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This evening's music features blues singer Bobby "Blue" Bland. Enjoy!

“No no you don’t understand, the US needs to keep bombing and starving civilians and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship and arming extremist militias and supporting dictators and destroying any nation who disobeys it. Otherwise the world might be taken over by a tyrannical regime!”

-- Caitlin Johnstone

News and Opinion

Click the link and read this. Matt Taibbi has written an excellent piece. Here are some excerpts to give you an idea of what it's about:

A Tale of Two Authoritarians

No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it. ...

It was no heroic storming of the Bastille. January 6th was a massive LARP that got out of hand. Trump has been around long enough for us to know his pattern as a serial line-crosser. Like a comedian, he’s always trying out new material, and if he gets the right reaction, he comes back with a bigger delivery next time. January 6th was Trump dipping a toe in the lake of strongman politics. The reason it wasn’t worse is because Trump has also been constantly mislabeled as a Hitler, Stalin, or Pinochet. The man has no attention span, no interest in planning or strategy, and most importantly, no ability to maintain relationships with the type of people who do have those qualities (like Steve Bannon). Even if he wanted to overturn “democracy itself” — I don’t believe he does, but let’s say — Trump has proven over and over he lacks the qualities a politician would need to make that happen.

Which brings us back to Cheney. All those things Trump is rumored to be, Dick Cheney actually is. That’s why it’s so significant that he appeared on the floor of the House yesterday to be slobbered over by the Adam Schiffs and Nancy Pelosis of the world. Dick Cheney did more to destroy democracy in ten minutes of his Vice Presidency than Donald Trump did in four years. Seeing leading Democrats nuzzling the man George W. Bush called “Iron Ass” summed up the essential problem of the ordinary person trying to find a political home in this landscape. Even if you find the Trump phenomenon troubling, his opposition is not only authoritarian, but organized and armed with the intellectual tools to understand and appreciate how the technological elimination of democracy might be achieved in the 21st century.

We’re living through a period where an unpleasantly likely outcome for the ordinary American is the invocation of emergency powers to eliminate basic rights. From which side is that threat most likely to come? The pattern during Trump’s presidency was hyping the Russian menace to justify increased surveillance and censorship. Russia has since been switched out in favor of two new emergency bugbears. The first is the rise of “domestic terrorism,” and if you don’t think Cheney-style democracy-canceling is on the minds of officials heading into the next presidential election, you haven’t been reading the growing pile of articles quoting military types advertising their preparations for counter-coup in 2024.

It was under Cheney’s watch that we turned into a country that snatched people off the streets all over the world, put them in indefinite detention in an archipelago of secret hell-holes, threatened to rape their family members, and resorted to techniques like “rectal feeding” so often that one Guantanamo Bay prisoner had to bring a special pillow to sit in court. ... It’s no accident this person is now receiving a “warm welcome” from Democrats because that party has for years now been openly worshipful of his secret-hammer model of executive rule, which expanded to a conspicuous degree after he left office. ...

Cheney’s reappearance and the outpouring of loony commentary describing 1/6 as a “coup” or an “insurrection” (instead of something closer to the American version of a soccer riot) are related. The types of policies that Cheney instituted relied upon the idea that government was capable of making unassailable decisions about, say, who was a real terrorist and who was just a taxi driver or a small-town cop in Yemen. He was successful in taking the courts out of the business of reviewing the detention of human beings because he argued that when it came to terrorism, our “professionals” didn’t make those errors. Cheney’s idea of justice was the same kind of insane authoritarian whack-off fantasy as the “surgical strike,” only even more dangerous because it had wider potential applications. “Professionals” do make errors, about everything from terrorists to viruses. In fact, a fair number of the people seeking this enhanced authority are dumber than average. You don’t have to like Donald Trump to recognize the dire threat represented by a clique of mediocrities with just enough brains to use their offices to organize the criminalization of their opposition.

Putin Unlikely to Invade Ukraine Despite Overheated U.S. Rhetoric, Says Nina Khrushcheva

US tells Putin to choose confrontation or dialogue over Ukraine

The US has told Vladimir Putin to choose between dialogue and confrontation on the eve of a critical week of diplomacy over Ukraine as Russian troops remained massed along its borders.

