This evening's music features Louisiana blues musician Lightnin' Slim.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Obama Does Have a Strategy in Iraq: Escalation

Even as Obama admits there's no military solution in Iraq, the Pentagon is pouring more U.S. troops and weapons into its floundering war on the Islamic State.

Almost nine months after President Obama admitted that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to challenge the Islamic State — and just days after he said he still has “no complete Iraq strategy” — the non-strategy suddenly has a name: escalation.

According to reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration is poised to send 400 to 500 additional troops to Iraq immediately, and to build a new U.S. military base in restive Anbar province to house them — and potentially many more.

These troops would not be limited to the officially narrow training mission of the 3,100 U.S. troops already on the ground in Iraq. They would still be considered trainers and advisers, but their mission, according to the Times, would be “to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi and repel the Islamic State.” ...

Despite the bluster of hawks who crave a deeper war in Iraq and Syria, it isn’t true that Obama has no strategy against the Islamic State. There is a strategy — but it’s wrong, and it’s losing.

The Obama administration has so far been unable or unwilling to act on its own oft-repeated understanding that “there is no military solution” to the so-called ISIS crisis. Instead, the U.S. strategy has relied almost solely on military action, with little or no investment in the funds, personnel, or political capital to wage the kind of powerful diplomacy that’s so desperately needed. If anything, the ongoing air war — and the flooding of the region with arms — is making a diplomatic resolution less likely.

New Bipartisan AUMF Greenlights Endless War

Proposal would allow "significant" troop deployments and geographically-limitless military intervention against a broadly-defined enemy

Amid a dearth of congressional debate, and fresh announcements of more troop deployments to Iraq, a group of bipartisan lawmakers is pushing yet another piece of legislation authorizing open-ended and geographically-limitless war against the Islamic State or ISIL.

Introduced by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) this week, the new authorization for use of military force (AUMF) is being framed by its backers as a bid to jump-start a real debate over the war and pursue a "narrow" mission.

However, analysts say that this new legislation, in fact, calls for extremely broad war powers, in some ways going beyond the failed AUMF proposed by President Barack Obama in mid-February.

"This is a bad AUMF," Raed Jarrar, policy impact coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, told Common Dreams. "But taking one step back, the idea of the use of force in Iraq and Syria is a bad idea to start with. Even if they came up with a better AUMF, the use of force is still bad idea. This is missing from the debate."

Despite Global Recognition, the Plight of Guantánamo’s Best-Selling Author Worsens

Mohamedou Ould Slahi's 13^th year of captivity in Guantánamo has been remarkable in many ways.

"Guantánamo Diary," his story of torture and unlawful detention by the United States, was finally published and has become a best-seller, earning rave reviews around the world and a Hollywood movie deal. Readers continue to marvel at a book that's been called a "masterpiece" and "literary magic," written by a man whose "unfailing humanity is the constant thread throughout." Celebrities like Jude Law and Benedict Cumberbatch are reading Mohamedou's work for a global audience. Almost 50,000 people have signed the ACLU's petition calling for his freedom.

But Mohamedou's despair only grows, because the Obama administration is still denying this innocent man what he most urgently needs: freedom.

Today, we asked a federal judge to order the Defense Department to give Mohamedou a hearing mandated years ago by President Obama. That hearing, before a Pentagon body called the Periodic Review Board (PRB), would give Mohamedou the opportunity to show that he poses no threat to the United States and must be set free. He's entitled by law to this administrative process, and it could be the key to sending him home.

The PRB process isn't the only way the U.S. government could set Mohamedou free. The Defense Department could also stop fighting Mohamedou's federal habeas corpus lawsuit, which challenges the legality of his initial detention. In the case, Mohamedou has argued that his capture by the U.S. in his home country of Mauritania in 2001 — far from any battlefield — and his subsequent detention and torture in Jordan, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, are unlawful. In 2010, the federal judge in his case agreed, rightly discounting evidence obtained from torture and finding that the government failed to show Mohamedou was "part of" al-Qaida at the time of his capture. But after the judge ordered Mohamedou released, the Obama administration appealed as part of a strategy it pursued for all Guantánamo habeas cases, in which it successfully persuaded the appeals court to adopt looser legal and evidentiary standards to keep some Guantánamo prisoners indefinitely detained — but never charged with a crime.

That case is still pending. In the meantime, we're asking for a prompt PRB hearing for Mohamedou. Despite President Obama's 2011 order that the hearings take place within a year, the Defense Department has dragged its feet.

Mideast’s worst case: A ‘big war’ pitting Shia Muslims against Sunni

The Middle East crisis that peaked one year ago Wednesday when the Islamic State captured Mosul may result in the breakup of Iraq and an indefinite continuation of a war in Syria that’s already out of control, analysts say.

Yet still worse things could happen.

“The conditions are very much like 1914,” says Michael Stephens of the Royal United Service Institute in London. “All it will take is one little spark, and Iran and Saudi Arabia will go at each other, believing they are fighting a defensive war.”

Hiwa Osman, an Iraqi Kurdish commentator, was even more blunt: “The whole region is braced for the big war, the war that has not yet happened, the Shiite-Sunni war.”

U.S. and foreign experts say the U.S still has not developed a strategy for dealing with the Sunni extremists who now hold more territory Iraq and Syria than one year ago. President Barack Obama on Monday acknowledged that the U.S. strategy in Iraq was a work in progress. “We don’t have, yet, a complete strategy, because it requires commitments on the part of Iraqis as well,” Obama said at the close of the G-7 summit in Germany. “The details are not worked out.” ...

