America: I didn't know Marla Ruzicka, but some of my best friends in the business did, like Canadian journalist Patrick Graham who lived for a while at her house in Baghdad, writes Conor O'Clery.
Marla was the opposite of the "ugly American". An irrepressible fun- loving activist from California, she went to Afghanistan and Iraq to record civilian deaths and injuries. She founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict and got Senator Patrick Leahy to help her win congressional approval for $10 million for her cause in Afghanistan and $20 million for Iraq.
Marla and her long-time Iraqi associate Faiz Ali Salim were killed on the Baghdad airport road on April 16th when a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of security contractors passing their car. She was on her way to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb.
Her work had drawn attention to the human cost of the war, which was made all the more important by the fact that the US military refused to account for civilian casualties.
Just before she died Marla learned that US forces did in fact keep such a record, despite public claims to the contrary.
Patrick Graham paid tribute to Marla and Faiz when receiving an Overseas Press Club award in Manhattan on Wednesday for his account in Harper's magazine of spending a year with the Iraqi resistance.
Graham recalled that when asked by Fox News to talk about his reporting, he was categorised as someone who not only spent time with terrorists but was a Canadian!
The president of the Overseas Press Club, Richard Stolley of Time, warned that the battle against the press had taken an ominous turn in the US, with 18 lawsuits against journalists for protecting sources.
A candle was lit at the podium in the Hyatt Hotel ballroom for Paul Klebnikov of Forbes magazine who was killed outside his Moscow office in July 2004. Last year 117 journalists and support staff were killed around the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 39 of them in Iraq; 33 were Iraqi nationals.
Marla Ruzicka joins the growing number of courageous people killed bringing aid to victims, including Dublin-born Margaret Hassan who was kidnapped in Iraq in October and whose body has not yet been found.
Marla Ruzicka coincidentally plays a minor role in the best thriller currently showing in American cinemas. It is Alex Gibney's documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
The movie, which opened this month, describes how a Texas gas combine grew into a vast corporation and the biggest financial supporter of the Bush family.
Its CEO, Kenneth (Kenny Boy) Lay was on the verge of becoming energy secretary in George Bush's first term when things started to unravel.
The top executives Ken Lay and ceo Jeff Skilling (both now under indictment) presided over what now looks like a vast criminal enterprise. Among other scams, Enron was responsible for California's rolling blackouts of 2001 during which its traders manipulated power-plant closures and bumped up electricity costs, all the while making crude jokes. One is heard on tape chuckling "Burn, baby, burn," when a fire threatens a power plant.
During the crisis Skilling had the audacity to go to San Francisco and blame the California Public Utilities Commission for screwing up deregulation. The movie shows him being hit in the face by a well-aimed pie from a group of protesters from Global Exchange, a human rights advocacy group.
It also shows a close up of a young woman being escorted out of the venue. It is Marla Ruzicka. Her mother Nancy told the San Francisco Chronicle last week that Marla had been active in Global Exchange since her school days. She recalled an episode when President Bush visited Sacramento during the California energy crisis.
"She mooned the president," she said. "The back of her underpants said, 'Public Power Now'. When she turned back around, the president looked her in the face - he was only about a foot away - and said, 'Cute'."
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As he concluded his primetime press conference at 9pm on Thursday, President Bush joked: "We better finish this up. There are TV programmes to show, for the sake of the economy."
It was too late. NBC had already cut him off in mid-sentence to start showing Donald Trump's Apprentice, Fox had gone to The Simple Life starring Paris Hilton, and CBS had switched to Survivor.
The timing of the end of the press conference had already been the result of a standoff between the White House and the networks. The White House originally announced the president would begin his hour-long event at 8.30pm. NBC, Fox and CBS initially said they would not show the press conference.
The president had no major announcement to make after all: he wasn't going to declare war or a pull out from Iraq. It seemed more like an attempt to revive a flagging presidency. Thursday also was the first night of the May "sweeps," when ratings are measured to set advertising rates for the following year.
But it was still only the president's fourth full-dress East Room press conference, and the networks were in two minds. NBC was adamant that its top-rated show, Apprentice, scheduled for 9pm, would not be postponed.
Donald Trump would win the standoff. The White House blinked first. Less than three hours before the scheduled time, it announced that the press conference would be brought forward to 8pm.
The decision meant that NBC agreed to go ahead with the broadcast of the Bush press conference and the other networks followed. The big loser was Reese Witherspoon, whose movie Sweet Home Alabama was dumped by ABC to make way for the president.
America's comedians had a field day following the television broadcast of George Bush strolling hand in hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at his Crawford ranch on Monday.
Jay Leno on NBC showed the president and the Saudi leader in a spoof of a TV advertisement that features a romantic couple strolling hand-in-hand in Las Vegas with the words "What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas". The punchline was changed to: "What happens in Crawford stays in Crawford."
On HBO, Bill Maher commented: "Bush is with the Saudis like Michael Jackson is with 12-year-olds."
In the New Yorker, Andy Borowitz wrote that President Bush "reiterated his opposition to gay marriage - unless one of the partners has several billion barrels of petroleum."