Marine Killed in Convoy

One Marine was killed and five were wounded Thursday when their Humvee was destroyed by a powerful bomb in a paved road outside the farming village of Saqlawiya.

The U.S. military also announced that a Marine had been killed Wednesday in Al Anbar province, which includes Fallouja. Neither Marine was immediately identified.

Violence in the area persists despite a security deal to end the Marine siege of Fallouja and replace U.S. forces with Iraqis.

The Humvee destroyed Thursday was part of a convoy that was beginning a morning mission to visit villages to aid in post-combat rebuilding.

Fighting continued elsewhere in Iraq, including in Karbala and Najaf, where fighters loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr refused to end their standoff with American forces.

U.S. troops are trying to disband the cleric’s army and sideline its leadership before handing power to a new Iraqi government June 30.

Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia became a major problem for the United States in April, when his fighters captured police stations and government buildings after U.S. authorities announced a warrant for his arrest in the April 2003 killing of a rival cleric.

In Washington, officials continued to discuss the prison abuse scandal and the cost of the war. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Democrats asked Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, No. 2 official at the Pentagon, and Marine Gen. Peter Pace about interrogations of Iraqi prisoners.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) asked whether holding a prisoner, naked, with a bag over his head and forcing him to squat for 45 minutes would be permitted under the Geneva Convention on treatment of war prisoners.

“I would describe it as a violation, sir,” Pace said.

Wolfowitz agreed that it sounded like a violation.

U.S. defense officials told a Senate committee Wednesday that misconduct shown in photos from Abu Ghraib prison would be punished, but that military interrogation techniques approved for use in Iraq did not violate international law.

Later, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) viewed the photos after returning from a campaign trip. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee declined to comment after seeing the images. But he told Fox News: “I am convinced this didn’t happen just because six or seven people decided to make it happen.”

He also blamed the Bush administration for casting doubt on the protections afforded prisoners by denying detainees from Afghanistan formal standing under the Geneva Convention.

Addressing budget issues, Wolfowitz said operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would cost more than $50 billion next year.

In London, British officials said Thursday that photographs allegedly showing British troops threatening and urinating on a hooded Iraqi prisoner were “categorically not taken in Iraq.”

Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram told the House of Commons that the truck in photos published by the Daily Mirror newspaper “was never in Iraq.”

But editor Piers Morgan said: “We have listened to what Mr. Ingram has said today, but he has still not produced incontrovertible evidence that the pictures are faked.”