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Tension in Tehran

An elderly lady, wrapped in her black chador, knelt in front of the grave, flowers in hand, while her husband washed the gravestone with a hosepipe. Behind the stone, a glass-fronted cabinet carried a picture of a young man – their son. He’d been killed, age 19, during the Iran-Iraq war.

“Something has to be done for Iraq,” said the mother, “so that all these people didn’t die in vain.”

The Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery spreads from the main highway southeast of Tehran -- seemingly endless rows of graves as far as the eye can see. The glass-fronted cabinets contain personal effects as well as photographs of the chillingly young men who died in the tens-of-thousands during the war.

Family members visit soldier's graves during an Islamic holiday in Tehran, Iran.

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Suprising Talks

We are following several important stories tonight.

From Iraq... we'll have the latest on the regional conference between Iraq, Iran, Syria and the United States.  The fact that envoys from Iran and the U.S. were at the same table... made this an unusual meeting.  Iraq's Prime Minister urged his neighbors to take a strong stand against terrorism.  NBC's Richard Engel is there tonight... and will have the latest.

Also... NBC's Ian Williams is in Iran with reaction from people on the street... to this latest conference.

As President Bush continued his trip through South America ... he had little to say about the Iraq conference.  The focus of his remarks today had to do with an ongoing controversy back in the U.S. There have been reports this week that the FBI abused its power in gathering information about suspected terrorists.  There have also been allegations that the Justice Department decided to replace several U.S. attorneys because of political pressure.  The revelations prompted the President to defend his Attorney General today.  NBC's John Yang is following that story from Washington.

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The forgotten children

Editor's Note: This post is from Mary Dudley, president and founder of Diema’s Dream, a charity devoted to changing the lives of disabled children in Russia.  Mary's story, and that of the children she helps, will be the subject of one of our broadcast stories Sunday night. Here, Mary talks about the cause, the children, and how the give so much joy back when given just a little care and attention.  "They are like a flower that suddenly blooms and the lingering scent lodges in your heart forever!"

When I first met Diema, it was hard to look away from those big brown eyes that were so desparately seeking attention.  He was three years old, paralyzed from the waist down with an oversized head.  He suffered from Hydrocephalus and Spina Bifida.  He was in an oversized wooden playpen with not one toy.  He was still bottle fed and his baby teeth were rotten.  He didn’t speak, partly because of never having been fed solid food which would help develop his facial muscles.

Diema with his headphones on     

Children, who have the misfortune of being born with disabilities in Russia, are for the most part abandoned at birth by their parents.  A holdover from Soviet times, parents are strongly encouraged to give their child up to the state.  These children are hidden away in closed institutions where care is at best minimal.  They are forgotten by their parents and ignored by the state.  For families who make the brave decision to keep their disabled child, there is little in the way of state support and they are shunned by society.  The assumption is that the parents have led a depraved lifestyle which is the cause of their child’s disabilities. 

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Long day's journey into 30 Rock

Because I've reached the concluding leg of a journey that started in Baghdad 27 hours ago -- and stretched through Amman, Jordan, via Frankfurt, Germany, and now finally has me back in New York -- today's posting will be brief. I've got one more broadcast to round out the week before I'm able to leave for home and take some time to be with my family.

Tonight's broadcast will cover subjects ranging from the Second Amendment to cancer, from Iraq to mortgages to Newt Gingrich... with ethanol thrown in for good measure. And because it's Friday, we'll have our "Making A Difference" segment as well.

It wouldn't be appropriate for me to end a week this eventful without repeating my thanks to our team -- the folks on the road with me and the folks here in New York who cared so deeply about the material we beamed in from the field. And once more: you all should know that I came home alive and without a scratch thanks to the members of the infantry and the aviators who transported us to some real hot spots -- places like Anbar Province -- and places where media simply have not been recently. They are top-notch and my family joins me in thanking them for doing their jobs so well.

Have a great weekend. We hope you can join us for tonight's broadcast.

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Early Nightly is up

Brian anchors the broadcast tonight, but while he makes his way back to NBC News headquarters in New York, Andrea Mitchell delivers the vlog from Washington, D.C.

Click here or on the image to watch.

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Let's launch this Fokker!

It was proof of the operating assumption that Iraq will find a way to get you until you are clear of Iraqi airspace and safely out of the country. After a final day of reporting, we chose to start making our way to New York by making a stop in Amman, Jordan, before ending the week in New York tomorrow night.

