Free Republic

The Democrats have bleated for years about the detention of illegal combatants at Guantanamo, while the Left and the "international community" have demanded that captured terrorists be treated as prisoners of war. We read in the November 22-23 Wall Street Journal (page A13) that Barack Obama's selected Attorney General, Eric Holder, agrees with us that terrorists are not uniformed combatants who are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. Per an interview on CNN in January 2002, One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find...

...Insurgent group al-Shabaab this week advanced to the edge of the capital Mogadishu and has seized important towns such as the strategic port Kismayo in recent months.... ...As the insurgents take over more territory, human rights activists are concerned that stringent punishments will be handed out under the rebels' interpretation of Islamic law. Fears were raised by a recent case in Kismayo, when a 13-year-old girl who complained of being raped by three men was stoned to death for adultery....

As Spc. Jorge Monjaras peered out the open hatch of an Abrams tank last month, he saw a young insurgent dart out of a crowd and lob a makeshift grenade. A small blast hit his back and burned a fist-sized hole into his body armor vest but left him without a scratch. The explosion was only the blasting cap. The main explosive, a 60 mm mortar round, landed inside his hatch and moved freely at his feet. It wasn’t until the next day when he prepped the tank for a different mission that he realized how lucky he was. To...

KABUL (Reuters) - Insurgents killed nine U.S. soldiers in an assault on an Afghan army and NATO outpost in northeastern Afghanistan on Sunday, making it one of the worst days for foreign troops casualties in the country since 2001. Afghanistan is suffering from a rising tide of violence this year, with a sharp increase in Taliban attacks, especially in the east where NATO says militants have taken advantage of peace deals in Pakistan to cross the border and fight in Afghanistan. --snip-- The dead soldiers were all American, a NATO official said. Fifteen ISAF troops and four Afghan soldiers were...

The outgoing American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan said the insurgency there will last for years unless Pakistan shuts down safe havens where militants train and recruit. Gen. Dan McNeill also blamed new peace agreements in Pakistan’s tribal areas for a spike in violence in eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. forces operate along the volatile border. “If there are going to be sanctuaries where these terrorists, these extremists, these insurgents can train, can recruit, can regenerate, there’s still going to be a challenge there,” McNeill said Wednesday. Taliban militants attacked and captured a remote town from the Afghan government overnight,...

Amid all the talk about the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq, little has been said about the accompanying "surge" of Iraqi prisoners, whose numbers rose to nearly 51,000 at the end of 2007. Four years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, occupation forces are holding far more Iraqis than ever before and thousands more languish in horrendous Iraqi-run prisons. The Detention Camps Detainees are held by the U.S. command in two main locations - Camp Bucca, a 100-acre prison camp and Camp Cropper, inside a massive U.S. base near the Baghdad airport. The number of Iraqis held in these facilities has...

Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a "measureable effect" on insurgents there. Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinions on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq... The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency...

Venezuela threatened to declare war on neighbouring Colombia last night, raising the prospect of the U.S. being drawn into conflict in South America. Venezuela's Left-wing president Hugo Chavez ordered ten tank battalions to the Colombian border and put war-planes under emergency stand-by. The tension follows Colombia's decision to send its army to strike against anti-government guerrillas hiding in the jungles of Ecuador. The surprise attack - launched without Ecuador's permission - killed Raul Reyes, a top commander in the Left-wing Colombian rebel group Farc, and about 16 of his men. President Chavez yesterday closed the Colombian embassy in Caracas, warning...

Al Qaeda's latest display of terror has made its way onto the Internet, showing horrifying images of what appear to be prisoners in Iraq being doused with an inflammatory liquid and then burned alive. -snip- As he speaks, two of the insurgents pour liquid on the blindfolded prisoners. Then they push the bound men into the pit, where they are engulfed in flames.

Muhammad Ayn-al-Nas, a 26-year-old Moroccan, started his journey in Casablanca. After flying to Turkey and then to Damascus, he reached his destination in a small Iraqi border town on Jan. 31, 2007. He was an economics student back home, he told the al-Qaeda clerk who interviewed him on arrival. Asked what sort of work he hoped to do in Iraq, Nas replied: "Martyr." Algerian Watsef Mussab, 29, who arrived in Iraq via Saudi Arabia and Syria, said he had come for combat. He complained that the Syrian smugglers who brought him to the border took his money, but he contributed...

