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 jazz and blues musicians Thelonious Monk, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Nappy Brown. Enjoy!
Thelonious Monk - Round About Midnight
“The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.”
-- George W. Bush
News and Opinion
Well, garsh, if you can assassinate people on a whim, or detain them indefinitely in a gulag at home or abroad without anything remotely resembling constitutional due process or even a charge - why the hell can't you torture some "folks?"
Obama Could Reaffirm a Bush-Era Reading of a Treaty on Torture
When the Bush administration revealed in 2005 that it was secretly interpreting a treaty ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” as not applying to C.I.A. and military prisons overseas, Barack Obama, then a newly elected Democratic senator from Illinois, joined in a bipartisan protest.
Mr. Obama supported legislation to make it clear that American officials were legally barred from using cruelty anywhere in the world. And in a Senate speech, he said enacting such a statute “acknowledges and confirms existing obligations” under the treaty, the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
But the Obama administration has never officially declared its position on the treaty, and now, President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view. It is considering reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders, according to officials who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity. ...
State Department lawyers are said to be pushing to officially abandon the Bush-era interpretation. Doing so would require no policy changes, since Mr. Obama issued an executive order in 2009 that forbade cruel interrogations anywhere and made it harder for a future administration to return to torture.
But military and intelligence lawyers are said to oppose accepting that the treaty imposes legal obligations on the United States’ actions abroad. They say they need more time to study whether it would have operational impacts. They have also raised concerns that current or future wartime detainees abroad might invoke the treaty to sue American officials with claims of torture, although courts have repeatedly thrown out lawsuits brought by detainees held as terrorism suspects.
This piece kinda makes you wonder if we might ever break the strangle hold on power held by the neocons such that Bush, Obama, Cheney, Addington, Holder, Brennan, Yoo, Feith, Perle, etc. can one day be wheeled out of their geriatric care facilities to face accountability for the evil that they've done.
Augusto Pinochet’s former bodyguard detained at Santiago military base
Retired Chilean army colonel Cristián Labbé, an outspoken defender of General Augusto Pinochet, was arrested on Monday.
Labbé was charged with being part of a conspiracy in the kidnapping and homicide of 13 prisoners. Another nine military officials were charged, some of whom are already in custody for a variety of human rights crimes. ...
A former bodyguard to the Pinochet family, Labbé was infamous for organising parties and celebrations in honour of colleagues convicted of murder and torture. Labbé was also key in organising protests against the detention of Pinochet at a private hospital in 1998. Labbé is now being held at a military base in Santiago while his lawyers seek to get him out on appeal. ...
But last year the Chilean journalist Javier Rebolledo detailed eyewitness accounts that placed Labbé at the torture camp. In his book El Despertar de los Cuervos (Rise of the Ravens) Rebolledo interviewed guards and prisoners at the notorious camp Tejas Verde who said Labbé was central to the death camp operations, though not participating in torture directly.
After Ignoring ISIS Assault on Kobani, U.S. Launches Major Strikes & Arms Turkey’s Kurdish Foes
Turkey to allow Kurdish peshmerga across its territory to fight in Kobani
Turkey will allow Kurdish peshmerga forces from northern Iraq across its territory to defend Kurds in the besieged Syrian border town of Kobani, in a move that fighters say could tip a month-long battle against Islamic State (Isis) insurgents in their favour.
The announcement marked an abrupt shift from Ankara’s position of refusing to militarily help the Kurds of Kobani and came hours after the US military dropped 24 tonnes of weapons and medicines in the first supply run it had made to the besieged town in nearly five weeks of fighting.
Both developments followed a substantial increase in the number of air strikes against Isis forces, which Kurdish militia members inside Syria and exiled residents of Kobani say are steadily turning the tide of the battle.
Guided in by special forces and by Kurdish spotters operating deep inside the war-ravaged town just south of the Turkish border, the air strikes are believed to have decimated the Isis command in recent days, forcing it to use an increasing number of untested cadres who are struggling to hold ground. ...
Mesut Yegen, a historian of the Kurdish issue, said that Turkey could not risk the fall of Kobani: “The events from two weeks ago clearly showed that if Kobani should fall, the peace process would end. The Turkish government wanted to test how people would react, and they saw what would have happened. Turkey can no longer be seen as watching the drama in Kobani unfold without doing anything.”
Why U.S. and allies can’t afford to let Kobani fall to IS
ISIS Launches Multiple Attacks Across Iraqi Kurdistan
Having apparently lulled Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) into a false sense of security, ISIS launched a series of 15 simultaneous attacks across their frontier today, testing their defenses and seizing some small villages. ...
With ISIS focused on the Syrian Kurds and the Iraqi Anbar Province lately, there hadn’t been much fighting with the Peshmerga, which would free them up to fight elsewhere. ISIS attacks today may aim at changing that equation, or may reflect that, with US airstrikes focused elsewhere, the Kurdish territory isn’t as defensible as it once was.
U.S. Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS
GAZIANTEP, Turkey—While U.S. warplanes strike at the militants of the so-called Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq, truckloads of U.S. and Western aid has been flowing into territory controlled by the jihadists, assisting them to build their terror-inspiring “caliphate.”
The aid—mainly food and medical equipment—is meant for Syrians displaced from their hometowns, and for hungry civilians. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, European donors, and the United Nations. Whether it continues is now the subject of anguished debate among officials in Washington and Europe. The fear is that stopping aid would hurt innocent civilians and would be used for propaganda purposes by the militants, who would likely blame the West for added hardship. ...
[T]he aid convoys have to pay off ISIS emirs (leaders) for the convoys to enter the eastern Syrian extremist strongholds of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, providing yet another income stream for ISIS militants, who are funding themselves from oil smuggling, extortion, and the sale of whatever they can loot, including rare antiquities from museums and archaeological sites. ...
And there are fears the aid itself isn’t carefully monitored enough, with some sold off on the black market or used by ISIS to win hearts and minds by feeding its fighters and its subjects. At a minimum, the aid means ISIS doesn’t have to divert cash from its war budget to help feed the local population or the displaced persons, allowing it to focus its resources exclusively on fighters and war-making, say critics of the aid.
Iraq Is Torturing and Executing Innocent Citizens, UN Report Says
Amid genocidal slaughter carried out by the Islamic State and extra-judicial killings perpetrated by Shia death squads, the United Nations says the Iraqi government is also torturing its citizens and unjustly sending hundreds of people to the gallows.
According to a report released on Sunday, in more than half of the capital trials in Iraq monitored by UN investigators, judges "systematically ignored claims by defendants that they were subjected to torture to induce confessions."
The investigators say the use of torture to extract confessions reflects an overwhelmed system that has no capacity to properly investigate crimes. The Iraqi government is also accused of using anti-terrorism laws to expedite the deaths of dissidents and suspected terrorists alike. ...
Since capital punishment was reinstated in 2004, the government in Baghdad has put to death more than 675 prisoners. Only 11 people were executed in 2005, but the number of death penalty cases has been steadily increasing ever since, climbing even higher after the withdrawal of US forces in 2011. Last year, the courts hanged 177 Iraqis citizens. Only China and Iran executed more of their citizens than Iraq in 2013.
Iraq PM rules out foreign boots on the ground
Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi on Monday ruled out any foreign ground intervention to assist government forces in retaking territory lost to jihadists and urged Sunnis to give up such hopes.
Abadi was speaking in the city of Najaf after a rare meeting with the most revered figure among Iraqi Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and before a trip to neighbouring Iran.
"No ground forces from any superpower, international coalition or regional power will fight here," Abadi told reporters, reiterating previous remarks on the issue.
"This is my decision, it is the decision of the Iraqi government."
Some officials and Sunni tribal leaders in areas most affected by the unrest have argued the world should step up its involvement from air strikes to a ground intervention against the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group.
German Intelligence Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17
After completing a detailed analysis, Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has concluded that pro-Russian rebels were responsible for the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on July 19 in eastern Ukraine while on route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
In an Oct. 8 presentation given to members of the parliamentary control committee, the Bundestag body responsible for monitoring the work of German intelligence, BND President Gerhard Schindler provided ample evidence to back up his case, including satellite images and diverse photo evidence. The BND has intelligence indicating that pro-Russian separatists captured a BUK air defense missile system at a Ukrainian military base and fired a missile on July 17 that exploded in direct proximity to the Malaysian aircraft, which had been carrying 298 people. ...
BND's Schindler says his agency has come up with unambiguous findings. One is that Ukrainian photos have been manipulated and that there are details indicating this. He also told the panel that Russian claims the missile had been fired by Ukrainian soldiers and that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to the passenger jet were false.
Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case
The West’s case blaming Russia for the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine last July appears to be crumbling as the German foreign intelligence agency has concluded that the anti-aircraft missile battery involved came from a Ukrainian military base, according to a report by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
The Obama administration and other Western governments have pointed the finger of blame at Russia for supposedly supplying a sophisticated BUK missile system to ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who then allegedly used the weapon on July 17 to shoot down what they thought was a Ukrainian military plane but turned out to be Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing all 298 people onboard. ...
None of the BND’s evidence to support its conclusions has been made public — and I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted.
What has been curious about the handling of the MH-17 case is the failure of the Obama administration and other Western governments to present whatever evidence they have, whether satellite, electronic or telephonic so the investigation can proceed more quickly in determining who was responsible. ...
With Der Spiegel’s report, it’s now clearer why the delay and the secrecy. If the missile responsible for bringing down MH-17 came from a Ukrainian military base – not from the Russian government – then a very potent anti-Putin propaganda theme would be neutralized.
'No More Talks About Ceasefire': Donetsk Explosion Officially Shatters Ukraine's Fragile Detente
Following a gigantic explosion in Donetsk today that shattered windows across the city and threw people of their feet, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic, officially declared the end of a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine that has more or less only existed in name.
"No more talks about ceasefire, of course we are not going to sit [at the negotiating table] with Kiev," Zakharchenko told RIA Novosit, a pro-Kremlin Russian news outlet.
At just after noon on Monday a direct hit to the Donetsk State Chemical Factory, a producer of explosives for armaments, caused a massive black mushroom of smoke to rise above the facility. An explosion shock was so powerful it buckled the metal and glass front of the city's $12 million Shakhtar Football Stadium eight miles away. ...
According to the United Nations, at least 331 people have been died since the ceasefire came into effect. Dmitry Kalashnikov, Director of Donetsk's morgue, told VICE News that at least 21 civilians had been killed as a result of the conflict in the past month.
Cluster bombs used in eastern Ukraine, says human rights group
Evidence collected by the New York-based Human Rights Watch suggests both government forces and pro-Russian separatists have used cluster munitions in eastern Ukraine.
A spokesman for the Kiev government’s military operation against the uprising in the east denied the accusations. The rebels were not available to comment.
Cluster bombs explode in the air, scattering dozens of smaller bombs over an area the size of a sports field. Most countries have banned them under a convention that became international law in 2010, but Ukraine has not signed it.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement it had carried out a week-long investigation in eastern Ukraine, where more than 3,700 people have been killed in fighting since April, and documented widespread use of cluster munitions.
It said it could not conclusively determine responsibility for many of the attacks but “the evidence points to Ukrainian government forces’ responsibility for several cluster munition attacks” this month on Donetsk, the rebels’ main stronghold.
Russia Won’t Accept Terms to End Sanctions Over Ukraine
Russia’s foreign minister said his country won’t accept conditions to end sanctions after talks in Italy failed to produce a breakthrough over the truce in Ukraine’s conflict-ridden east.
Russia has been told to comply with various criteria before the U.S. and its allies revoke the limitations, Sergei Lavrov said in a transcript of an NTV interview posted yesterday on the ministry’s website. The cease-fire in Ukraine’s easternmost regions, sealed Sept. 5, was broken several times during the past 24 hours, with two soldiers and 14 pro-Russian fighters dying, the military said today.
The U.S. and the European Union slapped restrictions on Russian officials and companies after the March annexation of Crimea and July’s downing of a Malaysian passenger plane over eastern Ukraine. Russia’s partners, including overseas politicians and businessmen, understand that a policy designed to punish the country is doomed to failure, Lavrov said. Russia denies stoking its neighbor’s conflict, which the United Nations estimates has cost more than 3,500 lives.
“We respond very simply: we shall not agree to any criteria or conditions,” Lavrov said.
Israeli settlers criticised for overnight move into hotly disputed East Jerusalem
Israeli settlers have provoked criticism after moving overnight into a building in the hotly disputed area of East Jerusalem.
“We did it at night because there is less chance of friction with the Arabs,” said Daniel Luria, spokesman for the Ateret Cohanim organisation behind the move.
Ateret Cohanim, which settles Jews in Arab areas of East Jerusalem, said it facilitated the purchase of the two buildings from their Arab owners. Mr Luria said the buildings contain nine apartments and that Jewish families and religious studies students would soon move into the properties, immediately doubling the Jewish presence in that section of Silwan.
Last month Jewish settlers took over six properties in another area of Silwan, in the biggest settler acquisition in the neighbourhood since Jews began moving there two decades ago. The White House called the move a provocation, but the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the settlement is just a question of Jews being able to buy property in Israel’s capital.
