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Wednesday, February 21, 2007 |
DemocracyNow: "After a long negotiation process involving US officials, the Iraqi government is considering a new oil law that would establish a framework for managing the third-largest oil reserves in the world.
Financially, it legalizes very unfair types of contracts that will put Iraq in very long-term contracts that can go up to thirty-five years and cause the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars from Iraqis for no cause.
And the second point is concerning Iraq's sovereignty. Iraq will not be capable of controlling the levels - the limits of production, which means that Iraq cannot be a part of OPEC anymore. And Iraq will have this very complicated institution called the Federal Oil and Gas Council, that will have representatives from the foreign oil companies on the board of it, so representatives from, let's say, ExxonMobil and Shell and British Petroleum will be on the federal board of Iraq approving their own contracts.
The law is seen by many Iraqi analysts as a separation for Iraq fund. The law will authorize all of the regional and small provinces' authorities. It will give them the final say to deal with the oil, instead of giving this final say to central federal government, so it will open the doors for splitting Iraq into three regions or even maybe three states in the very near future."
VanityFair: "Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the 'body shops' - SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year - sells brainpower, including a lot of the 'expertise' behind the Iraq war.
SAIC maintains its headquarters in San Diego, but its center of gravity is in Washington, D.C. With a workforce of 44,000, it is the size of a full-fledged government agency - in fact, it is larger than the departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined. Its anonymous glass-and-steel Washington office - a gleaming corporate box like any other - lies in northern Virginia, not far from the headquarters of the C.I.A., whose byways it knows quite well. (More than half of SAIC's employees have security clearances.) SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008.
It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In Washington these companies go by the generic name 'body shops' - they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can."
12:08:11 PM 
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BBC: "Labour-supporting actor Richard Wilson says he suffered a 'nasty and frightening' loss of heart in Prime Minister Tony Blair over the Iraq war.
Mr Wilson, who played Victor Meldrew in TV comedy One Foot in the Grave, has been a member of the party for years.
But interviewed for the parliamentary House Magazine, he said the Iraq invasion had been 'a big no-no for me'.
He said he had thought he would never be 'deeply upset' by the way Labour had 'by and large moved to the right'.
In 2003, Mr Wilson wore a gag during a protest against the war in Parliament Square, London. He and other stage actors, including Joseph Fiennes and Sheila Hancock, wore gags before reading out extracts from a Greek anti-war comedy.
Mr Wilson made his critical remarks ahead of his appearance in a new political play Whipping It Up.
A message from Tony.
Stop the war.
11:54:33 AM
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AlterNet: "While America is obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid."
11:42:58 AM
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CommonDreams: "An appeals court on Tuesday upheld the part of a tough anti-terrorism law signed by President George W. Bush that took away the rights of Guantanamo prisoners to challenge their detention before U.S. federal judges.
By a 2-1 vote, the appellate panel handed the Bush administration a major victory and ruled that the law removed federal court jurisdiction over the pending cases brought by the prisoners.
'Federal courts have no jurisdiction in these cases,' Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the court majority in his 25-page opinion.
There currently are about 395 detainees being held at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The first prisoners arrived more than five years ago following the September 11 attacks.
The appeals court rejected the argument by lawyers for the prisoners that the law unconstitutionally suspends their right to challenge their imprisonment.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the military tribunal system that Bush initially created to try Guantanamo prisoners, he went to the Republican-controlled Congress and got authority under the law signed in October.
Judge Judith Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, dissented and said the new law was inconsistent with the Constitution's clause limiting the suspension of habeas corpus, a long-standing principle of U.S. law."
And then there is also this:
ABCNews: "The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) won't say what it plans to do with thousands of dollars in campaign donations it received from an accused terror financier.
Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari gave $15,250 to the NRCC since 2002, according to FEC records published on the Web site opensecrets.org.
On Friday, Alishtari pled not guilty to funding terrorism and other crimes, including financial fraud.
The indictment against Alishtari unsealed in Manhattan federal court Friday charges him with providing material support to terrorists by transferring $152,000 between banks to allegedly be used to purchase night-vision goggles and other equipment needed for a terrorist training camp."
11:39:14 AM
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