Salam Pax is live-blogging the National Assembly meeting.
His rough transcript (the comment in parentheses is his, I think):
as we have told the Iraqi people that we will work hard to achieve a constitution whish everybody agrees upon and today we reciuved the draft(....Allahu akbar...Allahu akbar) BUT there are still a couple of issues which need to be disscussed in the next three days. All involved will try to achive at least partial agreement on someof these issues. The draft has been recieved and the issues will be discussed. The Assembly will in the mean time work on the rferendun laws.
god bless all and we shall meet in the next three days to resolve alll the issues still to be discussed. Thank you
No explanation whether they've voted another extension or found some other loophole to "approve" an unfinished draft. (UPDATE: See the extended copy.)
More from Salam, including his dad's inside scoop from the assembly session:
00:00
So nothing really. They just wanted to make sure the current Assembly is not desolved. al-Hassani is having a press conference and he is talking about four outstanding issues. One of them is the issue if regions.
al-hassani is saying this is not to be called an extension because we do have a draft what's going to be done are amendments only.
And it looks like the preamble has not been agreed upon yet!
"we had two choices either take an unfinished draft or apply for a new extension. We chose the unfinished draft".
!!!!
00:05
Actually the person I feel sorry for most is the anchor on al-Iraqiya. The poor guy was ready to start dancing 15 minutes ago and he is almost ready to cry now....
00:15
My dad just came back, have to see how much he will tell me.
00:25
"everybody's got a bloody nose". That's what he is telling me.
There are still two issues which are still open. The formation of regions is still very much debated. The Shia want this to be an issue decided within the region itself i.e. if Basra wants to become an autonomous region this is decided in Basra only the central federal government has no say. The other parties want this to be a national decision.
The other big issue is de-Baathification. The Shia parties want this tobe mentioned in the constitution. Allawi and the Sunnis don't want this to be mentioned there.
I did see the draft, I wasn't allowed to touch it tho :-) It looks like a hastily written document, not even good hand writing. It is hand written and with lots of things crossed out. Each page is signed by a memeber of the Shia coalition and a member of the Kurdish coalition.