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Attack on U.S. Base in Iraq Leaves 20 Dead
1 hour, 18 minutes ago
By SLOBODAN LEKIC, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - An explosion tore through a soft-sided mess tent where U.S. soldiers were eating lunch Tuesday at a military base near the northern city of Mosul, blowing a hole in the ceiling and leaving the floor littered with trays of food and puddles of blood. Officials said at least 20 people were killed in one of the most devastating attacks against Americans in Iraq (news - web sites) since the start of the war.
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Attack on U.S. Base in Mosul Kills 22(AP Video)
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A spokesman for U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad said 19 of the dead were American soldiers, which would make it the deadliest single strike against U.S. troops in this country. However, a military spokesman in Mosul said 14 U.S. troops died in the blast, which came just four days before Christmas.
Inside the tent, U.S. soldiers reacted quickly. With people screaming and thick smoke billowing, soldiers turned their lunch tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and gently carried them into the parking lot, said Jeremy Redmon, a reporter for the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch embedded with the troops in Mosul.
A radical Sunni Muslim group, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, claimed responsibility for the attack, which officials said wounded about 60 people — the latest in a week of deadly strikes across Iraq that highlighted the unwavering power of the insurgents in the run-up to the Jan. 30 national elections.
President Bush (news - web sites) said the explosion should not derail the elections and that he hoped relatives of those killed know that their loved ones died in "a vital mission for peace."
"I'm confident democracy will prevail in Iraq," he said.
A U.S. military official said authorities believe the damage was caused by at least one large-caliber artillery round or rocket. Another official said it was possible the explosive had been planted.
Portland (Maine) Press Herald photographer Gregory Rec, who was sleeping about a quarter-mile from the mess hall when he was awakened by the loud explosion, said he rushed to the scene, where a soldier told him "he heard a whoosh, he looked up and saw a fireball halfway between the ceiling and the floor."
The blast at Forward Operating Base Marez came hours after British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) made a surprise visit to Baghdad and spoke of a "battle between democracy and terror."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, responding to a question about how Iraqis will be able to safely get to some 9,000 polling places if U.S. troops can't secure their own bases, said there was "security and peace" in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces.
Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, was relatively peaceful in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime last year. But insurgent attacks in the largely Sunni area have increased dramatically in the past year — particularly since the U.S.-led military offensive in November to retake Fallujah from militants.
Like most mess halls at U.S. bases in Iraq, the meal area at Base Marez is covered with a tent. Insurgents have fired mortars at the mess hall more than 30 times this year, Redmon said.
Mortar attacks on U.S. bases, particularly on the huge white tents that serve as dining halls, have been frequent in Iraq for more than a year. Just last month, for example, a mortar attack on a Mosul base killed two troops with Task Force Olympia, the reinforced brigade responsible for security in much of northern Iraq.
Bill Nemitz, a columnist with the Portland Press Herald who was embedded with the troops in Mosul, told CNN that he heard "a lot of discussion" about the vulnerability of the tent.
Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for Task Force Olympia, acknowledged the tent's vulnerability and told CNN the military is building a new dining facility at the base — a concrete structure that Nemitz said was supposed to have been ready for Christmas.
"There is a level of vulnerability when you go in there and you don't feel like there's a ... hard roof over your head," Hastings told CNN.
Base Marez, also known as the al-Ghizlani military camp, is three miles south of Mosul and is used by both U.S. troops and the interim Iraqi government's security forces. It once was Mosul's civilian airport but is now a heavily fortified area surrounded by blast walls and barbed wire. Its two main gates are guarded by U.S. troops; Iraqi National Guard members man checkpoints outside to prevent cars from getting close without being searched.
Casualty reports fluctuated throughout the day, with military officials and others giving conflicting figures.
Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, spokesman for the Coalition Press Information Center, the military headquarters in Baghdad, said 19 U.S. troops were killed, along with three other soldiers of unknown nationality, and that 57 people were wounded. Hastings, however, said about 20 people died, including 14 American troops, and about 60 were injured.
"The number is very chaotic, we've had different numbers," Hastings said.
Halliburton Co., a Houston-based company whose subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root supplies food service and other support activities for U.S. troops in Mosul, said seven of its employees and subcontractors were killed in the blast. Their nationalities were not disclosed.
Earlier, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of Task Force Olympia, said U.S. military personnel, American and foreign nationals and Iraqi soldiers were among the dead. "It is indeed a very, very sad day," Ham said.
