In some of his most candid comments since leaving the White House, former President George W. Bush said Wednesday he has no regrets about authorizing the controversial waterboarding technique to interrogate terrorist suspects and wouldn't hesitate to do so again.

Private security guards who worked for Blackwater repeatedly shot wildly into the streets of Baghdad without regard for civilians long before they were involved in a 2007 shooting episode that left at least 14 Iraqis dead, federal prosecutors charge in a new court document.

One hundred forty-three years after passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and 60 years after Article 4 of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned slavery and the slave trade worldwide, there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million.

A senior Justice Department official said that Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.

Attorney General Eric Holder testifies that waterboarding, the interrogation method used on suspects by Bush-era officials, is illegal torture.

A Spanish court has taken steps toward opening an investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo's first shackled detainees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement — the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business.

Tang Xiaozhao's is the 3,943rd signature on a list that has swelled to more than 8,100 from across China. Although their numbers are still small, those signing, and the broad spectrum from which they come, have made the human rights manifesto, known as Charter 08, a significant marker in the demands for democracy in China, one of the few sustained campaigns since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Given that the majority of Democrats in Congress, a larger majority of registered Democrats nationally, and an even larger percentage of those who voted for Obama opposed the decision to invade Iraq, it is particularly disappointing that Obama would choose his vice-president, chief of staff, secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Homeland Security and special envoy to Afghanistan and Iraq from the right-wing minority who supported the war.

Iraq is banning security company Blackwater Worldwide from providing protection to U.S. diplomats because of "improper conduct and excessive use of force."

President Obama is resisting calls for an investigation into torture and other abuses during the Bush years, so the chance to learn from our mistakes is slipping away.

Americans should not have to turn 65 years old or become disabled to have access to a public healthcare program that controls overhead costs, provides broad, affordable access to care and protects patients against big bills.

Amnesty International has accused Israel of using white phosphorus in civilian areas of the Gaza Strip. The substance can kill or cause serious injuries by burning through skin, and it is banned near civilians. Armies may use it to create smoke screens.

Manfred Nowak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, called on the US authorities to pursue the former president and his former defence secretary for the treatment of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

More than 150 international scholars, human-rights activists and Nobel Prize laureates wrote to China's president calling for the release of one of the country's leading dissidents, Liu Xiaobo, adding new international pressure on Beijing over its human-rights practices.

"U.S. arms and military training played a role in 20 of the world's 27 major wars in 2007," said the report, co-authored by New America's Hartung and Frida Berrigan.

Top officials — including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — were responsible for the use of "abusive" interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a bipartisan Senate report concluded Thursday.

President-elect Barack Obama will face many pressing problems when he takes office. This is one with a simple solution -- sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions soon after taking office and then push the Senate to ratify it. He should see it as part of helping to repair the United States' damaged global reputation and reasserting U.S. moral leadership.

"I was struck by the similarity between the abuse they [Guantanamo prisoners] suffered and the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps," wrote Patricia M. Wald, a retired appointee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals...

Watch the new video about Malik Rahim, founder of New Orleans hurricane relief group Common Ground and candidate for Congress in Louisiana.

Malik Rahim is the Green candidate for Congress in the Louisiana’s 2nd district special election on December 6th. He has been a pioneering community organizer for decades. His chances are good to unseat the incumbent, who has weak political support and grave legal problems.

The U.S. environmental movement is failing – by any measure, the state of the earth has never been more dire. What’s needed, a leading environmentalist writes, is a new, inclusive green politics that challenges basic assumptions about consumerism and unlimited growth.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States continued spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined. Andrew Bacevich, author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism", questions whether the runaway spending actually makes America safer, and why candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties are swearing allegiance to the global "war on terror".

A Nobel-prize-winning rights group said US officials committed war crimes by ordering what the group says was torture of detainees, and called for them to be probed and prosecuted.

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes...The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

Fatmata Jalloh was just a kid selling pancakes on a rural road in Sierra Leone when a rebel soldier snatched her and made her his wife.

Myanmar's military junta extended the house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday, a government source and diplomats said.

In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file...

To Olympic athletes contemplating wearing messages of support for Tibet, Darfur or even the notion of a better world, the International Olympic Committee is saying, "Don't."

The International Olympic Committee has sent a memo to its members, advising them on how to respond to media scrutiny of China's human-rights record -- and reminding athletes that any "proactive political or religious expression" during the event will be punished.

Five former U.S. secretaries of State on Thursday urged the next presidential administration to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and open a dialogue with Iran.

Google investors proposed that the company create a committee on human rights and be forbidden from engaging in censorship.

As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world’s largest, is in danger of failing even as it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by Sudan’s government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.

Police opened fire on Tibetan protesters as anti-Chinese rallies spread outside of Lhasa on Sunday, a witness and activists said, amid warnings from the Dalai Lama of a "rule of terror" in his homeland.

China kept government workers confined to their offices Saturday and ordered tourists out of Tibet's capital while lines of soldiers sealed off streets where riots had erupted, witnesses said. A Tibetan exile group said at least 30 people were killed in protests Friday.

Protesters in Tibet's capital Lhasa burnt shops and vehicles and yelled for independence on Friday as the region was hit by its biggest protests for nearly two decades, testing China's grip months before the Olympics.

The conflict in Darfur has entered a violent and deadly new phase. Another "scorched earth" policy is being unleashed, reminiscent of the worst waves of government-backed violence that brought the Sudanese region to world attention five years ago and led the US to declare that what was happening there constituted genocide.

President Bush today will veto legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics and will argue that the agency needs to use tougher methods than the U.S. military to wrest information from terrorism suspects, administration officials said.