So there we were sitting on squishy, vaguely sticky sofas in the dated, cavernous, sparse and dark confines of the main terminal at Baghdad International Airport. I was chatting with Gen. Wayne Downing, while I scrolled through some photos of the trip that cameraman Jeff Riggins had taken and downloaded onto his laptop. Suddenly there were five straight concussions. We all knew what they were -- rockets or mortars -- and we all know there's always the chance that they were controlled explosions. They were not. Cameraman Craig White and Producer Subrata De went to the window and saw the puffs of smoke rising from a patch of grass just off the taxiway in front of us. Amazed at the staying power of the insurgents (after all, these attacks are so common on or near the airport grounds -- three rockets landed there yesterday and we've been at this for four years), Riggins theorized that our outgoing flight would be delayed for hours. Au contraire.

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Early Nightly is up

Brian anchors the broadcast tonight, but NBC's Andrea Mitchell delivers the vlog from Washington, D.C., where she'll have a report on the influence Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has in the Bush administration.

Click here or on the image to see her run down the rest of tonight's top stories.

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'On the Line' with the 3rd ID

It’s been repeated many times: even the best battle plans never survive the first shot fired. That maxim has never been more true than in the Iraq war. It applies to the troops fighting there, and to the journalists covering them. The art of reporting this war is always changing for NBC News as we continually adapt to new -– usually violent -- realities in Iraq. Now, as the war moves into its fifth year, we add another approach to our coverage with a series called, "On the Line."

The series began on Feb. 16, when correspondent Mike Taibbi reported from the National Training Center in Ft. Irwin, Calif., where we found the men and women of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division gearing up for a third deployment to Iraq -- a deployment pushed up three months by President Bush’s so-called "surge" plan to bring some stability to the mean streets of Baghdad. Mike introduced you to Capt. Alex "Pancho" Perez-Cruz, a tank company commander from El Paso, Texas, fiercely devoted to his men and the mission in Iraq. Alex seems to shrug off the American public’s flagging support for the war. He told us, "The way I deal with it... is we sacrifice. We're the ones doing the hard work, and from our perspective it's worth it." And he doesn’t buy the "support the troops, not the war" line. For him the two are inseparable. "The war" is what "the troops" do. It’s their job. To indict it is to give a failing grade to what Capt. Perez-Cruz does for a living; he takes it personally.

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As I was saying...

Considering there are well over 140,000 Americans here, I've had two stunners in the Small World department in the last 48 hours. Yesterday in Camp Victory, I ran into an Army Reservist who works in the store where I buy my eyeglasses. This is his second tour -- he's a computer technician, and it was wonderful to see him and to show off the fact that I had purchased both the sunglasses I was wearing, and the reading glasses in my pocket, from him. While we were in Ramadi a few days ago, a young captain left a lengthy note for me. I met him when I was paying one of my many visits to West Point a few years ago. He stayed in touch, and months later asked me to be his co-conspirator on an elaborate plan. He brought his longtime sweetheart in to our studio to be my guests for a broadcast of Nightly News. They sat in the control room for the broadcast, and I invited them both up to the set for photos afterward. That was where the conspiracy kicked in. I asked his girlfriend to sit in my chair and I backed away while the brave West Point cadet (there's battlefield bravery... and then there's THIS kind of bravery...) got down on one knee and proposed to her, and our cameras rolled videotape of the entire scene. Postscript: she smartly said yes, they now have a child, and he is here as part of an armored platoon on his second tour. He heard that I was coming to Ramadi, and while he was out on patrol and could not come to see me, he was nice to leave me a note and update me on life. And that... as Paul Harvey would say... is the rest of the story.

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Camp Victory diarist

Same drill tonight, I'm afraid. We were out shooting for much of the day, and then the heart of the afternoon was taken up writing the piece you'll see on the broadcast tonight about our trip into Baghdad with the First Cavalry. As a result I will divide this in two and post a longer bit when I have time after the broadcast. This was another macro/micro day, perfectly illustrating the dichotomy of the conflict between big picture and small. We will begin the broadcast with the sad toll from today (and please remember the three stateside families being notified of the loss of a loved one), and then Richard Engel and I will both show you what we found on our respective outings. More later...

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