Redmon said the dead included two soldiers from the Richmond-based 276th Engineer Battalion, which had just sat down to eat. The force knocked soldiers off their feet and out of their seats as a fireball enveloped the top of the tent and shrapnel sprayed into the area, Redmon said.
Scores of troops crammed into concrete bomb shelters, while others wandered around in a daze and collapsed, he said.
"I can't hear! I can't hear!" one female soldier cried as a friend hugged her.
A huge hole was blown in the roof of the tent, and puddles of blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor, Redmon reported.
Near the front entrance, troops tended a soldier with a serious head wound, but within minutes, they zipped him into a black body bag, he said. Three more bodies were in the parking lot.
"It was very hard to watch and very chaotic but at the same time what amazed me was that within 20 minutes the worst of the wounded, the ones who needed the most attention, were out of there. It was just a remarkable effort by all the soldiers involved. From what I could see they performed flawlessly."
In addition to the two soldiers in the Richmond unit, two soldiers from Maine National Guard's 133rd Engineer Battalion were killed and 12 were wounded, the Portland Press Herald reported.
Redmon and photographer Dean Hoffmeyer are embedded with the 276th Engineer Battalion, a Richmond National Guard unit that can trace its lineage to the First Virginia Regiment of Volunteers formed in 1652. George Washington and Patrick Henry were two of its early commanders. Henry created the unit's motto, "Liberty or Death."
The base is also used by members of the Stryker Brigade, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., a military official said.
The Ansar al-Sunnah Army claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on the Internet. It said the attack was a "martyrdom operation" targeting a mess hall.
Ansar al-Sunnah is believed to be a fundamentalist group that wants to turn Iraq into an Islamic state like Afghanistan (news - web sites)'s former Taliban regime. The Sunni group claimed responsibility for beheading 12 Nepalese hostages and other recent attacks in Mosul.
Before Tuesday, Mosul was the scene of the deadliest single incident for U.S. troops in Iraq. On Nov. 15, 2003, two Black Hawk helicopters collided over the city, killing 17 soldiers and injuring five. The crash occurred as the choppers maneuvered to avoid ground fire.
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December 19, 2004WORD FOR WORD 'BIG BIRD'
A New Pecking Order on Fifth AvenueBy PETER EDIDIN

NEW York has its first celebrity bird. Not a mere curiosity, like the dancing chicken in Chinatown, but a player.
Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk resident since 1993 on a 12th-floor perch at 927 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park, clearly meets the criteria. Not only have he, his mate, Lola, and their offspring (23 and counting) been the subjects of books, documentaries and pilgrimages by thousands of rapturous fans, but he has the political clout to face down some of the city's best-connected inhabitants.
On Dec. 7, the co-op board of Pale Male's building had his nest removed, provoking instant outrage from individuals and groups around the city, country and even internationally.
Soon, sign-waving demonstrators were camped out in front of the elegant building, and while Pale Male soared serenely above the fray, the co-op board sued for peace. Last week, it agreed to let the bird rebuild his nest.
New York Civic, a public interest group founded by Henry Stern, a former New York City Parks Commissioner, collected the e-mails it received on the controversy on its Web site (www.nycivic.org). They show passion, wit, some nuttiness and even a willingness to examine both sides of the question. Excerpts follow.
•
If Fifth Avenue doesn't want them, we would love to have them on S.I. [Staten Island]. Our pigeons are just as tasty and not as pricey. We might have more dirt underneath our fingernails, but our noses aren't pointed skyward. We tend to speak quickly and lose our "R's" in the process, but we talk forthrightly and never refer to each other as "lovey" or "darling."
Anonymous
No one mentions the homeless homo sapiens here very much anymore.
L.D.
The board and residents of 927 Fifth Avenue, M.T.M. excepted [Mary Tyler Moore, who lives in the building], have shown the world what pathetic specimens of the human race they are, and have demonstrated once again the continuing decline of Western civilization in all their wanton disregard for nature and the wonderful planet that has made their small lives possible.
C.R.
Thank you for supporting the hawks! Ms. Winters, the owner of the apartment where the birds nest, should be evicted from NYC. How dark is her heart? Goes to show, money can buy you everything, but not class! And Paula Zahn [who lives in the building], I will never watch her ever again! May she move to North Dakota and stay there!!!
F.W.
Disgusting, outrageous, and infuriating. I'm almost at a loss for words.
R.B.
