This evening's music features r&b singer and sax player Bull Moose Jackson.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting...

Inquiry Weighs Whether ISIS Analysis Was Distorted

The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress, according to several officials familiar with the inquiry.

The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said. ...

The prospect of skewed intelligence raises new questions about the direction of the government’s war with the Islamic State, and could help explain why pronouncements about the progress of the campaign have varied widely.

Centcom Skewed ISIS War Intel To Be More Upbeat

Inspectors General Inform Congress Intel Was Likely 'Reworked'

The perennial positivity of all public Pentagon assessments on the war against ISIS, despite major, glaring losses on the ground, has been a matter of no small controversy for awhile, and has also successfully kept the elected officials who are on the receiving end of those assessments maintaining the war strategy as-is. ...

According to one of the DIA analysts, the agency was providing “draft” versions of their analyses to Centcom, and Centcom was editing the conclusions wholesale to make the war sound like it was going better, then passing along the edited versions to policymakers.

Details of exactly which reports were the result of Centcom’s editing are as yet unclear, but it does explain why, in the wake of every major loss to ISIS, Centcom officials would start crowing about the great progress they are making and how overall, the war is on track. ...

How much of this will ever go public is unclear, but the implications are potentially enormous, as both the White House insistence on staying the course in the war and Congressional talk of doubling down were predicated on these Pentagon assessments that the war was going more or less acceptably, and were subsequently deliberately misled by faulty conclusions being appended to reports which, conclusions aside, were painting the war as going worse and worse.

Bradley Manning, the Nuremberg Charter and Refusing to Collaborate with War Crimes

Can the Supreme Court Force Congress to Own the War on ISIS?

Judicial intervention may be the only way left to break the political impasse on authorizing Obama’s use of force.

The biggest casualty in the struggle against the Islamic State so far has been the American Constitution. One year into the battle, the president and Congress threaten to destroy all serious restraints against open-ended war-making by the commander-in-chief. President Obama waited for half a year before even submitting a draft resolution authorizing his initiative. But it is now obvious that the Republican-controlled Congress finds it politically convenient to stand on the sidelines and let Obama take the blame for the escalating instability. That leaves only the Supreme Court to halt this transformation of the president into a latter-day King George III.

As The Atlantic’s Garrett Epps rightly emphasizes, allowing the president to go unchallenged will produce a terrible precedent. As the rise and rise of Donald Trump suggests, future presidents may make aggressive use of their powers as commander in chief—and they will predictably point to Obama’s unilateral war on ISIS to justify their own military adventures. ...

Existing case-law establishes that individual soldiers can go to court if they are ordered into a combat zone to fight a war that they believe is unconstitutional. During the closing years of the Vietnam War, two federal courts of appeal carefully considered, and unanimously affirmed, the standing of soldiers to bring such complaints.

Heh, note that Obama didn't call to apologize for spying on Japanese officials, he called to apologize because the spying was revealed to the public:

Obama calls Japanese leader to express regret for WikiLeaks spying scandal

Barack Obama has called Japan’s leader to express regret over recent WikiLeaks allegations that the US had spied on senior Japanese officials.

Obama told prime minister Shinzo Abe that he thought the trouble the revelations caused Abe and his government was regrettable, a Japanese government spokesman told reporters. ...

Abe told Obama that the allegations could undermine trust between the countries, and reiterated his request for an investigation of the matter.

Request to impeach Guatemalan president approved by supreme court

The country’s congress will decide whether President Otto Perez, whose administration is reeling from corruption allegations, will be removed from office

The Guatemalan supreme court on Tuesday approved a request by the country’s attorney general to impeach President Otto Perez over his suspected involvement in a racket to siphon customs revenue from the government, and passed the matter to congress for approval.

A number of corruption investigations have devastated Perez’s cabinet and led to the resignation in May of vice-president Roxana Baldetti.

On Sunday, Perez angrily dismissed corruption allegations that have been leveled against him by prosecutors, and he adamantly said he would not resign despite mounting pressure on the government and calls for his impeachment as a presidential election looms. ...

Perez’s conservative administration has spent much of this year mired in public protests and scandals over corruption allegations against senior officials, several of whom the retired general fired during a cabinet purge in May.

History's Lesson for Climate Action: No Other Choice 'But Mass Mobilization'

Joint statement ahead of UN climate talks in Paris declares humanity is "at crossroads" and that only hope is to stop digging up and burning world's remaining fossil fuel reserves

With less than 100 days until high-level UN climate talks take place in Paris, key leaders from the global climate justice movement have come together with a joint statement that affirms their belief that only mass popular mobilizations across the planet demanding a drastic reckoning with the world's fossil fuel paradigm will suffice when it comes to confronting the increasingly dire and intertwined threats of neoliberal capitalism and planetary climate change.

In a pair of "concretely" expressed demands aimed at world leaders, the signatories to the statement say governments must "end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry" and move swiftly to "freeze fossil fuel extraction by leaving untouched 80% of all existing fossil fuel reserves." ...

"For more than 20 years," the statement declares, "governments have been meeting, yet greenhouse gas emissions have not decreased and the climate keeps changing. The forces of inertia and obstruction prevail, even as scientific warnings become ever more dire." ...

Acknowledging their set of demands "implies a great historical shift," the signers of the statement say the globalized justice movement for will no longer "wait for states" to make the needed changes on schedules dictated by the powerful fossil fuel corporations, large agro-businesses, financial elites, or governments in the thrall of such interests.

"Slavery and apartheid did not end because states decided to abolish them," the statement reads. "Mass mobilisations left political leaders no other choice."

Also of interest:

Giant Coal Company Bankruptcy Reveals Secret Ties to Climate Denial, GOP Dark Money Groups

What We Don’t Know About Policing, Race and Mental Illness

Gil Scott-Heron: the revolution lives on

Lockheed Martin Took Taxpayer Dollars, Spent Them Lobbying for More Dollars

The Civilian Toll From the War Against ISIS Is Huge. Why Isn’t the Press Covering It?

Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists