Saturday, December 11, 2004
today's papersNot So Chummy With RummyBy Eric UmanskyPosted Thursday, Dec. 9, 2004, at 12:29 AM PT
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox, and Washington Post all lead with the White House's surprise announcement that President Bush has asked Secretary of Treasury John Snow to stick around. There had long been speculation that Snow would be booted, culminating a few days in a SAO telling the Post that Snow could stay as long as he liked, provided it wasn't very long. USA Today leads with word that the Dept. of Homeland Security's effort to create a list of potential terrorist targets, such as dams, nuke plants, and skyscrapers, is way behind schedule and kind of whacked. Apparently, it includes water parks and miniature golf course, but not some major sites. "Their list is a joke," said one Republican congressman. The Los Angeles Times leads with Ukraine's parliament passing laws checking the president's power and strengthening safeguards against voter fraud. In response, opposition protesters eased their barricades of government buildings. The NYT sees the deal, which was really a compromise, as allowing Ukraine's outgoing president to "preserve significant political influence." The presidential runoff will be Dec. 26.
The Snow dissing doesn't appear to be over: The papers hear that Bush committed to Snow only after first considering a few other candidates. And the Post says Bush actually offered the job to one exec, who turned it down. Eventually, the White House decided leaving Snow hanging was bad for the markets and the administration. The WP says "some of Bush's aides expressed bafflement" that the president dilly-dallied for so long.
Also, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, Anthony Principi, announced his resignation; nine of the 15 Cabinet secretaries have now left the building.
Everybody fronts SecDef Rumsfeld's Q&A encounter with forward-leaning GIs in Kuwait. One asked why soldiers are scrounging around for "rusted scrap metal" to add onto their unarmored trucks and Humvees. Once cheers from fellow GIs died down, Rumsfeld responded, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." He added, "If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up." The Post plays up how pissed those remarks made congressional Democrats and "some military experts." Other GIs asked about stop-loss orders as well as the old equipment many National Guard units are stuck with.
The Pentagon's chief spokesman later said that there are plenty of armored vehicles in Iraq and the ones that aren't just stay on bases. But the NYT speaks to one of the commanders of the GI who complained. The officer estimated that 95 percent of his unit's 300 trucks don't have proper armor. The military recently upped the number of armored Humvees it says it needs in Iraq, from 5,000 to 8,000. (TP wrote early this year about the lack of planning for building armored Humvees and trucks.)
In Iraq yesterday, guerrillas stormed a police station in Samara and looted the weapons inside. Also, Samara's police chief resigned. There were also clashes in Mosul, Ramadi, and Baghdad, killing about a half-dozen Iraqi troops and civilians. The Post says in Ramadi, "Insurgents roamed openly on the city's west side."
Everybody mentions appointed Prime Minister Allawi's proposal to extend (not delay) the coming elections over a few weeks. An official with Iraq's election commission said he hadn't heard of the idea and told the AP, "We are the ones who set the voting mechanism."
The Post details a lawsuit brought by a CIA vet who says his bosses urged him to "falsify" (WP) pre-war intel on Iraq and when he refused launched a retaliatory investigation of him. "Their official dogma was contradicted by his reporting and they did not want to hear it," said a lawyer for the once undercover officer, who worked at the CIA for 23 years—until he was recently fired—and was in charge of some Iraqi informants. The story is on A2.