Let's imagine that Mrs. Gotrocks on the 12th floor of that building spills some oil while preparing her dinner (O.K., she's rich, so her cook/maid/whatever does it), and it catches fire. The Fire Department responds, and while the brave firefighter ascends the ladder to rescue Mrs. Gotrocks (or the cook/maid/whatever), he/she is attacked by a hawk, falls from the ladder and dies. Can your imagination foresee the negligence claims against the co-op? They harbored wild animals!! Dangerous wild animals!! They allowed the dangerous situation to exist for 11 years!! You can even remove some of the sensationalism by substituting a lowly window washer for the brave firefighter (or add to it by making it a child leaning out the window to look at the hawks, or increase it further by making it the child of the cook/maid/whatever), but the lawyer's claims probably wouldn't change. And this is NOT an unlikely scenario!
Anonymous
So the residents of Fifth Avenue find their eating habits offensive? Just because your meat comes in a boneless filet doesn't mean there is no carcass. Letting some minimum-wage worker do your dirty work does not separate you from the rest of the carnivores.
Anonymous
Let's make this a cause, and DRIVE THEM NUTS.
V.J.
By the way, the best news - pigeon problems for the rich at 927 will increase because they removed the spikes and the natural controls. Ha!
B.F.
The answer is simple. Like all true pioneers, it's time for these hawks to go west. Over here on West 71st Street, we would welcome them to the neighborhood. Nobody more famous than they lives in our humble building, and we would be honored to work out a suitable roofline penthouse.
T.C.
This public keening over two birds is ludicrously disproportionate to any reasonable aesthetic or moral valuation - and property rights are moral, too. Worry about Islamic terror, Social Security solvency, U.N. corruption, the appalling state of our schools, wasting a billion dollars on an in-town stadium and the insufferable arrogance in Albany (compared to which NYC co-op boards are models of modesty). Fear not: Sooner or later some co-op board will do something really awful, but not this time.
J.C.W.
As neighbors, living half a block away from the nest of Pale Male and Lola, we have been out picketing on the street every day and have sent letters to each resident of the building. The arrogance and total lack of concern of these extraordinarily privileged people is symptomatic of the way many liberals ... only care for what is not in their backyard. If an environmental situation develops some place else, they are the first to show concern for an endangered tree toad in Arizona. They think nothing of blocking a dam or highway project, but let a pair of hawks nest in their building that give the citizens of New York genuine pleasure, they turn deaf ears to what has become a national outcry.
B.G.
The Pale Male episode just proves the truth of the old adage: Money can't buy class.
A.D.F.
Any New Yorker who helps reduced the pigeon population, free of charge, and in an environmentally responsible way, deserves to build a home on Fifth Avenue.
D.M.
My T.R.-style tree-hugging credentials earn me the regular spite of my more conservative fellow Republicans. But in this case, Mr. and Mrs. Male have a tremendous monument to nature (and to man's reverence for it) available to them in Central Park. Can't they simply move across the street?
I don't doubt that some of the human residents of 927 are vile, wealthy cretins, but I don't particularly begrudge them for asking Mr. and Mrs. Male to cross the avenue.
J.F.
Like all issues - I understand there are two points of view - an EIGHT-FOOT NEST! That's bigger than some studio apartments - perhaps the hawk should have been charged maintenance by the co-op - he could earn it from the film rights, etc.
J.D.
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December 21, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
Make No MistakeBy DAVID BROOKS

It was a series of unfortunate events.
How did we get to this sudden moment of cautious optimism in the Middle East? How did we get to this moment when Egypt is signing free trade agreements with Israel, when Hosni Mubarak is touring Arab nations and urging them to open relations with the Jewish state? How did we get to this moment of democratic opportunity in the Palestinian territories, with three major elections taking place in the next several months, and with the leading candidate in the presidential election declaring that violence is counterproductive?
How did we get to this moment of odd unity in Israel, with Labor joining Likud to push a withdrawal from Gaza and some northern territories? How did we get to this moment when Ariel Sharon has record approval ratings, when it is common to run across Israelis who once reviled Sharon as a bully but who now find themselves supporting him as an agent of peace?
It was a series of unfortunate events.
It was unfortunate that Ariel Sharon, whom tout le monde demonized as a warmonger, was elected prime minister of Israel. After all, as Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations reasoned in The New York Review of Books, "The war Sharon is waging is not aimed at the defeat of Palestinian terrorism but at the defeat of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for national self-determination."
