Cristián Correa : "The whole debate about if waterboarding is torture or not seems artificial to me, because it is very clear that drowning detainees during interrogation is a way of intentionally inflicting severe physical suffering for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession. McConnell's comments are just what should be expected from any [...]
Malcolm Nance : "That the National Director of Intelligence, Mike McConnell would recently come out and opine that waterboarding "hether it's torture by anybody else's definition … for me it would be torture" tells me that the heretofore positive view of torture may be ready to dramatically reverse itself. First, an aside. Admiral McConnell is [...]
A French court Monday froze bank accounts belonging to several Russian state organizations including the Central Bank of Russia, the Russian Finance Ministry , the presidential administration's foreign property arm, the Russian Energy Ministry , state arms monopoly Rosoboronexport, and the government news service RIA Novosti . The accounts were held by a French division [...]
The US Supreme Court on Monday denied without comment a petition for certiorari filed in Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. von Eschenbach (07-444) , a case challenging the constitutionality of the government's ability to deny terminally ill patients access to medications that have yet to receive full regulatory approval. The Abigail [...]
A report issued Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) criticized efforts by the Bush administration to prepare for a potential bird flu pandemic by relying on a law enforcement/national security approach rather than a public health approach. The report, authored by three professors, cautioned that the administration's current pandemic response plans could threaten [...]
New International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz does not plan to amend his predecessor's tough stance on Serbian cooperation, Reuters reported an ICTY spokeswoman as saying Monday. Former chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte long criticized Serbia for its seeming reluctance to cooperate with the ICTY; last October, she said [...]
French prosecutors Monday urged a criminal court in Creteil, a suburb of Paris, to convert the sentences of six French aid workers convicted and sentenced in Chad for their role in the attempted airlift of 103 supposed Darfur orphans to France from eight years of hard labor to eight years in prison. The workers, affiliated [...]
A former defense lawyer for German Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison Monday after being convicted of incitement and insulting the court during Zundel's original trial in 2005. Throughout Zundel's trial, Sylvia Stolz repeatedly denied the Holocaust, described Jews as "enemy people," distributed a legal document that concluded with the words [...]
The European Commission (EC) Monday announced formal investigations into two new allegations that Microsoft has abused its dominant market position regarding a range of Internet and operating system software. The EC will look into charges that Microsoft violated Article 82 of the Treaty Establishing the European Community, which covers market sharing and antitrust law. The [...]
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the US military have installed a video teleconferencing system at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan to allow detainees held at the base to speak with loved ones, the ICRC said Monday. The system is available to all detainees at the Bagram facility, some of whom have not [...]