In a NYT op-ed, writer Kevin Doughten says he's sorry: "For the past three Christmas shopping seasons, I have been taking performance-enhancing drugs to give myself a competitive advantage at the mall. I'd like to apologize first to those my actions hurt the most: my family, my friends, and the management and staff of the stores at the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, N.J."Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110845/
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox, and Washington Post all lead with the White House's surprise announcement that President Bush has asked Secretary of Treasury John Snow to stick around. There had long been speculation that Snow would be booted, culminating a few days in a SAO telling the Post that Snow could stay as long as he liked, provided it wasn't very long. USA Today leads with word that the Dept. of Homeland Security's effort to create a list of potential terrorist targets, such as dams, nuke plants, and skyscrapers, is way behind schedule and kind of whacked. Apparently, it includes water parks and miniature golf course, but not some major sites. "Their list is a joke," said one Republican congressman. The Los Angeles Times leads with Ukraine's parliament passing laws checking the president's power and strengthening safeguards against voter fraud. In response, opposition protesters eased their barricades of government buildings. The NYT sees the deal, which was really a compromise, as allowing Ukraine's outgoing president to "preserve significant political influence." The presidential runoff will be Dec. 26.
The Snow dissing doesn't appear to be over: The papers hear that Bush committed to Snow only after first considering a few other candidates. And the Post says Bush actually offered the job to one exec, who turned it down. Eventually, the White House decided leaving Snow hanging was bad for the markets and the administration. The WP says "some of Bush's aides expressed bafflement" that the president dilly-dallied for so long.
Also, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, Anthony Principi, announced his resignation; nine of the 15 Cabinet secretaries have now left the building.
Everybody fronts SecDef Rumsfeld's Q&A encounter with forward-leaning GIs in Kuwait. One asked why soldiers are scrounging around for "rusted scrap metal" to add onto their unarmored trucks and Humvees. Once cheers from fellow GIs died down, Rumsfeld responded, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." He added, "If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up." The Post plays up how pissed those remarks made congressional Democrats and "some military experts." Other GIs asked about stop-loss orders as well as the old equipment many National Guard units are stuck with.
The Pentagon's chief spokesman later said that there are plenty of armored vehicles in Iraq and the ones that aren't just stay on bases. But the NYT speaks to one of the commanders of the GI who complained. The officer estimated that 95 percent of his unit's 300 trucks don't have proper armor. The military recently upped the number of armored Humvees it says it needs in Iraq, from 5,000 to 8,000. (TP wrote early this year about the lack of planning for building armored Humvees and trucks.)
In Iraq yesterday, guerrillas stormed a police station in Samara and looted the weapons inside. Also, Samara's police chief resigned. There were also clashes in Mosul, Ramadi, and Baghdad, killing about a half-dozen Iraqi troops and civilians. The Post says in Ramadi, "Insurgents roamed openly on the city's west side."
Everybody mentions appointed Prime Minister Allawi's proposal to extend (not delay) the coming elections over a few weeks. An official with Iraq's election commission said he hadn't heard of the idea and told the AP, "We are the ones who set the voting mechanism."
The Post details a lawsuit brought by a CIA vet who says his bosses urged him to "falsify" (WP) pre-war intel on Iraq and when he refused launched a retaliatory investigation of him. "Their official dogma was contradicted by his reporting and they did not want to hear it," said a lawyer for the once undercover officer, who worked at the CIA for 23 years—until he was recently fired—and was in charge of some Iraqi informants. The story is on A2.
In a NYT op-ed, writer Kevin Doughten says he's sorry: "For the past three Christmas shopping seasons, I have been taking performance-enhancing drugs to give myself a competitive advantage at the mall. I'd like to apologize first to those my actions hurt the most: my family, my friends, and the management and staff of the stores at the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, N.J."Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110845/
today's papersCiting Personnel ReasonsBy Sam SchechnerPosted Saturday, Dec. 11, 2004, at 4:42 AM PT
Everyone leads their final editions with what appears to be a classic late-Friday news dump: Bernard Kerik pulled the plug on his nomination to head Homeland Security last night, citing "personal reasons" that he later clarified were of an illegal nanny variety. "I personally apologize to you for not having focused on this earlier," Kerik wrote President Bush in a letter the White House released. Later, Kerik released a statement in which he says he'd just discovered two days ago that a nanny under his employ may have been an illegal immigrant and that her payroll taxes had, uh, somehow gone unpaid.