It was unfortunate that George W. Bush was elected and then re-elected as president of the United States. After all, here is a man who staffed his administration with what Juan Cole of the University of Michigan called "pro-Likud intellectuals" who went off "fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv." Under Bush, the diplomats agreed, the U.S. had inflamed the Arab world and had forfeited its role as an honest broker.
It was unfortunate that Bush gave that speech on June 24, 2002, dismissing Yasir Arafat as a man who would never make peace. After all, the Europeans protested, while Arafat might be flawed, he was the embodiment of the Palestinian cause.
It was a mistake to build the security fence, which the International Court of Justice called a violation of international law. Never mind that the fence cut terror attacks by 90 percent. It was the moral equivalent of apartheid, the U.N. orators declared.
It was a mistake to assassinate the leaders of Hamas, which took credit for the murders of hundreds of Israelis. France, among many other nations, condemned these attacks and foretold catastrophic consequences.
It was unfortunate that President Bush never sent a special envoy to open talks, discuss modalities and fine-tune the road map. As Milton Viorst wrote in The Washington Quarterly, this left "slim prospects" for any progress toward peace.
It was unfortunate that Bush sided openly with Sharon during their April meetings in Washington, causing the European Union to condemn U.S. policy. It was unfortunate that Bush kept pushing his democracy agenda. After all, as some Israelis said, it is naïve to export democracy to Arab soil.
Yes, these were a series of unfortunate events. And yet here we are in this hopeful moment. It almost makes you think that all those bemoaners and condemners don't know what they are talking about. Nothing they have said over the past three years accounts for what is happening now.
It almost makes you think that Bush understands the situation better than the lot of them. His judgments now look correct. Bush deduced that Sharon could grasp the demographic reality and lead Israel toward a two-state solution; that Arafat would never make peace, but was a retardant to peace; that Israel has a right to fight terrorism; and that Sharon would never feel safe enough to take risks unless the U.S. supported him when he fought back.
Bush concluded that peace would never come as long as Palestine was an undemocratic tyranny, and that the Palestinians needed to see their intifada would never bring triumph.
We are a long way from peace. But as Robert Satloff observes in The Weekly Standard, Israel's coming disengagements "will constitute a huge leap - both in psychology and in strategy - rivaling the original Oslo accords in historic importance." And the U.S. is already raising millions to help build a decent Palestinian polity.
We owe this cautiously hopeful moment to a series of unfortunate events - and to a president who disregarded the received wisdom.
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December 21, 2004
Reporter Provides Account of Mosul AttackBy JEREMY REDMON
Filed at 5:47 p.m. ET
FORWARD OPERATING BASE MAREZ, Iraq (AP) -- It was a brilliant, sunny day with blue skies and warmer than usual weather in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers had just sat down for lunch in their giant chow hall tent.
It was about noon Tuesday when insurgents hit their tent with a suspected rocket attack. The force of the explosions knocked soldiers off their feet and out of their seats. A fireball enveloped the top of the tent, and shrapnel sprayed into the men.
Amid the screaming and thick smoke that followed, quick-thinking soldiers turned their lunch tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and gently carried them into the parking lot.
``Medic! Medic!'' soldiers shouted.
Medics rushed into the tent and hustled the rest of the wounded out on stretchers.
Scores of troops crammed into concrete bomb shelters outside. Others wobbled around the tent and collapsed, dazed by the blast.
``I can't hear! I can't hear!'' one female soldier cried as a friend hugged her.
Near the front entrance to the chow hall, troops tended a soldier with a gaping head wound. Within minutes, they zipped him into a black body bag. Three more bodies were in the parking lot.
The military asked that the dead not be identified until families could be notified.
Soldiers scrambled back into the hall to check for more wounded. The explosions blew out a huge hole in the roof of the tent. Puddles of bright red blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.
Grim-faced soldiers growled angrily about the attack as they stomped away.
``Mother (expletive)!'' one mumbled.
Sgt. Evan Byler, of the Richmond, Va.-based 276th Engineer Battalion, steadied himself on one of the concrete bomb shelters. He was eating chicken tenders and macaroni when the bomb hit. The blast knocked him out of his chair. When the smoke cleared, Byler took off his shirt and wrapped it around a seriously wounded soldier.
Byler held the bloody shirt in his hand, not quite sure what to do with it.
``It's not the first close call I have had here,'' said Byler, a Fauquier County, Virginia, resident who survived a blast from an improvised explosive device while riding in a vehicle earlier this year.