But in fact the government pays for the settlers’ security guards. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin criticised the way the homes were occupied, however. He is a supporter of Jews moving to the Arab area, but said Jerusalem cannot be a city “where sneaking into apartments is done in the cover of night”.
Former U.N. Special Rapporteur Richard Falk on the Legitimacy of Hope in the Palestinian Struggle
Hong Kong leader extends olive branch to pro-democracy protesters
Leung Chun-ying says Beijing will not back down on vetting his successor but election committee could be more democratic
Hong Kong’s embattled leader has said he is open to creating a more democratic selection committee before elections in 2017, extending a potential olive branch to democracy protesters as crunch talks to end the demonstrations got under way.
Parts of the Asian financial hub have been paralysed for weeks by rallies calling for the chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, to resign and for China to revoke a ruling in August that candidates for the city’s next election be vetted by a pro-Beijing committee – something protesters have called a “fake democracy”.
In an interview on Tuesday, Leung said that while Beijing would not back down on vetting his successor, the committee tasked with selecting those candidates could become more democratic.
“There is room for discussion there; there’s room to make the nominating committee more democratic and this is one of the things we’d very much like to talk to not just the students but the community at large about,” he said.
The offer is still a long way from meeting the core demands of protesters who say anything other than public nomination of candidates is unacceptable.
China's economic growth falls to lowest in 5 years
China’s economic growth waned to a five-year low of 7.3% last quarter, raising concerns of a spillover effect on the global economy but falling roughly in line with Chinese leaders’ plans for a controlled slowdown. ...
A further slowdown in China’s economy would likely cause some damage to the US economy, the world’s largest, as well as commodity producers such as Australia, Indonesia and Brazil that have grown accustomed to strong Chinese demand.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates that each 1 percentage point drop in China’s economic growth shaves 0.2 percentage point from annual US growth — equal to the effect of a $20-a-barrel increase in oil prices. ...
On Monday, the Conference Board, a New York-based research group, predicted that China’s economic growth would decelerate to 4% a year between 2020 and 2025, well below the widespread expectation of 7% to 8% growth over the next decade.
Low Black Voter Turnout Could Unseat Senate Democrats
US seeks to learn from allies' experience about transgender troops
A campaign to allow transgender troops to serve in the US armed forces has received support from overseas military allies who travelled to Washington to challenge arguments about its potential impact on operational effectiveness.
Eighteen countries around the world allow transgender personnel to serve openly, and officers from Nato allies such as Britain, Canada and Sweden joined others from New Zealand and Australia at the American Civil Liberties Union to discuss how the policies work in practice.
Three years after the Pentagon lifted remaining restrictions on lesbian, gay and bisexual troops, the ACLU is hopeful of similar progress for the transgender community, especially after the secretary of defence, Chuck Hagel, called for a “continuous review” of the current policy last May.
The Palm Center, a San Francisco research group which co-hosted Monday’s event, estimates there may already be up to 15,000 transgender personnel in the US military – defined as someone who does not identify with the physical gender that they were assigned at birth – but they are currently at constant risk of dismissal on “medical grounds”, especially if they seek to transition to a different gender as many have now done in allied militaries.
The Evening Greens
Remembering Rick Piltz, Who Fought Government Suppression of Science
Rick Piltz, a climate change whistleblower, died this weekend of cancer.
Piltz revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration was revising supposedly scientific reports to cast doubt on the existence of human-caused climate change. He leaked copies of the edited documents to The New York Times, after resigning from his job as a senior associate for the U.S. government’s Global Change Research Office.
Piltz’s move not only drew attention to Bush’s intentional suppression of scientific fact, but also to the administration’s dubious hiring practices. Less than a week after the story was published, the official who made the edits, Philip A. Cooney, announced he would resign as chief of staff for the Council on Environmental Quality in the White House to return to his former role as a lobbyist for the petroleum industry. ...
Throughout the documents that Piltz leaked, Cooney injected small but significant nuggets of uncertainty that reflected and helped produce a nationwide lethargy on climate action that lives on still today. Earlier and bolder action on climate change did not happen in part because of a narrative that said it might not be real or that humans had no influence on it.
Study Finds Sea Levels Rising at an Unprecedented Rate
Pink Drill Bits Bring Complaints of Komen Tie to Fracking
The Susan G. Komen Foundation has, once more, riled some of its base — breast-cancer activists, survivors and their families — this time by accepting $100,000 from an oil and fracking company that, in turn, produced 1,000 pink drill bits.
