Free Republic

A Delaware woman has become the next Terri Schiavo as her parents engage in a massive legal and philosophical debate about whether to subject her to euthanasia. Richardson is a 23-year-old woman who overdosed on heroin in August 2006 while she was three months pregnant with a baby girl. Doctors kept Lauren on life support until she delivered her baby in February 2007. Shortly thereafter, her parents began a fight that is reminiscent of the battle over Terri's life and death. As in the Terri Schiavo case, physicians have been quick to label Lauren as having a persistent vegetative state...

BALTIMORE – The only officer charged in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal has been cleared of criminal wrongdoing, his attorney said Thursday. A military jury convicted Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan in August of disobeying an order to not talk about an investigation into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the fall of 2003. Jordan was acquitted of allegations that he failed to supervise 11 lower-ranking soldiers previously convicted for their roles at Abu Ghraib. Now the conviction has been thrown out. Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe, commanding general of the Military District of Washington, sent Jordan's attorney...

A medical mystery after Milosevic's death By Elisabeth Rosenthal and Marlise Simons The New York Times THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2006 ROME Frustrated and filled with skepticism about Slobodan Milosevic's litany of medical complaints, the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague at times failed to investigate them adequately, according to several doctors who had recently examined the former Serbian leader. "His medical condition was not good, so we asked for additional tests to evaluate his cardiac situation," said Dr. Florence Leclercq, a French cardiologist who examined Milosevic for about three hours in November. "But these investigations were never performed, and...

Milan Babic, the leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia and one-time president of the Croatian Serbs in the 1990s, has committed suicide in his cell at a U.N. detention facility where he was serving a 13-year term for war crimes, officials said. Babic was found dead in his cell at the prison in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague, at about 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, according to a statement from the U.N. war crimes tribunal. "The Dutch authorities were called immediately. After conducting an investigation, they confirmed that the cause of death was suicide," the statement said.

FRONT PAGE More prison abuse found in Iraq - 13 of those at Interior Ministry site treated for torture so severe it broke bones By ELLEN KNICKMEYER Washington Post BAGHDAD, IRAQ - An Iraqi government search of a detention center in Baghdad operated by Interior Ministry special commandos found 13 prisoners who had suffered abuse serious enough to require medical treatment, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday night.

The “Loose Lips Sink Ships” Case (The information for this comment comes initially from an Associated Press story run on Yahoo News on 29 September, 2005.) US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in New York has just ruled in a case brought by the ACLU that 87 photographs and four videotapes concerning Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq must be released by the federal government. In his 50-page decision, the judge asserted that the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan "do not need pretexts for their barbarism." He added in his opinion that, "Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- An American contract worker who was kidnapped in Iraq and held more than 10 months says in an interview that his captors kept him blindfolded and bound throughout the ordeal. Roy Hallums, 57, described his experience to "60 Minutes" reporter Lesley Stahl in a segment that will air Sunday on CBS. Hallums also said the motive behind his kidnapping was ransom but he refused to give his captors contact information for his family to spare them from having to negotiate. Hallums was rescued Sept. 7 by coalition troops from a 4-foot-high crawl space under a farmhouse....

In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's "coercive tactics" with detainees, documents released yesterday show. "You won't believe it!" the agent wrote. Two years later, the frustration among F.B.I. agents had grown. Another agent sent a colleague an e-mail message saying he had seen reports that a general from Guantánamo had gone to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" it. "If...

Two West Virginia lawmakers this week voted against historic legislation that overhauled the nation’s spy network in order to beef up the country’s counterterrorism network. The legislation passed overwhelmingly in both the U.S. House and the Senate. The vote in the Senate was 89-2, with U.S. Sens. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., voting against the legislation. In the House, U.S. Rep. Alan B. Mollohan, D-W.Va., voted against the bill. Mollohan, in an interview Thursday, cited four major concerns with the legislation. ... “Does it adequately address the problems that have been identified with our intelligence gathering, storage...

FORT BRAGG, NC -- Lawyers for Pfc. Lynndie England moved Wednesday to throw out statements she made when first questioned about Iraqi prisoner abuse, including that reservists were just "joking around, having some fun." The motion was one of five taken up by military judge Col. Stephen Henley in a hearing in advance of England's Jan. 18 court-martial on abuse charges stemming from photos of her pointing and smiling at naked detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. Paul Arthur, an Army special investigator, testified that England was aware of her rights, including to have a lawyer present, when she was...

