• Listen to this segment with Robert Jensen

Uprising’s guest expert Robert Jensen, sitting in for Maya Rockeymoore – he’s an author and a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, analyzes today’s news headlines:

President Obama is considering taking a number of steps to confront the growing fears over the spread of Ebola in the US, including appointing former Biden staffer, Ron Klain as a so-called “czar” to oversee the national response. The news comes as a second hospital employee who came into contact with Mr. Thomas Eric Duncan at a Dallas hospital has been diagnosed with the disease. With proper treatment the two nurses so far known to be infected are likely to survive. Meanwhile, the US is also ready to supplement its 3000-strong contingent of troops already deployed to Africa to help respond to the crisis, with additional National Guards and other military reserves. The White House is also considering a travel ban from West African nations to the US. Click here for an RT.com article about the National Guard, here for an Al Jazeera article about appointing a Czar, and here for a Guardian article about a travel ban.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is claiming that Islamic State militants are not restricted to ground-battles, but are now apparently flying 3 captured fighter jets with the help of former Iraqi soldiers. Reuters, which reported the claim, has not been able to independently verify it, but if true, it could change the equation of the US war against ISIS. What is also as yet unknown is if the jets are equipped with weapons. ISIS has often used captured weaponry. Click here for a Huffington Post article about the story.

And finally, a 5 year long Senate investigation into Bush-era torture programs at US bases seems to have deliberately avoided taking aim at the role of high-level officials. The report, which is classified, has been touted by Democrats as the authoritative examination of the disturbing reliance of the CIA on torture techniques against terrorism suspects in the years after 9/11. Details of the report were leaked to McClatchy by an anonymous source who is familiar with it, who said, it “does not look at the Bush administration’s lawyers to see if they were trying to literally do an end run around justice and the law.” Instead its focus is on the CIA and what members of Congress knew about the program. Click here for a Commondreams article about the story.