Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features New Orleans songwriter, pianist and singer Allen Toussaint. Enjoy!
Allen Toussaint - Workin' In A Coal Mine
“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs.”
-- Bibi Netanyahu
News and Opinion
Bush White House’s Repeated Torture Denials Led CIA Torturers to Seek Repeated Reassurances
The Bush administration was so adamant in its public statements against torture that CIA officials repeatedly sought reassurances that the White House officials who had given them permission to torture in the first place hadn’t changed their minds.
In a July 29, 2003, White House meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet went so far as to ask the White House “to cease stating that US Government practices were ‘humane’.” He was assured they would.
The memo describing that meeting is one of several documents that were unclassified last year but apparently escaped widespread notice until now. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole called attention to the trove of documents on the Just Security blog.
The documents were apparently posted in December at ciasavedlives.com, a website formed by a group of former senior intelligence officials to rebut the newly released Senate report that documented the horrors that CIA officers inflicted upon detainees and the lies about those tactics’ effectiveness that they told their superiors, would-be overseers and the public.
The new documents don’t actually refute any of the Senate report’s conclusions – in fact, they include some whopper-filled slides that CIA officials showed at the White House. But they do call attention to the report’s central flaw: that it didn’t address who actually gave the CIA its orders.
“New Torture Files”: Declassified Memos Detail Roles of Bush White House and DOJ Officials Who Conspired to Approve Torture
Last week, I wrote, both here and in the New York Times, that after reading all 828 pages of the released SSCI report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program and responses to it from the CIA and Republican committee members, I had concluded that the report’s focus on whether the techniques used by the CIA were “effective” was misguided, and essentially gave a pass to too many culpable actors beyond the CIA, especially in the White House, the Cabinet, and the Justice Department.
This week, in the name of correcting the record, and thanks, ironically, to the CIA’s own effort to defend itself, I want to place blame where it rightly belongs – with the CIA, to be sure, but also with specific high-level officials and lawyers outside the agency who were directly involved in reviewing the CIA’s tactics, and either said yes or failed to say no. It’s now been brought to my attention that lost in all the focus on the irresolvable “efficacy” debate were a series of recently declassified documents that fill out the picture of joint responsibility that is the real story of our descent into torture. These documents, not addressed in any other reporting on the subject of which I am aware, name names, describe specific meetings, and demonstrate that many well-respected lawyers and statesmen said yes when they should have said no. They provide an important – if likely uncomfortable for some – addition to the narrative, and show just how widespread the blame for the torture program really goes. ...
Feeling the heat of the SSCI inquiry, the CIA chose to declassify a series of memoranda and communications that reflect and record multiple high-level meetings at the White House and the DOJ involving the torture program. The CIA’s interest in declassification is clear. It wants to show that it repeatedly sought – and received – legal assurances from higher-ups that its actions were legal and authorized. But as is so often the case when co-conspirators try to deflect blame by pointing the finger at others, the CIA’s newly declassified documents don’t so much exculpate it as inculpate others. The documents are reproduced at the website launched by agency alumni last December and dedicated to defending the CIA, with a name only a security consultant could have dreamt up, “ciasavedlives.com.” They recount in detail multiple meetings and communications, in which White House and DOJ officials repeatedly gave the CIA a green light to torture. ...
The overall picture that the documents paint is not of a rogue agency, but of a rogue administration. Yes, the CIA affirmatively proposed to use patently illegal tactics — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, physical assault, and painful stress positions. But at every turn, senior officials and lawyers in the White House and the Department of Justice reassured the agency that it could — and should — go forward. ... At every point where the White House and the DOJ could have and should have said no to tactics that were patently illegal, they said yes.
Obama won't prosecute American war criminals, in fact he keeps them employed - but perish the thought that America might be harboring somebody else's war criminals...
The US Is Trying to Deport At Least 150 Bosnian War Crime Suspects
More than 120,000 Bosnians fled to the US amid fierce fighting during the 1990s. Although they were required to detail their military experience when applying for refugee status, the system depended largely on honesty rather than formal checks, allegedly allowing some war criminals and fugitives to slip through the net.
According to the New York Times, US officials have identified about 300 immigrants suspected of concealing personal information related to their involvement in the conflict. The number of suspects could double as more records from Bosnia become available.
US officials reportedly have evidence that at least half of the 300 suspects currently under investigation participated in the 1995 atrocities in Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb forces executed more than 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys after seizing a UN "safe area." The massacre, declared an official act of genocide by the United Nations, was the worst in Europe since World War II.
Afghanistan officials sanctioned murder, torture and rape, says report
Top Afghan officials have presided over murders, abduction, and other abuses with the tacit backing of their government and its western allies, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.
A grim account of deaths, robbery, rapes and extrajudicial killings, Today We Shall All Die, details a culture of impunity that the rights group says flourished after the fall of the Taliban, driven by the desire for immediate control of security at almost any price.
“The rise of abusive political and criminal networks was not inevitable,” the report said. “Short-term concerns for maintaining a bulwark against the Taliban have undermined aspirations for long-term good governance and respect for human rights in Afghanistan.” ...
Some have ties to the former president Hamid Karzai, who as early as 2002 warned that security would be his first priority. “Justice [is] a luxury for now; we must not lose peace for that,” the report quotes him saying soon after coming to power. While he was in office, a blanket amnesty law for civil war-era crimes was passed.
There are also multiple links to America’s military and government, sometimes beyond the liaisons that were essential for troops on the ground.
When Assadullah Khalid, the former head of the country’s spy agency, was badly injured in a Taliban assassination attempt, Barack Obama and the former defence secretary Leon Panetta both went to visit him in the American hospital where he was recovering.
In doing so they chose to ignore a long history of accusations of rape, torture, corruption and illegal detentions, some of it from US diplomats or their allies, detailed in the HRW report.
A confidential Canadian government report from 2007 warned that “allegations of human rights abuses by [Khalid] are numerous and consistent” and he was described as “exceptionally corrupt and incompetent” in a leaked US embassy cable.
Noam Chomsky: To Deal with ISIS, U.S. Should Own Up to Chaos of Iraq War & Other Radicalizing Acts
US Syria policy in tatters after favoured 'moderate' rebels disband
US policy towards Syria has suffered a new blow with the dissolution of the Hazm movement, its favoured and best-known rebel group – raising tough questions about Washington’s strategy and limiting its future options.
Hazm (“Determination”) announced its demise at the weekend after fierce battles with Jabhat al Nusra (JAN), the al-Qaida-linked group and jihadi rival of the Islamic State (Isis) that is fighting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president. It said it wanted to avoid further bloodshed after clashes with JAN killed dozens of men on both sides.
Hazm is one of several dozen Syrian rebel groups that have received US anti-tank Tow missiles and training in the past and has been described as the “poster boy” for the moderate opposition at a time when attention is focused sharply on Isis. But other elements of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), such as Fursan al-Haq, still receive discreet American support. ...
From Washington’s point of view, the timing of the Hazm collapse was bad, coinciding with the long-awaited start of a US-sponsored training programme for moderate rebels in Turkey. The plan is to train and equip a new force as part of a broader plan to develop ground forces needed to defeat Isis, which is currently being targeted only from the air in Syria. The US worked with Saudi Arabia and Jordan to develop the plan. Qatar has also joined the programme.
Obama Throws Cold Water on Chances of Iran Deal
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is heading to Congress to try to do anything possible to sabotage the ongoing US-Iran nuclear negotiations. The White House is responding by insisting a deal was probably never going to happen in the first place.
Obama today declared Iran would “more likely than not” refuse to sign the agreement that has reportedly been very close to finalizing. Why Iran is negotiating along those terms if they don’t intend to accept them is totally unclear.
Netanyahu's speech to Congress snubbed by prominent Democrats
More than 50 Democratic lawmakers are expected to boycott Binyamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Tuesday, including high-profile liberals such as senators Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken. ...
Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who has been sponsoring legislation supportive of Netanyahu’s concerns over Iranian nuclear talks, will escort him to the House chamber – despite sharing some of the misgivings about the politicisation of his trip just two weeks before Israeli elections.
