Veterans for Common Sense

Theater of War: An Ex-Marine Brings Iraq Stateside at MetroStage with play ‘Sand Storm’

By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 8, 2005; C01

It’s been a very bad week for the Marines in Iraq, and playwright Sean Huze is taking it personally. “Twenty-one Marines killed in the past 48 hours,” he says, his voice rising in anger. “I wonder when we’ve had enough — when we as a society will hold this administration accountable for getting us into a war unnecessarily.”

Huze, 30, lean and tattooed, sips from a can of Red Bull and drags on his cigarette outside MetroStage, the small theater in Alexandria where he is overseeing rehearsals for his first play, “The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front.” You might be tempted to dismiss him as another antiwar Hollywood liberal — he is, after all, an actor and playwright from Los Angeles — except there’s this: Until a few months ago, he was Marine Cpl. Huze, a veteran of combat in Iraq. He also was one of those gung-ho young patriots who marched into recruiting offices on Sept. 12, 2001, itching for payback.

Nicknamed “Hollywood” by his fellow Marines, Huze joined the invasion force that toppled Saddam Hussein. More than two years later, buddies in his old unit, the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, are still in Iraq, attempting to disrupt insurgent supply lines in the western Anbar province. When his eyes redden and mist with tears, you get it: This war is still inside him.

“You don’t come back the same man,” he says, lighting another Natural American Spirit cigarette on an ovenlike evening last week after news broke that 14 Marines had died in a massive roadside bombing in Anbar. “So in essence, no one returns from the war.”

A cliche, perhaps, but one that has given the world a significant body of literature. Huze doesn’t necessarily expect to join the ranks of Homer, Hemingway or Mailer, but says there was only one way to process what he saw and did in Iraq: “I wrote.”

“Sand Storm” is a 70-minute series of monologues delivered by 11 characters, all of whom represent some part of his combat experience. The one-act play enjoyed two popular runs in Los Angeles, where the LA Weekly described its vignettes as “raw transcripts of war.”

Here’s a grunt named Pfc. Weems, looking for survivors after an assault that left numerous civilians dead:

“My ankle rolled and I almost fell into a pile of dead hajjis . I caught my balance and looked down to see what had tripped me. It was a foot. . . . I picked it up and stared at it. I couldn’t get past it. I was stuck on this foot.”

And here’s the ghostly character called the Fallen Marine:

“You’re supposed to go through absolute Hell, become something so base you can’t hardly believe it’s still you, but whatever you do, if you make it home, keep it to yourself.”

When Huze came back, he found that he couldn’t do that.

* * *

He grew up as Shannon Hughes Dykes in Baton Rouge, La., the son of a National Guardsman and grandson of a sailor. From childhood he wanted to be an actor, and after kicking around in college without taking a degree, he struck out for L.A. in 1999. On the advice of an agent, he legally changed his name and landed bit TV and movie parts — “Rude Guy in Bar” and “Bus Boy” among them.

Working as a health-care employment recruiter when 9/11 hit, Huze took a “70 percent pay cut,” he says, to join the Marines. He initially signed up for the reserves but decided to go on active duty because “I wanted to fight.”

Huze’s time in combat was relatively short. A light-armored vehicle crewman, he deployed to Kuwait just before the war began and saw action mainly in Nasiriyah and Kut. On patrol near Baghdad and Tikrit, he also saw for himself how little was being done to secure the peace: Looters ran wild after Hussein’s rapid fall. No way were there enough Marines, he realized, to stop the constant theft of AK-47s and artillery rounds from Iraqi Army resupply points. (“The administration went to war on the cheap,” he says now. “The troops did the best we could with what we had.”)

A few weeks after President Bush declared the end of “major combat operations” on May 1, 2003, Huze’s unit was sent home. Back at Camp Lejeune, N.C., he underwent treatment for migraines and nerve damage caused by a head injury when his vehicle rolled in Iraq.

As a nascent insurgency rose in July of that year, Bush issued his famous response to Iraqi militants’ attacks on U.S. troops: “Bring ’em on.” To Huze, it was an unforgivable provocation that endangered the troops still deployed.

“It was a provocation that no one who had experience in combat ever would have issued,” he says. “Who bleeds in order for him to look tough?”

