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For only the second day so far this year, Iraq attracted coverage from reporters on all three networks. NBC had Richard Engel offer a brief stand-up from Baghdad on the suicide bomber who killed five GIs on foot patrol in the "generally safe, upscale" neighborhood of Mansour. ABC's Terry McCarthy (embargoed link) updated us on the general success of those foot patrols as soldiers leave their heavily-armored vehicles to "walk and talk with locals, drinking tea, making friends, picking up scraps of intelligence." For CBS, Allen Pizzey went into the countryside south of Baghdad to Zambraniyah, where a USAF B-I bomber staged a $100,000 publicity stunt to impress "local sheikhs and tribal leaders." After six weeks of fighting, the US military had cleared the region of a guerrilla cell operated by al-Qaeda. To celebrate, local dignitaries assembled to watch the destruction of the cell's "torture chamber and operational headquarters" with a high-priced air raid. Haditha in Anbar Province, NBC's Martin Savidge reminded us, was the town where a Marine Corps patrol had killed 24 civilians including five children back in 2005. Savidge narrated videotape from The New York Times as a family of former insurgents embraced Major Kevin Jerrard "not just as a friend but as a brother" after he organized lifesaving heart surgery for two-year-old Amina al-Bayati in Tennessee. The girl is now cured and "two of her uncles, jailed for more than a year, were specially released just to be at her homecoming."
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