The papers more or less swallow this two-day timeline, although the New York Times ominously notes that the nanny was sent packing to her unspecified home country two weeks ago, and the Washington Post says White House officials found it suspicious that Kerik was not aware of any potential problem. No word on whether they might have been aware.
In fact, the papers are shy about speculating that the nanny might be a smokescreen (as suggested by Slate's Mickey Kaus), but everyone winkingly recaps the growing list of news accounts that have been dogging Kerik in recent days—from his questionable relationship to a company that produces Taser guns to his less-than-stellar stint supervising police training in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times cites recent a Newsweek profile that mentions how he bought the NYPD four $50,000 security doors that were too heavy to be installed and later became an adviser to the company that sold them. Last night, Newsweek also reported that it had unearthed an old arrest warrant for Kerik and faxed it to the White House just a couple hours before the withdrawal announcement.
Extra credit to the LAT for getting someone, albeit a lowly GOP Senate aide, to speculate candidly about the seemingly obvious cumulative effect of these charges: "It was probably a mounting list of potentially embarrassing issues, and they decided to cut their losses before it got worse," the aide said. "Good timing too: late on a Friday night."
In an about-face yesterday, the Pentagon asked the contractor that produces fully armored Humvees—known as "up-armored" Humvees—to boost its production by 100 per month to 550. The move comes after the company revealed Thursday, in response to statements by Donald Rumsfeld that production was at full capacity, that it had offered to boost output a month ago but received no word back from the Army. The NYT says that even yesterday morning the Army was insisting that what it needed was not more up-armored vehicles but more armor kits, which provide less protection but would allow the Humvees to be converted back into lighter vehicles after the war. (In an accompanying piece, the LAT provides some sobering anecdotal evidence of the effects of insufficient armor.)
The Post finally delivers something somewhat concrete about the secret spy-tech program that has had Democratic senators fuming in bizarrely oblique terms in recent days. The hubbub is over a classified stealth spy satellite code-named Misty whose projected cost has doubled to $9.5 billion in an overall intel budget of about $40 billion, according to "officials." The satellite would apparently be a third-generation Misty, with a second-generation one, launched in 1999 according to a Russian space magazine, probably still in operation.
The NYT and WP both off-lead Sprint's potential $34 billion acquisition of Nextel, a union that would yield the third largest wireless phone provider in the country and lead to three companies controlling some 74 percent of the U.S. cell phone service market. The NYT says that there is a chance that No. 2 player Verizon Wireless may try to buy Sprint instead. Or, the papers say, the whole deal might fall apart.
The WP fronts a long, laudable story on the hearings that Pentagon has been holding for Gitmo detainees since June's Supreme Court decision ordering it to do so. Advocates for the prisoners, however, say the resemblance to real habeas corpus proceedings is purely cosmetic: Detainees don't have lawyers present, and the Post, which reviewed more than 50 case files from the hearings, says the incarcerations are often upheld using classified evidence to which prisoners don't have access. Moreover, many captives told the panels that their confessions had been coerced through torture (a practice whose legality Justice Department backed only last week). "I see now that the duress and mistreatment that I am incurring shall not stop until they get the result they want," one prisoner told his tribunal.
Everyone notes that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could decide whether foreign nationals arrested for serious crimes in U.S. states have the right under international law to legal help from their native countries. The specific case in question is that of a Mexican national sentenced to death in Texas and the LAT is alone in noting that it could prove a delicate issue for Alberto Gonzales, Bush's nominee for attorney general. As legal counsel to then-Gov. Bush, Gonzales opined that Texas had no obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a position he will likely have to revisit when the court hears the case in the spring.
In other SCOTUS news, the White House and Supreme Court announced yesterday that Chief Justice Rehnquist has agreed in a letter to administer the oath of office at President Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20.