“I may agree with some Democrats that the political timing of Netanyahu’s invitation may have been unfortunate, and that we must work fervently to keep the US-Israel relationship a strong bipartisan endeavour,” Menendez told a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) on Monday.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Long History of Crying Wolf About Iran’s Nuclear Weapons
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to address the U.S. Congress tomorrow about the perils of striking a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu, not generally known for his measured rhetoric, has been vociferous in his public statements about the dangers of such compromise, warning that it will allow Iran to “rush to the bomb” and that it amounts to giving the country “a license” to develop nuclear weapons.
It is worth remembering, however, that Netanyahu has said much of this before. Almost two decades ago, in 1996, Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress where he darkly warned, “If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind,” adding that, “the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.”
Almost 20 years later that deadline has apparently still not passed, but Netanyahu is still making dire predictions about an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon. Four years before that Congressional speech, in 1992, then-parliamentarian Netanyahu advised the Israeli Knesset that Iran was “three to five years” away from reaching nuclear weapons capability, and that this threat had to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.” ...
For a considerable time thereafter, Netanyahu switched his focus to hyping the purported nuclear threat posed by another country, Iraq, about which he claimed there was “no question” that it was “advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons.” Testifying again in front of Congress again in 2002, Netanyahu claimed that Iraq’s nonexistent nuclear program was in fact so advanced that the country was now operating “centrifuges the size of washing machines.”
Needless to say, these claims turned out to be disastrously false. Despite this, Netanyahu, apparently unchastened by the havoc his previous false charges helped create, immediately went back to ringing the alarm bells about Iran.
British refusal to cooperate with spy inquiry causes row in Germany
Downing Street and the German chancellery are embroiled in a worsening dispute over intelligence-sharing and the covert counter-terrorism campaign because of conflicts arising from the surveillance scandals surrounding the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ.
According to German newspaper reports citing government and intelligence officials in Berlin, the Bundestag’s inquiry into the NSA controversy is being jeopardised by Britain’s refusal to cooperate and its threats to break off all intelligence-sharing with Berlin should the committee reveal any UK secrets.
The weekly magazine Focus reported last month that a national security aide to David Cameron had written to Peter Altmaier, Angela Merkel’s chief of staff, refusing all requests for help in the inquiry and warning that Britain would cease supplying terrorism-related intelligence to the Germans unless Berlin yielded. ...
“The British possibly want to cover up that they are spying on Germany, not only on countering terror,” Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung said. “[Merkel’s] chancellery is baffled as to why the British are being so stubborn … Why are the British so set on escalation?
“It’s particularly hot for the British because often it’s about straightforward spying, as well as terrorism hunting. This would definitely be against the European spirit on the continent, perhaps a breach of the European treaties.”
Chomsky on Cuba: After Decades of U.S. Meddling & "Terrorism," Restoring Ties is Least We Could Do
Obama hopes to reopen US embassy in Cuba before April summit
Barack Obama has said he hopes the US will open an embassy in Cuba ahead of an Americas summit in April, one of the first major steps in restoring diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana.
The US president emphasized that considerable work remains to be done as the two countries seek to re-establish diplomatic ties, but said in an interview with Reuters on Monday that he hopes recent negotiations can lead to the embassies reopening in the coming weeks.
Both Obama and the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, are expected to attend the Summit of the Americas, which is set for 10 and 11 April in Panama City. Obama said before the summit: “My hope is that we will be able to open an embassy, and that some of the initial groundwork will have been laid.”
Violence Caused by Far-Right Extremists Has Surpassed That Caused by Domestic Jihadists, Study Says
In both cases — radical Islamism and far right extremism — a majority of terrorist attacks on US soil have been at the hands of individual "lone wolves" acting outside established groups. But violence caused by far right extremism has surpassed that caused by domestic "jihadis," according to a study published last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Still, much of the public's attention — and law enforcement's efforts — focus on the latter, the civil rights group said ahead of last month's White House summit on countering violent extremism.
"We felt that the report demonstrated pretty clearly that some attention should be paid to the domestic radical right," Ryan Lenz, a writer at the SPLC's Intelligence Project, told VICE News. "The domestic radical right has killed more people than radical Islam since 9/11 in the United States, without a doubt."
