President Bush Passes a Bill giving himself and his whitehouse retroactive immunity for possible war crimes... Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, signed by the United States and thereby part of our law, guarantees that any detained person has the right to be free from "cruel treatment and torture; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."
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A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.
While George Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be...
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"An emboldened al Qaeda with access to Iraq's oil resources could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations."
Bush first used a more modest variant of that argument while campaigning for Republicans during the 2006 Congressional elections. Back then, the threat was that "extremists and radicals" would "pull a bunch of oil off the market". While it was refreshing to hear him finally acknowledge the blood-oil nexus, I don't think the threat resonated with many voters, judging from the...
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Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.
Ms Bhutto - the first woman PM in an Islamic state - was leaving an election rally in Rawalpindi when a gunman shot her in the neck and set off a bomb.
At least 16 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.
President Pervez Musharraf condemned the killing and urged people to remain calm. Security forces were placed on a state of "red alert" nationwide.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack....
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Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi, an Iraqi journalist and member of the Alive in Baghdad blog, was killed in his home yesterday.
Ali lived in Habibya, it’s considered as a part of the Sadr city. On Friday the 14th at 11:30pm Baghdad time, Iraqi National Guard forces raided the street where Ali’s house is, one of the neighbors heard a gun firing after 15 minutes from the arrival of the Iraqi National Guard convoy to the street, the force left at 3:00am. His neighbors kept calling Ali’s phone and it was switched off all the time, so they called...
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The CIA videotaped its interrogations of two top terror suspects in 2002 and destroyed the tapes three years later out of fear they would leak to the public and compromise the identities of U.S. questioners, the director of the agency told employees Thursday.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA's intention to destroy them. He also said the CIA's internal watchdog watched the tapes in 2003 and verified that the interrogation practices were...
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Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a book written by John Perkins and published in 2004. It tells the story of his career with consulting firm Chas. T. Main. Before employment with the firm, he interviewed for a job with the National Security Agency (NSA). Perkins claims that this interview effectively constituted an independent screening which led to his subsequent hiring by Einar Greve, a member of the firm (and alleged NSA liaison) to become a self-described "Economic Hit Man."
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The government's terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list's effectiveness.
The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004. Some lawmakers, security experts and civil rights advocates warn that it will become useless if it includes too many people.
"It undermines the authority of the list," says Lisa Graves of...
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U.S. air strikes in a Shi'ite stronghold of Baghdad early on Sunday killed two toddlers, Reuters TV footage showed, in clashes that police said left a total of 13 dead and 69 wounded.
The bodies of the toddlers, one in a nappy, lay on crumpled blankets in the morgue of Imam Ali hospital in the poor district of Sadr City where doctors tended to wounded men and boys.
In a house where one of the children lived, a man pointed to bloodstained mattresses and blood-splattered pillows, choking back tears as he held up a photo of one of the...
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced early Wednesday he had vetoed legislation that would have allowed Californians to vote on an advisory measure calling for President Bush to immediately withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.
The Republican governor said in a statement that a proposed ballot measure on the war would further divide Californians as they go to the polls in the Feb. 5 presidential primary.
"There is no louder message Californians can send to Washington on the Iraq war than who should lead our nation," Schwarzenegger said....
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