This evening's music features Los Angeles blues singer Ray Agee.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

New Effort to Rebut Torture Report Undermined as Former Official Admits the Obvious

Eight former top officials wrangled by Bill Harlow — the former CIA flak who brought us the CIASavedLives.com website after the Senate report was issued last December — are publishing a book in the coming weeks entitled “Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Meanwhile, however, Alvin Bernard “Buzzy” Krongard, who was the CIA’s executive director from 2001 to 2004 — the number-three position at the agency — was asked on a BBC news program if he thought waterboarding and putting a detainee in painful stress positions amounted to torture.

“Well, let’s put it this way, it is meant to make him as uncomfortable as possible,” he said. “So I assume for, without getting into semantics, that’s torture. I’m comfortable with saying that.”

He added: “We were told by legal authorities that we could torture people.”

Anti-Austerity Candidate Corbyn: Tony Blair Could Face War Crimes

MP Jeremy Corbyn says Iraq war illegal, Blair must divulge details of 2002 meetings with George W. Bush

Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing MP who's leading the polls, said that former Prime Minister Tony Blair could possibly face war crimes for his involvement in the Iraq war.

The long-time MP, whom the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill characterized as "the anti-austerity candidate, in tune with similar movements in Greece and elsewhere in Europe," made the comments Tuesday In an interview with BBC2's Newsnight.

"I think there are some decisions that Tony Blair has got to confess or tell us what actually happened in Crawford, Texas in 2002 in his private meetings with George Bush," Corbyn told interviewer Emily Maitlis.

He said that the still unreleased Chilcot Inquiry, an official investigation into Britain's role in the Iraq war, is going to come out, and "Tony Blair and the others that have made the decisions are then going to have to deal with the consequences of it."

Asked by Maitlis, "So should [Blair] be tried for war crimes?" Corbyn said, "If he's committed a war crime, yes. Everyone who's committed a war crime should."

Obama administration faces criticism over human trafficking report

Several U.S. politicians sharply criticized the Obama administration on Monday over an annual global report on human trafficking in response to a Reuters article chronicling how senior U.S. diplomats had watered down rankings of more than a dozen strategically important countries.

Democratic Senator Bob Menendez called the account “alarming & unacceptable if true”, tweeting that “we must get to the bottom of this” at a Senate hearing set for Thursday to review the 2015 Trafficking in Persons report.

Al-Qaeda Whittles Down US-Trained Rebels in Syria

Late last month, the first US-trained rebels from a group called “Division 30,” also called the New Syrian Forces (NSF) by US officials, arrived in northern Syria. The faction is the result of hundreds of millions of dollars in US spending to create a new force, but amounted to only 54 people. It’s getting progressively smaller.

Almost immediately after arriving, the rebels ran afoul of Syrian al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra, who captured between eight and 18 of them. Not long thereafter, more fighting left one of the NSF dead, and today al-Qaeda is confirmed to have captured another 5 fighters.

Losing a few fighters here or there would normally be seen as “acceptable losses,” but with only 54 rebels to start with, there could be as few as 30 of the NSF fighters even left in the field, depending on just how many have actually been taken by al-Qaeda.

Court Rules Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking Violates Fourth Amendment

A divided appellate court panel in Richmond, Virginia, ruled on Tuesday that citizens do not give up their privacy rights just because their mobile-phone providers know where to reach them.

The decision is the strongest assertion of the Fourth Amendment rights of mobile phone users out of three appellate court decisions on the matter, setting up a likely Supreme Court hearing. ...

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling rejected the “third party doctrine,” a legal theory that private information held by a company is not protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. ...

“People cannot be deemed to have volunteered to forfeit expectations of privacy by simply seeking active participation in society through use of their cell phones,” the court wrote.

Despite Epic Crash of World Economy, White Collar Prosecutions at 20-Year Low

Despite lofty rhetoric from politicians who vowed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to hold Wall Street accountable, U.S. Justice Department statistics show a "long-term collapse" of federal white collar crime prosecutions, which are down to their lowest level in 20 years, according to a new report from Syracuse University.

The analysis of thousands of records by the university's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows a more than 36 percent decline in such prosecutions since the middle of the Clinton administration, when the decline first began. While there was an uptick early in Barack Obama's presidency, current projections indicate that by the end of the 2015 fiscal year, such prosecutions will be at their lowest level since 1995.

But while news of the 20-year low is troubling, it's not particularly surprising. As journalist David Sirota noted on Thursday for the International Business Times:

In 2012, President Obama pledged to "hold Wall Street accountable" for financial misdeeds related to the financial crisis. But as financial industry donations flooded into Obama’s reelection campaign, his Justice Department officials promoted policies that critics say embodied a "too big to jail" doctrine for financial crime.

Sirota went on to point out, both the former head of the Justice Department's criminal division, Lanny Breuer, and former Attorney General Eric Holder made similar remarks at the time. "Prior to serving in the Obama Justice Department, both Breuer and Holder worked at white-collar defense firm Covington & Burling," Sirota wrote. "Both of them went back to work for the firm again immediately after leaving their government posts."

Also of interest:

TTIP: what does the transatlantic trade deal mean for renewable energy?

Thanks to Reliance on "Signature" Drone Strikes, US Military Doesn't Know Who It's Killing

Ted Rall: 14 Years Ago, a Woman Vindicated Me Now