The report — titled "The Age of the Wolf," in reference to the lone nature of most attacks — surveyed violence carried out between April 1, 2009, and February 1, 2015, for a total of 63 victims of terrorism — ranging from migrants, to abortion providers, to FBI agents, to the victims of the Fort Hood shooting.
Almost half of the attacks during that time were apparently motivated by antigovernment sentiment, mostly carried out by people subscribing to the so-called "patriot" movement, while the other half came from ideologies of hate — ranging from white supremacy, to misogyny and anti-abortion ideologies, to radical Islamism.
That diversity of motives and ideology is hardly reflected in current conversations about homegrown violent extremism, the study suggests.
Anti-Fascists Clash with Pegida Movement in Vienna: Hate in Europe
LAPD on fatal shooting: Homeless man 'forcibly grabbed' officer's gun
The homeless man killed by Los Angeles police officers on the city’s Skid Row “forcibly grabbed” an officer’s pistol, police chief Charlie Beck told reporters on Monday, as he shared enhanced images taken from video footage of the fatal altercation.
In a dramatic confrontation caught on video, six Los Angeles police department (LAPD) officers are seen scuffling with a man, who has not been officially identified, on a sidewalk in the downtown area on Sunday afternoon. Officers struggled with the man, known on the street as “Africa”, who is writhing on the ground, before shooting him several times. ...
Beck said two officers were wearing body cameras, and said the footage offers a “unique perspective” of the shooting.
The Los Angeles Times viewed an enhanced video of the incident and said it appeared that the man had reached “in the direction of the officer’s waistband”.
Noam Chomsky on Black Lives Matter: Why Won’t U.S. Own Up to History of Slavery & Racism?
Revealed: Democratic Super PAC Architect Moonlights for Walmart, Cable Lobby
According to a disclosure document obtained by The Intercept, Susan McCue — Sen. Harry Reid’s chief of staff from 1999–2006 and now co-founder and president of Senate Majority PAC, which claims to “fight to elect Democratic senators who will put working Americans ahead of the Kochs and their corporate interests” — has also consulted for numerous corporate clients. (McCue’s central role in the creation of Senate Majority PAC was first reported by the Huffington Post.)
McCue, through her public affairs company Message Global LLC, provided consulting services for the Motion Picture Association of America, the American Gaming Association, the National Business Aviation Association, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and Walmart, among other clients. None of these clients are mentioned anywhere on the Message Global website, which instead highlights its work for Bono’s One campaign and Humanity United. (Humanity United was established by Pierre Omidyar, founder of The Intercept’s parent company First Look Media.)
McCue’s corporate clients are among the most politically active lobbying interests inside the Beltway. The Motion Picture Association of America has pushed hard for new copyright-related legislation such as the notorious Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association has been engaged in a pitched battle in opposition to so-called “net neutrality” regulations. And Walmart is known for its engagement on an enormous range of issues including its successful effort to kill the Employee Free Choice Act, a top priority of labor which would have made union organizing easier.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature more on the Layland Mine Disaster. Courageous attempts continue to rescue 170 entombed miners.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Chomsky: Greece’s Syriza & Spain’s Podemos Face "Savage Response" Taking on Austerity "Class War"
Clinton Skirted Public Disclosure Laws While Heading State Department
Former Secretary of State and likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for years skirted public disclosure and federal record-keeping laws by using her personal email account while serving her post as the United States' highest ranking ambassador, reports revealed on Tuesday.
According to the New York Times, during Clinton's four-year tenure at the State Department, she never had a government email address nor did her aides take any action to preserve her correspondence on department servers. Under the Federal Records Act, such communications are considered government records and are supposed to be archived "so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them," the Times reports. ...
Jason Baron, an attorney with Drinker Biddle & Reath who served as the director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration from 2000-2013 said the exclusive use of private email was unprecedented for such a high-ranking official.
"It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business," Baron said. Exceptions to the law exist for certain classified materials and the use of private email is meant to be limited for emergencies.
Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill defended her use of the personal email account telling the Times she had complied with the "letter and spirit of the rules."
The Evening Greens
Climate Change Is Likely a Cause of the Civil War in Syria, Researchers Say
An estimated 200,000 Syrians have died since the onset of the country's civil war in 2011 and another three million have been forced to flee the country.
