The Globe and Mail 15/05/2013 - Amnesty International says Canada is obstructing efforts to compensate three men who suffered torture in Syria - effectively ignoring a key recommendation from the United Nations Committee against Torture. In a brief to the UN committee, the  human rights group says it is "profoundly concerned" that Canada has not heeded the committee's call to provide redress to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin. The three Arab-Canadians were brutalized in Syrian prisons, in part due to lapses by Canadian agencies. In its June 2012 report, the UN committee took issue with several aspects of Canada's legal regime, including planned measures affecting refugee claimants and the continuing use of national security certificates to deport non-citizens. It also asked Canada to provide followup answers to key concerns and recommendations by June 1 of this year. The committee plans to hold a meeting Friday in Geneva to review Canada's progress.  

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The New York Times 13/05/2013 - Federal investigators secretly seized two months of phone records for reporters and editors of The Associated Press in what the news organization said Monday was a "serious interference with A.P.'s constitutional rights to gather and report  the news." The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year. The organization was not told the reason for the seizure. But the timing and the specific journalistic targets strongly suggested they are related to a continuing government investigation into the leaking of information a year ago about the Central Intelligence Agency's disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner. The disclosures began with an Associated Press article on May 7, 2012, breaking the news of the foiled plot; the organization had held off publishing it for several days at the White House's request because the intelligence operations were still unfolding.  

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The Obama-backed "press shield" probably wouldn't have helped the Associated Press 

NYT Editorial: Spying on the Associated Press  

Glenn Greenwald: Justice Department's pursuit of AP's phone records is both extreme and dangerous 

Justice Department investigation of AP part of larger pattern to intimidate sources and reporters 

The New York Times 15/05/2013 - Amid talk of an increasing mismatch between the law and the nature of the terrorist threat today, Congress appears poised to do exactly what it assiduously avoided in 2001: authorize a broad, open-ended war against groups unconnected to those responsible for Sept. 11. The Senate Armed Services Committee is holding hearings on the issue on Thursday. One leading proposal, put forward by the Hoover Institution, would have Congress delegate to the executive branch broad-based authority to create a list of terrorist groups against which the United States is at war. This designation process would supposedly be transparent and subject to the constraints of international law. But it would essentially concentrate within the executive branch the power to both declare and wage war - authorities that our founding fathers rightly separated. It would effectively allow the use of military force as a matter of first resort against members of any terrorist group that the president so designates. And it would eliminate the requirement that we could use force only against those who had some nexus to the groups that attacked us in 2001.