Byler started walking back to his base when he spotted a soldier collapse from shock on the side of the road. Byler and Lt. Shawn Otto, also of the 276th, put the grieving soldier on a passing pickup truck.
The 276th, with about 500 troops, had made it a year without losing a soldier and is preparing to return home in about a month.
``We almost made it. We almost made it to the end without getting somebody killed,'' Otto said glumly.
At least two other soldiers with the 276th were injured, but it was not clear how serious their wounds are.
Insurgents have fired mortars at the chow hall more than 30 times this year. One round killed a female soldier with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in the summer as she scrambled for cover in one of the concrete bomb shelters. Workers are building a new steel and concrete chow hall for the soldiers just down the dusty dirt road.
Lt. Dawn Wheeler, a member of the 276th from Centreville, Va., was waiting in line for chicken tenders when a round hit on the other side of a wall from her. A soldier who had been standing beside her was on the ground, struggling with shrapnel buried deep in his neck.
``We all have angels on us,'' she said as she pulled away in a Humvee.
Wheeler quickly joined other officers from the 276th for an emergency meeting minutes after the blast.
Maj. James Zollar, the unit's acting commander, spoke to more than a dozen of his officers in a voice thick with emotion. He urged them to keep their troops focused on their missions.
``This is a tragic, tragic thing for us but we still have missions,'' he told them. ``It's us, the leaders, who have to pull them together.''
Just hours before the blast, Zollar had awarded a Purple Heart to a soldier from the 276th who was wounded in a mortar attack on another part of the base in October.
Zollar eventually turned the emergency meeting over to Chaplain Eddie Barnett. He led the group in prayer.
``Help us now, God, in this time of this very tragic circumstance,'' Barnett said. ``We pray for your healing upon our wounded soldiers.''
With heads hung low, the soldiers trudged outside. They had work to do.
------
Jeremy Redmon, a Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter embedded with U.S. troops, was at Forward Operating Base Marez when it came under attack.
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December 21, 2004
At Least 19 U.S. Soldiers Are Among the DeadBy RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 21 -

A powerful explosion killed at least 24 people and wounded 57 others today when it ripped through the tented dining hall of a large American military base in Mosul, tearing a foot-wide hole in the hard concrete floor and spraying shrapnel into a line where American soldiers, civilian contractors and Iraqi troops were waiting to be served lunch, military officials said.
At least 19 American servicemen were among the dead, according to Maj. Earle Bluff, a military spokesman in Baghdad, making the noontime explosion the deadliest single attack on American forces in Iraq.
Pools of blood streamed out of the darkened dining hall at Forward Operating Base Marez as soldiers rushed in to evacuate the wounded from amid crumpled and melted chairs and tables, with the only light coming from a massive hole ripped in the tent roof by the force of the blast, according to one eyewitness.
The attack was the latest in a campaign by militants to terrorize and intimidate Iraqis working either for the Iraqi security services or for American forces, and to disrupt elections planned for Jan. 30, which the militants oppose.
Speaking in Washington, President Bush offered his condolences to relatives of those killed and wounded in Mosul today, but said that the sacrifices were not in vain. "This is a very important and vital mission," Mr. Bush said outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he visited with soldiers wounded in Iraq. "I'm confident democracy will prevail in Iraq. I know a free Iraq will lead to a more peaceful world. So we ask for God's blessings on all who are involved in that vital mission."
The radical Islamist group Army of Ansar al-Sunna issued a statement over the Internet taking responsibility for the Mosul attack, saying one of its fighters had carried out a "martyrdom operation" against forces it described as unbelievers and occupiers. However, a United States military spokesman in Mosul said that no corpse or human remains had been found that appeared to come from a suicide bomber.
Military officials said the blast could have been caused by a well-aimed rocket or mortar round fired by insurgents outside the base. But they also cautioned that it was far too early to narrow the possibilities and that other potential causes, including a bomb smuggled onto the base, would be considered.
They said the blast was a single explosion, and that its shrapnel had created uniform perforations in metal kitchen appliances and other objects near the serving line, as if ball bearings or similar projectiles had been part of the explosive device. "The perforations were perfectly round," Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, the chief military spokesman in Mosul, said.
In the chaos of the explosion's aftermath, there was some confusion over some aspects of the casualty toll. In addition to the military deaths, the blast killed four employees and three subcontractors of Halliburton, the large Houston oil-services company that provides cafeteria and other support services to forces in Iraq, the company said. That would bring the death toll to at least 26, though a military spokesman in Mosul said he knew of only 24 confirmed deaths.
