Free Republic

When I traveled to Auschwitz a few years ago, one question played over and over in my mind: Did they know? Did the German people know what was happening in this camp near their own border, in their own occupied territories? With the trains coming and going year after year, with the long lines of prisoners and the billowing smokestacks, did they just turn a blind eye to the atrocities? Had they become desensitized to the point that they could no longer see the carefully choreographed death operations nearby? Some concentration camps, like the one in Dachau, were set in...

America's news media, an amoral university, an opportunistic district attorney, and a police department that seems to have collaborated in framing innocent students all combined to nearly destroy the lives of three innocent young men -- members of the Duke University lacrosse team. The attorney general of North Carolina announced that all charges -- of rape, sexual assault and whatever other charges a mendacious young woman got Mike Nifong to bring against the Duke lacrosse team players -- were being dropped. He pronounced the students "innocent," not merely "not guilty." And the attorney general also declared Nifong a "rogue prosecutor."...

A few dozen people gathered in front of the state Capitol on Monday to protest the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams and also to denounce police brutality and what they say is poor media coverage of that issue. The rally was organized by Earl Armstrong, whose brother, Thomas Charles Armstrong, was injured during an encounter with Denver police on Nov. 11. Thomas Armstrong was scheduled to appear at the rally but did not show up. "He's signing off the life and death of a man he's not fit to lick the boots of," Churchill said.