Martin Craighead, chairman of Houston-based Baker Hughes Inc., will hand that check to Komen founder Nancy Brinker at Pittsburgh’s Heinz field on Oct. 26, before the Steelers play the Indianapolis Colts, the company announced.
The handoff comes near the close of the NFL’s pink-hued celebration of national Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The pink bits are being distributed by the company to drilling sites worldwide "as a reminder of the importance of supporting research, treatment, screening, and education to help find the cures for this disease," the company said in a press release.
But Komen’s decision to take the money — its second donation from Baker Hughes in two years — has sparked anger and disbelief across the breast cancer community. Some advocates are furious because some scientists have linked chemicals used in fracking to cancer, though there are disputes about fracking's health impact.
WTO Meat-Labeling Ruling Jeopardizes Consumer Safeguards
The World Trade Organization ruled Monday that U.S. rules requiring labels on packaged steaks, ribs and other cuts of meat identifying where the animals were born, raised, and slaughtered are in violation of trade rules that require imports to be treated no less favorably than domestic products.
In its decision, the WTO said the country-of-origin labels (also referred to as 'COOL') forced meatpackers to segregate and keep detailed records on imported livestock, giving them an incentive to favor U.S. livestock. The WTO ruling was seen as a victory for Canada and Mexico, who had said the meat-labeling rules were protectionist, overly burdensome, and discriminated against livestock exports from their countries. Canada, for example, claims that its cattle and hog industries have lost more than $911.5 million because of COOL. ...
"The WTO’s continued assault against commonsense food labels is just another example of how corporate-controlled trade policy undermines the basic protections that U.S. consumers deserve," said Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter in response to the news. ... "The meatpacking lobby has lost the COOL debate from the court of public opinion to the Court of Appeals to the halls of Congress so they are taking their complaint to the faceless unelected bureaucrats in Geneva," she said. "When the meat cannot get its way here in America, it is trying to use the WTO to overturn the will of the American people."
US Taxpayers Funding Controversial Indian Coal Project
Forced relocations, brutal beatings, questionable disappearances, a number of broken human rights, labor and environmental standards: a federal bank supported by US tax payers has helped develop a Reliance Power project involving a plague of abuse on locals, according to a report by a coalition of U.S. environmental organizations.
The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im) — a publicly owned financial institution that loans to overseas industries that buy US exports — has graced Reliance Power's Sasan Ultra Mega Power coal-based project in Singrauli, India with over $650 million since October 2010, about 14 percent of Sasan's $4 billion construction cost.
A fact-finding team from the Sierra Club, 350.org, Carbon Market Watch, Pacific Environment, and Friends of the Earth US visited affected communities earlier this year and compiled testimony from 25 locals. ...
The US coalition alleges that during construction of the project the company bulldozed houses in order to erect smokestacks and forced displaced people into resettlement colonies, where coal ash filled their homes on windy days. Reliance never delivered promised utilities, infrastructure for education, or electricity produced from the plant. Many residents were denied adequate compensation for the loss of their homes. When locals took their grievances to authorities, they faced intimidation and violence from the company and police. ...
According to the report, Ex-Im has withheld multiple documents "in relation to pollution levels, the use of pollution control technology, safety measures, labor practices, and mitigation" in violation of the bank's Environmental and Social Due Diligence Procedures.
The coalition filed a Freedom of Information Act request today to access documents that might help verify claims of abuse. Ex-Im has 30 days to respond to the group's petition.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
How the UAE Tried to Silence a Popular Arab Spring Activist
‘National Security and Double Government’
Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
Transgender woman speaks to International Bar Association
A Little Night Music
Harry "Sweets" Edison - Willow Weep For Me
Nappy Brown - Cherry Red
Harry Edison & Eddie Lockjaw Davis - Dirty Butt Blues
Thelonious Monk - Straight No Chaser
Thelonious Monk - Blue Monk
Nappy Brown - If You Need Some Lovin'
Nappy Brown - Don't Be Angry
Nappy Brown - Any Time Is The Right Time
Thelonious Monk - Misterioso
Thelonious Monk - Caravan
Nappy Brown - Coal Miner
Nappy Brown - Open That Door
Nappy Brown - My baby
Nappy Brown - Who
Nappy Brown - Well,Well,Well, Baby La
Nappy Brown - Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleepin'
Nappy Brown - I Done Got Over
Nappy Brown - Skidy Woe
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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