Senior diplomats from the US and Russia held a working dinner in Geneva on Sunday evening before Monday’s formal negotiations to discuss Moscow’s demands. Those were set out last month in two draft treaties, one with the US and one with Nato. Much of their content is unacceptable to Washington and the alliance, most importantly a pledge that Ukraine will never be a Nato member.

Russia has 100,000 troops positioned near Ukraine and a similar number are primed to be mobilised at short notice, according to the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who said on Sunday that the week’s diplomacy was a moment of truth for the Russian president.

“There are two paths before us,” he told CNN. “There’s a path of dialogue and diplomacy to try to resolve some of these differences and avoid a confrontation. The other path is confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine. We’re about to test the proposition about which path President Putin’s prepared to take.”

The Biden administration insists that sovereign states’ right to apply for Nato membership is not negotiable. Nor are US troop deployments in Europe, administration officials have stressed. They said, however, that Washington would discuss other security guarantees, such as mutual limits on missile deployments and military exercises on the continent. That would fall far short of the comprehensive changes Moscow is demanding.

Russia, US start 'difficult' talks on Ukraine

Kazakhstan says 164 people were killed in week of unrest

Authorities in Kazakhstan have said 164 people were killed in the unrest that rocked the country in the past week, including three children. The health ministry said 103 of the deaths were in Almaty, the country’s largest city and the centre of the violence.

After the worst violence in independent Kazakhstan’s 30-year history, the situation in Almaty and other cities was largely calm on Sunday. Authorities said they had recovered control and life would slowly get back to normal in the coming days. In Almaty, authorities announced that some public transport would resume on Monday.

However, the deputy defence minister, Sultan Gamaletdinov, said on Sunday that a “counterterrorist operation” was still under way and would continue “until the terrorists are completely eliminated and the constitutional order is restored in the republic of Kazakhstan”.

The number of people detained by police continues to rise, with the office of Kazakhstan’s president giving an updated figure of 5,800.

Kazakhstan: Tokayev denounces 'attempted coup d'etat'

Polish leader admits country bought powerful Israeli spyware

Poland’s most powerful politician has acknowledged that the country bought advanced spyware from the Israeli surveillance software maker NSO Group, but denied that it was being used to target his political opponents.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party, Law and Justice, said in an interview that the secret services in many countries are using the Pegasus software to combat crime and corruption. Kaczynski said the use of such spyware arose in response to the growing use of encryption to mask data in transit, which defeated earlier monitoring technologies. By hacking phones, it lets authorities monitor communications, as well as real-time conversations where they are not encrypted. ...

On Thursday, Amnesty International independently verified Citizen Lab’s finding that Sen. Krzysztof Brejza was hacked multiple times in 2019 when he was running the opposition’s parliamentary election campaign. Text messages stolen from Brejza’s phone were doctored and aired by state-controlled TV in Poland as part of a smear campaign in the heat of the race, which the populist ruling party went on to narrowly win.

Brejza now maintains that the election was unfair since the ruling party would have had access to his campaign’s tactical thinking and plans. The hacking revelations have rocked Poland, drawing comparisons to the 1970s Watergate scandal in the United States and eliciting calls for an investigative commission in parliament.

Kaczynski said he saw no reason to set up such a commission, and he denied that the surveillance played any role in the outcome of the 2019 election.

Exclusive: many resettled Guantánamo detainees in legal limbo, analysis shows

About 30% of former Guantánamo detainees who were resettled in third countries have not been granted legal status, according to new analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian, leaving them vulnerable to deportation and restricting their ability to rebuild their lives.

Of the hundreds of men released from Guantánamo since the prison first opened 20 years ago, about 150 were sent to third countries in bilateral agreements brokered by the US, because their home countries were considered dangerous to return to.

Publicly, the US committed to transferring them in a humane way that would ensure rehabilitation after years of incarceration – and, in many cases, torture – without charge. But many remain in legal limbo, unable to work or reunite with their families, and have been subject to years of detention. Others have been forcibly returned to dangerous conditions.

The new data was produced by the human rights organization Reprieve, which assists former detainees, and illustrates how the lawlessness that has marked the prison from the beginning can follow men years after their release. The analysis indicates that approximately 45 men have not been given residency documents upon resettlement.

The Semi-Inside Story of Why Trump Refused to Pardon Snowden and Assange

Transcript here.