Halliburton confirmed the loss of its workers, noting that 62 of its workers had died thus far in "Iraq-Kuwait region" while working "side by side with the military and Iraqi people."
In Washington, the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, emphasized the administration's resolve to press ahead with its Iraq policy despite such attacks. "The enemies of freedom understand the stakes involved," he said. "You heard the president talk about that yesterday. They will be defeated, and a free and peaceful Iraq will emerge."
In a taped statement, the commander of American forces in northern Iraq, Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham, said: "The killed include U.S. military personnel, U.S. contractors, foreign national contractors and Iraqi army. The wounded also come from those various groups."
"It's a sad day in Mosul," General Ham added. "But as they always do, soldiers will come back from that. And they will do what they can do best to honor those who were fallen today, and that is to see this very important mission through to a successful completion."
The focal point of the blast appeared to have been where the soldiers collected plastic folks and spoons at a stand a few feet from the long serving line, where a four-inch deep crater, about a foot wide, was blown into the thick concrete floor, said Capt. Pat Roddy.
The tiles on the floor near the serving line "were covered with so much blood you couldn't see what color the tiles were," Captain Roddy, of Fort Lewis, Wash., said in a telephone interview from Mosul. "At least 50 percent of the tables and chairs had been obliterated by shrapnel. Anybody who was sitting in there, with the magnitude of the explosion, it was large enough, it could have killed anybody."
Outside, he said, "there were half-burned boots, not attached to any soldier, and you could see blood trails coming past the concrete barriers." In the sinks outside, where soldiers washed their hands before entering the dining hall, there were "glass, parts of uniforms, watches and gloves" strewn about basins full of an inch or two of blood, he said.
The Mosul base is home to a sizable contingent of troops from Fort Lewis, in Washington State, but officials there told reporters that they had few details of the attack or how many casualties involved soldiers from the fort.
F.B.I. investigators were en route to the Mosul base tonight, and military officials were careful to not rule out any potential explanations for the blast.
"People are out there saying it was a rocket attack, but we flat out don't know that, and it could very well have not been indirect fire," said Colonel Hastings said. "It very well could have been a placed explosion."
Mosul has been the scene of frequent raids by insurgents on police stations in the past six weeks. More than 100 bodies have turned up in the city in recent weeks, as the country heads toward the elections. On Sunday, car bombers struck crowds in Najaf and Karbala, killing at least 61 people and wounding about 120 in those two holy Shiite cities. In Baghdad, about 30 insurgents hurling grenades and firing machine guns pulled three election officials from their car in the midst of morning traffic and killed them with shots to the head.
The Army of Ansar al-Sunna is regarded as a particularly brutal faction of the insurgency that has developed in strength and scope over the last several months. Among its more notable acts have been the killings, sometimes by beheading, of 11 captive Iraqi soldiers and 12 hostage truck drivers from Nepal. Ansar al-Sunna is an offshoot of Ansar al-Islam, a jihadist organization chased out of its mountain base in northern Iraq by American Special Forces and Kurdish militiamen at the start of the war in Iraq.
Today's explosion coincided with an unannounced visit to Baghdad by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who vowed that the war against the insurgents would be won and the elections held on time. Britain has some 8,000 troops in Iraq, mainly in the south of the country, centered in the city of Basra.
At a news conference in the so-called Green Zone, a fortified, heavily guarded walled compound for Iraqi government officials and foreign forces, Mr. Blair used his visit, his first to Baghdad since Saddam Hussein was toppled in spring 2003, to emphasize Britain's support for the national elections, saying the country was engaged in a "battle between democracy and terror."
Insurgents have been trying to disrupt or prevent the scheduled vote and the campaigning process by an Iraqi government that they see as collaborating with occupying foreign forces. The attacks on the Iraqi police and national guard officers have complicated plans to train enough local forces that would ideally spearhead security at polling stations.
Some Iraqi leaders have called for a postponement of the elections, saying that the continuing violence has made holding them untenable, especially in the Sunni-dominated areas north and west of Baghdad. Millions of voters would have to brave the threat of attacks by guerrillas to go to polling stations.
With the elections only six weeks away and just days into the campaigning, concern has been growing over whether the Iraqi security forces will be able to perform well enough to allow voting to proceed.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, David Stout contributed reporting from Washington, and Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York.
