Evening Blues Preview 4-13-15

This evening's music features blues songwriter and guitarist from New Orleans, Earl King.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

Twelve Years Later, US Media Still Can’t Get Iraqi WMD Story Right

This past fall The New York Times began publishing a powerful, ongoing series revealing the U.S. military’s mistreatment of soldiers who were exposed to decades-old chemical weapons during Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to The Times, between 2004 and 2011 U.S. troops stumbled across about 5,000 Iraqi chemical munitions of various types, and at least 17 American personnel, mostly bomb disposal experts, were wounded by them. All of the ordnance was manufactured by Iraq prior to the 1991 Gulf War, during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Much of the conservative media has seized on the Times articles as long-awaited, sweet vindication of Bush’s case for war. According to Rush Limbaugh, it is now proven that “Saddam Hussein was doing and had done pretty much everything he was being accused of that justified that invasion.”

And the conservative glee is understandable: after all, Bush said Iraq had WMD, and here they are. Unfortunately for the right, however, they are just as wrong about this issue now as they were in 2003 — but for a peculiar, little-understood reason: Saddam Hussein was not trying to hide the chemical munitions found by the U.S. Just the opposite, in fact.

In an interview with The Intercept, Charles Duelfer, head of the CIA’s definitive post-war investigation of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, explained that “Saddam didn’t know he had it … This is stuff Iraqi leaders did not know was left lying around. It was not a militarily significant capability that they were, as a matter of national policy, hiding.”

It is long established that Iraq — with assistance from the U.S. and other Western countries — produced enormous quantities of chemical weapons during its eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s. After Iraq was expelled from Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991, the United Nations Security Council sent inspectors to ensure that Iraq disclosed and destroyed its entire chemical (and biological and nuclear) weapons programs.

Bringing the U.S. Torture Team Justice

I guess Obama, Hillary and the R2P'ers can be rightfully proud of the great job they did in Libya. That regime change thing really worked out great.

Two Embassies in Libya Attacked, the Islamic State Claims Responsibility

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a bomb attack at the Moroccan embassy in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, early on Monday morning, as well as a shooting outside South Korea's embassy hours earlier.

Two people were killed and another injured on Sunday in a drive-by shooting on a security post at the South Korean diplomatic mission. An explosive device was left in a bag at the gates of the Moroccan embassy — which is currently closed — and damaged vehicles nearby, though no injuries have been reported.

The attacks come on the eve of a decisive summit aimed at reconciling the two major factions which claim the right to govern the country. As they fight over who will rule the country, the Islamic State (IS) in Libya continues to assert itself, and remains the strongest branch of the organization outside of Syria and Iraq.

Merkel Sells Nuclear-Capable Sub to Israel Without Consulting EU

Germany's Federal Security Council has approved the export of a fifth submarine to Israel.

It's the penultimate submarine promised to Israel by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and will be handed over by the company Thyssen Krupp. ...

Germany's Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) builds the new Air Independent Propulsion Dolphins and the decision to sell them has been criticized for two reasons. One, in that German taxpayers are shouldering a third of the cost. ...

Secondly, the vessels are reportedly capable of being equipped with nuclear weapons.


8 Things You Need to Know About Hillary Clinton and Climate Change

It’s strange to remember how bitterly divisive the 2008 Democratic presidential primary battle was. Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s platforms and ideological positioning were awfully similar. And on the chief difference between them — Obama’s less hawkish foreign policy — the victor wiped away that distinction by appointing Clinton as secretary of state. Now Clinton is expected to announce her candidacy on Sunday and is poised to coast through the 2016 Democratic primaries as her party’s prohibitive favorite. Would a Clinton presidency be essentially a third Obama term?

On climate change and energy, it seems the answer is yes. For better and for worse, Clinton’s record and stances are cut from the same cloth as Obama’s. Her close confidant and presumed campaign chair, John Podesta, served as an Obama advisor with a focus on climate policy. Like Obama and Podesta, Clinton certainly seems to appreciate the seriousness of the threat of catastrophic climate change and to strongly support domestic policies and international agreements to reduce carbon emissions. But, like Obama and Podesta, she subscribes to an all-of-the-above energy policy. She promotes domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, including through potentially dangerous fracking.

Recommended:

License to Kill

Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

link

One of America’s biggest banks is going to be protested by an unlikely group on Monday: its employees.

Workers at Wells Fargo and their supporters are to gather in front of the bank’s corporate office in Minneapolis to protest the bank’s alleged predatory practice – mainly the sales quotas imposed on some of its workers.

The quotas, first exposed in a lawsuit filed by a long-term Wells Fargo customer, David Douglas, have led to at least 30 employees opening duplicate accounts, sometimes without customers’ knowledge, in order to inflate their sales numbers. The 30 employees have been fired, according to the Los Angeles Times. The quotas, however, persist.

“When I started and was really struggling with meeting my quota, a few of my co-workers approached me and said: ‘Oh, you are lucky. They reduced the sale quotas’,” Khalid Taha, 27, who works as a personal banker in San Diego, California, told the Guardian. Taha started working for Wells Fargo in November 2013. In 2013, the sales quota for personal bankers like him was to make 20 sales per day, he said. That means bankers had to sell 20 products, such as a new account, overdraft insurance or travel insurance.

“I am not sure how that’s possible within an eight-hour day of work. Pretty much every customer takes an hour,” said Taha. Then, beginning in 2014, “the sales goal dropped to 15 products a day, which is still unreasonable. You don’t sell more than a product per customer. You can, but it’s not that easy. And most of our customers are current customers. They already have several products.”

up
0 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

it will continue to be 2007 until it's October of 1907 or 1929 again.

up
0 users have voted.
NCTim's picture

up
0 users have voted.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -

this is the King:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKY8KIt9kqc width:500 height:500]

up
0 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

up
0 users have voted.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_SlgMu3vDE width:400 height:400]

up
0 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

up
0 users have voted.

up
0 users have voted.
Big Al's picture

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/13/1377444/-Mika-Brzezinski-Utterl...

Words cannot express my contempt for such drivel taking place in this universe. Nor can they express how
fucking insane it is to be presenting an argument between those two cretins as somehow relevant to the
situation we serfs find ourselves in today.

So I won't try.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/13/1377444/-Mika-Brzezinski-Utterl...

up
0 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

gosh, i can't wait for the next exciting installment.

up
0 users have voted.

now that we know what Fox News things, we can all get a good nights sleep.

up
0 users have voted.

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon