An American anti-war “activist” was one of the victims of a terrorist car bomb in Baghdad: Iraq Car Bomb Kills American Activist. (Hat tip: NC.)

SAN FRANCISCO - A woman who founded a humanitarian group to aid civilian casualties in Iraq has died in a car bombing in Baghdad, officials said Sunday.

Marla Ruzicka, founder of Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, died Saturday in the blast, which also killed an Iraqi and another foreigner, officials said. She had been in Iraq conducting door-to-door surveys trying to determine the number of civilian casualties in the country.

Ruzicka, 28, founded CIVIC in 2003 to “mitigate the impact of the conflict and its aftermath on the people of Iraq by ensuring that timely and effective life-saving assistance is provided to those in need,” according to the group’s Web site.

Marla Ruzicka was a contributor to the World Socialist Web Site and an admirer of Fidel Castro, as James Taranto pointed out in July 2002.

So what is this Global Exchange, which Filkins describes only as “an American organization”? A look at its Web site makes clear it’s a far-left outfit that opposed any military intervention in Afghanistan. Blogger Michael Moynihan has more details on Marla Ruzicka, who turns out to be a fervent admirer of Fidel Castro. There’s also a “report” on the 2000 election dispute from the World Socialist Web Site, which quotes her as suggesting Republicans are terrorists:

Marla Ruzicka, 23, an officially accredited observer from the Green Party, commented on the tactics of the Bush supporters. She described them as “really nasty. There was one guy with a bald head, like a skinhead. They surrounded me and called me a baby killer, because of my support for the right to abortion. When I pointed out Bush’s presiding over the death penalty, they said: no, no, that’s justice. They’re scary. Maybe they’re the ones who should be on the terrorist lists.”

Ruzicka, of course, is entitled to her opinions—but surely her extremist political agenda is relevant to Filkins’s readers in determining how much weight to give to her comments. Meanwhile, buried in the 16th paragraph of Filkins’s story is an admission that the whole thing is trumped up: “Indeed, the extraordinary accuracy of American airstrikes since they began in October has produced few of the types of disasters that plagued past wars, when bombs aimed at one target hit something else instead.” Oh well, never mind.

UPDATE at 4/17/05 9:07:34 pm:

Marla Ruzicka’s anti-war organization was paid for by George Soros, and subsidized by Human Rights Watch. (Hat tip: Van Impe.)

Ruzicka’s organization operates on an annual budget of about $100,000, funded now in large part by the Open Society Institute, a George Soros organization, with low-cost rental space provided by Human Rights Watch.

UPDATE at 4/18/05 5:29:31 pm:

Cori Dauber at Rantingprofs says it well: let us not speak ill of the dead, but let us speak accurately.