I am in search of any information pertaining to the Order 81. Iraqi Order 81 prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq.
PRESS ACTION

“The American Administrator of the Iraqi CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) government, Paul Bremer, updated Iraq’s intellectual property law to ‘meet current internationally-recognized standards of protection’.
The updated law makes saving seeds for next year’s harvest, practiced by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002, and is the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilizations, to be now illegal.. Instead, farmers will have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified (GM) seeds from American corporations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from seeds developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers like the Iraqis, and shared freely like agricultural ‘open source.’”
GRAIN

It has dawned on me more and more how crucial true information is for the modern world. Not only my first encounters with propaganda, as I did my (compulsory) national service on the Soviet border at the end of the Cold War, and having read George Orwell as well as one of my favourite authors, John le Carre, made me aware of how much power that lies in swaying the public by lies. There are anectotal evidence of witch-hunts in the middle ages, which could only happened because of lies, prejudice and superstition, and when I read about ‘The Great Leap’ from the Cultural Revolution in China, I wonder how on Earth such a thing could take place. Commonplace to all these stories is the lack of knowledge, critical voices, and true information. I have also seen documentaries about how the tobacco and sugar have influenced the public information about drawbacks associated with their products, but realise that someone is twisting the truth, but one cannot be sure who. Presumably the lobby groups of those industries… But the even more recent encounter with lies in the media scared me the most: when one nation invaded another on the basis of lies. Sure, the invaded country was headed by a brutal dictator, but that argument probably could not justify a war…? After Hans Blixt and the UN had spent years searchin for evidence of WMD in country, they had come up empty handed. The country was flooded with volunteer ‘human shields’ just at the run-up forthe invasion, and in this golden opportunity for spying the living daylight out of the country, still the secret services didn’t manage to produce convincing evidence. A prominent British weapons specialist was found dead after having stated on the BBC that the Iraq dossier was ’sexed up’ (WMD could be launched within 45 minutes). Iraq relented at one point and produced a massive report to the UN, that the invading countries snatched and didn’t let anybody else read. Then there were false evidences: alleged radioactive materials from Nigeria, satellite images shown in the UN, alleged links between Saddam & Al Quaida, etc. The bottom line was that a war was started from lies. That’s scary.

[Greg Palast] has a very interesting analysis of the Baker report:

[The Baker Boys: Stay Half the Course]

Iraq Study Group or Saudi Protection League?
by Greg Palast
They’re kidding, right?

James Baker III and the seven dwarfs of the “Iraq Study Group” have come up with some simply brilliant recommendations. Not.

Baker’s Two Big Ideas are:

1. Stay half the course. Keeping 140,000 troops in Iraq is a disaster getting more disastrous. The Baker Boys’ idea: cut the disaster in half — leave 70,000 troops there.

But here’s where dumb gets dumber: the Bakerites want to “embed” US forces in Iraqi Army units. Question one, Mr. Baker: What Iraqi Army? This so-called “army” is a rough confederation of Shia death squads. We can tell our troops to get “embedded” with them, but the Americans won’t get much sleep.

Lots of news today about the Iraq Study group, which suggests that Iraq
privatize its oil industry and to open it up to international companies.

Nowhere is mentioned what author and activist Antonia Juhasz notes:

“Put simply, the oil companies are trying to get what they were denied before the war or at anytime in modern Iraqi history: access to Iraq’s oil under the ground.”  I’ll just quote the conculusion of her article but you should read the entire piece :