Today’s top story - After nearly two years of investigations, prosecutors have been given the go-ahead to seek a grand jury indictment against a 28-year-old Blackwater guard who shot and killed the bodyguard of Iraqi vice president Adel Abdul Mahdi. According to sources, the Blackwater guard, Andrew Moonen, shot and killed the bodyguard in a drunken stupor following a Christmas party in the Iraq green zone in 2006. But the actions of the contractor that night are not nearly as deplorable as what happened afterwards. According to a Congressional memo, within hours of the killing, Blackwater struck a deal with the US State Department to have Moonen immediately flown out of the country, in order to prevent any charges from being filed in Iraq against him. Upon his return to the United States, Moonen was fired from Blackwater and fined for his actions, while the company itself paid the slain guard’s family $20,000. While Moonen was too drunk to be interviewed on the night of the killing, he later claimed that the guard fired on him first, and he only shot back in self-defense. This claim runs contrary to the eyewitness accounts that evening, who claim that Moonen acted without being provoked, as has been the case with numerous other Blackwater murders.

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The federal government seems to believe that, even though they haven't been paying taxes, we should use tax dollars to bail out America's failing financial institutions. Mike Papantonio of Air America's Ring of Fire talks about how corporations (like AIG) managed to avoid the IRS for years by hiding their money in offshore accounts. These are the same companies who are being rescued by the $700 billion bailout.

Hey everybody. I’m Farron Cousins, and this is The Daily Left – your interactive source for progressive news and commentary. Thanks for joining me.

Today’s top story – A leaked copy of an unreleased government report says that the US-led rebuilding projects in Iraq have been complete failures, leading to a loss of over $100 billion dollars. The report says that the failures were due in part to bureaucratic turf wars, violence, and ignorance about the basic aspects of Iraqi society. According to the report, former Secretary of State of Colin Powell was growing increasingly agitated during his tenure, due to the fact that the Defense Department kept inflating the number of Iraqi security forces. He said that the number would jump by 20,000 a week, which was just not true. By mid-2008, according to the report, over 117 billion dollars had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including about 50 billion in US taxpayer money. The document concludes that the rebuilding effort never did much more than to restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the pervasive looting that followed. It also said that the US government has in place neither the policies nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake the largest reconstruction program since the Marshall Plan.

Last night, the House passed a $14 billion dollar bailout bill for the auto industry, but there’s little celebrating going on in Detroit. Republicans were in full revolt against their party's lame-duck president over the measure, balking at helping Detroit's struggling Big Three without hefty concessions from autoworkers and creditors, and furious about an environmental mandate House Democrats insisted on including in the measure. The situation between House Republicans and the White House actually got so bad that the Administration sent Josh Bolten into closed-door meetings with Republicans to make the case for the bailout. In the end, 32 Republicans crossed the aisle and voted with the Democrats, while 20 Democrats voted against the measure. However, the bill is still facing some tough opponents in the Senate, including Richard Shelby of Alabama and John Kyl of Arizona. These republicans would rather see the big 3 file for bankruptcy and liquidate their assets, rather than saving the jobs of over 3 million Americans who depend on the auto industry for their income. The Senate will begin deliberations today.