'20 Years of US Torture and Counting': Report Details Post-9/11 Abuse at Gitmo and Beyond

A report released Sunday, nearly 20 years after the first prisoners arrived at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, details "systematic abuses carried out by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. military" since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Entitled Legacy of the "Dark Side": The Costs of Unlawful U.S. Detentions and Interrogations Post-9/11, the new paper was published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

"This report lays out a comprehensive assessment of the many unconscionable costs of U.S. torture and illegal detentions and renditions of Muslims over the past 20 years since 9/11," said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, in a statement. "This is a moral failure of epic proportions, a stain on the nation's human rights record, a strategic blunder, and an abhorrent perpetuation of Islamophobia and racism."

The authors assess the "massive costs of U.S. extraordinary renditions, unlawful detentions, and torture after September 11—including to the victims and suspects, to U.S. taxpayers, and to U.S. moral authority and counterterrorism efforts worldwide, ultimately jeopardizing universal human rights protections for everyone."

They argue that "significant counterterrorism reforms, including closing the prison at Guantánamo, strengthening measures to protect civilians from death and harm, increasing transparency and accountability for the crimes the U.S. has committed, and addressing religious and racial biases, are critical steps toward mitigating the damage."

The assessment comes ahead of Tuesday, which will mark two decades since "the first 20 men to be imprisoned at Guantánamo were flown to the base aboard a U.S. military plane." There are now 39 men detained there; 27 of them have not been charged with a crime.

"Many lack adequate medical care and even access to their medical records, making the prison a living legacy of the rights violations spawned by 9/11," the report explains. "The military commission system created to prosecute suspects at Guantánamo is fundamentally flawed. As a result, the five prisoners accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks have yet to be brought to trial, depriving them of due process and the survivors and the families of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks of their right to justice."

As Common Dreams reported late last month, the Pentagon is supposedly building a new $4 million courtroom, to be assembled at Guantánamo by next year, that will enable prosecutors to hold two simultaneous trials. 

At least 780 men and boys have been held at the prison since it opened in 2002, after then-President George W. Bush declared a "war on terrorism," and at least 119 people were subjected to the CIA's rendition, detention, and interrogation (RDI) program, the HRW and Costs of War report notes. No U.S. officials have been held accountable for that torture.

The military prison has remained open—costing U.S. taxpayers $540 million per year—under former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and now President Joe Biden, who has signaled that he intends to close Guantánamo.

"Around the world, Guantánamo remains one of the most enduring symbols of the injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law that the U.S. unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks," report co-author Letta Tayler, an associate director in HRW's Crisis and Conflict Division, said in a statement.

Tayler and co-author Elisa Epstein, a University of Chicago Law School student who was previously an advocacy officer HRW, pressure Biden to finally shut down the prison, and more.

"Biden should take bold steps to repair the damage from abusive U.S. interrogations and detentions, starting with the closure of the U.S. prison at Guantánamo," Tayler and Epstein write. They also urge him to release the 2014 "torture report" from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, noting all but a heavily redacted summary remains classified.

The authors point out that Biden, like Obama and Trump, "has shown no appetite for releasing the torture report, much less criminally investigating the architects" of the RDI program, and that the president "also opposes allowing the International Criminal Court to include abuses by U.S. nationals in its investigation on grave human rights crimes in Afghanistan."

As the paper details:

The Taliban's return to power and the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 will test the U.S. government's legal rationale for indefinite law-of-war detentions at Guantánamo, as well as the Biden administration's commitment to adopting a more rights-respecting approach to counterterrorism. Thus far, Biden administration actions raise sobering questions about its commitment to ending the so-called "War on Terror." Measures of concern… include the Justice Department's willingness to side-step critical legal questions on habeas rights for the men held at Guantánamo and to block certain testimony related to CIA torture, and Biden's apparent intent to continue using lethal force outside recognized war zones with drone strikes and special forces raids euphemistically rebranded as "over the horizon" operations.

They authors highlight that "abroad, the U.S. has continued abusive practices against terrorism suspects including transferring them to countries that torture, and, in at least some cases, unlawfully detaining them at U.S.-run sites abroad or at sea."

"Although such U.S. detention-related counterterrorism violations have dramatically decreased, Washington has replaced capture with kill, conducting airstrikes—often with armed drones that have killed thousands of civilians, including outside recognized battlefields," they note. "Its counterterrorism campaign has spread to 85 countries with scant transparency or oversight."

