The authenticity of the five-and-a-half-minute video, which was posted on a Web site that has carried other messages from insurgent groups, couldn't be determined. The video shows three men dressed in black, their faces cloaked, discussing plans for the attack. Then it shows a fireball four stories high ripping through the top of a large tent.
The Pentagon declined to comment, and a military spokesman in Mosul said he hadn't seen the video. A New York Times reporter who recently ate in the mess tent while embedded with an Army unit said it wasn't clear whether the structure shown in the video was the same tent.
Insurgents continued their campaign against Iraqi officials on Sunday. Attackers gunned down Muhammad Abd al-Hussein, a member of a secular political party that had been strongly critical of Syria, in front of his house in Baghdad.
''We have lost today a hero killed by terrorists,'' said Mithal al-Alusi, the head of Saddam's party, the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation. ''After he took part in the demonstration in front of the Syrian Embassy in Baghdad, he received death threats, and now he is killed.'' Gunmen also killed an Iraqi police colonel in Baghdad on Sunday, an Interior Ministry official said.
The head of Iraq's independent electoral commission, Abdul Hussein al-Hindawi, strongly criticized recent conversations between the Bush administration and Iraqi leaders about giving some high-level government positions to Sunni Arab politicians even if the Sunnis do poorly in the Jan. 30 election.
''Everything will be clear by voting and only the boxes will decide, according to the law, without any intervention,'' Hindawi said.
