This evening's music features blues singer and piano player Roosevelt Sykes.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

Former CIA Director Says "Rectal Hydration" Not Torture

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden tells The Real News that the rectal hydration of Guantanamo detainees was a "medical procedure", but prominent human rights attorney Michael Ratner says this was a torture tactic used to break hunger strikes and intimidate detainees

How Big Business Is Helping Expand NSA Surveillance, Snowden Be Damned

Since November 11, 2011, with the introduction of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, American spy agencies have been pushing laws to encourage corporations to share more customer information. They repeatedly failed, thanks in part to NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass government surveillance. Then came Republican victories in last year’s midterm Congressional elections and a major push by corporate interests in favor of the legislation.

Today, the bill is back, largely unchanged, and if congressional insiders and the bill’s sponsors are to believed, the legislation could end up on President Obama’s desk as soon as this month. In another boon to the legislation, Obama is expected to reverse his past opposition and sign it, albeit in an amended and renamed form (CISPA is now CISA, the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act”). The reversal comes in the wake of high-profile hacks on JPMorgan Chase and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The bill has also benefitted greatly from lobbying by big business, which sees it as a way to cut costs and to shift some anti-hacking defenses onto the government.

For all its appeal to corporations, CISA represents a major new privacy threat to individual citizens. It lays the groundwork for corporations to feed massive amounts of communications to private consortiums and the federal government, a scale of cooperation even greater than that revealed by Snowden. The law also breaks new ground in suppressing pushback against privacy invasions; in exchange for channeling data to the government, businesses are granted broad legal immunity from privacy lawsuits — potentially leaving consumers without protection if companies break privacy promises that would otherwise keep information out of the hands of authorities. ...

The legislation — at least as marked up by the Senate Intelligence Committee — provides an expansive definition of what can be construed as a cybersecurity threat, including any information for responding to or mitigating “an imminent threat of death, serious bodily harm, or serious economic harm,” or information that is potentially related to threats relating to weapons of mass destruction, threats to minors, identity theft, espionage, protection of trade secrets, and other possible offenses ... "The lack of use limitations creates yet another loophole for law enforcement to conduct backdoor searches on Americans,” argues a letter sent by a coalition of privacy organizations, including Free Press Action Fund and New America’s Open Technology Institute.

Leading Papers Incite ‘Supreme International Crime’

Advocating for war is not like advocating for most other policies because, as peace activist David Swanson points out, war is a crime. It was outlawed in 1928 by the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain, Germany, France, Japan and 55 other nations “condemn[ed] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce[d] it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”

Kellogg-Briand was the basis for the “crimes against peace” indictment at the Nuremberg Trials for Nazi leaders, several of whom were hanged for “planning, preparation, initiation, or waging a war of aggression.” At Nuremberg, chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson declared:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

So to advocate for war, as the Washington Post and New York Times op-ed pages have done, is to incite a crime–“the supreme international crime,” as Jackson noted. How would we react if leading papers were to run articles suggesting that genocide was the best solution to an international conflict–or that lynching is the answer to domestic problems? Calling for an unprovoked military attack against another nation is in the same category of argument.

Heh, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Shrub and Obama can all claim the title, "The Education President," having created a number of "Finishing Schools for Foreign Extremists."

Iraq and Syria are 'finishing schools' for foreign extremists, says UN report

The number of foreign fighters joining al-Qaida and Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and other countries has spiked to more than 25,000 from more than 100 countries

Iraq and Syria have become “international finishing schools” for extremists according to a UN report which says the number of foreign fighters joining terrorist groups has spiked to more than 25,000 from more than 100 countries.

The panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaida estimates the number of overseas terrorist fighters worldwide increased by 71% between mid-2014 and March 2015.

It said the scale of the problem had increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters was “higher than it has ever been historically”.

The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has “risen sharply from a few thousand … a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” the panel said in its report to the UN security council, which was obtained by Associated Press.

The report said just two countries had drawn more than 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the al-Nusra Front.

Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who travelled to Syria and Iraq were living and working in “a veritable ‘international finishing school’ for extremists”, as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Astroturf Warning: TPP Critics Call Out Fake 'Progressive' Group Pushing Corporate Trade Agenda

'The fact is, you can be a progressive committed to fighting for working families or you can be for this massive job-killing trade deal written by hundreds of corporate representatives, but you can't be both.'

Critics of the corporate-friendly Trans-Pacific Partnership are lining up against what they call an "astroturf" operation claiming to represent progressives in favor of Fast Tracking the sweeping and secretive trade deal.

No such progressives exist, they say.

Last month, a Democratic political consulting firm founded by former Obama administration staffers launched a website dubbed "Progressive Coalition for American Jobs," which claimed to prove the existence of progressives who support trade promotion authority, or Fast Track power. ...

However, groups like Public Citizen, CREDO Action, and Democracy for America say no real progressives support handing over trade authority to the White House in this way.

"A consultant-run, pro-TPP astroturf campaign won't change the fact that progressives are united in their opposition to Fast Track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership," said Murshed Zaheed, deputy political director at CREDO Action, on a press call (pdf) Wednesday.

Also of interest:

Why Iran Distrusts the US in Nuke Talks