This evening's music features Piedmont bluesman Pink Anderson.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

A Sea of Blood - John Kiriakou

The Justice Department Just Declared That the War in Afghanistan Is Not Over

The war in Afghanistan is not ending, US government attorneys said in court documents unsealed Friday, undercutting statements President Barack Obama made last December and in his State of the Union address a few weeks later when he formally declared that "the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion."

But Obama didn't really mean that the war was over, the government now argues.

"Simply put, the President's statements signify a transition in United States military operations, not a cessation …" Andrew Warden, a Justice Department attorney, wrote. "Although the United States has ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, the fighting there certainly has not stopped."

Warden made the argument in a 34-page motion filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia in response to a legal challenge by Guantanamo detainee Mukhtar Yahi Naji al-Warafi. The detainee asked a federal court to grant his writ of habeas corpus and set him free because Obama said the war in Afghanistan is over and the legal authorization the US has relied upon to hold him for the past 13 years is no longer valid.

"The government's position is incoherent," David Remes, al-Warafi's Washington, DC-based attorney, told VICE News. "The president says the war is over. The brief says the war isn't over and will never be over. And the government says they are being consistent with what the president said. They are twisting the president's own words. Obama was clearly making the point that the war was over, that hostilities have ended."

Greenwald: Writers Withdraw From PEN Gala to Protest Award to Charlie Hebdo

Under the guise of the “War on Terror,” there has indeed been a systematic assault on free speech: though it’s been one waged by Western governments primarily against their Muslim citizens. For that reason, it has provoked almost no objections from those who dressed up as free speech crusaders that week. That’s because, as I wrote in the aftermath of that rally, the incident was used to manipulatively exploit, not celebrate and protect, free expression. Celebrating Charlie Hebdo was largely about glorifying anti-Muslim sentiment; free expression was the pretext.

This is all quite redolent of how the U.S. government and its acolytes quite adeptly exploit social issues to advance imperial aims. U.S. officials, for instance, gin up anger toward Putin or Iran by highlighting the maltreatment of those countries’ LGBT citizens — as though that’s why the U.S. government is hostile — while at the same time showering arms and money on allied regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt whose treatment of gays is at least as bad (while LGBT groups in the U.S. say nothing because those are Obama’s policies). Or American and British officials will denounce free press attacks by governments they want to demonize while cozying up to regimes that allow no press freedoms at all. It’s also similar to how neocons tried to persuade feminists to support the war in Afghanistan because the Taliban is heinous to women or justified the invasions of Iraq because Saddam violated human rights — at the very same time that the regimes neocons love the most are at least as bad if not worse on those issues (to say nothing of the human rights records of neocons themselves and the U.S. government).

This is now a common, and quite potent, tactic: inducing support for highly illiberal Western government policy by dressing it up as support for liberal principles. And it highlights the fraud of pretending that celebrations of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are independent of the fact that the particular group they most prominently mock are Muslims, a marginalized, targeted, and largely powerless group in France and the West generally.

Baltimore’s Disgrace Is History of Police Violence

After Saturday’s full day of peaceful protests in Baltimore calling for justice for Freddie Gray — the 25-year-old who recently died of a spinal injury suffered while in police custody — some protesters opted Saturday evening and Sunday to pursue more hands-on expressions of frustration. On Monday, the day of Gray’s memorial service, public tensions led to rioting in West Baltimore that continued into the evening.

The media also ran riot. As of Saturday night, the protests were said to have turned “violent” and “destructive.” ABC News initially reported that protesters had simply “become rowdy” but quickly amended the headline to incorporate the V-word. Conservative news site Breitbart.com took full advantage of its lack of editorial constraints to proclaim, “War zone: Baltimore erupts into violence, chaos as #BlackLivesMatter riots rage.”

When crowds turned to rioting on Monday, CNN legal analyst and New Yorker contributor Jeffrey Toobin took the opportunity on Anderson Cooper 360 to denounce the city. “Protest is an honorable thing; looting and criminality are not,” he said. “Baltimore disgraced itself today.” For Toobin, it’s as if nothing disgraceful or criminal happened before Monday, as if the city’s long history of racist police violence weren’t disgrace enough to be worth comment. On the receiving end of that violence have been teenagers, pregnant women, and octogenarian grandmothers.

Finally, the media found, the protesters were behaving according to the script — the one that casts black communities in America as powder kegs that can be contained only by the cops. Never mind that chucking hot dog buns and condiments at police and smashing up police vehicles and store windows is inherently less destructive, at least in terms of human life, than fatally severing a person’s spinal cord or shooting an unarmed man multiple times in the back. The latter two operations were performed under the sanction of U.S. law enforcement, whose behavior, no matter how outrageous, is still defended from public outrage by media and politicians alike.

Obama Compares Progressive Opposition to Trade Deal to ‘Death Panels’ as the Left Ramps Up Opposition

At a speech to a summit hosted by Organizing for Action, the organization created out of Obama's presidential campaigns to advocate for his policies and train organizers, Obama said he wanted to address the controversy surrounding his trade policy. ...

"If you were watching MSNBC and all this stuff, and you're thinking, 'Oh, man, I love Obama but what's going on here?'" the president joked, trying to reframe the deal as part of his push for what he calls "middle-class economics," which he said was "the idea that this country does best when everybody gets their fair shot, everybody does their fair share, everybody plays by the same set of rules."

Obama also called the deal "the most progressive trade agreement in our history," adding that it has labor and environmental enforcements. Obama compared the liberal complaints to the rumors of "death panels" during the Obamacare debate.

But the line was seen as a slap in the face to some progressives.

"It's shameful to see President Obama compare Democrats who oppose fast-tracking the TPP through Congress to Sarah Palin and the delusional 'death panels' rhetoric," said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, in a statement. "Frankly, it's beneath this president to resort to such name-calling."