With Mike Huckabee's continuing surge, the Republican Party now has an Iowa front-runner whose religious beliefs are virtually identical to those of George Bush. He's anti-choice, born-again, against gay-marriage, and gets political advice directly from God. So why is the Republican establishment suddenly in a state of near-apoplexy about Mike Huckabee? Shouldn't they be happy? They've been cultivating evangelicals and fundamentalists for 30 years. Now they finally have a candidate who's truly part of the movement. So what's the problem? Actually, that is the problem. The evangelical crowd was fine when it was just a resource to be cynically exploited...

Why does the GOP Establishment fear Huck? Juan Cole's got a bad case of left-wing Huckenfreude: I simply can not tell you how much I am enjoying this. The GOP has been pandering to these stupid bastards for years, and every time I pointed it out I was called “anti-Christian” or something or other. Those of us who saw what the party was becoming were told to shut up, that it was good politics. Enjoy your new GOP, folks. And here is something else to think about- are the evangelicals going to support Romney or Giuliani if you do manage...

Iranian-made weapons were among a large cache of arms and ammunition found during operations in a Shiite militia stronghold south of Baghdad, the Iraqi Army said Monday. Major General Jamil Kamel al-Shimari, a senior officer in the 8th Iraqi Army Division, said the cache was the biggest store of weapons found since the launch of Operation Lion Pounce on Saturday. Iraqi security officials said that 3,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen supported by military tanks and hundreds of US and Polish troops launched the assault Saturday to flush out Shiite militants from the city. The stockpile, which included roadside bombs, rocket-propelled...

The Longest Morning By Jeff Emanuel Published 11/1/2007 12:08:23 AM This article is the cover story of The American Spectator's new, November 2007 issue. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here. Samarra, Iraq THE DAY OF AUGUST 26, 2007, began like any other for the soldiers of Charlie Company, 2-505 Parachute Infantry Regiment (from the 82nd Airborne Division) -- with a mission in the city. Over a year into its deployment to Samarra, Iraq, and now working on the three-month extension announced by Secretary of Defense Gates in the spring, the company knew the city like the back...

ASADABAD, Afghanistan — A raid late Sunday night on a house the U.S. military says was housing foreign al-Qaida “facilitators” in Afghanistan’s restive northeast resulted in the killing of several insurgents and detention of five others, a U.S. military spokesman said. The operation was focused in the Asadabad District in the mountainous Kunar province, a hotbed for clashes between U.S. and insurgent militants fighting for both al-Qaida and Taliban networks. U.S. spokesman Maj. Chris Belcher said intelligence indicated a foreign al-Qaida presence in the Asadabad area, and when U.S. and Afghan forces reached the house, they called for the insurgents...

Children mass in the doorway of their Zaidon, Iraq, classroom Oct. 22 after receiving school supplies from Iraqi Police and Marines from Company I, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 6. The supply run served the dual purpose of both helping schoolchildren by providing much-needed pens, pencils and bookbags, in addition to introducing the city's new mayor, Iraqi Police Lt. Col. Ishmael, to the people. “The relationship between us and the IPs is absolutely critical. Lt. Col. Ishamel established the IPs, and they have made it possible for the kids to come back to school after four...

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President Bush has endorsed General David Petraeus's recommendation to begin withdrawing 30,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by next summer. Yet the drawdown would only restore troop levels to where they were before the surge began in January 2007. In the final months of 2006, debate in Washington centered on how fast a reduction from pre-surge levels could occur. The Iraq Study Group recommended that approximately half of the 130,000 troops then in Iraq be withdrawn by early 2008. In marked contrast to that and similar proposals, President Bush is now endorsing a step that would mean a return to the...

Anthony Giacchino had just started as a producer at The History Channel in 1996 and was looking for a topic for his first documentary film. During a chance meeting at a church service, his former high school history teacher told him about a group of anti-war activists who, 25 years earlier, were caught red-handed breaking into a draft board office in Camden. Remarkably, they won a rare and momentous legal victory for the anti-war movement. The teacher brought up the story because the pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Camden, where Giacchino's parents worshiped, was the Rev. Michael Doyle,...

Iraq to free 6,000 Sunni insurgents from jail By Colin Freeman in Baghdad, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:58am BST 02/09/2007 Up to 6,000 suspected Sunni insurgents are to be freed from Iraqi jails in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the country's government from collapsing under the strain of sectarian in-fighting. Iraq’s prison population is 85pc Sunni and a release scheme is seen as an attempt at reconciliation with Sunni parties The release scheme, which could put some hardened combatants back on to the streets, is part of a high-stakes gamble by Iraq's Shia-led government to win back the confidence of...