The LAT and NYT note that Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine's opposition presidential candidate, is back in Vienna to receive treatments for his mysterious and disfiguring ailments, which he reiterated were the result of poisoning: "The aim was to kill me." Last week's New Yorker has an excellent story (sadly, unavailable online) about the tainted runoff election there, noting the "curious fact," that Yushchenko dined with the head of the Ukraine's Security Service the night before he fell ill.
Meanwhile, the WP reports that Viktor Yanukovych is less than gracious in the face of possible defeat. Abandoned by his old patrons, he says that new election laws aimed at stopping fraud are in fact stacked against him. "I believed in those who betrayed me, those cowards," he said yesterday. "I trusted these liars and traitors with whom I worked in the government."
Everyone leads their final editions with what appears to be a classic late-Friday news dump: Bernard Kerik pulled the plug on his nomination to head Homeland Security last night, citing "personal reasons" that he later clarified were of an illegal nanny variety. "I personally apologize to you for not having focused on this earlier," Kerik wrote President Bush in a letter the White House released. Later, Kerik released a statement in which he says he'd just discovered two days ago that a nanny under his employ may have been an illegal immigrant and that her payroll taxes had, uh, somehow gone unpaid.
The papers more or less swallow this two-day timeline, although the New York Times ominously notes that the nanny was sent packing to her unspecified home country two weeks ago, and the Washington Post says White House officials found it suspicious that Kerik was not aware of any potential problem. No word on whether they might have been aware.
In fact, the papers are shy about speculating that the nanny might be a smokescreen (as suggested by Slate's Mickey Kaus), but everyone winkingly recaps the growing list of news accounts that have been dogging Kerik in recent days—from his questionable relationship to a company that produces Taser guns to his less-than-stellar stint supervising police training in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times cites recent a Newsweek profile that mentions how he bought the NYPD four $50,000 security doors that were too heavy to be installed and later became an adviser to the company that sold them. Last night, Newsweek also reported that it had unearthed an old arrest warrant for Kerik and faxed it to the White House just a couple hours before the withdrawal announcement.
Extra credit to the LAT for getting someone, albeit a lowly GOP Senate aide, to speculate candidly about the seemingly obvious cumulative effect of these charges: "It was probably a mounting list of potentially embarrassing issues, and they decided to cut their losses before it got worse," the aide said. "Good timing too: late on a Friday night."
In an about-face yesterday, the Pentagon asked the contractor that produces fully armored Humvees—known as "up-armored" Humvees—to boost its production by 100 per month to 550. The move comes after the company revealed Thursday, in response to statements by Donald Rumsfeld that production was at full capacity, that it had offered to boost output a month ago but received no word back from the Army. The NYT says that even yesterday morning the Army was insisting that what it needed was not more up-armored vehicles but more armor kits, which provide less protection but would allow the Humvees to be converted back into lighter vehicles after the war. (In an accompanying piece, the LAT provides some sobering anecdotal evidence of the effects of insufficient armor.)
The Post finally delivers something somewhat concrete about the secret spy-tech program that has had Democratic senators fuming in bizarrely oblique terms in recent days. The hubbub is over a classified stealth spy satellite code-named Misty whose projected cost has doubled to $9.5 billion in an overall intel budget of about $40 billion, according to "officials." The satellite would apparently be a third-generation Misty, with a second-generation one, launched in 1999 according to a Russian space magazine, probably still in operation.
The NYT and WP both off-lead Sprint's potential $34 billion acquisition of Nextel, a union that would yield the third largest wireless phone provider in the country and lead to three companies controlling some 74 percent of the U.S. cell phone service market. The NYT says that there is a chance that No. 2 player Verizon Wireless may try to buy Sprint instead. Or, the papers say, the whole deal might fall apart.
The WP fronts a long, laudable story on the hearings that Pentagon has been holding for Gitmo detainees since June's Supreme Court decision ordering it to do so. Advocates for the prisoners, however, say the resemblance to real habeas corpus proceedings is purely cosmetic: Detainees don't have lawyers present, and the Post, which reviewed more than 50 case files from the hearings, says the incarcerations are often upheld using classified evidence to which prisoners don't have access. Moreover, many captives told the panels that their confessions had been coerced through torture (a practice whose legality Justice Department backed only last week). "I see now that the duress and mistreatment that I am incurring shall not stop until they get the result they want," one prisoner told his tribunal.
