Disclosure of a 75 percent increase in secret wiretaps and "sneak and peek" searches since 2000 is likely to provide ammunition for civil liberties groups determined to modify the USA PATRIOT Act when Congress begins two months of debate on the law Tuesday....
As the U.S. State Department was unveiling its third annual report on "Supporting Human Rights and Democracy" this week, four of the country's best-known legislators came together to introduce a bipartisan bill to boost the promotion of democracy throughout...
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is charging that U.S. Army documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the mistreatment of detainees in Iraq was much more widespread than the government has admitted. The advocacy group also accused the...
A major advocacy group charges that a Yemeni businessman captured in Egypt was handed over to U.S. authorities and "disappeared" for more than a year and a half before being sent to the Pentagon's Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Human Rights Watch has...
Civil libertarians and opposition political leaders are stepping up their efforts to pull back the "veil of secrecy" they claim has characterized the George W. Bush administration. In separate developments, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sought to...
In a political environment more fractious than Washington has seen in over a decade, there are still signs that Left and Right can find common ground. A current example is a coalition of conservative interest groups that has joined forces with the American Civil...
President George W. Bush has taken a baby step toward fulfilling his pledge to spread democracy in the Middle East by giving grants totaling one million dollars to six civil society groups in Egypt, including perhaps the most controversial in the country – the...
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is trying once again to discover who was rounded up by the Department of Homeland Security in the weeks preceding the November 2004 presidential election "to assure the Arab-American and Muslim communities...
The nomination of one of President George W. Bush's closest advisors to lead U.S. public diplomacy efforts has been met with both hope and skepticism by some leaders in the U.S. foreign policy community. "You need someone who knows something serious about the...
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a major advocacy group, has filed the first challenge to "rendition," known by critics as "outsourcing torture," a practice used by U.S. intelligence agencies to deliver detainees to prisons in countries...
