Monitoring group Human Rights Watch Wednesday asked the G8 , the heads of government of the major industrial democracies, to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin not to sign a controversial bill that would create an oversight group with greatly increased control over the funding and activites of non-governmental orginizations, including the Russian arms of a [...]
Defense lawyers working on several high-profile terrorism cases plan to bring legal challenges to discover whether the National Security Agency (NSA) used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslims linked to Al Qaeda and whether the government misled judges and defense lawyers about the selection and monitoring of suspects. Lawyers for Jose Padilla say they plan [...]
The Greek Ministry of Justice has begun investigating the alleged torture in Greece of 28 Pakistanis suspected of involvement in the July 7 London bombings following a lawsuit filed by the men against Greek intelligence officers. A story in the Greek weekly Proto Thema Sunday revealed the identities of a British MI6 officer in Athens [...]
Alexander Torshin, the head of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating last year's Beslan school siege told the upper house of parliament Wednesday that despite their exoneration by prosecutors earlier this week, local law enforcement officials were in fact negligent in ignoring instructions to increase school security. Last year, Islamic militants seized Beslan's School No. 1, [...]
Former Enron Chief Accounting Officer Richard Causey has reached a deal with prosecutors and is expected to plead guilty Wednesday to one or more criminal charges and a reduced prison sentence in exchange for his testimony against former bosses Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling . Causey, who was responsible for Enron's public accounting statements, faces [...]
CIA inspector general John Helgerson has launched an investigation into fewer than ten cases of possibly erroneous rendition , according to an intelligence official quoted by AP. In several cases it is believed that either the wrong person was captured, or the person later turned out to have no links to terrorism. The disclosed number [...]
US District Judge Ivan Lemelle Tuesday urged federal and state officials to work together and quickly set a date for the postponed New Orleans mayoral primary elections at a hearing of a lawsuit challenging the postponement of the primary. He said a vote would encourage a sense of normalcy, noting that although he did not [...]
On a brief visit to Iraq Tuesday US Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter met with the chief judge overseeing the Saddam Hussein trial , telling reporters gathered in the trial chamber before the meeting that he had been "disappointed the way the court has permitted Saddam to dominate the proceedings." Saddam has several times [...]
The US State Department said Tuesday that Iraqi prisons are only “nominally” under control of the elected government in Baghdad, acknowledging that they are in practice run by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry , which has not yet relinquished control of them. The central government, with help from US forces, is trying to take charge of [...]
The US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) substantively modified 179 Bush administration wiretap requests made after 2001, after declining to modify a single request in 20 of the 21 years between 1979 and 1999, according to an analysis of Justice Department statistics reported Tuesday by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The FISC also rejected or modified at [...]