The military police soldiers who ran the high-security wing of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq kept an unofficial log of their daily activities, a diary of sorts that documents the conditions that gripped the prison during the months that detainees were abused in what would later erupt into an international scandal. From Oct. 19, 2003, to Jan. 18, 2004 -- just days after digital photographs of soldiers mistreating prisoners were turned in to Army criminal investigators -- the members of the 372nd Military Police Company who ran tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib jotted their experiences in a...

Letter Of Apology Author unknown - sentiment shared. For good and ill, the Iraqi prisoner abuse mess will remain an issue. On the one hand, right thinking Americans will abhor the stupidity of the actions while on the other hand, political glee will take control and fashion this minor event into some modern day My Lai massacre. I heard some Arabs are asking for an apology. I humbly offer mine here: I am sorry that the last seven times we Americans took up arms and sacrificed the blood of our youth, it was in the defense of Muslims (Bosnia, Kosovo,...

Mayor Bloomberg says the city "acted appropriately" while arresting and holding thousands of people during the Republican convention. I beg to differ. I wasn't even a demonstrator - I was going for a drink with a friend when I was arrested - and my experience tells a different story. It was Tuesday, Aug. 31, about 8:30 p.m. when my friend and I saw a lot of cops running on 26th St., then up Park Ave. South. I saw a man being handcuffed who said he had done nothing. The cop was using a lot of force, and I asked him...

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Thursday opposed calls for an independent investigation of prisoner abuse from human rights groups and a key congressional Democrat, who said such a probe was the only way to get to the truth. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch called for an independent investigation into U.S. prisoner detention and interrogation operations after two Pentagon reports this week greatly expanded the scope of culpability in the prisoner abuse scandal. "The investigations either completed or under way and the rigorous oversight by Congress provide the department and the public a thorough examination of the facts," said Matt...

What went wrong at Abu Ghraib prison? Two reports released this week agree: Woefully deficient planning for post-war Iraq, too few troops and inadequate leadership at the top.... THE REMAINDER OF THE COLUMN IS NOT WORTH IT.

Army Abuse Report Seeks To Skirt Blame, Evade SpotlightFull, public airing of mistreatment and its causes is needed. What is the best way to bury a scandal? Bring out the bad news when attention is focused elsewhere. The Army, abetted by the Senate Armed Services Committee, executed the tactic with military precision late last week, trotting out a hard-to-swallow, 300-page account of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal under cover of the 9/11 Commission's sweeping report on terrorism. Army abuse report seeks to skirt blame, evade spotlight _______________________________________ No 'Systemic' Failure Individuals' actions are to blame for mistreatment of prisoners. By...

WASHINGTON — Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez (search), commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has asked investigators to take the Abu Ghraib (search) prison abuse probe to the top of the chain of command — and that means to Sanchez himself, senior Defense officials have told Fox News. Sanchez has asked the Pentagon to appoint a senior investigating general who outranks him, and thus would be authorized to push the probe to the highest rungs of the command ladder, according to the officials.

WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday he was not aware of any order by President Bush that would violate U.S. laws or treaties banning torture of military prisoners captured in Iraq or elsewhere in the war on terrorism. “This administration rejects torture,” Ashcroft declared under tense questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee

Shoplifting Charge Dogs Iraq General Military Sources: Gen. Karpinski Caught Stealing Perfume In 2002 Jun 3, 2004 5:45 am US/Central NEW YORK (CBS) An American general caught up in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is now at the center of a new controversy involving allegations about her past, but she's calling it a smear campaign. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who claims she has been made a scapegoat for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, is the subject of an investigation by the Army Inspector General involving an alleged shoplifting incident in October of 2002, one year before the abuses began, reports...

After weeks of repetitive wall-to-wall coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the American media have finally achieved success: U.S. soldiers are now being labeled as war criminals by some of their fellow Americans - just as their predecessors in Vietnam were. "I've been called a baby killer," ROTC recruit Alexia Regner told the New York Post on Friday, saying the insult was hurled by some of her fellow students at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. "I was pissed. I would never kill a baby," Regner explained. "I was thinking, I took an oath to defend their right to call...