This evening's music features Chicago blues pianist Otis Spann.

Hi Honey, I'm home!

Defense Attorneys Demand Release of Thousands of CIA Black Site Photos

A recently unearthed cache of photographs of CIA black sites is threatening to further complicate the proceedings of the 9/11 military commission as attorneys for the men detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility are demanding the release of the documents as evidence of the U.S. torture program.

U.S. officials told the Washington Post that the roughly 14,000 photographs were discovered earlier this year by military prosecutors reviewing documents on the intelligence agency's interrogation program ahead of the Senate Intelligence Committee report

The classified materials reportedly depict "external and internal shots of facilities where the CIA held ­al-Qaeda suspects after 9/11" —including the infamous "Salt Pit" in Afghanistan—as well as sites in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, and Romania. While the images don't explicitly show the interrogations, there are pictures of naked detainees stripped naked for transport, as well as of torture devices, such as a waterboard and confinement boxes.

"If pictures from black sites exist," James Connell, who represents 9/11 defendant Ammar al-Baluchi said, "they are crime scene photographs."

"Why is it we are still learning about this stuff?" added Joe Margulies, attorney for Abu Zubaydah, who has been held for more than 12 years without ever being charged with a crime.

Egypt’s Power Struggle Intensifies with Killing of Prosecutor Behind Mass Jailings of Islamists

Egyptian president 'to change law to allow faster executions'

The Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, appears poised to further crack down on dissent after announcing he would fast-track the judicial process in the aftermath of the assassination of the country’s lead prosecutor.

On Tuesday, Sisi promised new laws that will allow Egyptian courts to speed up hearings, and appeared to suggest that the appeals process would be circumvented to guarantee the execution of those on death row.

Speaking at the funeral of Hisham Barakat, the state prosecutor killed in a car bomb on Monday, Sisi said: “The arm of justice is chained by the law. We’re not going to wait for this. We’re going to amend the law to allow us to implement justice as soon as possible.”

Repeating the words “the law, the law”, Sisi added: “If there is a death sentence, a death sentence shall be enforced.” According to the current process, a death sentence can only be enforced after lengthy appeals. But as Egypt has been without a sitting parliament for two years, Sisi – as the country’s sole elected official – can issue laws by decree. As a result, he may technically be able to change the speed at which executions can be completed. Legal experts believe he is already enacting authoritarian laws at a rate not seen in Egypt for 60 years.

U.S. Will Resume Sending Weapons to Bahrain Despite Ongoing Repression

The State Department announced it will lift its freeze on arms sales to the repressive government of Bahrain on Monday, despite the country’s myriad human rights abuses in recent years, including arbitrary detention of children, torture, restrictions for journalists and a brutal government crackdown on peaceful protestors in 2011. ...

Human rights groups were quick to criticize the decision. “There is no way to dress this up as a good move,” Brian Dooley, a program director at Human Rights First, said in a statement. “It’s bad for Bahrain, bad for the region, and bad for the United States.” Dooley said Obama should be “doing everything to stop sectarianism in the Middle East, rather than send more weapons to bolster a military drawn almost exclusively from Bahrain’s Sunni sect.”

Bahrain’s Sunni government rules a country where the majority of the population is Shiite.

French Newspaper Cites U.S. “Contempt” as Reason to Offer Snowden Asylum

France should respond to the U.S.’s “contempt” for its allies by giving Edward Snowden asylum, the leftist French daily newspaper Libération declared on Thursday.

France would send “a clear and useful message to Washington, by granting this bold whistleblower the asylum to which he is entitled,” editor Laurent Joffrin wrote (translated from the French) in an angry editorial titled “Un seul geste” — or “A single gesture.”

The editorial came just two days after Libération co-published a trove of documents obtained by WikiLeaks that recounted how the National Security Agency spied for years on the last three French presidents. (President Barack Obama spoke to French President Francois Hollande Wednesday and told him that — as of late 2013 — “we are not targeting and will not target the communications of the French President.”)

French Justice Minister Says Snowden and Assange Could Be Offered Asylum

French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira thinks National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange might be allowed to settle in France.

If France decides to offer them asylum, she would “absolutely not be surprised,” she told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday (translated from the French). She said it would be a “symbolic gesture.”

Taubira was asked about the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of three French presidents, disclosed by WikiLeaks this week, and called it an “unspeakable practice.”

Tens of thousands in Syntagma Square tonight to say 'NO' to austerity - but 'YES' to democracy and social justice. pic.twitter.com/mE9NfdzPxb

— Kanjin Tor ™ (@xugla) June 29, 2015

'No to Austerity': Tens of Thousands Back Syriza at Rally in Athens

Tens of thousands gathered in Athens on Monday night, adding their voices to the ranks of the Syriza government officials and international observers who are urging Greek citizens to act boldly and reject the terms of an aid deal offered by Greece's austerity-loving international creditors. ...

Those who took to the streets in Athens on Monday night were largely in the anti-austerity camp. According to Reuters, "at least 20,000 defiant supporters of Alexis Tsipras' left-wing government packed the main avenue in front of parliament," many carrying banners that declared simply "No!" while others read, "Our lives do not belong to the lenders" and "Don't back down".

‘Greece not for sale’: PM Tsipras urges ‘no’ vote on Euro bailout referendum

Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy

Why are European Union leaders resisting the referendum and refusing even to extend by a few days the June 30 deadline for Greece’s next payment to the IMF? Isn’t Europe all about democracy?

In January, Greece’s citizens voted for a government committed to ending austerity. If the government were simply fulfilling its campaign promises, it would already have rejected the proposal. But it wanted to give Greeks a chance to weigh in on this issue, so critical for their country’s future wellbeing.

