Big Oil ignores Pentagon lies

on the day that the US military starts declaring al-qaeda destroied or cripped, the oil price reaches some high point due to fear of a turkish incursion.

looks like those economic analysists undersatnd, that al-qaeda is not the most important force in the Iraq debacle?

and that US victory declarations are not worth the paper that they are printed on.

absurde claim by heritage

the heritage foundation is lauding the faked petraeus numbers with an absurd claim:

When the media covered the Petraeus-Crocker hearings, they missed one really big story: With about 160,000 combat troops, Gen. Petraeus managed to stem the rising tide of violence in Iraq. That is a statistic worth noting because, according to the “experts,” it couldn’t be done.

instead of noting the faked numbers or at least noting, that a reduction to the 2006 deathtoll numbers is NOT good, they get everything completely wrong

Petraeus fishy numbers

via talking points, a NYTimes article is looking back at the numbers:

Stephen Biddle, a scholar at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, said Petraeus's December number was "very high" but was likely the result of "statistical noise" — the tendency of Iraq numbers to jump all over the place. Biddle was an adviser to Petraeus last spring but believes the general's testimony was "potentially misleading" because it didn't discuss all the reasons why the numbers might have improved.

the times of course is not fully evaluating their sources:

Biddle was challenged by Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former top Defense Department official in the Reagan administration. Korb said there has been no decrease in violence in Iraq. He noted that August's death toll was higher than July's and pointed to several reports, including a Government Accountability Office study that found no decrease in violence through July. Finally, Korb cited little-reported numbers released by the Pentagon a week after Petraeus testified, which Korb said showed an increase in civilian casualties since the surge began.

and this claim is MORE than fishy:

Petraeus came up with his "over 45 percent" decline by comparing December 2006 and this past August. The December number, in particular, stands out as questionable. For almost all of 2006, the U.S. military count of civilian deaths ran lower than Iraq Body Count's numbers. But the Petraeus number for December, the starting point for measuring the impact of the surge, suddenly leaped 12 percent above the group's, before plunging back well below it.

Kurds trying to sell their oil

it looks like the Kurds are trying to make deals without asking the Baghdad government:

Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has signed new oil deals in defiance of Baghdad's wishes but the landlocked region still needs central government approval before it can export any oil.

their biggest problem is, that the only way to get rid of their oil is via turkey, and the Turks do not want to strengthen the Kurds...

blackwater reports itself

yes, blackwater wrote the report investigating blackwater:

A Blackwater contractor wrote an initial U.S. government report about how his colleagues killed Iraqi civilians in a September shooting that strained U.S.-Iraqi relations, government and industry sources told CNN.

if it was not the truth, you could not believe it.