Australia played a larger role than previously thought in the abuses of detainees at the Abu Graib Prison in Iraq, according to Australia Defense Force (ADF) documents obtained by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre through freedom of information laws. The documents show that Major George O'Kane worked closely with US authorities as a military lawyer and helped author the manual for processing prisoners. He also advised on the legality of interrogation methods and denied the Red Cross access to prisoners deemed by the US as "high value detainees."

Civil Administration demolishes Jordan Valley village Khirbet Tana
[with video] B'Tselem 15 Mar -- On 2 March 2011, the Civil Administration demolished all the structures in the Palestinian village Khirbet Tana, in the Jordan Valley. This is the sixth time that the Civil Administration has demolished structures in the village since 2005, and the fourth in the last four months ... Khirbet Tana is the third Palestinian community in the Jordan Valley from which the Civil Administration has sought in recent years to expel the residents. In 2008, the Civil Administration planned to demolish most of the houses in al-Aqaba, a village in the northern Jordan Valley.

The pressure used by the US and Iraqi authorities in an attempt to prevent the website Wikileaks from releasing about 400,000 "classified" US military documents about the war in Iraq was both absurd and contrary to the principle of access to public information. The documents shed light on the scale of the violence that the US-led coalition and its Iraqi allies have used against the civilian population since 2003.