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The Pathetic thing is that the Slimes didn't need to look any further than their sister paper - the Boston Globe to even confirm that their story was unmitigated BS. Tje Globe ran this story on April 5, 2003 on their FRONT PAGE.

WAR IN IRAQ / THE MILITARY OFFENSIVE

Barnard reported from Qatar, Milligan from Washington. Brian MacQuarrie of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Iraq. Robert Schlesinger of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington. Material from the Associated Press and Reuters also was used.;

US FORCES CROSS INTO BAGHDAD AIRPORT SEIZED; THOUSANDS FLEE IRAQI CAPITAL

By Anne Barnard, and Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

CAMP SAYLIYAH, Qatar - US forces tightened their hold around Baghdad yesterday, with units of the Army's Third Division entering the city for reconnaissance. US Marines and infantry battled Republican Guard loyalists as a defiant Saddam Hussein appeared on television to rally his troops against the coalition squeeze on the Iraqi capital.

US Army troops took command of Saddam International Airport, 12 miles southwest of central Baghdad, pushing out Iraqi forces that had clung overnight to the northern edge of the airfield and searching for holdouts in its many tunnels and buildings, said officials at US Central Command headquarters.

The facility was renamed Baghdad International Airport, said US Brigadier General Vincent Brooks. US commandos were moving into the capital, Brooks added. US tanks and armor also were rolling into the capital yesterday morning for brief missions, according to reports.

Thousands of Baghdad residents were seen fleeing the city, with hundreds of trucks, buses, and cars overflowing with people, possessions, and food backed up for 6 miles on roads heading north. Inside the capital, residents deprived of electricity for the last two days stored up on food and water, apparently bracing for the final battle for Baghdad.

The city continued to come under heavy attack from the air yesterday. Explosions and large plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the city, and Reuters reported heavy artillery blasts in the eastern part of the capital.

Air attacks also continued in the north, allowing opposition Kurdish forces to seize a bridge at Khazer, near the city of Mosul.

Early today, two US Marine pilots were killed when their AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter crashed in central Iraq, Central Command said. The cause was under investigation, but the crash did not seem to be a result of hostile fire, the command said.

Even with US troops closer than ever to Baghdad, the Iraqi government vowed resistance. Hussein was shown on local television being cheered and kissed by crowds. It was not clear that the figure was indeed the Iraqi leader, or when the video was made.

In a separate, televised address, Hussein referred to the downing of a US helicopter four days after the attack began, suggesting that Hussein survived a US attack on an Iraqi leadership compound March 19.

Iraq's Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, threatened the use of "nonconventional" methods to thwart coalition soldiers. He said the measures might include suicide attacks but would not involve chemical or biological weapons, which Iraqis have repeatedly denied having.

US troops yesterday came upon what they called a "suspicious" industrial site 25 miles south of Baghdad, where they found a large number of boxes of white powder, along with nerve agent antidote and instructions related to chemical warfare, a Third Infantry officer told the Associated Press.

A US officer said that first tests of the white powder indicated it was not a chemical weapon, Reuters reported early today.

Colonel John Peabody, commander of the Engineer Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, said most of it seemed to be the chemical antidote atropine.

United Nations weapons inspectors visited the Al Qa Qaa complex many times - as recently as March 8 - but found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site.

The United States has used Hussein's suspected possession of chemical or biological weapons as a fundamental justification for the attack on Iraq, which agreed to destroy such weaponry after the 1991 Gulf War. Coalition forces have discovered protective gear, but have yet to find chemical or biological weapons.

While US officials described steady progress in the march toward the capital, there were setbacks and tragedies.

The Massachusetts area lost its first soldiers in the war. Matthew Boule, a 22-year-old Army specialist from Dracut, and Erik Halvorsen, a 40-year-old chief warrant officer and native of Bennington, Vt., were killed when their Black Hawk helicopter crashed Wednesday near Karbala, Iraq. Both were members of the Third Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, Ga.

Michael Kelly, a 46-year-old Swampscott resident, became the first US reporter to die in the conflict. Kelly, editor at large for The Atlantic Monthly and a former Globe correspondent, died Thursday night when the Humvee he was traveling in went into a canal.

Three US special forces troops were killed when a car carrying a pregnant woman and a male driver blew up at a checkpoint southeast of the strategic Haditha Dam in northwestern Iraq, US officials said. It was the second car bombing attack on US troops and came five days after a taxi exploded at a checkpoint near Najaf in southern Iraq, killing four US servicemen.

Seconds before yesterday's car explosion near Haditha Dam, the woman fled from the car screaming for help, officials said. The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television later broadcast a videotape reportedly made by two Iraqi women who set off the attack.

"I swear to God to sacrifice myself to jihad against infidel Americans, British, and Israelis to defend my country's beloved soil," one woman said in the videotape, holding a rifle and placing a hand on the Koran.

President Bush, meanwhile, announced plans to meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the war and the Middle East peace process. It will be the second such summit between the two coalition partners since the fighting began two weeks ago.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that an interim government, made up of dissidents from within and outside Iraq, should be set up quickly.

"We're anxious to move quickly now that the day of liberation is growing near," Powell said. "I don't know when it will happen, but certainly we can see what's going to happen in the not-so-distant future, we hope."

A defense official also said an undisclosed number of civilians - three children among them - were killed when Marines fired on a truck that refused to stop at a checkpoint south of Baghdad. The victims were reportedly in a vehicle behind a military truck that tried to crash through the roadblock.

US forces, having secured most of the Baghdad airport, laid the foundation for a planned cordon of soldiers to encircle nearly all of Baghdad. Throughout the day, troops from the First Brigade of the Third Division continued attacks on Republican Guard positions that were estimated to include 70 tanks, about 70 other armored vehicles, and at least 400 infantry troops.

Just south of Baghdad, Second Brigade tanks and troops consolidated their control of a key highway crossroads, and other advance units moved east to the Tigris River to continue attacks against the badly damaged Medina Division of Hussein's Republican Guard. Resistance generally was light, military officials said, with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades accounting for most of the hostile fire.

What enemy presence existed seemed to be confined to small units operating from palm groves on the side of roads controlled by American armor and infantry.

With thousands of troops and support vehicles continuing to cross the Euphrates River from the west, Army commanders said, the cordon could be established as early as tomorrow, with the Third Infantry controlling access to the west and south of Baghdad, and Marines controlling movement to the east of the city.

"I think we're a little surprised at how much success we've had," Bailes said.

Seizing the airport, officials said, would keep government leaders from fleeing by air and could be crucial for practical and symbolic reasons.

"That airport now becomes a key transportation node for coalition forces," one senior military official said. "It will be absolutely essential for the quick flow of humanitarian aid, for the quick flow of military personnel and equipment, and for large-scale evacuation of the wounded."

The official cautioned that large-scale air operations will not begin immediately, since the Iraqis still have some air defenses over the city.

Elements of the Fourth Infantry Division - which was originally planned to deploy in the north, but was shifted to Kuwait when the US could not secure permission to move through Turkey - could be flown in, bolstering US forces around Baghdad.

"When we lost the northern front, a substantial portion of the ground force that was supposed to be brought to bear on the Iraqi capital went away with it," said Loren Thompson, a military expert with the Lexington Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Securing the airport also had symbolic value, the senior military official said.

"It was taken intact. So there's a symbolic message that [Hussein's] domain is falling."

I am utterly fed up with the media's lazyness and lies when it comes to our President.