This evening's music features Chicago blues slide guitarist and singer, Johnny Littlejohn.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

CIA Torture Tactics Reemerge in New York Prison

Over 60 inmates at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility have complained of abuse by prison guards in the wake of the June escape of convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt.

According to a New York Times report, they allege that the prison staff interrogated them by beating them, placing them in solitary confinement, and in at least one inmate’s case, throwing a bag over his head and threatening to waterboard him.

Hearing about the domestic use of tactics so similar to those used by the CIA on suspected terrorists during the Bush administration, the Reverend Ron Stief, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, made the obvious connection.

“Faith and human rights leaders who worked to stop the CIA’s torture program have long feared its corroding influence on our civilian authorities,” he said in a statement. “These events prove that we must fight the torture of Americans here at home just as we have fought the use of torture abroad.”

Facial Recognition Software Moves From Overseas Wars to Local Police

Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse. ...

The software can identify 16,000 points on a person’s face — to determine the distance between the eyes or the shape of the lips, for instance — and compare them with thousands of similar points in police booking or other photos at a rate of more than one million faces a second.

The technology is so new that experts say they are unaware of major legal challenges. In some cities, though, a backlash is stirring.

In Northern California, the Oakland City Council, under pressure from residents and civil liberties advocates, scaled back plans this year for a federally financed center that would have linked surveillance equipment around the city, including closed-circuit cameras, gunshot microphones and license plate readers. It also formed a committee to limit the use of this equipment and to develop privacy standards, like how long data may be kept and who will have access to it. ...

Yet the F.B.I. is pushing ahead with its $1 billion Next Generation Identification program, in which the agency will gather data like fingerprints, iris scans and photographs, as well as information collected through facial recognition software. That software is capable of analyzing driver’s license photos and images from the tens of thousands of surveillance cameras around the country. The F.B.I. system will eventually be made accessible to more than 18,000 local, state, federal and international law enforcement agencies.

But people who are not criminal suspects are included in the database, and the error rate for the software is as high as 20 percent — meaning the authorities could misidentify millions of people.

Tony Blair Should Be 'Dragged in Shackles to Court' Over Iraq War

The father of a soldier killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq said Wednesday that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be tried as a war criminal, as military families pledged to take legal action against the UK government if it does not publish a long-delayed investigation into the war.

"I'd like to see Tony Blair dragged in shackles off to court as a war criminal because we have to bear in mind 180 British service personnel were killed here, over 3,500 wounded, two million Iraqis fled Iraq, over 100,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed," Reg Keys, who lost his son, Lance Corporal Tom Keys, during the 2003 invasion, told the BBC.

Keys is part of a group of 29 families that on Wednesday threatened to sue the inquiry's lead investigator, Sir John Chilcot, if he does not set a date of publication for the report within two weeks.

Stalling publication of the Chilcot Inquiry is keeping grieving families of slain veterans from getting "closure," he added. The families have called the delay "morally reprehensible."

Turkey headed for more elections after coalition talks break down

Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s efforts to forge a coalition alliance with the country’s pro-secular party have failed, edging Turkey closer to another round of elections.

Davutoğlu told reporters on Thursday that the two party leaders had not reached common ground for a power-sharing deal.

His Islamic-rooted ruling party, AKP, lost its majority in June elections, forcing it to seek a coalition alliance in order to remain in power. More elections are likely to be called if no government is formed by the end of next week.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was reported to favour renewed elections later in the year, in the hope that the ruling party – which he founded – can regain parliamentary majority. Officials say the party’s grassroots are also opposed to a coalition with the pro-secular party.

Israeli Troops Furious at New West Bank Rules of Engagement

Troops Can't Shoot Fleeing Palestinians in the Back Anymore

Israeli soldiers are acting with outrage tonight after news that the military has temporarily revised the rules of engagement for combat soldiers in the occupied West Bank, centering on efforts to prevent gunfire except in genuine cases of threats to the lives of soldiers.

The ban, for instance, explicitly forbids shooting fleeing rock-throwers in the back, and likewise warns that if a car runs through a checkpoint without trying to run people over, the military isn’t to just fire willy-nilly into the sides of it. ... Israeli soldiers termed the new rules “bizarre,” saying they are all in “total shock” at the sudden efforts to tamp down shooting at Palestinians.

Chelsea Manning may face solitary confinement for having magazine in cell

Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier serving a 35-year military prison sentence for leaking official secrets, has been threatened with indefinite solitary confinement for having an expired tube of toothpaste in her cell and being found in possession of the Caitlyn Jenner Vanity Fair issue, according to her lawyers and supporters.

Manning, a Guardian columnist who writes about global affairs, intelligence issues and transgender rights from prison in the brig of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has allegedly been charged with four violations of custody rules that her lawyers have denounced as absurd and a form of harassment. The army private is reportedly accused of having showed “disrespect”; of having displayed “disorderly conduct” by sweeping food onto the floor during dinner chow; of having kept “prohibited property” – that is books and magazines – in her cell; and of having committing “medicine misuse”, referring to the tube of toothpaste, according to Manning’s supporters.

