This evening's music features blues singer and harmonica player Sammy Myers.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

Omar Khadr, Once Guantanamo’s Youngest Prisoner, Finally Out of Jail

Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was once the youngest inmate held at Guantanamo Bay, was today let out on bail from a Canadian prison — walking free for the first time since he was captured by US forces when he was 15 years old. A judge today ruled that Khadr should be released from a maximum-security prison in Edmonton, Alberta, while he appeals his conviction for throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier during a raid near Ayub Khel, Afghanistan in 2002.

Khadr, who spent nearly 10 years at Guantanamo, will live with his lawyer Dennis Edney and his wife. “I look forward to Omar Khadr letting the Canadian public see who he is,” Edney said outside the courtroom after the judge’s decision was rendered. ...

Born in Canada in 1986, Khadr spent his childhood in the suburbs of Toronto before being taken by his now-deceased father, Al Qaeda financier Ahmed Khadr, to Afghanistan in the late-90’s. Brought into the orbit of militant groups at a young age, Khadr’s life would take a further turn for the worse following the 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S. invasion of the country.

In later years, videos would surface of Khadr as a young boy being taught by militants how to construct rudimentary landmines with which to target U.S. troops. In July 2002, a house he was residing in would be the target of a U.S. military raid that killed several militants and grievously wounded Khadr, who suffered several gunshot and shrapnel wounds throughout his body before being captured. Sgt. Christopher Speer, a U.S. army medic, would die in that raid, hit by a grenade dubiously alleged to have been thrown by Khadr as he lay wounded.

Following this incident, Khadr was transferred first to the American prison at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and then to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. In both places, he is alleged to have suffered torture by prison guards and interrogators, including beatings, denial of medical care for wounds, sleep deprivation and various other forms of humiliation and physical mistreatment.

His chief interrogator at Bagram, Joshua Claus, would later be charged in connection with the deaths of several Afghan civilians who were tortured and killed at the camp.

Court Rules NSA Bulk Spying Illegal: New Vindication for Snowden, and Uncertainty for PATRIOT Act

Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden

With the NSA’s bulk surveillance ruled illegal, the debate on the Patriot Act should be reinvigorated – with Edward Snowden free to join in

On 6 June 2013, the Guardian published a secret US court order against the phone company Verizon, ordering it on an “ongoing, daily basis” to hand over the call records of its millions of US customers to the NSA – just one of numerous orders enabling the government’s highly secret domestic mass surveillance program. Just days later the world learned the identity of the whistleblower who made the order public: Edward Snowden.

Now, almost two years later, a US court has vindicated Snowden’s decision, ruling that the bulk surveillance program went beyond what the law underpinning it allowed: the US government used section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify the program. A US court of appeals has ruled the law does not allow for a program so broad. In short, one of the NSA’s most famous and controversial surveillance programs has no legal basis.

Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has so far been found to have acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden. That surely must change the nature of the debate on civil liberties being had in America, and it should do so in a number of ways.

The first is the surprisingly thorny question of what to do with Snowden himself. ... Now the courts have ruled that Snowden’s flagship revelation, the very first and foremost of the programs he disclosed, has no legal basis, who now might challenge his status as a whistleblower? ... If the US wants moral authority to talk to other governments about whistleblowers and civil liberty, it needs to be brave: it needs to offer Snowden amnesty.

The court of appeals judges very deliberately chose not to consider the constitutionality of NSA bulk surveillance programs, as such questions are currently before Congress with the ongoing debate on how to reform the Patriot Act. ... For domestic bulk surveillance to continue and be legal, Congress must explicitly vote for it – and then, in time, the judicial branch will consider the constitutional case in earnest.

The president could also use this ruling as an opportunity to consider his stance. The line endlessly aired by the administration and its officials is that all surveillance is legal. That line is no longer valid.

Obama to promote TPP at Nike - a corp that offshores jobs and pays slave wages overseas

Today, President Obama is visiting Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon to garner support for the trade deal, which would be signed by the US and 11 Pacific Rim countries. That’s an apt place for Obama to beat the free-trade drum – Nike, like the TPP, is associated with offshoring American jobs, widening the income inequality gap, and increasing the number of people making slave wages overseas. Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, we’ve seen the loss of nearly five million US manufacturing jobs, the closure of more than 57,000 factories, and stagnant wages. This deal won’t be any different.

In November, Zachary Senn, a college student reporter at the Modesto Bee, spent three weeks in Indonesia living with and interviewing workers who make goods for Nike, Adidas, Puma and Converse. When you hear Obama talking about those “high-quality jobs,” think of RM, a 32-year-old mother who told Senn that she works 55 hours, six days a week and makes just $184 a month after 12 years at the PT Nikomas factory, a Nike subcontractor that employs 25,000 people. That’s 83 cents an hour or $2,208 a year. ...

Wages in Vietnam, a key TPP partner, are even lower than Indonesia. Nike’s largest production center is in Vietnam where 330,000 mostly young women workers with no legal rights earn just 48 to 69 cents an hour, according to the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights (IGLHR).

According to the IGLHR’s A Race to the Bottom report, Nike symbolizes the destructive impacts of trade deals like the TPP. Those $100-$200 Nike shoes you see in stores carry a declared customs value of $5.27 per pair, according to a sampling of ten shipments of Nike shoes from Vietnam destined for the US market.

In 2014, Nike contracted 150 factories in 14 countries to produce more than 365 million pairs of shoes, according to IGLHR and Matt Powell, sports industry analyst at the NPD Group. Vietnamese workers made 43 percent of those shoes; Chinese workers made 28 percent; and Indonesians made 25 percent. Not one pair was made in the United States.