Appearing as a guest on the May 11 edition of FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, FOX News Channel host Oliver North followed other conservative commentators (such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and Weekly Standard online editor Jonathan V. Last) in comparing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. prison guards to behavior on a college campus.

The prisoner abuse, North said, was committed by “a group of obviously twisted young people with leashes and weird sex acts, the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays, being perpetrated by people in uniform.” Two days earlier, in a May 9 Commentary for The Washington Times, North wrote, “The media's 'compassion' for these imprisoned miscreants and suspected terrorists [the abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison] is a front for their journalistic jihad against the [George W. Bush] administration.” From the May 11 episode of Hannity & Colmes:

NORTH: The official response of the United States is to catch and punish the perpetrators of this heinous act [the murder of American civilian Nick Berg]. That's what we must do.

COLMES: And there certainly has been outrage. There's been outrage in this country. There's outrage globally. You don't feel there's enough outrage about this? I've been hearing outrage all day.

NORTH: Alan -- Alan, for 13 or 14 days now, all we have seen on the front pages of America's newspapers is a group of obviously twisted young people with leashes and weird sex acts, the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays, being perpetrated by people in uniform.

Oliver North was a member of the National Security Council staff during the Reagan administration and is founder and honorary chairman of the conservative public policy organization Freedom Alliance. His felony conviction in connection with the Iran-contra scandal was overturned by an appeals court that said his appearance before Congress may have influenced his criminal trial [USA Today, 7/9/97].

North is a nationally syndicated columnist and the host of the weekly FOX News Channel series War Stories with Oliver North. North is also the author of a book -- based on his tour in Iraq embedded with Marine and Army units during Operation Iraqi Freedom -- titled War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom (Regnery Publishing, November 2003). The book includes a free DVD featuring an hour-long FOX News Channel episode of War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to a Publishers Weekly review, FOX shares copyright on the book.