Former US military police commander Lt. Col. William Steele was sentenced to two years in prison Friday after being convicted of unauthorized possession of classified documents, failing to obey an order, and conduct unbecoming an officer by having an inappropriate relationship with an interpreter. Earlier Friday, Steele was found not guilty of more serious charges [...]

READ MORE

UK lawmakers will investigate whether the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has secretly held terror suspects on a sovereign British territory in the Indian Ocean, the Guardian reported Friday. The House of Commons' Foreign Affairs Committee will look into the long-standing allegations of interrogations by the CIA on the island of Diego Garcia, which has [...]

READ MORE

Serbian police arrested four members of the Scorpions paramilitary group suspected of crimes committed in Kosovo during Serbia's 1998-1999 war with ethnic Albanian separatists, the Serbian Interior Ministry announced Friday. Several members of the Scorpions, one of the most brutal paramilitary groups active in the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, have already been convicted of [...]

READ MORE

The Canadian government is trying to derail a lawsuit over whether the Canadian Army in Afghanistan is transferring custody of detainees to Afghan forces to face torture by bogging it down with a flurry of technical arguments, Amnesty International Canada said Thursday. Amnesty and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association brought complaints against the Canadian [...]

READ MORE

Former Argentinian coast guard officer Hector Febres went on trial Thursday on charges of kidnapping and torturing four people at the Navy Mechanics School during Argentina's Dirty War . If convicted, Febres faces life in prison. Last week, an Argentinean court sentenced former military chaplain Christian von Wernich to life imprisonment for participating in seven [...]

READ MORE

Israeli military Brigadier General Yair Golan received a reprimand Thursday after an investigation by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) into allegations that Golan improperly used Palestinians as human shields. Golan, commander of the West Bank army division, will not be promoted for at least the next nine months as part of his reprimand. According to [...]

READ MORE

JURIST Guest Columnist Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University School of Law says that US Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey should acknowledge that waterboarding employed by US interrogators is torture, and not attempt to dodge the critical question… Former judge Michael B. Mukasey, nominated by President Bush to serve the United States as Attorney General, has [...]

READ MORE

European Union (EU) leaders reached agreement on the text of a proposed EU Reform Treaty at a summit in Lisbon early Friday local time, working through last minute objections by Poland and Italy. Much of the summit focused on reservations by those countries; observers said that the treaty could have been defeated if they had [...]

READ MORE