The maximum punishment for such offences is an indeterminate amount of time in a solitary confinement cell.

The fourth charge, “medicine misuse”, follows an inspection of Manning’s cell on 9 July during which a tube of anti-cavity toothpaste was found. The prison authorities noted that Manning was entitled to have the toothpaste in her cell, but is penalizing her because it was “past its expiration date of 9 April 2015”.

CIA Whistleblower to Civil Rights Groups: Where are You?

In the letter published at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jeffrey Sterling, who is black, specifically calls out the NAACP, National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Congressional Black Caucus, writing "I saw you when other black faces were either killed or mistreated." But, to these civil rights groups, he writes, he is "invisible."

In a case that relied on circumstantial evidence, Sterling was convicted in January on nine separate felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.

As torture whistleblower John Kiriakou previously explained, Sterling "didn’t sell secrets to the Russians. He didn’t trade intelligence for personal gain." He continues:

He reported to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA had botched an operation to feed false information about nuclear technology to Iran — and may have actually helped Iran’s enrichment program instead.

Largely based on this, the government accused Sterling of leaking details about the program to journalist James Risen, who wrote about it in his book State of War.

Even worse, the feds claimed that Sterling, who is black, did it out of resentment over a failed racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency — in effect using Sterling’s willingness to stand up for his rights against him.

"Where were you when I, one of the first black officers to do so, filed a discrimination suit against the Central Intelligence Agency?" Sterling asks in his letter.

"Where were you when the justice system of the United States dismissed my discrimination suit because the U.S. government maintained that trying my suit would endanger national security?" ...

"I am now in prison for a crime I did not commit," he writes. "Where are you?"

SEC Admits It’s Not Monitoring Stock Buybacks to Prevent Market Manipulation

The Securities and Exchange Commission has admitted that it has no ability to enforce the main rule intended to prevent market manipulation when companies buy back their own stock, and has no intention to do so.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White made the acknowledgement in a response to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., who queried the agency about stock buybacks. Baldwin is one of a growing number of politicians — including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — who are citing buybacks as an example of deliberate financial engineering that bolsters concentration of wealth and keeps working-class wages stagnant.

Stock buybacks are an increasingly common practice in which corporations take profits, and instead of investing in facilities, research and development, or boosting worker wages, buy shares of their own stock on the open market, thereby boosting demand and driving up its price. Companies bought back over half a trillion dollars’ worth of their own shares last year.

The practice creates short-term rewards for executives who are paid in stock and stock options, and benefit from an increased price. They also make corporate earnings look better by reducing outstanding shares and increasing the commonly reported ratio of earnings-per-share.

The Clinton campaign could use a public disruption from Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter movement has had two major run-ins with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, both of which left him flustered. ... But the confrontations worked; Sanders’s immediate reaction was to draft a policy plan for racial justice that has been praised by important members of the Black Lives Matter movement. The plan calls for ending employment discrimination based on criminal history and steering people with drug problems into treatment rather than jail cells, among other progressive changes. ...

As the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton should be pushed and challenged publicly too, especially since her views may not align with the rights agenda Black Lives Matter is pushing. The enemies of Black Lives Matter are racism, sexism, homo/transphobia and capitalist exploitation. Clinton opposed gay marriage until 2013. Among the Black Lives matter list of demands are an end to mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, which both grew exponentially under her husband’s administration. Clinton also has a record of racially divisive rhetoric. She turned to race baiting in 2008, claiming she was the candidate with the best chance of winning the general election because she could attract more working-class white voters than Obama, presumably based solely off of her whiteness. She was subsequently admonished by the black political organization ColorofChange. Black Lives Matter also is devoted to progress for the poor, while Ms. Clinton is a favorite of big banks on Wall Street. ...

Clinton’s record, unlike Sanders, says she can never be completely trusted, but must chased and forced into dialogue. The Black Lives Matter movement cannot simply accept carefully worded responses and classic Clinton political platitudes in private meetings. She must be forced to answer for the shortcomings of her political career, many of which are tied to race and class, and to do so publicly. She should have to come face to face with a generation of black youth who lost their fathers and mothers to her husband’s failed drug policies. Occasionally, she should not be permitted to speak at all. Thus far, that strategy has yielded better results than backdoor meetings.

Also of interest:

Hillary Clinton on the Sanctity of Protecting Classified Information

Hunger-Striking Detainee Tests Obama’s Will to Close Guantánamo

This is the real Cuba: a timeline of gripping photography since the 50s

Jeremy Corbyn replies to Blair warning: I don't do personal, I don't do abuse

U.S. Jets Meet Limit as Iraqi Ground Fight Against ISIS Plods On

The Growing Danger of Israeli Teens Waging Jewish Jihad