IRAQ Two car bombs explode in Baghdad

No Americans were believed killed in either blast.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Two car bombs ripped through Baghdad streets today, with one blast killing at least 15 people and wounding 81 at an entrance to the Green Zone, the seat of the U.S. Embassy and key Iraqi government offices, officials said.
In the first explosion, a four-wheel-drive vehicle packed with explosives detonated outside the heavily fortified complex, Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman said.
Yarmouk Hospital received 15 bodies and 81 wounded from the explosion, said Sabah Aboud, the facility's chief registration official.
No Americans were believed hurt or killed in the blast, which happened shortly before 9 a.m. near a checkpoint at the western entrance to the Green Zone, said Maj. Phil Smith, a spokesman for the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division
Injured man
"I was thrown 10 meters away and hit the wall," said Wissam Mohammed, 30, who was visiting a nearby recruiting center for Iraqi security forces when the explosion happened. He lay in a bed at Yarmouk Hospital, his right hand broken, his head wrapped in bandages and his clothes stained with blood.
Troops cordoned off the scene and helicopters clattered overhead.
The second car bomb exploded at 9:45 a.m., near a number of major hotels, Abdul-Rahman said. American and Iraqi forces opened fire after the blast, but it was not immediately clear what they were shooting at, witnesses said.
The car carrying the explosives was ripped in half with one part left dangling from a shop sign on the opposite side of the street.
At least five other cars were charred and a burned body was left sitting in one of them. Broken glass littered the street.
Some of the injured, including a man with bloodied bandages wrapped around his head, were helped into nearby hotels. Others were rushed to surrounding hospitals.
Smith said that no Americans were hurt in the second blast, either.
Thick black smoke rose from the scene and a pair of helicopters circled the area as troops blocked off the road.
Targeted before
Both the Green Zone and the area around Saadoun Street have been the target of previous suicide attacks that have killed dozens of people.
Also in Baghdad, a senior official of Iraq's Sciences and Technology Ministry and a female employee were assassinated today, the Interior Ministry said. Thamir Abdul-Latif and the woman were killed near Baghdad's southeastern Zayona suburb, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman.
In rebel-held Fallujah, American warplanes unleashed strikes on two houses early today, killing at least 11 people, including women and children, hospital officials said.
The military, which regularly accuses hospitals of inflating casualty figures, said the strikes targeted followers of Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and their associates.
A strike in the central al-Jumhuriyah area killed nine people, including three women and four children, said Dr. Adil Khamis of Fallujah General Hospital. Twelve were injured, including six women and three children, he said. They include residents of neighboring houses that were damaged in the blast.
A second strike in the city's southern Al-Shuhada neighborhood killed two more people, Khamis said.
The military said a "precision strike" at about 1 a.m. hit a building where about 25 insurgents were moving weapons on the outskirts of Fallujah.
Intelligence sources said insurgents were using the site to store weapons and conduct training, the military said in a statement.
Rice stands firm
Meanwhile, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sunday defended the emphatic statements she made in the run-up to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program.
Rice acknowledged that she knew in 2002 of a "dispute" among intelligence officials about a central piece of evidence she and other senior Bush administration officials were using to justify the war -- that Saddam was trying to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
But she said the administration did not want to underestimate the threat Saddam posed, so it took the evidence seriously.
"A policymaker cannot afford to be wrong on the short side, underestimating the ability of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein" to build a nuclear program, Rice said on ABC's "This Week."
Rice was responding to a report Sunday in The New York Times, based on anonymous sources, that the government's pre-eminent nuclear experts at the Energy Department had said as early as 2001 that they did not believe the aluminum tubes were part of a nuclear program, but for small artillery rockets.