Tayler and Epstein recommend that Biden "increase transparency and accountability for other crimes and violations perpetrated in the name of countering terrorism, including unlawful airstrikes and raids that kill and injure civilians both in and out of recognized war zones."

The president "should officially apologize and provide redress to victims," they add, asserting that "anything less not only inadequately addresses the suffering and death wrought by the U.S., but also risks perpetuating cycles of violence by fueling the narrative of groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda that the West is at war with Islam."

Biden GASLIGHTS On Failing Economy With Ridiculous Charts

Joe Manchin appears to have withdrawn offer to back $1.8tn bill on Biden agenda

A $1.8tn spending offer proposed to the White House in late 2021 by Senator Joe Manchin appears to be off the table, following another breakdown in talks between the moderate Democrat from West Virginia and the Biden White House, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.

Manchin told reporters this week he is no longer involved in discussions with the White House and has signaled privately that he is not interested in approving any legislation like Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Package, the newspaper said, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.

#ForceTheVote 1 Year Anniversary Special

A lot of people have been saying that the rest of the Democratic Party should take whatever Manchin supports. But it’s not clear that Manchin supports what Manchin supports https://t.co/24tbNnF7u8

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) January 8, 2022

Condolences to the dudebro pundits who spent months saying Manchin has had a consistent set of demands and we were just waiting for Democrats to move through the stages of grief and accede to them. https://t.co/Db4isPUHDT

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) January 8, 2022

If the Democrats get crushed in the midterms, it will be in part because they refused to use their power to deliver real, permanent economic gains to millions of people who have been promised help for decades and who have been constantly betrayed.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 9, 2022

Father and Son Who Murdered Ahmaud Arbery Given Life in Prison Without Parole

Three white men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery last year in Georgia were sentenced Friday to life in prison, and the judge denied parole to the father and son who armed themselves and hunted down the 25-year-old Black man.

According to the Associated Press:

Murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison under Georgia law unless prosecutors seek the death penalty, which they opted against for Arbery's killing. For Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley, the main decision was whether to grant Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor, William "Roddie" Bryan, an eventual chance to earn parole.

"The judge ordered both McMichaels to serve life without parole," the news outlet noted, while Bryan, who filmed the deadly pursuit of Arbery, "was granted a chance of parole, but must first serve at least 30 years in prison."

During the sentencing hearing, Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said that the three men who killed her son "chose to target [him] because they didn't want him in their community. They chose to treat him differently than other people who frequently visited their community."

"And when they couldn't sufficiently scare or intimidate him, they killed him," she said. "They have no remorse and do not deserve any leniency."

Wajahat Ali, a columnist at The Daily Beast, said Friday after the sentencing that the three convicted murderers "lynched Ahmaud Arbery and almost got away with it if it wasn't for the video that was leaked."

Ryan Grim: Progressive SHOWDOWN? Shock Money Haul Has Dem Incumbent On Defense In Minnesota

Greenland Ice Sheet Shrunk for 25th Year Straight in 2021, Report Shows

"2021 is the 25th year in a row in which Greenland's ice sheet lost more mass during the course of the melting season than it gained during the winter."

That's according to the latest report from Polar Portal, a website featuring observations from Danish research institutions that monitor the Greenland Ice Sheet and the sea ice in the Arctic.

The report explains that while "the early part of the summer was cold and wet with unusually heavy and late snowfall in June, which delayed the onset of the melting season," July saw a heatwave that "led to a considerable loss of ice."

The Greenland Ice Sheet lost about 166 billion tonnes of ice during the 12-month period that ended in August, which is near the annual average since the mid-1980s, the report notes. From September 1986 to August 2021, it has lost about 5,500 billion tonnes, contributing 1.5 centimeters to the average global rise in sea levels of about 12 centimeters.

The ice sheet ended this season with a net surface mass balance of about 396 billion tonnes. Although that "makes the current season the 28th lowest in the 41-year time series," or a "somewhat average year," the report highlights "how our perspective changes in line with climate change," explaining that in the late 1990s, "the same figure would have been regarded as a year with a very low surface mass balance in the climate picture at that time."

The report explains various observations in detail, including unusual weather during the 2021 Arctic summer, extreme melting periods despite average temperatures, and sea ice dropping to its second-lowest level last July.