“IS cannot be ended by Kurds, Shiites, Americans or Iran. It has to be done by Sunni Arabs,” said Osman. “You need to present them with a deal for the day after IS is defeated. And no one has managed to articulate that vision for them,” he said.

Conceivably, that would be a federal system that ends Shiite domination of the security services, but most importantly secures reconciliation with Baathists, members of the party that ruled Iraq under the late dictator Saddam Hussein. Baathists are said to comprise a great many of the top positions in the Islamic State military apparatus.

After Iraq-Syria Takeover, the Inside Story of How ISIL Destroyed Al-Qaida from Within

Al-Qaida 'cut off and ripped apart by Isis'

Insiders say group has been drained of Middle East recruits and that US wrongfooted by shift in balance of power between warring jihadi groups

Two of al-Qaida’s most important spiritual leaders have told the Guardian that the terror group is no longer a functioning organisation after being ripped apart by Isis. In a wide-ranging interview, Abu Qatada, a Jordanian preacher who was based in London before being deported in 2013, and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, regarded as the most influential jihadi scholar alive, say the al-Qaida leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is cut off from his commanders and keeping the group afloat through little more than appeals to loyalty.

Senior insiders in Jordan add that al-Qaida around the Middle East has been drained of recruits and money after losing territory and prestige to its former subordinate division. The ongoing war between al-Qaida and Isis has left the US struggling to catch up with the tectonic shifts within the global jihadi movement, intelligence insiders told the Guardian. ...

Isis leaders, who described al-Qaida as a “drowned entity” in issue six of their official English-language publication, Dabiq, have declared that they will not tolerate any other jihadi group in territory where they are operating. They have readily delivered on that statement. Last week, Isis fighters in Afghanistan were reported to have beheaded 10 members of the Taliban, and on Wednesday al-Qaida in Libya vowed retaliation after blaming Isis for the death of one of its leaders.

The US has been slow to grasp the implications of al-Qaida’s decline and possible collapse despite extensive study of Isis, according to intelligence community insiders. “There’s such a cadre of people so closely tied to the al-Qaida brand within the IC [intelligence community] that I think they don’t see what else is going on outside the organisation,” said Derek Harvey, a former intelligence analyst who predicted how resilient the Iraq insurgency would be. ...

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has depicted the rivalry between the two jihadi groups as cosmetic, and his top Iraq policy official, Brett McGurk, has repeatedly stated: “Isis is al-Qaida.” Kerry’s new spokesman, John Kirby, said in his old job at the Pentagon that Isis, al-Qaida and al-Qaida’s Syrian proxy the Nusra Front “in our minds, from our military perspective, are very much one and the same”. ...

However misleading, the conflation of the two groups has political and legal benefits for Obama. He launched military action against Isis without congressional approval 10 months ago and a push for retroactive legislative blessing is all but dead in Washington. Portraying al-Qaida and Isis as the same thing has allowed the president to claim that the 2001 and 2002 congressional authorisations for attacks on al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein provide the legal foundations for the current campaign.

Number of people killed by police this year reaches 500

Two young black men shot dead by police in New York City and Cincinnati puts number killed by police in the US on track to exceed 1,000 by end of 2015

The number of people killed by police in the United States during 2015 reached 500 on Wednesday, according to a Guardian investigation, after two young black men were shot dead in New York City and Cincinnati.

Isiah Hampton, 19, was fatally shot by New York police department officers at an apartment building in the Bronx on Wednesday morning, according to police chiefs. His death followed that of Quandavier Hicks, 22, during a confrontation with Cincinnati officers at a house on Tuesday night.

Their names were added to The Counted, a project by the Guardian to report and crowd-source names and a series of other data on every death caused by law enforcement in the US this year.

The updated findings on fatalities so far this year means that the total is on track to exceed 1,000 by the end of 2015 – and that people are being killed by officers at more than twice the rate most recently detected by the much-criticised FBI system, which recorded 461 killed in 2013.

As Bonn Climate Talks Conclude, Another Failure for Planet Earth, Humanity

Developed countries criticized for being unwilling to buck fossil fuel industry and make necessary transition to renewable energy sources

As ten days of UN-sponsored climate talks came to end in Bonn, Germany on Thursday morning, global campaigners demanding far-reaching solutions to the crisis of a warming planet expressed dissatisfaction on multiple levels, charging that the continued foot-dragging of governments is sentencing future generations to unparalleled catastrophe even as scientists issue grave new warnings about the dangers of inaction.

As the final sessions concluded and the latest draft texts emerged from the talks, activists staged protests inside and outside of the convention center calling for bold action on climate and an "energy revolution" that would steer the world away from coal, oil, and gas and towards renewable sources like wind and solar.

Speaking on behalf of Friends of the Earth, Lucy Cadena, the group's climate justice and energy coordinator, said the among the deepest frustrations is that while solutions are available to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, Bonn has once again proven that leaders from the most developed countries are unwilling to buck the fossil fuel industry and make the urgent transition to renewable energy sources.

"Climate change is upon us, and every increase in temperature causes more heatwaves, droughts and floods, killing thousands of people," Cadena said. "If developed country governments continue to drag their feet at the UN negotiations instead of taking immediate action, millions of people will pay for it with their lives. People around the world are already implementing real, proven solutions—community-controlled, renewable energy systems. The energy revolution has come of age, and our politicians must help implement it or fade into obsolescence along with the dirty energy systems they cling to."

Climate Change Could End By 2100, If We Make It That Long

Also of interest:

When I lost my hands making flatscreens I can't afford, nobody would help me

Provocative moves by great powers are pushing the world one step closer to the ultimate disaster.

German Banker: Obama Is Destroying Europe