Everyone notes that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could decide whether foreign nationals arrested for serious crimes in U.S. states have the right under international law to legal help from their native countries. The specific case in question is that of a Mexican national sentenced to death in Texas and the LAT is alone in noting that it could prove a delicate issue for Alberto Gonzales, Bush's nominee for attorney general. As legal counsel to then-Gov. Bush, Gonzales opined that Texas had no obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a position he will likely have to revisit when the court hears the case in the spring.
In other SCOTUS news, the White House and Supreme Court announced yesterday that Chief Justice Rehnquist has agreed in a letter to administer the oath of office at President Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20.
The LAT and NYT note that Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine's opposition presidential candidate, is back in Vienna to receive treatments for his mysterious and disfiguring ailments, which he reiterated were the result of poisoning: "The aim was to kill me." Last week's New Yorker has an excellent story (sadly, unavailable online) about the tainted runoff election there, noting the "curious fact," that Yushchenko dined with the head of the Ukraine's Security Service the night before he fell ill.
Meanwhile, the WP reports that Viktor Yanukovych is less than gracious in the face of possible defeat. Abandoned by his old patrons, he says that new election laws aimed at stopping fraud are in fact stacked against him. "I believed in those who betrayed me, those cowards," he said yesterday. "I trusted these liars and traitors with whom I worked in the government."
THOMAS L. FRIEDMANPublished: March 21, 2004
ARTICLE TOOLS
My favorite building in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, is a corporate complex called the "Golden Enclave." In some ways, the whole tech sector in Bangalore could be called India's "Golden Enclave" — disconnected from the country's bad governance, as companies create their own walled enclaves, with their own electricity, bus service, telecommunications and security, and disconnected from the countryside, where many Indians still live in abject poverty.
As long as these two liabilities of inept governance and endemic poverty are not addressed, India can't really take off and become a big-time technology competitor of the United States. The information revolution, though, has given India, for the first time, some real resources and tools to address its chronic ailments. Will it seize this opportunity? This is India's "to be or not to be" question.
Says Vivek Paul, president of the cutting-edge Indian software giant Wipro: "In some sense, all that this globalization of information technology and [outsourcing] has done is to give India pin money to reform itself." If India "blows it," well, the opportunities may still be out there, "but India won't be a beneficiary in the long run," he said. "The beneficiaries will be those who are most flexible and able to organize themselves around the opportunities." Mr. Paul said he believed India would seize this moment.
But it will require some radical changes in politics: While India has the hardware of democracy — free elections — it still lacks a lot of the software — decent, responsive, transparent local government. While China has none of the hardware of democracy, in the form of free elections, its institutions have been better at building infrastructure and services for China's people and foreign investors.
When I was in Bangalore recently, my hotel room was across the hall from that of a visiting executive of a major U.S. multinational, which operates in India and China, and we used to chat. One day, in a whisper, he said to me that if he compared what China and India had done by way of building infrastructure in the last decade, India lost badly. Bangalore may be India's Silicon Valley, but its airport (finally being replaced) is like a seedy bus station with airplanes.
Few people in India with energy and smarts would think of going into politics. People don't expect or demand much from their representatives and therefore they are not interested in paying them much in taxes, so most local governments are starved of both revenues and talent.
