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In addition, the President presented shocking photos of atrocities in the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, which he visited this morning. In the booklet, recovered on the battlefield from a Hamas terrorist who was killed after taking part in the attack on Israel, terrorists are advised in detail on how to carry out the kidnapping. According to the description, the kidnappers are required to create chaos and intimidation, coercing and blindfolding captives, using electric shocks, and instructing them to execute any person who may pose a threat or distraction. They were also instructed to collect the captives and use them as...

After insisting their forces would "fight to the death," Ukraine has ceded control of the major city to Russia.

Ukraine’s military worked Tuesday to evacuate its remaining fighters from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol where three months of Russian bombing has left the besieged port city in ruins. Ukrainian officials said more than 260 fighters were evacuated Monday. Fifty-three seriously injured fighters were taken to a hospital in Novoazovsk, east of Mariupol, Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar said. Novoazovsk is under the control of Russian troops and Russian-backed separatists. Another 211 fighters were taken to the town of Olenivka, an area also controlled by Russian-backed separatists, Malyar said, adding that the evacuees would be subject to a...

Ukraine has vowed to investigate after graphic videos emerged purporting to show the horrific abuse of Russian prisoners of war, including some who were shot in the legs. “The government is taking this very seriously, and there will be an immediate investigation,” senior presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said Sunday, the Washington Examiner reported. “We are a European army, and we do not mock our prisoners. If this turns out to be real, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior,” President Volodymyr Zelensky’s adviser added. One clip shows what appear to be Ukrainian troops removing three Russian soldiers from a van seconds before...

The Russian armed forces were able to take over a Ukrainian military command center in Nikolaevka, a town in the suburbs of Kiev, the Russian Defense Ministry announced Saturday. The command center, according to Moscow, was a fortified and protected underground facility, and it had 61 Ukrainian soldiers. Moscow's defense ministry said most of the Ukrainian servicemen were senior officials in the country's armed forces, and they all surrendered to the Russian forces. The Russian defense ministry also said all of the Ukrainian servicemen laid down their arms because of the mass shortage of equipment, munition, and food. "All of...

Yesterday I wondered if Democrat Rep. Jacki Speier of California had gone off the deep end by musing that the Taliban aren't really terrorists, but rather "part of the fabric of Afghanistan." It turns out she was basically mangling the new talking points from the Obama Administration, which is going all-in for the reinvention of the Taliban butchers as legitimate battlefield opponents. CNN reports on Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's testimony before Congress today: Bergdahl was held by the Haqqani network, a Taliban wing designated a terrorist group in 2012. However, Hagel noted Bergdahl was a war captive, not a...

So powerful to watch POWs returning home. History...

For years now, Hannah Y. Kim has been focused on July 27 — the date that she would like to see a peace treaty signed with North Korea officially recognizing the end of the Korean War. The Korean War unofficially ended on July 27, 1953, when a negotiated agreement was signed in Panmunjon, a village north of the 38th parallel separating North and South Korea – after three years of bloody fighting, which claimed almost 37,000 American lives and 100,000 wounded. The death and casualty count for North and South Korean soldiers has been reported at more than 217,000 South...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

A "Mark III" military escape kit, with a silk map peeking out. Imagine it’s 1942, and you’re a member of Britain’s Royal Air Force. In a skirmish above Germany, your plane was shot out of the sky, and since then you’ve been hunkered down in a Prisoner of War camp. Your officers have told you it’s your duty to escape as soon as you can, but you can’t quite figure out how—you’ve got no tools and no spare rations, and you don’t even know where you are.One day, though, you’re playing Monopoly with your fellow prisoners when you notice a strange seam...

The death of communist tyrant Fidel Castro has yielded much-deserved coverage of the monstrous nature of his tyrannical rule. What has gone virtually unreported, however, is the direct and instrumental role Castro played in the torture and murder of American POWs in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The story of Castro’s atrocities against American soldiers in this conflict is rarely ever told, least of all by our mainstream media. During the Vietnam War, Castro sent a gang of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” As...

