Free Republic

I'd planned on writing a fairly mocking narrative of my day as an anti-globalization protester. And, in fact, there were some humorous moments -- there's lots about these morons that's worth mocking. But I gotta' say, for the most part, the experience gave me a wrenching stomachache. And had I stayed much longer, there'd probably be other body parts hurting, too, because it was all I can do to bite my tongue, and not jump headfirst into the fray. I got to Dupont Circle at about 10:30am. I was to meet a friend there before heading over to the IMF...

An engineer of the fiercest battle waged by the Palestinians during the invasion of the West Bank spoke to Jonathan Cook about the days of defiance in Jenin Omar sits restlessly on his chair in the safe-house. He is an "engineer" from Jenin refugee camp: one of the revered bomb-makers from the City of the Bombers. To the Israelis he is the most lethal, and wanted, of terrorists. The poison from the Cobra's head. We meet late last Thursday, hours after he escaped from the camp as Israeli soldiers took control of the area. We are still close enough to...

WASHINGTON -- As the debate intensifies over U.S. policy toward Iraq, I keep thinking about a conversation I had last spring over dinner with a surgeon I'd met while visiting a hospital in Northern Iraq. "We have real problems with the United States," he said. "The American government always interferes in the Middle East. But it doesn't interfere enough in Iraq." As the rest of the world dithers about whether President George W. Bush overstepped bounds in declaring Iraq to be part of an "Axis of Evil," Kurds in the so-called "safe haven" of Northern Iraq have few doubts. During...

<p>When suicide bombers attacked America last September, nothing could stop our retaliation.</p> <p>Yet when suicide bombers attack Israel, week after week, Israel is told -- even by Americans -- to back off.</p> <p>When we bombed Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was organized, it was a mission to "smoke them out."</p>

ASHINGTON — Not long after Sept. 11, somebody scribbled these chillingly profound words on a wall in Washington: "Dear God, save us from the people who believe in you." The atrocities and brutalities and repressions committed in the name of God fill us with a greater need for God, or some spiritual solace. Dark days — in New York, Washington, Central Asia, the Middle East, the Archdiocese of Boston — make us look inward and affirm the power of faith to make the unbearable slightly more bearable. Beyond Prozac and Paxil, religion should be able to step into the breach....

THE B-52s cruised in pairs high over the Afghan mountains yesterday, apparently unconnected from the destruction their bombs would periodically unleash on the valleys and mountainsides below. Not far from the detonations squads of American and Canadian troops scoured the area, slowly coming to the inevitable conclusion: the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were long gone. For nearly two weeks American aircraft pounded suspected al-Qaeda bases near the Afghan city of Gardez and around 2,000 American troops launched their biggest ground assault since the war in Afghanistan began last October. The offensive, codenamed Operation Anaconda, began on March 2 and involved...

THE Scottish detective who put Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi in Barlinnie jail last night broke his silence on the case to reveal who he believes started the countdown to mass murder. Stuart Henderson, speaking exclusively to Scotland on Sunday, said the Libyan acquitted of involvement in the crime last year, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, started the bomb timer in his Malta apartment. Describing Fhimah as "the luckiest man in Scottish legal history", Henderson said the Libyan probably forgot to adjust the bomb timer to take account of the one-hour time difference between Malta and the UK, resulting in the...

PATIENTS will be allowed to bypass their GP and refer themselves for hospital treatment as part of a radical patient "DIY diagnosis" plan being considered by the Scottish Executive. The fast-track scheme would enable patients who have used the internet or medical books to diagnose their illnesses to see a consultant without the need for an appointment at their local surgery. The plan, proposed by a senior Glasgow consultant, has won the backing of the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Physicians of Glasgow and is being investigated by the Scottish Executive. John Sinclair, a urologist at the...

Perhaps you remember George W. Bush's innocent use of the word "crusade" six months ago, and perhaps you recall the furor it provoked. Commentators around the globe quickly pounced: Why, the word is a provocation, they insisted. It will rattle Muslim moderates and confirm the worst fears of the radicals who hate us so. There are two things to keep in mind, however, about Bush's use of "crusade": He meant it in the familiar secular sense, not as a synonym for holy war. And he never used it again. Now comes Yasser Arafat, one week ago today, exhorting Palestinians to...

Pat Robertson has warned you: The next Muslim you see may kill you. As he explained on his Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club" the other day, "I have taken issue with our esteemed president in regard to his saying Islam is a peaceful religion. It's just not. And the Koran makes it very clear. If you see an infidel, you are to kill him." And then Robertson went on to warn about the Muslim immigrants who come to our shores. "They want to coexist," he declared, "until they can control, dominate, and then if need be destroy." Mind you now, ...