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today's papersFOIA'd Again!By Sam SchechnerPosted Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2004, at 2:29 AM PT
Everyone leads with what little news could be wrung from President Bush's 53-minute presser yesterday morning, in which he gave an uncharacteristically frank assessment of the situation in Iraq, a characteristically upbeat assessment of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and sidestepped many other questions.
The papers' news conference lead stories are pretty much interchangeable, down to the use of the word "sober" to describe Bush's Iraq comments. Everyone notes his shocker admission that progress there is "mixed" when it comes to training Iraqi troops. "They've got some generals in place and they've got foot soldiers in place, but the whole command structure necessary to have a viable military is not in place," Bush said. "No one can predict every turn in the months ahead, and I certainly don't expect the process to be trouble-free. Yet I'm confident of the result. I'm confident the terrorists will fail, the elections will go forward."
Both USA Today and the Washington Post tout their own polls showing that a majority of the American public doesn't exactly share that confidence: 51 percent told USAT's Gallup poll that they now disapprove of the decision to go to war and 56 percent told the WP/ABC survey that the war was not worth fighting. In addition, both surveys say 52 percent of Americans think Rumsfeld should resign.
But, as everyone notes, Bush at least temporarily halted the Rumsfall, declaring his strong support for the SecDef and defending his general goodness. "You know, sometimes perhaps his demeanor is rough and gruff, but beneath that rough and gruff, no-nonsense demeanor is a good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes." (Rummy, for his part, defends himself in a USAT op-ed.)
The best account of the conference comes inside the WP, from Dana Milbank, who focuses on Bush's amusing rationale for refusing to answer substantive questions about his proposal to privatize Social Security. "Now the temptation is going to be … as we run up to the issue, to get me to negotiate with myself in public," Bush explained. And when the LAT's Ed Chen later tried to get some details by pointing out that Bush had already, ahem, negotiated with himself by ruling out benefit cuts for retirees and near retirees, Bush was unmoved. "Yeah, well, that's going to fall in the negotiating-with-myself category," he said.
Milbank also notices an interesting trend: This marks two news conferences for Bush in as many months. Is he finally warming to the task?
The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and WP all front some nice investigative reporting … by the ACLU, which has FOIA'd its way into yet another cache of documents describing the torture of military detainees at Gitmo and in Iraq. (The ACLU also scooped the papers on Dec. 8, when it released an earlier set of torture memos, yielding stories in the WP and NYT.)
In this case, FBI memos and e-mails running through August of this year offer first-hand accounts of the torture—including, the WP points out, the use of growling dogs to intimidate Gitmo prisoners, despite Pentagon denials of such treatment there. One FBI "Urgent Report" from June gives a witness's account of "serious physical abuses" of prisoners in Iraq, including "strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings and unauthorized interrogations." In July, an agent told his superiors that interrogations he had witnessed were "not only aggressive, but personally very upsetting."
Citing only "officials," the Post says at least some of the FBI memos were written after agency headquarters requested first-hand accounts of abuses. The motive, naturally, was CYA; some of the documents allege that military interrogators were impersonating FBI agents. "DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators," an agent moans in one e-mail. "The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public."
In other torture news, the WP buries a short AP wire piece noting that a Navy SEAL was acquitted of charges that, in November 2003, he beat a hooded and handcuffed Iraqi prisoner, Manadel Jamadi, who later died in Abu Ghraib from his injuries.
Everyone picks up news that another anti-inflammatory painkiller—this time one that's sold over-the-counter as Aleve—could increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Following similar revelations for Vioxx and Celebrex, federal drug officials did a quick review of an ongoing NIH study of the drug's benefits for Alzheimer's disease and discovered, to their surprise, that it increased the risk of heart attack or stroke by 50 percent over those who took placebos. Now, officials aren't ruling anything out; other common anti-inflammatory drugs, like Advil, might have similar affects.
The WP notes that, for the eighth year in a row, the Congressional organ formerly known as the General Accounting Office (now, the Government Accountability Office!) found the U.S. government's record keeping so abysmal that it could not verify whether it meets generally accepted accounting practices.
Now that the intel bill has passed, the former members of the 9/11 Commission plan to start their uphill-to-vertical battle lobbying Congress to reform itself, according to the NYT. They're urging legislators to streamline their now tortured oversight of intelligence and homeland security. The commission's report notes, for example, that 412 of 435 House members and all 100 senators have some kind of jurisdiction over the Homeland Security Department.