Krishna Prasad, an editor for Outlook magazine and one of the brightest young journalists I met in India, said to me that criminalization and corruption, caste and communal differences have infected Indian politics to such a degree that it attracts all "the wrong kind of people." So India has a virtuous cycle working in economics and a vicious cycle working in politics. "Each time the government tries to put its foot in the door in IT [information technology]," he said, "the IT guys say: `Please stay away. We did this without you. We don't need you now to mess things up.' "
That attitude is not healthy, because you can't have a successful IT industry when every company has to build its own infrastructure. America's greatest competitive advantages are the flexibility of its economy and the quality of its infrastructure, rule of law and regulatory institutions. Knowledge workers are mobile and they like to live in nice, stable places. My hope is that the knowledge workers now spearheading India's economic revolution will feel compelled to spearhead a political revolution.
There are signs. Consider Ramesh Ramanathan, an Indian-born former Citibank executive, who returned to India to lead an N.G.O., Janaagraha, dedicated to improving local governance.
India's independence revolution in 1947 began in urban India and its political reform revolution is also going to begin in urban India — "this time fueled by the forces of globalization," he said to me in his Bangalore office, surrounded by young volunteers. "Globalization is creating the affluent urban Indian who is going to demand more from government and is not going to be content with islands of affluence. [Because] it will be impossible for them to fully take advantage of the opportunities globalization is giving them without airports and roads and sidewalks . . . acceptable in any city in the world. And the only way they are going to get that delivered is if they get engaged in government. We have [in India] a motto: `Elect and forget.' And what we need is to `elect and engage.' "
ARTICLE TOOLS
My favorite building in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, is a corporate complex called the "Golden Enclave." In some ways, the whole tech sector in Bangalore could be called India's "Golden Enclave" — disconnected from the country's bad governance, as companies create their own walled enclaves, with their own electricity, bus service, telecommunications and security, and disconnected from the countryside, where many Indians still live in abject poverty.
As long as these two liabilities of inept governance and endemic poverty are not addressed, India can't really take off and become a big-time technology competitor of the United States. The information revolution, though, has given India, for the first time, some real resources and tools to address its chronic ailments. Will it seize this opportunity? This is India's "to be or not to be" question.
Says Vivek Paul, president of the cutting-edge Indian software giant Wipro: "In some sense, all that this globalization of information technology and [outsourcing] has done is to give India pin money to reform itself." If India "blows it," well, the opportunities may still be out there, "but India won't be a beneficiary in the long run," he said. "The beneficiaries will be those who are most flexible and able to organize themselves around the opportunities." Mr. Paul said he believed India would seize this moment.
But it will require some radical changes in politics: While India has the hardware of democracy — free elections — it still lacks a lot of the software — decent, responsive, transparent local government. While China has none of the hardware of democracy, in the form of free elections, its institutions have been better at building infrastructure and services for China's people and foreign investors.
When I was in Bangalore recently, my hotel room was across the hall from that of a visiting executive of a major U.S. multinational, which operates in India and China, and we used to chat. One day, in a whisper, he said to me that if he compared what China and India had done by way of building infrastructure in the last decade, India lost badly. Bangalore may be India's Silicon Valley, but its airport (finally being replaced) is like a seedy bus station with airplanes.
Few people in India with energy and smarts would think of going into politics. People don't expect or demand much from their representatives and therefore they are not interested in paying them much in taxes, so most local governments are starved of both revenues and talent.
Krishna Prasad, an editor for Outlook magazine and one of the brightest young journalists I met in India, said to me that criminalization and corruption, caste and communal differences have infected Indian politics to such a degree that it attracts all "the wrong kind of people." So India has a virtuous cycle working in economics and a vicious cycle working in politics. "Each time the government tries to put its foot in the door in IT [information technology]," he said, "the IT guys say: `Please stay away. We did this without you. We don't need you now to mess things up.' "
That attitude is not healthy, because you can't have a successful IT industry when every company has to build its own infrastructure. America's greatest competitive advantages are the flexibility of its economy and the quality of its infrastructure, rule of law and regulatory institutions. Knowledge workers are mobile and they like to live in nice, stable places. My hope is that the knowledge workers now spearheading India's economic revolution will feel compelled to spearhead a political revolution.
