Vice President Dick Cheney urged Republican senators during a closed meeting earlier this week to exempt CIA agents from the Senate anti-torture McCain amendment attached to the 2006 defense spending bill. The amendment, approved 90-9 in the Senate last month, was unanimously reaffirmed by voice-vote on Friday. According to an anonymous senator, Cheney, who is [...]

President Bush sent a memo to White House staff members Friday announcing mandatory "ethics" briefings next week. The week-long series of "refresher lectures" on general ethics rules and the protection of classified information appears to be in response to the recent indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby [...]

The landmark Pennsylvania federal trial debating the legality of a school district's decision to teach ninth-grade biology students the theory of anti-evolutionary intelligent design drew to a close Friday. The plaintiffs, eight families in the Dover Area School District , filed the lawsuit in November 2004 , arguing that the school district's policy, the nation's [...]

Oregon Circuit Judge Joseph Guimond Friday upheld the constitutionality of Measure 36 , an Oregon constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage . Judge Guimond rejected arguments that the Measure, defining marriage as "between one man and one woman", violated the state constitution because it made several constitutional changes at once, and unlawfully prevented local governments from [...]

Lawyers for Jumah Dossari , the Bahraini Guantanamo detainee identified as having made a suicide attempt during an October 15 visit by attorney Joshua Colangelo-Bryan , asked a federal judge Friday to order a relaxation of his solitary confinement, more communication with lawyers and relatives, and independent assessment of his medical and psychological records. Dossari [...]

Judicial Watch, Inc. v. State, Vermont Supreme Court, November 4, 2005.. Read the full text of the opinion here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

A military jury Friday cleared a US Army sergeant of all charges related to his alleged abuse of a prisoner at the US-run Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan . Sgt. Duane Grubb had been charged with assault, maltreatment and making a false official statement, but testified that he had never hit prisoner Zarif Khan. Prosecutors [...]

The Vermont Supreme Court Friday ruled that a decision made by former state governor Howard Dean and Vermont's secretary of state to seal 93 boxes of sensitive papers collected during his term was legal. When he left office in 2003 Dean decided to seal the papers for ten years and joked with reporters that he [...]

US Senators Friday confirmed their support for an anti-torture amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and attached to the 2006 defense spending bill by unanimously re-passing the amendment by voice vote after approving it 90-9 last month. President Bush has threatened to veto the defense spending budget if it contains the anti-torture amendment. McCain [...]

A US Senate subcommittee referred British MP George Galloway Thursday evening to the US Department of Justice for potential prosecution because the committee said they found "probable cause" that Galloway lied to Congress regarding his role in the UN oil-for-food scandal. The Senate panel uncovered a payment of $150,000 in Iraqi oil sales to Galloway's [...]