A former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has called US Vice President Dick Cheney a "vice president for torture," saying that the Bush administration condones and even approves torture policies. Admiral Stansfield Turner, a Carter administration appointee who led the CIA from 1977 to 1981, spoke to Britain's ITV News and said Cheney [...]

Iraqi Special Tribunal officials Thursday denied reports that Saddam Hussein was attacked and punched several times by two court clerks after he insulted two Shiite saints during an interrogation session. Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Mousawi said "no one in the court attacked Saddam or punished him and we will never allow anyone in the court to [...]

The US Department of Justice has downplayed the conclusions of a 51-page memo indicating that a Georgia voter identification law will harm black voters, saying the information was based on old data and followed a faulty analysis. Earlier this year, the Georgia state legislature passed a plan that requires all voters to have photo IDs, [...]

A district court in Kiev Friday reinstated Svyatoslav Piskun as Ukraine's prosecutor general after Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko dismissed him last month. Piskun accused the president of terminating him because he began an investigation into the expenditures of Yushchenko's wife . Piskun said Friday that he was satisfied with the court's opinion calling it a [...]

Government lawyers have defended US treatment of a suicidal Guantanamo Bay detainee in court papers filed this week, claiming that he is receiving appropriate mental health care and otherwise being treated humanely. Jumah Dossari has made nine suicide attempts since March 2003, including an attempt in front of his lawyer and another earlier this week [...]

Federal prosecutors have charged an official of St. Tammany Parish with accepting kickbacks to arrange a debris-removal contract as part of the Hurricane Katrina cleanup. St. Tammany Parish Council member Joseph Impastato is accused of taking $85,000 from a local businessman who had a site available for dumping. The parish awards contracts every year in [...]

Leading Friday's international brief, UN officials are now admitting that membership of the Security Council is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite months of negotiation and calls for changes to the body's composition. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan supports expansion , and the US supports it in principle, but it opposed the plans put forth [...]

Former French UN ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee has admitted to a French judge that he accepted $156,000 in connection with the now-defunct UN Oil-for-Food program . Merimee received the money by way of oil allocations from Saddam Hussein's government that could be sold for profit; he is thought to be the first high-level official to admit [...]

Kizza Besigye , the president of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change party, appeared in a military court in Uganda on Friday along with 18 others on charges of treason . Besigye is the top challenger to President Yoweri Museveni in the 2006 election. The US Embassy in Uganda called for the trial to be [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour Friday called for an international investigation into present conditions in Iraqi jails after 173 malnourished, beaten and possibly tortured detainees were found in a secret Iraqi Interior Ministry prison facility earlier this week. The Iraqi government has already announced plans to investigate the prisoner abuse itself, and [...]