This evening's music features blues singer Bertha "Chippie" Hill who frequently recorded with Louis Armstrong and Tampa Red.

Here are some stories from tonight's diary:

When a Government Declares Memories Classified

“The government,” the Huffington Post’s Nick Baumann wrote on Twitter on Thursday, “ is giving former CIA detainees their memories back.”

Baumann was referring to a Huffington Post report that U.S. authorities are relaxing sweeping rules that prohibited prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility from publicly telling their stories of CIA detention and interrogation, since disclosing those experiences could reveal the agency’s secret sources and methods for combatting terrorism. The report included these jarring opening lines:

For years, Guantanamo Bay prisoners’ memories of their time in CIA custody have been considered classified state secrets. Abu Zubaydah's lawyers can’t talk publicly about how he lost his left eye. Lawyers for Mustafa al Hawsawi, who can now only sit on a pillow, can’t tell the press or the public about anal feedings that left him with a rectal prolapse. And until recently, Majid Khan's lawyers couldn’t bring up the time he was hung from a pole for two days, naked and hooded, while interrogators threw ice water on him.

But all that is changing, albeit gradually, following the release in December of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing extensive abuses in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration. The revelations thrust many of the intelligence agency’s techniques into the open, prompting the government to rethink its classification rules for detainees remaining at Guantanamo.

“Under the new rules, the torture methods used in CIA prisons are no longer subject to classification, although any information that could reveal the locations where torture took place or the people who helped facilitate it remains secret,” the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly and Jessica Schulberg reported on Thursday. Lawyers for detainees must still petition the government to declassify their clients’ memories on a case-by-case basis.

CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation

Watchdogs shocked at ‘disconnect’ between doctors who oversaw interrogation and guidelines that gave CIA director power over medical ethics

The Central Intelligence Agency had explicit guidelines for “human experimentation” before, during and after its post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees, the Guardian has learned, which raise new questions about the limits on internal oversight over the agency’s in-house and contracted medical research.

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.

CIA director George Tenet approved abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, designed by CIA contractor psychologists. He further instructed the agency’s health personnel to oversee the brutal interrogations – the beginning of years of controversy, still ongoing, about US torture as a violation of medical ethics.

But the revelation of the guidelines has prompted critics of CIA torture to question how the agency could have ever implemented what it calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” – despite apparently having rules against “research on human subjects” without their informed consent.

The agency confirmed to the Guardian that the document was still in effect during the lifespan of the controversial rendition, detention and interrogation program.

After reviewing the document, one watchdog said the timeline suggested the CIA manipulated basic definitions of human experimentation to ensure the torture program proceeded.

“Crime one was torture. The second crime was research without consent in order to say it wasn’t torture,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a former war-crimes investigator with Physicians for Human Rights and now a researcher with Harvard University’s Humanitarian Initiative.

Sudan president Omar al-Bashir leaves South Africa as court considers arrest

The Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, has flown out of South Africa in defiance of the country’s high court, which was considering whether to enforce an international warrant for his arrest.

The abrupt departure, announced by a Sudanese official, came amid urgent calls from the United Nations general secretary, Ban Ki-moon, the EU and the US for Bashir to be detained.

His flight is a severe setback to the authority of the international criminal court. The ICC has issued two warrants seeking the Sudanese leader’s arrest and accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity for atrocities committed in the Darfur conflict. ...

Bashir had travelled to South Africa for a summit of African Union leaders that was chaired by Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, who has urged African leaders to pull out of the ICC.

African states accuse the court, which is based in The Hague, of only targeting political leaders on their continent and failing to bring those responsible for war crimes in the Middle East and elsewhere to justice.

Heh, NPR accidentally allowed one of it's reporters (Ofeibea Quist-Arcton) to say aloud on the air that African leaders feel that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Netanyahu are war criminals. Listen to it here:

Court In South Africa Detains Sudan's President On War Cimes

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Even if you lead a country, you are not immune from charges of crimes against humanity - at least so says the International Criminal Court. But in a case involving Sudan's president, the court's power is being tested. His name is Omar al-Bashir, and he's accused of leading a genocidal war in Darfur. Yesterday, Bashir appeared in legal trouble. Because of the international arrest warrant, a court was blocking him from leaving South Africa, where he was attending a summit of African leaders. Reports now suggest he has flown out of South Africa. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton is in Johannesburg and joins us on the line. ...

GREENE: Ofeibea, in just a few seconds we have left, I mean, if he did indeed fly out of a military base, presumably the South African government allowed that to happen, what does that say about the South African government's level of respect for the International Criminal Court and its work?

