Former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was formally charged with extortion in Dhaka on Sunday. Hasina and co-defendant Sheikh Selim, a former Minister of Government, are accused of extorting around $1.16 million from two businessmen while in office. Reuters cited court officials as saying that her trial will begin January 17, and that a verdict [...]
US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an article published in the New Yorker Sunday that waterboarding , the controversial interrogation technique simulating drowning allegedly used against detainees by the CIA, was torture as far as he was concerned. The question of whether waterboarding is in fact illegal torture dogged now-Attorney General Michael [...]
Robert M. Nelson et al. v. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, January 11, 2008 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
The Iraqi parliament on Saturday approved a bill that will allow most members of Saddam Hussein's now-defunct Baath Party to be reinstated to public life. The law, known as the Justice and Accountability Law, was introduced by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki last March and was passed unanimously by the 143 [...]
A Chilean appeals court in Santiago Friday sentenced General Manuel Contreras , the secret police chief under former dictator Augusto Pinochet , to 10 years in prison. Contreras, the former head of Pinochet's National Intelligence Directorate , was sentenced for the kidnapping of 7 neighborhood leaders from La Legua in December 1973. The two men [...]
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf ruled out the possibility of a United Nations investigation into the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in an interview with a French newspaper published Friday. He told Le Figaro that an investigation will be conducted internally with the help of British police from Scotland Yard . Musharraf's statement [...]
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued a memo saying that its officers are now required to obtain a judge's approval before a deportee can be sedated in order to facilitate his or her removal from the country. The memo, written by ICE Director of the Office of Detention and Removal Operations John Torres [...]
US Navy Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby , commander of the Guantanamo Bay military prison, was reassigned Friday after only six months at that position. The date of Buzby's departure for the Virginia-based US Fleet Forces Command has not been publicly released. According to a brief Pentagon statement , Rear Adm. David M. Thomas will [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Friday that NASA cannot compel low-risk contract employees working at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory to undergo intensive background checks. NASA has been conducting background checks of employees since it was founded in 1958, but contract employees were only included after the agency revised its Security [...]
Shafiq Rasul et al. v. Richard Myers, Air Force General et al., January 11, 2008 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