Complex political and social forces worked to drive the unrest. But, researchers from University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Columbia University argue that a severe, multi-year drought spurred a massive migration to already stressed urban areas, agitating existing tensions — and that it was climate change that made the drought so bad.
"You can think of it as a natural drought that was made much worse by climate change," Colin Kelley, a climatologist at UCSB, told VICE News. "And because it was so severe, then you had this cascade of effects like the agricultural collapse and the mass migration and the population shock and the rise in crime and unemployment and nutrition-related diseases, and all that kind of stuff that happened just prior to the uprising."
The researchers' findings appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Farmers Clash With Activists Over Divisive Dam Near Wetlands in Southern France
French farmers squared off against a group of environmental activists Monday near the site of a proposed dam in the Sivens Forest, around 400 miles south of Paris. The clash coincided with an upcoming vote by local officials that will decide the fate of the divisive dam proposal.
The farmers argue that the dam will provide much-needed irrigation for their fields. They have been clashing with the Zadists — the name given to the activists occupying an area near the proposed dam site dubbed the "zone to defend," or ZAD — who maintain the project poses a huge environmental threat to the biodiverse Sivens wetland.
Tensions had been building all weekend after the two sides fought over a barricade that was erected by activists on a road near the proposed dam site. Local police said clashes between the opposing groups "came to blows several times."
In an attempt to avoid any further skirmishes, police reportedly formed a 150-strong cordon on Monday to separate the farmers from the protesters.
Can Fracking Pollute Drinking Water? Don't Ask the EPA
The EPA has been unable to collect the data it needs from the multibillion dollar oil and gas sector, which has stymied a five-year federal study.
The Environmental Protection Agency embarked in 2010 on what was intended to be a definitive study to find out. The answer could prove critical to future U.S. regulation of the multibillion-dollar fossil fuel sector and to ensuring water safety for millions of Americans.
But after five years of fighting with the oil and gas industry, the agency may still be unable to provide a clear answer when a draft of the study is published this spring, based on internal EPA documents and interviews with people who have knowledge of the study.
"We won’t know anything more in terms of real data than we did five years ago," said Geoffrey Thyne, a geochemist and a member of the EPA's 2011 Science Advisory Board, a group of independent scientists who reviewed the draft plan of the study. "This was supposed to be the gold standard. But they went through a long bureaucratic process of trying to develop a study that is not going to produce a meaningful result." ...
The EPA's failure to answer the study's central question partly reflects the agency's weakness relative to the politically potent fossil fuel industry. The industry balked at the scope of the study and sowed doubts about the EPA's ability to deliver definitive findings. In addition, concerns about the safety of drinking water conflicted with the Obama administration's need to spur the economy out of recession while expanding domestic energy production. ...
By 2012, as President Barack Obama was campaigning for reelection, a public, confrontational approach to the fracking water study was out of the question, according to former EPA officials.
"While all this was going on, the president was talking about the virtues of natural gas," said one former EPA official close to the work. "The nation's energy policy was shifting, and that fuel source was the basis of it. The president was very gung-ho on it."
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
UK Media Regulator Again Threatens RT for “Bias”: This Time, Airing “Anti-Western Views”
A Black Teen, a White Cop, and a Photo That Changed the Civil Rights Movement
Yves Smith: The Administration's Dishonest Response to Elizabeth Warren's Attack on TPP, TTIP Deals
Supreme court hears challenge to health law – but Obama is confident he'll win
Playing Chicken with Nuclear War
Being Authentic
A Little Night Music
Elvis Costello's Spectacle - A Certain Girl
Etta James, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint - Groove Me
Allen Toussaint - Java
Allen Toussaint - On Your Way Down
Allen Toussaint - Yes We Can Can
Pointer Sisters - Yes we can can
Allen Toussaint - St. James Infirmary
Bonnie Raitt + Allen Toussaint - What Is Success
Allen Toussaint plays Prof Longhair
Allen Toussaint - It's A New Orleans Thing
Allen Toussaint - Night People
Allen Toussaint - Blue Drag
Allen Toussaint - Get Out My Life, Woman
Allen Toussaint - Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky
Allen Toussaint - Second Liner
Allen Toussaint - Up The Creek
Allen Toussaint - Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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