the capital. An estimated 1.7 million people died from hunger, disease, overwork and execution when the Khmer Rouge was in power in 1975-79. The 62-year-old, also known as Duch, was one of five...

Leadership: Asked about the fate of the Iraqi people if the Democrats force a premature withdrawal, the Senate majority leader said they'd have to fend for themselves. Welcome back to the killing fields of Congress. The sheer callousness of the Iraqi policy espoused by Harry Reid was exquisitely exposed by ABC's Jake Tapper's questioning at a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday. Tapper's "World News" story on the confrontation began with the observation: "Some foreign policy experts predict that such a U.S. withdrawal could unleash genocide against innocent Iraqis. It's a subject Democrats don't want to discuss." Indeed. On the heels...

Remembering Communism’s Victims By Jacob Laksin FrontPageMagazine.com June 15, 2007 Washington D.C. -- Holocaust victims have one. So do the fallen of World War II and Vietnam. But what of the estimated 100 million who perished at the hands of the last century’s greatest tragedy, communist totalitarianism? Until recently, these silenced masses -- victims of Soviet gulags, Vietnamese concentration camps, Cambodia‘s killing fields, the East German, Cuban and North Korean police states -- had no fitting memorial to remind the world of their unjust, and often inhuman, fate, let alone of the ideology that abbreviated so many lives. That changed...

JACKSONVILLE, FL -- Jacksonville Narcotics officers shot and killed a man during an undercover operation on the Southside. The shooting happened in the 2300 block of Westmont Street, just off Philips Highway Saturday night. "An individual approached from between two houses brandishing a handgun. The officers gave several commands to drop the gun, he did not, so they exchanged gunfire," says Chief Dwain Senterfitt. Witnesses told First Coast News it appeared the man mistook the officers for drug dealers and was trying to scare them away.

WASHINGTON - Many participants in Saturday’s “peace” demonstration on the Mall — including mainstream media journalists covering it — noted the parallels with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. Thousands demanded American withdrawal from a nation under siege by totalitarians bent on enslaving millions. Hollywood celebrities and Democrat politicians stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the speaker’s platform. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was even a weekend presence, via television from Switzerland, again telling the world how terrible is his country. All that was needed to complete this reconstruction in time was new photos of Jane Fonda consorting with insurgents killing Americans in...

Leave it to our Southern cousins to make Playboy scandalous again. The magazine's a relic, hobbled by octogenarian Hugh Hefner locking his arms around its knees while the culture scoots off without him to scale new heights of naughtiness. They put sexier stuff than Playboy on the sides of CTA buses. But it causes a stir in Tennessee. Let Democrat Harold E. Ford (below) -- who is black and for some reason wants to be a senator from the Volunteer State -- attend a Playboy party, and the Republican National Committee is running vile TV commercials with a sultry blond...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Former Khmer Rouge military commander Ta Mok died Friday as he awaited trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, his lawyer said. The notoriously brutal commander had been in government detention since his capture in 1999. He was transferred from prison to a military hospital last month suffering from high blood pressure, tuberculosis and respiratory complications. He had been in and out of a coma since last week. Ta Mok was believed to be 80. His lawyer, Benson Samay, said that he died at 4:45 a.m. Friday. Ta Mok, whose real name is Ung...

France faces moment of truth over events that ended embassy siege in Cambodia He is safe, she thought. But he was not. Four days later two French gendarmes dragged Ung Boun Hor, the former speaker of the Cambodian national assembly, to the compound gates and delivered him, with six other alleged "traitors", to a platoon of waiting Khmer Rouge soldiers.