QUIST-ARCTON: That South Africa seems to have changed its mind. And it's not just South Africa. I have to tell you that the African Union - the leaders of the African Union have instructed member states not to cooperate with the ICC, which they say is anti-African, anti-poor, singling out African leaders. And why hasn't it gone after the likes of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Netanyahu in Israel because they are war criminals, say many Africans.

The Forgotten Costs of War in the Middle East

I’m sure that you’ve heard about the three bare-bones “staging outposts” or, in the lingo of the trade, “cooperative security locations” that the U.S. Marines have established in Senegal, Ghana, and Gabon. We’re talking about personnel from Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response-Africa, a unit at present garrisoned at Morón, Spain. It would, however, like to have some bases – though that’s not a word in use at U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which oversees all such expansion – ready to receive them in a future in which anything might happen in an Africa exploding with new or expanding terror outfits.

Really? You haven’t noticed anything on the subject? Admittedly, the story wasn’t on the nightly news, nor did it make the front page of your local paper, or undoubtedly its inside pages either, but honestly it was right there in plain sight in Military Times! Of course, three largely unoccupied cooperative security locations in countries that aren’t exactly on the tip of the American tongue would be easy enough to miss under the best of circumstances, but what about the other eight “staging facilities” that AFRICOM now admits to having established across Africa. The command had previously denied that it had any “bases” on the continent other than the ever-expanding one it established in the tiny nation of Djibouti in the horn of Africa and into which it has already sunk three-quarters of a billion dollars with at least $1.2 billion in upgrades still to go. However, AFRICOM’S commander, General David Rodriguez, now proudly insists that the 11 bare-bones outposts will leave U.S. forces “within four hours of all the high-risk, high-threat [diplomatic] posts” on the continent.

Hmmm, that might be truly strange if anyone in this country (outside the Pentagon) paid the slightest attention to the issue of U.S. global garrisons. Of course they don’t. They never have, which should qualify as one of the great mysteries of American life and yet somehow doesn’t. U.S. bases abroad are just about never in the news. Few are the journalists who write stories about them, though they often spend time on them. Pundits rarely discuss them. Candidates don’t debate them. Editorialists don’t write about them. ... Almost no one, including a Congress generally eager to cut funds on just about anything, discusses the costs of preserving the hundreds and hundreds of bases of every size and shape that the Pentagon maintains globally in a fashion that is historically unprecedented. Back in 2012, TomDispatchregular David Vine estimated that those costs ran to about $170 billion a year, conservatively speaking, and since 9/11 had added up to a total of perhaps a couple of trillion dollars.

If you don’t get the way this country has garrisoned the planet, if you never notice its empire of bases, there is no way to grasp its imperial nature, which perhaps is the point.

Tamir Rice Report Finds No Hard Evidence Cop Gave Warning to Raise Hands Before Shooting

A lengthy investigative report on the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice found no hard evidence that the Cleveland police officer who pulled the trigger gave the 12-year-old boy a warning to raise his hands before firing.

The report, released by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department this week, will likely lead to further questions about officer Timothy Loehmann's actions in the moments before Rice was shot while holding a toy airsoft pellet gun.

According to witness statements, it was unclear if Loehmann told Rice to raise his hands before firing. One witness said in the report that the she heard two gunshots before the warning was given. The witness reportedly "described hearing two gunshots 'Bang, Bang,' then hearing someone yell, 'Freeze… show me your hands!' then she heard a third and final 'Bang.'"

Cleveland police said previously that the officer warned Rice three times to raise his hands, and that he fired after Rice attempted to reach for his waistband where he had placed the pellet gun. Investigators said in the new report that it was unclear if Loehmann had given any instructions to Rice before exiting his car and firing twice.

The report estimated that Loehmann fired when he was between seven and four and a half feet away from Rice.

Boehner and Obama have four days to twist arms for TPP

Despite last minute pressure from President Obama this morning, Democratic lawmakers voted down Trade Adjustment Assistance, part of the package of bills necessary to advance Trade Promotion Authority, which authorizes the administration to move forward with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade agreements.

After TAA failed, Republicans quickly brought up a stand-alone trade promotion authority bill. The measure passed by a two-vote margin. But observers note the vote was a test to see where members stand. For a stand-alone trade promotion bill to advance on its own, the Senate would have to take up the entire package again.

House Republican leaders have scheduled another vote for TAA on Tuesday. Speaker of the House John Boehner and Obama therefore have four days to persuade members of their parties to swallow their objections to TAA and TPA, respectively.

Also of interest:

Six Facts from “Sudden Justice,” A New History of the Drone War

Why does a Fisa court decide if Twitter can talk about its dealings with Fisa?