Another car bombing in Iraq

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A suicide car bombing early Monday outside the Green Zone government compound in Baghdad killed six people and wounded 15, police said, a day after seven U.S. Marines died in clashes in restive Al Anbar province.

Iraq's interim government is based in the Green Zone, which is also home to the U.S. Embassy.

On Sunday seven Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were killed in two separate incidents while conducting security and stabilization operations in Al Anbar province west of Baghdad, the military said.

The Combined Press Information Center said in a written statement that because of protective measures, it was not releasing details of how the deaths occurred.

"The release of more details about the incident could place our personnel at greater risk," the military said. The victims' names also were withheld.

The Al Anbar province has a strong presence of Iraqi insurgents.

The death of the first U.S. Marine was announced earlier Sunday.

Sunday's deaths bring the number of U.S. troops to die in the war to 1,296. A total of 1,442 Coalition troops have died since the war began.

Rumsfeld criticized over armor issue

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle Sunday pointed to poor planning to explain what they viewed as the lack of appropriate armor to protect U.S. soldiers in Iraq, with some showing less and less confidence in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, repeated his call for Rumsfeld's resignation, while New Jersey Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine joined the calls, saying that "no one has been held accountable" for any of the many things that have gone wrong in the war.

Corzine told "Fox News Sunday" that the country had already been faced with "the miscalculation and interpretation of the intelligence before the war," a "failure to secure all the weapons dumps," and "a problem with our administration of the prisons."

"Now we find that there has been underinvestment in protecting our men and women on the ground," he said. "And as we have said, there's been an underinvestment in the number of troops on the ground to actually protect themselves."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, acknowledged that the government "misunderstood ... the nature of what we thought would happen after Baghdad," but he did not lay the blame on Rumsfeld.

"The leadership that he's provided, I think, has been firm when we needed to be firm," Graham told Fox. "War is a messy thing. The insurgents are ruthless people. We're trying to adapt. We have made mistakes. It was the right thing to take this dictator out. A year ago tomorrow, we found him in a spider hole."

The armor issue came up last week when a soldier in Kuwait, awaiting deployment for Iraq, asked the secretary during a large question-and-answer session why soldiers had to dig in trash heaps for armor to protect their vehicles.

Rumsfeld replied that he was unaware of the problem and that "you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have." He said shortages of armor did not stem from a lack of money but were "a matter of physics." The manufacturers of add-on armor are producing it as fast as humanly possible, he said.

That apparently is not the case, however: two armor-producing companies quickly came forward to say they were not working at capacity and were awaiting orders from the Pentagon.

The Army struck a deal with one of those companies on Friday.

There was another twist in the story when it became known that an embedded reporter had planted the question with the soldier who confronted Rumsfeld. The publisher of the reporter's newspaper later said readers should have been told promptly about the reporter's involvement.

Other developments



<LI>A number of the 11 jailed former top lieutenants to Saddam Hussein have refused meals but are snacking, and the ousted leader himself is eating normally, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a coalition spokesman on detention operations in Iraq, told CNN. The comments came after published reports quoted a lawyer for former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz saying he had heard that Saddam and some of the other former Iraqi leaders were on a hunger strike.



<LI>One year after Saddam's capture, Iraq's National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told The Associated Press that officials expect his trial to get under way no earlier than the beginning of 2006. During his detention, Saddam has taken up gardening, undergone a hernia operation and written poetry that one visitor describes as "rubbishy." (Full story)



Iraq's interim president has criticized U.S. and British forces for dismantling Iraqi security forces and warned that long-term instability could give rise to an "Iraqi Hitler." Ghazi al-Yawer said Monday the decision to dismantle Saddam's defense and interior ministries contributed to the violence and disorder seen since the Iraqi dictator was captured a year ago. (Full story)