Iraq

Bombings kill American soldier and wound five

BAGHDAD - Bombings struck four coalition and Iraqi military convoys and a provincial government office Monday, killing at least eight people, including an American soldier and an Estonian trooper in the Baghdad area.

A roadside bomb in western Baghdad killed one U.S. soldier and wounded five, the U.S. military said.

An Estonian soldier died when a roadside bomb exploded at a market just outside Baghdad as his patrol went by, the Estonian military said. Five Estonian soldiers were wounded.

A car bomb also targeted an Australian military convoy 350 yards from their country's embassy in Baghdad, killing three Iraqi civilians and wounding nine people, including three Australian soldiers who suffered minor injuries, Iraqi and coalition officials said.

In near-simultaneous attacks in the northern city of Mosul, suicide car bombers struck provincial government offices and a military convoy, the U.S. military said. Three government employees were killed and one injured at the offices and an Iraqi general was slightly injured in the attack on the convoy, a government spokesman said.

Insurgent attacks across Iraq have increased by 25 percent since the holy month of Ramadan began two weeks ago. Attacks on U.S. and coalition forces averaged 56 a day last month - down from a high of 87 in August.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The Lebanese Embassy in Baghdad is working with Iraqis to secure the release of a 7-year-old Lebanese boy taken by kidnappers demanding $150,000, Foreign Ministry officials said Monday.

The Associated Press quoted unnamed officials as refusing to say who the embassy was in contact with.

The boy, Mohammed Hamad, was kidnapped Saturday while walking home from school in the Diyala province east of Baghdad. His father, Abdel-Ghani Hamad, is a Lebanese citizen who has lived in Iraq for 30 years.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration intends to seek about $70-billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225-billion since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Washington Post reports, quoting unnamed Pentagon and congressional officials.

White House budget office spokesman Chad Kolton emphasized that final decisions on the spending request will not be made until shortly before the request is sent to Congress.

But the newspaper quoted unnamed Pentagon and House Appropriations Committee aides as saying the Defense Department and military services are scrambling to get their final requests to the White House Office of Management and Budget by mid November, shortly after the election. The new numbers underscore that the war is going to be far more costly and intense, and last longer, than the administration first suggested.

WASHINGTON - A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by U.S. forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the New York Times reports, quoting unnamed administration officials.

The opinion, reached in recent months, establishes an important exception to public assertions by the Bush administration since March 2003 that the Geneva Conventions applied comprehensively to prisoners taken in the conflict in Iraq, the officials said. They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the CIA to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of al-Qaida and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

The officials outlined the opinion's findings on Monday in response to a report in the Washington Post over the weekend that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly transferred a dozen non-Iraqi prisoners out of Iraq in the past 18 months, despite a provision in the conventions that bars civilians protected under the accords from being deported from occupied territories.

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