That concern for popular legitimacy is incompatible with the politics of the eurozone, which was never a very democratic project. Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.

And, sure enough, what we are seeing now, 16 years after the eurozone institutionalized those relationships, is the antithesis of democracy: Many European leaders want to see the end of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftist government. After all, it is extremely inconvenient to have in Greece a government that is so opposed to the types of policies that have done so much to increase inequality in so many advanced countries, and that is so committed to curbing the unbridled power of wealth. They seem to believe that they can eventually bring down the Greek government by bullying it into accepting an agreement that contravenes its mandate.

Guaranteed government jobs would be a huge boon to the American worker — and deprive the rich of their power

Long-term unemployment is the scourge of modern economies. In a society where people take value from work, unemployment is destabilizing and degrading. A bout of long-term unemployment can permanently scar worker, leaving them with lower wages and fewer usable skills. Last year, Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker put forward a persuasive case for a return to full employment as the palliative to unemployment. But it’s increasingly clear the private sector cannot create full employment on its own. Even at the height of the Clinton boom, millions of African-Americans and low-skilled workers were jobless. To get full employment, progressives should embrace an idea that hasn’t surfaced recently in mainstream American political dialogue: a universal government job guarantee. ...

A government job guarantee has a long history in American politics. As Theda Skocpol notes in “Social Policy in The United States,” during the recession of the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor (which later merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form AFL-CIO), requested public works to abate the recession. They repeated these demands during the early 1900s, and after World War I demanded that “a nation that sent men into battle had a moral and political obligation to make sure they had jobs when they returned home.”

However, the AFL were opposed to government-sponsored unemployment insurance. Skocpol cites Alex Keyssar who writes that, “unionists stressed that public works programs were preferable to simple poor relief in three respects: They paid workers a living wage rather than a pittance; they permitted jobless men and women to avoid the demoralizing consequences of accepting charity; and they performed a useful public service.” However, over the past decade, the government hasn’t guaranteed jobs; instead ,conservative austerity policies have lead to millions of public sector jobs being cut. ...

A job guarantee could leverage two of the strengths of the progressive movement: electoral power at the federal and city level. A progressive President could direct money and projects to mayors, thereby ending the scourge of inner-city poverty that has plagued America for far too long. Progressives have a long history of creating more jobs, but have failed to articulate an argument for why that is true. That is mainly because progressives have preferred an active monetary policy, rather than active fiscal policy, to boost employment. But voters struggle to understand monetary policy. On the other hand, they could understand a universal job guarantee. ...

The biggest opposition to a government job guarantee will almost certainly come from big business, and particularly the business-conservative wing of the Republican Party. This may seem surprising, since businesses would benefit from infrastructure and public works, as well as having a highly trained workforce. But this is to misunderstand what corporations seek: not profit, but power.

Economist Chris Dillow makes this argument, arguing that full employment would deprive business of political power by removing their mystical power over the “state of confidence.” If, in fact, the government can maintain full employment, it won’t have to kowtow to business on taxes, regulation and spending. There are also labor implications. If workers could chose to reject a private sector job knowing that a public sector job was available, business would actually have to make working conditions livable and pay a fair wage. This “reserve army of unemployed paupers,” as one economist called them, ensures that workers accept degradation on the job rather than suffer the horrifying fate of unemployment.

And so O'Malley shows his true colors as a fighter of progressives rather than a progressive fighter, doing his job to help the Democratic Party keep the primaries safe for Hillary:

Martin O’Malley Ad Hits Not Hillary Clinton — But Bernie Sanders?

Let’s say you’re running underdog Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s Super PAC. What’s the first order of business?

Could it be: Convincing voters he has a shot? Trying to chip away at the Hillary Clinton colossus?

Well, in the mixed-up world of presidential politics, where it’s sometimes not entirely clear whether candidates are running for president or jockeying for the vice presidential nod, O’Malley’s Super PAC on Thursday released an ad slamming not Hillary Clinton — but fellow underdog Bernie Sanders. ...

The O’Malley attack on Bernie appeared online only shortly after Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a close ally of the Hillary Clinton campaign, appeared on MSNBC this morning to bash Sanders. “I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie that he’s a socialist,” McCaskill said on MSNBC.

[As if McCaskill would recognize a socialist if one bit her on the ass. - js]

During the 2008 presidential election, O’Malley co-chaired the business-friendly Democratic Leadership Council, authoring an opinion column with Harold Ford to persuade his party not to drift too far to the left. He also served as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination

US supreme court strikes down Obama's EPA limits on mercury pollution

Justices invalidate new rules in move that could make Environmental Protection Agency more vulnerable to challenges to new regulations on carbon emissions

The US supreme court struck down new rules for America’s biggest air polluters on Monday, dealing a blow to the Obama administration’s efforts to set limits on the amount of mercury, arsenic and other toxins coal-fired power plants can spew into the air, lakes and rivers.

The 5-4 decision was a major setback to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and could leave the agency more vulnerable to legal challenges to its other new carbon pollution rules, from industries and Republican-led states.

The justices embraced the arguments from the industry and 21 Republican-led states that the EPA rules were prohibitively expensive and amounted to government overreach. ...

Monday’s decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that the EPA did not reasonably consider the cost factor when drafting the toxic air-pollution regulations.

The Clean Air Act had directed the EPA to create rules to regulate power plants for mercury and other toxic pollutants that were “appropriate and necessary”. ...

Scalia was joined in overturning the rule by the more conservative members of the bench, Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy . The dissent, written by Elena Kagan, was supported by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.