Last year was also "notable," the report says, because "precipitation at Summit Station, which is located at the 'top' of the ice sheet at an altitude of 3,200 meters above sea level, was registered in the form of rain."

When the rain was recorded in August, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center noted that "there is no previous report of rainfall at this location (72.58°N 38.46°W), which reaches 3,216 meters (10,551 feet) in elevation."

EPA's First New Air Pollutant Addition in 30 Years Reveals Agency Failings

The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week the addition—for the first time in over three decades—of a new substance to its list of hazardous air pollutants.

The chemical compound called 1-Bromopropane or 1-BP—used in dry cleaning and automobile care products and linked to cancer and other adverse human health impacts—is now among 188 pollutants including benzene, formaldehyde, and methanol on the list established in 1990 under the Clean Air Act.

The final rule was published Wednesday at the Federal Register and is set to take effect next month.

Earthjustice attorney Tosh Sagar welcomed the development as "a historic first: the first new HAP in over 30 years, ensuring that communities across the country will be protected from the widespread use of this toxic chemical."

“But EPA can't let this first be the last," Sagar said in his statement in which he pointed to "a number of obvious toxic air pollutants that need to be regulated—such as PFAS—and EPA should move swiftly to protect the public from the full range of air toxics."

In its 2020 final risk evaluation on 1-BP, the EPA found that the compound posed unreasonable risks to human health. Also that year, Earthjustice, on behalf of groups including Sierra Club, sued the Trump administration to compel inclusion of 1-BP to the HAP list.

That filing that came three years after Earthjustice told former President Donald Trump's EPA that the compound's "scientific record" makes clear 1-BP "is a reproductive toxicant, carcinogen, and a cause of neurological harm and related chronic health problems including depression," and that any of those effects alone requires the EPA to add the chemical to the list.

Adam Finkel, a former director of health standards programs at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), wrote in a Twitter thread Wednesday that the update reflected "the wheels of 'progress'" and referenced his owns efforts beginning over 20 years ago to protect public health from the compound.

"In 1999," wrote Finkel, "I petitioned on behalf of OSHA that the National Toxicology Program should test a newly-marketed solvent called 1-bromopropane, to see if (as expected by its structure) it would cause cancer in lab animals."

"In 2007, tests were complete, showing 1-BP is a potent carcinogen and causes neurological damage," he continued, pointing to the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance and state of New York's 2011 petition to the EPA to add the solvent to the HAP list.

“I hate the term no-brainer, but this is a no-brainer,” Finkel told the Washington Post. "It's a toxic air pollutant, so it belongs on the list of toxic air pollutants."

In a Thursday tweet sharing the Post's reporting, Environmental Working Group president Ken Cook also suggested the list addition was long-needed.

"This isn't proof that our environmental laws are working," he said. "It's proof that they aren't."

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

US-Russia Talks May Be the Last Chance

How Far Can Diplomacy Go? Awaiting the US-Russian Talks in Geneva on January 10

Mysteries Of The Failed Rebellion In Kazakhstan

France Says Progress Has Been Made in Iran Nuclear Deal Talks

Undermining US Global Hegemony Is Good, Actually: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

From Iron Dome to supply chains, US Christian group quietly shaping US-Israel ties

These Charts Are the Smoking Guns in the Fed’s 2019-2020 Emergency Repo Loan Bailouts

Federal Action Demanded After Endangered Wolf Illegally Killed in Arizona

MASSIVE Fake News Screwup EXPOSED At Politico

Economist Philip Pilkington: Is Millennial Vs Boomer Violence INEVITABLE?

Ossoff Vs. Pelosi: GA Sen TAKES ON House Speaker, DRAFTS Bill To Keep Lawmakers From Trading Stock

A Little Night Music

Bobby "Blue" Bland - 36 22 36

Bobby "Blue" Bland - You've Got Bad Intentions

Bobby "Blue" Bland - Lovin' Blues

Bobby "Blue" Bland - You Did Me Wrong

Bobby "Blue" Bland - That Did It

Bobby "Blue" Bland - Driftin Blues

Bobby 'Blue' Bland - Don't Want No Woman

Bobby 'Blue' Bland - You Got Me (Where You Want Me)

Bobby 'Blue' Bland - Loan a Helping Hand

Bobby 'Blue' Bland - No Blow, No Show