Wack-job … A botched security drill at an enriched uranium stockpile in Tennessee almost led to fatalities, the NYT reports, after a "shadow" security team with loaded guns rushed "intruders" carrying laser tag equipment. "For two minutes, it was mass confusion," said one of the guards on duty that night. "People asked several times, 'Is this a drill?' Nobody would clarify." It's not the only lapse there either: Drills were suspended a couple of weeks later when guards who were practicing loading and firing their weapons using blanks accidentally discharged a live round through a wall and into a refrigerator in the next room. Although the stockpile is a government facility, its security is provided by a private contractor, Wackenhut, which the paper says is responsible for security at about half of the country's nuclear power plants.Sam Schechner is a freelance writer in New York.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111279/

readmeSold!Goodbye, Bill G. Hello, Don G.By Jacob WeisbergPosted Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2004, at 8:00 AM PT
Today the Washington Post Co. announces that it is buying Slate from Microsoft Corporation, our home since we began publishing in 1996. When the transaction closes in mid-January, we will leave the splendiferous House of Gates for the munificent House of Graham.
Readers are likely to notice little, if any, change in the magazine. All of our senior editorial staff and writers are staying on, and most of the junior ones as well. Although the move creates exciting opportunities for us, especially on the business side, neither the new publisher nor the old editor (who is also staying) envisions drastic editorial changes. Washington Post Co. Chairman and CEO Don Graham and his colleagues have impressed upon us that they're buying Slate because they like it the way it is, not in order to make it into something else. They've assured us that we will retain our editorial independence and stay separate from our new sister publications, which include the Washington Post newspaper, Washingtonpost.com, Newsweek, and Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel. Slate is not going to be merged, submerged, bent, folded, spindled, or mutilated.
These were also key considerations for Microsoft, where Slate has been generously supported lo these many years. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had the wisdom to say yes when my predecessor, Michael Kinsley, came to them in 1995 with a proposal for a journalistic experiment. We're all deeply grateful to Microsoft for giving us the financial backing and freedom we needed to experiment, stir up trouble, and grow into early adolescence with the new medium. When we published articles that the "shirts" in Redmond can't have liked very much, they did not complain or otherwise attempt to restrain us. When other online publications were being scaled back or shuttered, our budget remained intact. Even after determining some years ago that it did not much want to be in the media business, Microsoft assured us that we had a place, if a somewhat anomalous one, at the company. In a final burst of vision, the MS execs came to the realization that at this stage in Slate's development, we would be better off at a media company than at their technology company. But even as Microsoft put Slate on the block, Bill G. let us know we'd be welcome to stay put if we couldn't find the right buyer.
I am confident that we have found the right buyer for Slate. The Washington Post Co. is known for supporting high-quality publications, for taking editorial integrity seriously, and for being as good as its word. Don G., as we shall now call him, recognized early on the journalistic potential of the Web, making a significant long-term investment in Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), the Post's online wing. Don wants Slate to become consistently profitable, but he is a patient man and prepared for this to take a while. Like the other people we've met at the Post Co., Don is almost suspiciously nice and appears to have some kind of personal relationship with each of the approximately 30,000 employees at his company. Another of these disturbingly nice Posties, Cliff Sloan, has agreed to become Slate's new publisher.
Though we've decided to go our separate ways, Slate and Microsoft will remain friends. We'll be maintaining a "distribution" relationship with MSN, which means that Slate headlines will continue to appear on the MSN.com home page. Nor are we severing our ties to the Pacific Northwest. For the time being, several Slate employees will continue to work from Seattle. So this isn't goodbye to all that—just goodbye to some of it.
It is farewell, however, to a few longtime staff members who are leaving us behind. Cyrus Krohn, our outgoing publisher, was Slate's first employee and has done everything for the magazine short of performing a striptease for an audience of drunken salespeople in Las Vegas. Never mind—Cyrus did do that! He is going to stay on at Microsoft with the MSN Video team. Our associate publisher, Eliza Truitt, who, like Cyrus, began her career here as an editor, is seizing the opportunity to pursue a career in photography. Associate Editor Amanda Fortini is moving to California and will continue to write for the magazine. Helping us through the transition, but leaving thereafter are several other loyal, long-standing, and much-valued Slatesters: Production Designer Lori Johnson, Redmond Office Manager Gretchen Evanson, Development Engineer Krisjan Fritz, Support Engineer Igor Shames, and our payments and newsletters guru, JoAnne Spencer.
Slate, and I, will miss each of them.Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111289/