This video is called Raed Jarrar on the Iraq Oil Law. It says about itself:
Raed Jarrar is an Iraqi blogger who obtained a leaked copy of the Iraq Oil Law before it was known to the public.
By James Cogan:
Corporate oil giants scramble to plunder Iraq’s energy reserves
18 December 2007
When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki finally sent the so-called “oil law” to be passed by the parliament in July, George Bush phoned to congratulate him personally. Maliki’s failure to push the legislation through had been a source of growing frustration and anger in Washington for more than a year. The law was needed to legitimise one of the main aims of the illegal US invasion of Iraq—to allow foreign corporations to assume control over the country’s state-owned energy resources on the most lucrative of terms.
Bush’s congratulations—made on behalf of the major oil corporations and their share-holders—were premature however. The rival Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions of the Iraqi ruling elite have still not agreed on the legislation due to their bitter and increasingly intractable differences over how to divide the revenues that would flow to the Baghdad government. Five months after the law was sent for ratification, it is still tied up in debates within a parliamentary committee, with few indications as to when, or in what form, it will to be passed.
US backs Turkish military attacks on northern Iraq: here.
Lieberman Peddles the Old Iraq-9/11 Connection: here.
The US has drastically escalated its aerial assault on Iraq and Afghanistan, below the radar of the corporate media: here.
US soldiers’ revolt in Iraq: here.
Iraq Slashes Food Rations, Putting Lives at Risk: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
HOW BUSH SUPPORTED TROOPS IN 2007
1. Required that soldiers discharged early because of
battlefield injuries repay their enlistment bonuses.
2. Sent the longest-serving National Guard unit home after 729
days of combat in Iraq – one day shy of the 730 that the
soldiers needed to qualify for education benefits.
3. Omitted 20,000 cases of brain trauma from the official tally
of troops injured in Iraq.
4. Denied medical benefits to 22,000 veterans suffering from
post-traumatic stress by discharging them for having enlisted
with “pre-existing personality disorders”.
*
Rolling Stone Magazine
December 27 2007 – January 10 2008 issue
page 88
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This Date in Bush History 12/20: “villain of the year”
Posted by: “frankofbos” FrankOfBos@yahoo.com frankofbos
Thu Dec 20, 2007 3:33 pm (PST)
With the end of the year approaching, its traditionally a time to
look back. So with that in mind I’m posting Bush blunders tied to
the current date thru year-end. With a 2008 election year around the
corner maybe history can teach us a thing or two before we cast our
next presidential vote ….
On this Date in Bush History 12/20: “amateurish & unreliable”
2000: President-elect Bush says today: “Natural gas is hemispheric. I
like to call it hemispheric in nature, because it is a product that
we can find in our own neighborhoods.”
2004: A memo by three-star general James ‘Ron’ Helmly, dated today,
revealed a “deepening concern” about troop readiness in the Army
Reserve. Helmly said that the Reserve is rapidly degenerating into
a “broken” force. The general’s letter is more evidence of the harm
done to the U.S. military’s capabilities by the tremendous strain
caused by the Iraq war.
2006: An AP-AOL News telephone poll is being conducted today. From
December 19th through the 21st, just over 1000 adults from every
state in the continental U.S. were queried: “If you were asked to
name a famous person to be the biggest villain of the year, whom
would you choose?” The most frequent answer, given by one out of four
respondents, was George W. Bush.
2006: A report prepared for the government’s Intelligence Science
Board is released this month. The report reviews techniques used by
the government to obtain information from captives. The report
concluded: “the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist
attacks are outmoded, amateurish, and unreliable”. Specialists say
that there is no proof that harsh interrogation techniques are the
best way to get information. Billions are spent on new technologies
such as spy satellites but the government invests little in the study
and development of interrogation techniques, an essential tool in the
age of terror. The study suggests that methodologies developed by
experienced police detectives could be helpful additions to the
government’s interrogation tool set. Given that this is the
administration that gave us the botched response to Katrina and the
botched occupation of Iraq, “amateurish, and unreliable”
interrogation techniques seem par for the course.
Excerpted from the 2008 Bush Calendar:
http://www.PoorGeorgesAlmanac.com/onThisDate.htm
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11.
Who Are the Insurgents?
Posted by: “bigraccoon” bigraccoon@earthlink.net redwoodsaurus
Thu Dec 20, 2007 3:41 pm (PST)
Who Are the Insurgents?
The Progressive
Dahr Jamail reviews “Meeting Resistance ”
“Suppose Iraq invaded America. And an Iraqi soldier was on a tank passing through an American street, waving his gun at the people, threatening them, raiding and trashing houses. Would you accept that? This is why no Iraqi can accept occupation, and don¹t be surprised by their reactions,” says “The Imam,” a young man from a mixed Sunni-Shia family, as he explains the genesis of the insurgency in Iraq and its exponential growth. He is one of the protagonists that Meeting Resistance presents as unmistakable evidence that the root cause of the conflict in Iraq is the occupation itself. The film has resistance fighters themselves tell their story.
Journalists-turned-filmmakers Molly Bingham and Steve Connors were compelled to film this documentary during their early reporting of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. They used the al-Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad to explore and depict an insurgency that has been caricatured by the Bush Administration.
Bingham, who has reported previously from Rwanda, the Gaza Strip, and Iran, was the official photographer to the Office of the Vice President of the United States from 1998 to 2001. She believes that it is imperative to understand the people within the resistance if the United States is to find a solution to the Iraq quagmire.
Bingham teamed up with Connors, a photographer who has covered ten conflicts and is a former British soldier who served in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s. Between the two of them they share thirty-three years of experience in covering conflicts around the globe.
