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Iraq: Car Bomb Kills 21 in Tal Afar, Curfew in Diyala Contractors Devour Billions |
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No, the violence isn’t over yet, even as various voices proclaim victory. A car bomb in Tal Afar, northern Iraq (near Mosul), killed 21 today.
In March 2006, Tal Afar was hailed as a model Iraqi town by US President George W Bush, but almost exactly a year later it was the target of one of the deadliest attacks in Iraq’s insurgency, when more than 150 people were killed in a truck bombing.
In recent months there have been military operations in the area, says the BBC’s Crispin Thorold in Baghdad.
But this attack demonstrates once again that Sunni Muslim insurgents still have the ability to bring death to Iraq’s streets, our correspondent adds.
In Diyala, the governor survived a suicide attack that killed two and wounded several others. Iraqi and American forces have imposed a curfew in response.
Finally, $100 billion spent on private contractors in Iraq has achieved….what? Senator Byron Dorgan has a brilliant idea:
Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said recently that the Pentagon’s outsourcing in Iraq had grown so large and raised so many unanswered policy questions that he had been pushing for the Senate to create a special war-contracting committee, like the panel that Harry S. Truman led in the Senate before he was tapped to be Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944.
“The Truman Committee held 60 hearings on waste, fraud and abuse,†Mr. Dorgan said. “It’s unfathomable to me that we don’t have a bipartisan investigative committee on contracting in Iraq.â€
Conservatives want to worship World War II? Put your money where your mouth is (literally, motherfucker), and let’s get the hearings started.