Using uncompromising language rarely heard in public by a foreign leader, visiting Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman said Israel must not negotiate with terrorists and implied that includes Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Drawing on Czechoslovakia’s experience during World War II, when the Allies sought to appease Germany by sacrificing the Czech Sudetenland to Hitler, Zeman said, “You cannot negotiate with terrorists because the single response of terrorists for fulfilling their demands is blackmail - new demands, nothing more.” Zeman, on a two day visit to Israel as the head of a large Czech delegation including government and business leaders, ...

Tom Clancy being interviewed now with no annoying phone calls, at least not yet.

Two sisters thwarted a kidnapper when one of the girls jumped from a car and her older sister stabbed their attacker with a pocket knife. A man abducted the girls Monday night after finding them walking along U.S. 78 and offering a ride to a convenience store, Charleston County sheriff’s deputies said. The man pulled into the parking lot, but suddenly sped off and refused to let the sisters out of the vehicle, deputies said. Hope Frame, 17, and her sister, Nicole, 16, suffered bruises and scrapes. A suspect was arrested when he went to a hospital seeking treatment, said ...

KARLSTAD, Sweden -- On the afternoon of Dec. 18, Ahmed Hussein Agaiza, 39, an Egyptian dissident living in Sweden, set out on foot for a language class, unaware that an Egyptian government airplane had landed in the Swedish capital to take him home against his will. Near the school, Swedish police grabbed Agaiza, who had been sentenced in absentia in Egypt to 25 years of hard labor on charges of taking part in an armed attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan. A few hours later in Stockholm, Muhammad Zari, another Egyptian asylum-seeker facing years in prison in his home ...

Back when the Brady Crime Victim Disarmament Law was being debated, rape enabling legislators such as Charles Schumer and Ted Kennedy rolled their eyes and ridiculed as hopeless paranoids anyone who dared suggest that the goal was to set up some kind of national registry of gun-buyers. You know, the kind of pre-existing registry that proved useful when it came time for earlier governments to round up and confiscate the civilian weapons of the Armenian Turks in 1915, the Ukrainian Kulaks in the 1930s, and Hitler's untermenschen a few years later -- not to mention those of the hapless citizens ...

Cornel West, the professor at the center of a racially tinged dispute that threatens to break up Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department, says that Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers "attacked and insulted" him and treated him with "disrespect." In his first public comments on his highly publicized clash with Summers, West made clear that he was deeply offended by a meeting in which the former treasury secretary expressed displeasure with West's conduct. "The one thing I do not tolerate is disrespect, being dishonored and being devalued," West told Tavis Smiley in a National Public Radio interview to be aired today ...

DENVER, Jan. 4 — Brian E. Rohrbough and Susan A. Petrone never much trusted the official account of what happened that awful day at Columbine High School. The report by Sheriff John P. Stone of Jefferson County concluded that their son, Daniel, and the 12 others killed on April 20, 1999, were all shot by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Columbine students who then shot themselves to death. But Daniel's parents said a growing list of inconsistencies among accounts of the shootings had led them to suspect that their son had been killed not by the rampaging teenagers but by ...

Indianapolis is ordered to pay $318,000 in legal fees industry spent fighting local law on violent games. By Maureen Groppe mgroppe@gns.gannett.com January 04, 2002 WASHINGTON -- Indianapolis' failed attempt to be the first U.S. city to keep minors from playing violent video games in public arcades is costing taxpayers more than anticipated. In a consent judgment approved this week by U.S. District Judge David F. Hamilton, Indianapolis has agreed to pay the video game industry $318,000 for lawyers' fees and other costs. The heads of the industry groups that successfully challenged the law's constitutionality said they have been "totally vindicated" ...

I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall. He is an American insider, a man working in the military bio-weapons field. He's a skilled microbiologist who did not aim to kill anybody or even to disrupt the postal system. Rather, he wanted to sow terror. Like many in the bio-warfare field, he felt that the government was not sufficiently attuned to the risks of anthrax, so he seized upon the opportunity presented by Sept. 11 to get more attention and funding for bio-terror programs like those that have been his career. How do I know all this? ...

<p>At 9:20 p.m. on a November Friday, Dr. Eleanor Walker and Gerardo Guzman sat close together in the bar at the elegant Aqua, waiting for their table. The couple had traveled from Detroit so that Walker could attend a medical conference. But the visit also afforded them an opportunity to eat at one of the best seafood restaurants in America.</p>