"Look at this. Is this acceptable? Does God accept this?" said a youth holding torn, blood-splattered pages of the Koran outside a mosque hit by one of the blasts in the town of Baiji.
The police chief was wounded and the condition of the tribal leader was unclear, officials said.
The above is from David Clarke and Aseel Kami's "Car bombs kill 22 in northern Iraq" (Reuters). AP reports that "at least 24" died in Iraq yesterday from bombings. ICCC's total for the number of US service members killed in Iraq stands at 3817 and AP's is 3816. But if you look for anything that covers the continued violence in the New York Times, you're left with an AP story (the first AP link in this entry). Apparently, the paper thinks citing the millions spent 'covering' Iraq is supposed to blot out the memory of their pre-war coverage. (The coverage once the war started was no better but few paid attention it. Dexy Filkins filed another bad story for the Sunday magazine and along comes Toad to praise it. The ineffectual and timid always praise Dexy. He's their boy.)
From Military Families Speak Out's Dante Zappala's "The Not-So-Small Price of Iraq" (Philadelphia Inquirer via Common Dreams):
The question is: What are we funding? Are we really benefiting our military by leaving them under-equipped and stretched thin? What is their mission amidst a civil war fought, in part, with weapons we flooded into the country? Does continuing this morass not somehow benefit al Qaeda?
Politicians will gloss over these questions and the brunt of the unending carnage will be absorbed by people like my nephew. Some pundits, meanwhile, cheer from the sidelines and ask these children to accept their tragedy as historically insignificant. How awful will we, as a nation, become to maintain this war?
For four and a half years, the reported deaths of soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors, Coast Guardsmen and contractors has been heartbreakingly painful. The magnitude of their sacrifice has been a crucial part of the debate. Politically savvy war supporters want to change that.
They will try to keep the blinders on with their morally defunct contextualization. They want the focus out front, even as their policies and ideologies leaves broken bodies and broken lives in the rear-view mirror.
Today on Democracy Now!, they report on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Che Guevara.
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