Turkey conducted mass raids of journalists and a media organizations today. The targets of the raids were those who support Fethullah Gulea, a U.S. cleric and opponent of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. More from The Guardian here.

Among the 31 people arrested: Ekrem Dumanli, the editor-in-chief of the Zaman daily newspaper. The paper is known for its exposure of government corruption.

Those held include an executive of Samanyolu television, also seen as close to Gulen, as well as a TV director, producers, scriptwriters and some police officers. Arrest warrants were issued for a total of 31 people, the official Anatolia news agency reported.

Among the offenses charged: "Using intimidation and threats" to "form a gang to try and seize state sovereignty", "forgery" and "slander."

I was watching this develop on the newspaper's Twitter feed last night. The raids were expected and 2,000 people gathered outside the Zaman's headquarters in support of the media and particularly the editor. Check out this short video. [More...]

Former President GW Bush was interviewed on CNN about the Torture Report. He said:

Whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it's way off base..... The CIA are patriots and ...."really good people and we're lucky as a nation to have them.

We're luckier not to have GW Bush in charge anymore.

Update: Memo to GW Bush: It's not cool to defend those who commit rape and forced sodomy. "Good people" don't threaten to rape or cut the throat of another person's mother. These "good" CIA officers have also put our military at risk to have the same done to them. As Afghan President Ashrafn Ghani correctly observed, "When a person is tortured in an inhumane way, the reaction will be inhumane."

Indian police have put Shami Witness' Twitter Account back online so they can investigate his tweets and all the people who followed him. All of his tweets are here. (You can read them without following him.)

You can also read what his supporters are saying about his arrest at the hashtag #FreeShamiWitness. [More...]

"Shami Witness", the prolific tweeter about ISIS who was outed Friday by a British news channel, has been arrested in India. He's being investigated for a violation of the Information Technology Act.

Mehdi Masroor Biswas, the person behind Twitter handle "@shamiwitness", is a 24-year-old engineer who worked for a multinational in Bengaluru, police said. He moved to the city in 2011 and stays in Bengaluru's upscale southeast suburb. Police said he is an alumnus of West Bengal Institute of Technology.

Sources say Mehdi did not have any direct link with Al Qaida or Islamic State group and nothing as yet suggests he was in direct touch with any jihadi element....So far, no anti-India activity or tweets posted by Mehdi have been found. Nothing has been found to infer Mehdi suggested any attacks in India, say sources.

[More...]

Here's a new open thread. All topics welcome.

Give it away, Give it away now. [Red Hot Chile Peppers]

While most of the Congressional news today is about the $1 trillion spending bill and the potential government shutdown (which won't happen), I'm more concerned about the $600 billion Defense Authorization bill that passed the Senate today and now goes to Obama to sign.

War-spending is a bottomless pit. The bill provides $521.3 billion for the military and $63.7 billion for overseas operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. [More....]

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved Sen. Melendez' draft of an Authorization for the Use of Force against ISIS. It has a three year sunset provision, unless reauthorized. It also provides that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Force will sunset 3 years after this one takes effect.

The authorization excludes the use of ground forces with exceptions (see below.) The White House has said so long as 5 conditions were met, it would support the authorization. (See below for the State Department's reaction to the committee's approval.)

The full text of the bill is here. [More....]

Time for a new open thread. All topics welcome.

Via Newsweek and several other media sites: ISIS is offering to return the body of James Foley for $1 million. The family has not confirmed the report.

Also today, a news station disclosed the identity of Shami Witness, one of ISIS most ardent supporters on Twitter. He was followed by 17,000 people (including 2/3 of foreign fighters) with 2 million views of his tweets each month. The station did not disclose his full name, but they said he goes by the name Mehdi and "he is an executive in Bangalore working for an Indian conglomerate." Here's an article on him. I've used this article he wrote a few times in my posts on ISIS.

The judge in the Oscar Pistorius trial has ruled the state can appeal her judgment of culpable homicide and dismissal of the murder charge against Pistorius. She ruled that she can't say it's a remote possibility that the appeals court might rule differently on the legal issue of whether dolus eventualis applies.

She refused to allow the state to appeal Oscar's sentence for culpable homicide. She said that's a factual ruling and she made it based on the evidence presented. So if the appeals court upholds the judge's ruling dismissing the murder charge, his sentence cannot be increased.

Based on the cases she cited in her original ruling dismissing the murder charge, and some related cases in South Africa I looked at, I think the judge was correct in her legal ruling. I don't think the state proved Oscar had the necessary intent for a murder conviction. Dolus eventualis exists when an accused foresees that his conduct poses a risk that an unlawful killing might occur, reconciles himself to the risk, and decides to proceed anyway. There was no evidence Oscar contemplated that risk. He was operating under a mistaken assumption of fact. That his assumption was wrong does not translate to intent. Intent is a subjective test. [More...]

Dick Cheney, former CIA officials Michael Hayden and Jose Rodriguez, and even the $80 million contract psychologists claim details in the newly released Senate Torture Report are "hooey" and "a bunch of crap" or they didn't know about the use of the techniques like "rectal feeding" and the program worked.

Their protestations are pointless. This report is the latest, but certainly not the only report containing many of the same details they dispute.

Just one example: Take a look at the 2013 extensively sourced report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition. (Interestingly, it accounts for 136 detainees who were subjected to CIA secret detention and/or extraordinary rendition operations, while the Senate Report lists only 119.)

I'll focus on just one of the "mistaken identity" detainees -- Khalid Sheikh al-Masri (also known as Khaled Sheikh el-Masri.) There are many reports about him, as well as court decisions, here and in Europe. [More...]

The U.S. Senate Select Committee's release of the 525 page summary (available here) of its 6,000 page report of the CIA's detention and interrogation program under the Bush Administration finally puts to rest the false claim that the United States does not torture. The report shows the CIA not only tortured, it lied about it.

The report names the 119 detainees held by the CIA in overseas black sites. 26 of them were detained due to mistaken identity or erroneous intelligence. Even today, some Republicans took to the airwaves to defend the CIA's actions.

The world is watching and wondering, where are the prosecutions? The United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, today issued this statement. [More..]