Volunteer torture victim Maboub Ebrahimzdeh lies on the sidewalk after a waterboarding demonstration in front of the Justice Department in Washington DC, in November 2007.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted to limit CIA interrogators to techniques approved by the military, which would effectively bar them from waterboarding prisoners, AP quoted congressional officials as saying.
The vote Tuesday on an amendment by Sen. Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat, was taken behind closed doors as the committee debated legislation to authorize money for intelligence operations in 2009, marks at least the second attempt by intelligence overseers in Congress to regulate CIA questioning of detainees. Congressional officials discussed the vote on condition of anonymity because the vote was secret.

Bush’s Bill
President George W. Bush vetoed the 2008 intelligence authorization bill in March because it included the same curbs on questioning techniques. This interrogation provision, if passed by the full Senate and House, would likely face the same fate.
Committee officials refused to comment because deliberations over the bill were ongoing. The bill was expected to be completed later this week.
In a statement announcing her intention to offer the amendment, Feinstein said, “United States will never again engage in waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques.“
The military rewrote its field manual on interrogation in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq. It outlines 19 legal interrogation techniques, including--making prisoners think they are in the custody of another country--and the separation of a prisoner from other prisoners for up to 30 days at a time.
It prohibits waterboarding, which simulates drowning. The technique has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture.
According to the field manual, prisoners may not be hooded or have duct tape put across their eyes. They may not be stripped naked or forced to perform or mimic sexual acts.
They may not be beaten, electrocuted, burned or otherwise physically hurt. They may not be subjected to hypothermia or mock executions. The manual also does not allow food, water and medical treatment to be withheld, and dogs may not be used in any aspect of interrogation.

Objecting the Limitation
CIA Director Michael Hayden has objected to limiting the CIA to military methods, saying the CIA was not consulted on the 19 approved techniques and they do not encompass all lawful, non-abusive methods of interrogation. For example, sleep deprivation is not mentioned in the manual.
The CIA says it has held and interrogated fewer than 100 detainees. It has used interrogation techniques on a third of them, according to Hayden.
Hayden told Congress this spring that the CIA waterboarded three prisoners in 2002 and 2003. In 2006 he ordered a halt to the practice in the wake of a Supreme Court decision and new laws on the treatment of US detainees.
Absent a law against it, waterboarding remains a possibility in future interrogations of terrorism suspects, as long as the president authorizes it after consulting with the attorney general and intelligence officials.

Warning Letter
A March 5 letter from the Justice Department to Congress makes clear the Bush administration has not defined which interrogation methods might violate the Geneva Convention’s bans on “outrages upon personal dignity,“ the Times said.
A senior Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the classified information: “I certainly don’t want to suggest that if there’s a good purpose you can head off and humiliate someone.“
But, he said, “the fact that you are doing something for a legitimate security purpose would be relevant ... There are certainly things that can be insulting that would not raise to the level of an outrage on personal dignity.“
The Geneva Conventions prohibit humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners.

Britons vote in local polls Thursday in England and Wales, amid warnings that heavy losses for the ruling Labour Party--notably in London--could spell disaster for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, reported AFP.
Labour is facing 21-year lows in the polls and Brown a slump in his own personal ratings going into what is his first major electoral test since taking over from Tony Blair last June.
The tightly-fought race to become London’s next mayor is seen by many as a litmus test of public opinion on the Labour administration, with a general election in the offing in the next two years.
The capital is a big political prize: the mayor controls an annual budget of more than 11 billion pounds (Û14 billion, $22 billion) and his policy decisions affect 7.5 million Londoners and millions more who visit.

European Union nations have signed a pre-membership trade-and-aid pact with Serbia to help pro-Western parties there win the May 11 elections and signaled they want to pull Serbia closer despite significant differences over Kosovo.
According to AP, the EU’s 27 foreign ministers and Serbian Deputy Premier Bozidar Djelic signed the deal Tuesday. But, wary of Serbia’s Balkan wars record, the EU will only implement the pre-membership deal once Belgrade fully cooperates with the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, which has demanded the extradition of the last remaining war crimes suspects.
The pact was signed after the Netherlands and Belgium lifted their vetoes on the signing of the so-called Stabilization and Association Agreement. But because it will not take immediate effect, the signing had a largely symbolic value.
Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said that proof of Belgrade’s cooperation with the UN tribunal would be delivering four war crimes suspects to trial in The Hague.

Malaysia’s resurgent opposition flexed its newfound muscles Wednesday
(April 30), disrupting Parliament’s first business session with noisy arguments as lawmakers from both sides traded insults and jeers, according to AP.
The record 82 opposition lawmakers who were elected to the 222-member Parliament in the March 8 elections shouted down, in one voice, ruling National Front coalition lawmakers in an argument over a technicality.
Karpal Singh, from the opposition Democratic Action Party, called National Front member Bung Mokhtar Radin a “Bigfoot,“ who retaliated by calling Singh a “Big Monkey.“
Tuesday’s (April 29) pandemonium broke out as soon as the speaker opened the floor to Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi for the question and answer session. Opposition members objected, saying most of the first questions had been allotted to National Front lawmakers.

New Cuban President Raul Castro has publicly proclaimed the end of the 21-month “temporary“ phase opened by the illness of his brother, long-time Cuban leader Fidel Castro, said DPA.
At the same time, he announced a series of measures--including the first Cuban Communist Party (PCC) congress in more than a decade--that could consolidate his power over the Caribbean island while he prepares generational change to grant “continuity“ to the revolution, he said.
Raul Castro’s comments at the end of a Politburo meeting were reported Monday night on Cuban television.
The announcement “sees the temporary circle at the institutional level,“ dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe told DPA on Tuesday.
It ends a phase “not just from the government’s point of view,“ but also from the political side. “Now it is clear that Raul is going to be in power, and Fidel is only a soldier of ideas,“ Espinosa Chepe said.

This year’s Olympics has turned into a political tug of war between China on the one hand and the United States and Europe on the other. Some world leaders have threatened to boycott the games unless China reverses its political line concerning the Tibet issue.
Some liberal western states have even threatened to boycott the Olympic torch relay unless China gives assurance that it will look into the human rights violations across China.
Olympics, which was once the venue of peace and interaction, has now turned into a conflict between Asia’s powerhouse China and the West. Being witness to demonstrations and protests on the way of the Olympic torch relay is a question for those who have tried their best in the 21st century to keep the “symbol of peace“ away from politics.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics even has turned into a political struggle between the West and China in which the former is manipulating the global public opinion for political gain against the world’s largest nation.
Public opinion in fact has a memory full of the composition of politics and sports or in other words “the political use of sports“.
Western powers are trying to mobilize public opinion against China in a politically-motivated move. In other words, westerners do not have the patience to see China gaining political and economic prestige by hosting the games.
The Tibetan political game was instigated with western support in a coordinated move to ruin the peaceful and cordial ambience of the Olympics to Beijing’s detriment.
China is turning into a superpower economically and politically. The West turned against China when it became known that it would be the next economic superpower.

Uganda on Tuesday accused UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo of supplying arms to a dormant rebel group that is re-grouping in the troubled central African state.
According to AFP, Ugandan Defense Minister Crispus Kiyonga said Kampala will protest to the UN Security Council over intelligence which he said links the MONUC peacekeeping mission to the arming of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels.
“The government is very upset with the conduct of some of these UN officers,“ Kiyonga told AFP. “We have intelligence information that they are giving guns to these people of ADF.“
He added, “We are writing a protest note to the UN Security Council and the foreign affairs ministry has already been instructed to forward our protest.“
Kampala accuses the ADF -- a dormant rebel movement hiding in eastern DR Congo -- of recruiting and re-arming to fight President Yoweri Museveni’s government.
MONUC is the French acronym for the UN Mission in DR Congo, the largest and most expensive of all UN peacekeeping missions. It has more than 16,000 troops from 18 nations, with India and Pakistan the leading troop contributors, its website says.