There are signs. Consider Ramesh Ramanathan, an Indian-born former Citibank executive, who returned to India to lead an N.G.O., Janaagraha, dedicated to improving local governance.
India's independence revolution in 1947 began in urban India and its political reform revolution is also going to begin in urban India — "this time fueled by the forces of globalization," he said to me in his Bangalore office, surrounded by young volunteers. "Globalization is creating the affluent urban Indian who is going to demand more from government and is not going to be content with islands of affluence. [Because] it will be impossible for them to fully take advantage of the opportunities globalization is giving them without airports and roads and sidewalks . . . acceptable in any city in the world. And the only way they are going to get that delivered is if they get engaged in government. We have [in India] a motto: `Elect and forget.' And what we need is to `elect and engage.' "
December 11, 2004CASUALTIES
2 G.I.'s Killed as One Copter Hits a 2nd; Marine and Iraqi Die in AttacksBy ROBERT F. WORTH
AGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 10 - Two American soldiers were killed and four were wounded late Thursday when an airborne helicopter struck one on the ground at an airfield in the northern city of Mosul, military officials said.
A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, said the airborne helicopter, an AH-64 Apache gunship, had hit a UH-60 Black Hawk transport. He added that the cause of the crash was unclear.
Violence continued to flare in the Sunni Triangle, to the north and west of Baghdad. In western Anbar Province, a marine was killed on a security operation, military officials said, without providing details.
In Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, mortar fire struck a car carrying two civilians near an Iraqi National Guard patrol on Friday afternoon, killing one and wounding the other, said Master Sgt. Robert Cowens, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division.
Over the last week, there have been at least four attacks on police station and national guard units in Samarra. American forces drove insurgent forces out of the city or into hiding during a siege in early October, but rebel attacks resumed there a few weeks later and have continued steadily since then.
In Baquba, north of Baghdad, four Iraqi national guardsmen and three civilians were wounded Friday when a roadside bomb exploded near a national guard patrol and insurgents attacked the patrol with small arms afterward, Sergeant Cowens said.
With violence breaking out regularly throughout Iraq, a fuel crisis has worsened in recent days. Gasoline, heating oil and cooking gas are all in short supply, which could further complicate the effort to hold elections as scheduled on Jan. 30.
A chief concern as the elections approach is security, and on Friday, members of a newly formed Shiite militia called the Anger Brigade volunteered to help provide protection at voting stations. The brigade was formed to fight back against Sunni militants who have killed numbers of Shiites in the lawless area south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River.
Using Shiite militia groups for voting security could sharpen the sectarian dimensions of the conflict here, with violent Sunni groups bent on disrupting the election, and it is not clear whether they will be used. Election officials have said regular Iraqi security forces will have primary responsibility for security during the election, but there is a severe shortage of officers.
Also on Friday, the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry announced that two hostages, a Sri Lankan truck driver and a Bangladeshi man, had been released by the militants who kidnapped them in October. Dinesh Rajaratnam of Sri Lanka and Muhammad Farook Abdullah Hadi of Bangladesh are being returned to their home countries, according to a statement on the Web site of the Sri Lankan ministry.
In the devastated city of Falluja, the International Red Cross visited for the first time since the American-led military offensive last month, meeting with Iraqi engineers to discuss the city's sewage and water needs, The Associated Press reported. The Red Cross officials were unable to visit a potato-chip plant where several hundred bodies of insurgents and civilians are apparently being stored.
In Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne Jr. pleaded guilty to one count of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the killing of a severely wounded Iraqi teenager in Sadr City, an impoverished Shiite district in northeastern Baghdad, on Aug. 18. He is the first of four soldiers to face court-martial in the case.
Sergeant Horne said he and the other soldiers had discovered the Iraqi in a burning truck, with wounds he had sustained during fierce fighting between American soldiers and rebels loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. At an earlier hearing, a criminal investigator said Sergeant Horne and the soldiers with him had decided to shoot to "put him out of his misery."
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