In August of 2003, they began working on the film. The project kept them in Baghdad for ten months, as Connors filmed and Bingham wrote the script.
The eighty-five-minute groundbreaking film focuses on ten members of the Iraqi resistance. Interspersed with stunning footage of the aftermath of car bomb attacks, of frightened soldiers aiming their weapons at crowds of Iraqis, and of burning remains of destroyed military vehicles, the meat of the film is the words of the fighters themselves.
“I felt a fire in my heart,” one of them recounts. “When they occupied Iraq, they subjugated me, subjugated my sister, subjugated my mother, subjugated my honor, my homeland. Every time I saw them I felt pain. They pissed me off, so I started working [in the resistance].”
The complex nature of their lives speaks to the intricacies of the Iraqi resistance.
“The Teacher,” for instance, is married with three children, and always loathed the Ba’ath Party. “The Wife” is a Shiite woman who works as a courier, carrying messages and weapons between groups when she is not watching her two children. Other members, Sunni and Shia alike, work as consultants, weapon producers, and strategists.
In the spring of 2004, a twenty six-year-old photographer in Baghdad told me in an interview that “this is not a rebellion, this is a resistance against the occupation. The media concentrates on the Americans, and does not care about Iraqis.” He had been opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein, and had even welcomed the U.S. invasion, but had quickly grown weary of watching his fellow countrymen humiliated and killed by the occupiers. Like the people in Meeting Resistance, he had subsequently taken up arms.
Connors understands this frustration toward Western media coverage of the occupation. “A major weapon in the arsenal of a modern military is the use of information operations,” he says. “These operations, which often take the form of misinformation or disinformation, are directed as much at the enemy population as it is at our own population, without whose support the military cannot continue to execute a war.”
He aims to counteract this propaganda.
“To place an opponent like the Iraqi resistance in the human space of ordinary people defending their right to self-determination is to challenge our view of ourselves as liberators,” says Connors.
While laying bare the motivations of the resistance, the film also does a forceful job of dispelling other myths.
One of the interviewed, referred to as “The Republican Guard” since he was a career officer in Saddam Hussein’s military, is a Sunni married to a Shia woman. “The Sunni and Shia are bound together by blood and family ties,” he explains. “I am married to a Shia, my sister is married to a Shia. I can¹t kill my own children’s uncles or kill my wife, the mother of my children.”
One scene includes a butcher hacking away at a side of beef. “Iraq is our homeland, it’s our Iraq,” he says. “If you don’t defend your land, you will not defend your honor.”
The film recognizes that the resistance has the tacit support of a large percentage of the population, even though the Bush Administration doesn’t acknowledge this.
“The Administration chooses to portray people who oppose their will in Iraq as terrorists or extremists who live on the fringes of Iraqi society, isolated from their own countrymen,” says Bingham. “Without doubt some individuals involved in attacking U.S. troops are ‘extreme’ in their beliefs, and they are relentless fighters in the pursuit of their goals, but they are very human and very much part of the social structure of Iraqi society, and move within it. If we removed the context of occupation‹in all its forms‹from Iraq, most of them would stand down and return to their lives.”
Aside from screenings at international film festivals and numerous private and public shows, Connors and Bingham screened the film at West Point, the U.S. Marine Corps staff college at Quantico, and Baghdad.
Bingham feels that the film represented a radically different perspective to the military personnel who viewed it.
“The bulk of the people were taking on new information that was a dramatic paradigm shift for them,” she says. “To see their enemy as largely fighting for their homeland because of nationalism and religion, rather than being terrorists, is a big deal.”
Dahr Jamail is the author of the recently released book “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1931859477?ie=UTF8&tag=dahjamsmiddis-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1931859477
Jamail spent eight months reporting from Iraq, and has been covering the Middle East for over four years for the Inter Press Service, The Sunday Herald, Foreign Policy in Focus, and The Independent, among others.
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On this Date in Bush History 12/21: Jack Abramoff
Posted by: “frankofbos” FrankOfBos@yahoo.com
Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:31 pm (PST)
With the end of the year approaching, its traditionally a time to look back. So with that in mind I’m posting Bush blunders tied to the current date thru year-end. With a 2008 election year around the corner maybe history can teach us a thing or two before we cast our next presidential vote ….
On this Date in Bush History 12/21: Jack Abramoff
“There is neither honour nor gain, got in dealing with a vil-lain.”
Ben Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1733
2005: The Washington Post reports today that disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff is close to reaching a plea deal. In early 2006 Abramoff did indeed plead guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe government officials. The Abramoff scandal reached into the Bush White House when former aide David Safavian was found guilty of lying and obstructing justice concerning his dealings with Abramoff. Other events hint at broader White House Abramoff links.
The LA Times reported that in the U.S. territory of Guam a grand jury had opened an investigation of Mr. Abramoff, issuing a subpoena in 2002. Just one day later the investigation’s chief prosecutor found himself demoted by President Bush. He had held that job for over ten years but was replaced by Leonardo Rapadas, a man Guam Republicans had reportedly recommended to Karl Rove. The Abramoff probe ended a short time later.
Other documents found in Abramoff’s files indicated that Abramoff requested and received $9 million dollars from President Omar Bongo of the African country of Gabon to arrange for a meeting with President Bush. In May 2004 President Bush did, in fact, meet Gabon’s president. A White House spokesperson said that the meeting was “routine” and went “through normal staffing channels”.
“We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.” President Bush, June 18th 2001, seemingly unaware that Africa is a continent, not a nation.
2006: Condoleezza Rice coldly states today that the lives and money lost in Iraq were “worth the investment”.
Excerpted from the 2008 Bush Calendar:
http://www.PoorGeorgesAlmanac.com/onThisDate.htm
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