IRAQ Authorities discover bomb outside eatery in safe zone

A report says sanctions and the first Gulf War halted weapons programs.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. authorities raised the security alert in the heavily guarded Green Zone after an improvised bomb was found in front of a restaurant there, officials said today.
Twenty Iraqis were arrested in the north in operations against those suspected of planting bombs against U.S. and Iraqi targets.
Elsewhere, one American soldier was killed and two others were wounded when a bomb exploded late Wednesday near their convoy outside the insurgent stronghold Fallujah. Four U.S. Marines and three Iraqi soldiers were reported injured in an operation to crush insurgents south of Baghdad.
Detainees released
About 240 detainees, meanwhile, were released from U.S. and Iraqi custody today, the U.S. military said. It was the fourth round of releases under a joint U.S.-Iraqi review process set up Aug. 21 after the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison.
The publication in April of photographs showing naked, terrified Iraqi prisoners being abused and humiliated by grinning American guards at Abu Ghraib caused outrage here and internationally.
None of those freed today were so-called high-value detainees, who are processed separately from the 1,700 "security detainees" held at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman.
Explosive device
The warning to Americans and Iraqi officials in the Green Zone followed the discovery Tuesday of an explosive device at the Green Zone Cafe, a popular hangout for Westerners living and working in the compound -- which houses major U.S. and Iraqi government offices. A U.S. military ordnance detachment safely disarmed it, U.S. officials said.
A loud explosion shook the Green Zone this afternoon and smoke was seen rising from inside the compound.
The U.S. military had no immediate information on the situation. Insurgents regularly fire at the compound.
Americans living and working in the zone were warned to avoid nonessential movements, travel in groups and avoid specific areas.
Although movements in and out of the Green Zone are restricted, about 10,000 Iraqis live inside the 4-square-mile district, located along the western side of the Tigris river.
In Mosul, the U.S. military said American and Iraqi forces detained 20 people in operations in northern Iraq and foiled a roadside bombing Wednesday in the city of Tal Afar, scene of intense fighting last month between U.S. soldiers and insurgents.
Weapons finding
Meanwhile, the chief U.S. weapons hunter found that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs had deteriorated into only hopes and dreams by the time of the U.S.-led invasion last year, a decline wrought by the first Gulf War and years of international sanctions.
And what ambitions Saddam harbored for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading those sanctions, and he wanted them primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists, but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel.
The report of weapons hunter Charles Duelfer was presented Wednesday to senators and the public in the midst of a fierce presidential election campaign in which Iraq and the war of terror have become the overriding issues.
The report chronicles the decay of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs after its defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. By the late 1990s, only its long-range missile efforts continued in defiance of the United Nations; even then, Iraq's ballistic and cruise missile designs had not proceeded far past the drawing board.