This evening's music features r&b and soul singer Otis Clay.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

Obama Secretly Loosened Standards for Drone Killings in Pakistan

While publicly vaunting drone strike reforms allegedly aimed at minimizing civilian deaths, President Barack Obama secretly loosened the standards for covert attacks in Pakistan, likely paving the way for the killing and wounding of an unknown number of non-combatants, the Wall Street Journal revealed Sunday. ...

The new reporting sheds light on the Presidential Policy Guidelines (pdf), which were announced by Obama in May 2013 and allegedly impose the requirement that "before lethal action may be taken," U.S. forces are required to attain "near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed." Furthermore, the policy states that the U.S. "will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons."

However, according to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, Pakistan was exempted from these alleged reforms. Journalist Adam Entous writes:

Under a classified addendum to the directive approved by Mr. Obama, however, the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan was exempted from the “imminent threat” requirement, at least until U.S. forces completed their pullout from Afghanistan.

The exemption in the case of Pakistan means that the CIA can do signature strikes and more targeted drone attacks on militant leaders who have been identified without collecting specific evidence that the target poses an imminent threat to the U.S. Being part of the al Qaeda core in Pakistan is justification enough in the Obama administration’s eyes.

Robert Naiman, policy director for Just Foreign Policy, told Common Dreams that Pakistan is not the only country exempted from supposed drone reforms. "This is part of a pattern where the administration announces reforms to drone strike policy that never happen or were eviscerated through exemption, or reversed," said Naiman.

White House Pushes to Keep Power to Shut Down Cellphone Networks

Obama Desperate to Avoid Oversight on Secret, Self-Granted Power

In 2005, amid reports that the London subway bombers had used cellphones as detonators, the White House secretly established the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 303, which granted the government the ability to unilaterally shut down all cellphone service in an area of its choosing when it feels it needs to.

The details of the procedure are still not public, and a series of lawsuits aiming to at the very least get the basics of how the law even theoretically works have faced massive official opposition, with the White House and DHS desperate to avoid any oversight. ...

In 2011, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system used the kill switch to shut off all cellphone services in several stations specifically to try to prevent organization of a public protest there.

The administration argues that even letting the public know the basic outline of the policy would itself be a threat to national security.

NSA releases coloring book to save face

U.S. needs to stop fomenting violence in Yemen

Despite reports indicating that Washington has been attempting to quietly persuade the Saudis to curb their bombing, actions speak louder than words. The Obama administration has been supplying intelligence for the campaign, has moved eleven warships to the waters off of Yemen in a show of support for the Saudi-led effort, and has expedited arms shipments to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Seemingly without irony, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest then charged that Iran was continuing “to supply arms to one party to that dispute so that the violence can continue.”

In Washington, the civil war in Yemen is being framed as a proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, with the Houthi rebels supposedly beholden to Iran and the ousted government evidently loyal to the Saudis. This is utterly simplistic. The origins and grievances of the war are many, but Yemen has long been plagued by its own fissures, endemic corruption and abysmal governance. Iran’s influence in Yemen is limited. “It remains our assessment that Iran does not exert command and control over the Houthis in Yemen,” a spokeswoman for the National Security Council recently admitted to The Huffington Post.

The only sensible action for the United States is to change its course entirely. Washington’s assistance to Saudi Arabia will escalate this conflict and further inflame a volatile region.

Same-sex marriage: US supreme court has few choices but to 'end the debate'

The highest court in the United States on Tuesday will hear arguments in one of the last major undecided civil rights struggles in American history – whether same-sex marriage is a constitutional right – but this particular landmark case for equality may already be open and shut.

The US supreme court has a reputation for being contrarian and unpredictable. Its key swing votes are often shrouded in mystery until decisions arrive at the end of each term.

Constitutional lawyers, however, are confident enough in the imminent future of nationwide marriage equality to insist that anything less would require an extraordinarily complex – even unprecedented – reading in stark contrast with the court’s recent history and occasionally overt political leanings.

Between the clever way the cases have been set up and the overwhelming pressure to answer to public demand, the end of state gay marriage bans is not just inevitable, court watchers say – the nine justices may be left with no other choice.

In order to rule against the gay couples and their children bringing the challenge, a majority of the justices would have to conclude that marriage is not a fundamental right with respect to straight couples, according to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone. The judges would also have to decide that there is no legal animus to state laws that limit who can get married – and that laws disadvantaging LGBT citizens are not suspect under the equal protection clause of the US constitution’s 14th amendment.

Chris Hedges: Rise of the New Black Radicals

The almost daily murders of young black men and women by police in the United States—a crisis undiminished by the protests of groups such as Black Lives Matter and by the empty rhetoric of black political elites—have given birth to a new young black militant.

This militant, rising off the bloody streets of cities such as Ferguson, Mo., understands that the beast is not simply white supremacy, chronic poverty and the many faces of racism but the destructive energy of corporate capitalism. This militant has given up on electoral politics, the courts and legislative reform, loathes the corporate press and rejects established black leaders such as Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson. This militant believes it is only in the streets and in acts of civil disobedience that change is possible. And given the refusal of the corporate state to address the mounting suffering of the poor and working poor, draconian state repression and indiscriminate use of lethal state violence against unarmed people of color, I think the new black radical is right. It will be a long, hot and violent summer.

The world’s hundreds of millions of disenfranchised youths—in America this group is dominated by the black and brown underclass—come out of the surplus labor created by our system of corporate neofeudalism. These young men and women have been discarded as human refuse and are preyed upon by a legal system that criminalizes poverty. In the United States they constitute the bulk of the 2.3 million human beings locked in jails and prisons. The discontent in Ferguson, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Ayotzinapa is one discontent. And the emerging revolt, although it comes in many colors, speaks many languages and has many belief systems, is united around a common enemy. Bonds of solidarity and consciousness are swiftly uniting the wretched of the earth against our corporate masters.

Corporate power, which knows what is coming, has put in place sophisticated systems of control that include militarized police, elaborate propaganda campaigns that seek to make us fearful and therefore passive, wholesale surveillance of every citizen and a court system that has stripped legal protection from the poor and any who dissent. The masses are to be kept in bondage. But the masses, especially the young, understand the game. There is a word for what is bubbling up from below—revolution. It can’t begin soon enough.

Also of interest:

Embracing the Saudi War on Yemen