KUWAIT CITY -- Kuwaiti prosecutors have drawn up a list of charges against ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and hundreds of his officials for alleged war crimes committed during Iraq's occupation of the Gulf nation, the prosecutor general said Wednesday. The list will be delivered to the Iraqi court that will try Saddam and other former regime members and the new charges will be added to the existing allegations, prosecutor general Hamed al-Othman said, according to the state-owned Kuwait News Agency. Saddam, who was captured in December 2003, already faces charges in Iraq that include killing rival politicians during his...

Bowe Bergdahl compared his first year in Taliban captivity — starved, stinking and chained to a bed — to being tossed in a closet and forgotten. “Picture someone taking a bag, throwing it into the closet, shutting the door and just forgetting about it. That was basically how they treated me,” he said. (snip) Although watching over Bergdahl was a high honor, the guards were often bored and would pass the time by making videos of him, interrogating him with ridiculous questions or shaving his beard into shapes they found amusing, he said. “They ask you, is Obama gay and...

WHEN THE IRAQI REGIME collapsed in April 2003, few observers saw reason to mourn the loss of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. While a great deal of information about the former Iraqi regime's assorted atrocities has been uncovered since the invasion, newly-released documents go even further in demonstrating its manifest depravity. One such document is CMPC-2003-012666, a letter from Qusay Hussein that directs as follows: Transfer all Kuwaiti POW's / a total of 448 captured Kuwaitis who are located at the Al-Nida Al-Agher Prison and the Intelligence / General Center and Kazema Prison in Al-Kazema, to make them human shields at all...

[Ad-free 51 min video] Soldiers returned from the Vietnam War with harrowing tales of survival, but one was especially remarkable. This is the story of James Stockdale and his fellow prisoners at "Hanoi Hilton," who used spy communications to prompt a daring rescue.

Bosnian police arrested a wartime Muslim army commander on Tuesday on charges of failing to prevent crimes committed by foreign Islamic fighters against captive Bosnian Serb soldiers during a 1992-1995 war. The arrest of 63-year-old retiree Sakib Mahmuljin was carried out on orders of the state war crimes prosecutor, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. "The suspect is under investigation for acting in contravention of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions while serving as a commander of the 3rd Corps of the Army of BiH," it said. Mahmuljin has denied the charges during earlier proceedings. Many Islamic fighters,...

Hillary Clinton recently drew scrutiny for a claim that resurfaced in a New Hampshire breakfast on Tuesday that she once tried to join the Marines. The dubious claim, which even implicitly accused the Marines of sexism, brings to mind another case of military optics that might not have worked out the way Mrs. Clinton wanted it: A photo of her taken while shaking the hand of a soldier. The photo inevitably made the rounds in chain emails and on websites for years. But unlike some stories that seem too good to be true, and frequently turn out to be false,...

The Story of the Other Racist Flag As the Nixon administration prosecuted the Vietnam War, American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal By Rick Perlstein Posted on August 10, 2015 in Politics You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down. Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about this.

Uploaded on Jul 16, 2008 Al Santoli -- combat vet of the Vietnam War and former Congressional investigator Carol Hrdlicka --wife of a Vietnam War pilot shot down, captured, yet never returned Mike Benge -- returned POW of the Vietnam War andEleanor Apodaca -- sister of a Vietnam War MIA explain some of the reasons that: Disabled American Veterans (DAV) rates John McCain's voting record as only 20% in support of veterans, the lowest in Congress; Iraq and Afghanistan American Veterans give McCain a grade of "D"; and Vietnam Veterans of America rate McCain's voting record on veterans' issues at...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Saying they felt a "deep sense of ethical responsibility for a past tragedy," executives from a major Japanese corporation gave an unprecedented apology Sunday to a 94-year-old U.S. prisoner of war for using American POWs for forced labor during World War II.At the solemn ceremony hosted by the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, James Murphy of Santa Maria, California, accepted the apology he had sought for 70 years on behalf of U.S. POWs from executives of Mitsubishi Materials Corp.