Then came a growing sense of betrayal: Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. There was no link to al Qaeda. Huze says he kept asking himself, “Was it worth it?” and arrived at this conclusion: “I was part of something wrong.”

He worked on his play and kept his opinions mainly to himself. But in March 2004 he fired off an intemperate e-mail to Michael Moore, urging the filmmaker to “keep pounding away at Bush.”

“I saw more than a few dead children littering the streets in Nasiriyah, along with countless other civilians. And through all this, I held on to the belief that it had to be for some greater good,” Huze wrote.

“Months have passed since I’ve been back home and the unfortunate conclusion I’ve come to is that Bush is a lying, manipulative [expletive] who cares nothing for the lives of those of us who serve in uniform. Hell, other than playing dress-up on aircraft carriers, what would he know about serving this nation in uniform?”

Huze says he authorized a more measured version of his missive for Moore’s book of GI letters, “Will They Ever Trust Us Again?,” but somehow the original made it in — and onto the Internet. The enlisted man’s blistering attack on the commander in chief did not go unnoticed along the chain of command. Huze says the words “Article 134” were tossed around, referring to the broad charge in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that covers good order and discipline. He took that as a threat to silence him.

“If somebody threatened that, I don’t really know,” responds 2nd Lt. Barry Edwards, a Marine spokesman at Camp Lejeune. “We really don’t have any documentation of that.”

In any event, no charge was brought. And the Marine Corps’ public relations operation gave Huze’s literary aspirations a boost by clearing him to stage his play last September while on leave.

That makes sense: The play isn’t anti-military in the least. It’s not even antiwar. Rather it is a searing exploration of what happens to those who become our warriors.

Listen to the character called Cpl. Rodriguez:

“We pushed right into that town and lit everything up that moved. The fear gave way to adrenaline, and a part of me was actually enjoying it. Don’t get me wrong, killing another man isn’t fun. Neither is being shot at. But it is powerful. What could be closer to playing God than ending another’s life?”

Says the playwright: “It’s a lot to ask of a young man, isn’t it?”

In March 2005, Huze left the Marines with an honorable discharge — an early separation connected to his injury. He’s become increasingly active in Operation Truth, a nonpartisan group of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with a mission of keeping the troops’ concerns before the public. As the death toll mounts almost daily, Huze sees his play as a way to “humanize those numbers.”

He says he wants the audience to ask, “What if it was my son? What if it was my daughter?” His intense eyes moisten. “Then maybe they’ll expect accountability.”

In the version previously staged, “The Sand Storm” had a character called the Voiceless Marine, who watched silently from the shadows, representing the dead.

But for the East Coast premiere at MetroStage (its month-long run begins Aug. 20), Huze has renamed him the Fallen Marine, put him front and center as the narrator, given him lines.

Somebody, after all, must speak for the dead.

Vacations 50, Funerals 0 — Keeping Score for G.W. Bush

50 to 0 is quite a score.

Fifty vacations for George W. Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas and zero funerals for soldiers or marines killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

It’s not about enough time, its about priorities — the President’s priorities.

If George W. Bush were a War President, instead of a “Struggle President,” he would interrupt his vacation for a day and fly to Ohio where 14 marine reservists are returning home in coffins. Such a one day interruption in his vacation schedule would not be a statement of defeat but a visible sign that he shares the pain and respects the honor the citizens of Ohio bestow on their native sons.

It would be an acknowledgement that sacrifices are being borne by a small patriotic portion of this great country — an acknowledgement that this war has a cost, and a face — usually a young one.

But it is not to be. The President is on vacation(s) and the country struggles along.

Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.

In continuing violence, the United States military announced today that four American soldiers were killed on Tuesday and six others were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Baiji in northern Iraq. Two Iraqi policemen and four civilians were killed in a suicide car bombing in western Baghdad, the Interior Ministry said.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

“This is the new Iraq,” said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.”

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq’s capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

“If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that,” said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.

“We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone,” Mr. Makkia said. “This is not a coup.”

Mr. Makkia confirmed that he had entered the building with armed men but said that they were bodyguards for him and several other council members who accompanied him. Witnesses estimated that the number of armed men ranged from 50 to 120. Mr. Makkia is a member of a Shiite political party that swept to victory during the across-the-board Shiite successes during January’s elections.

Mr. Tamimi, the deposed mayor, was appointed by the central government and held ministerial rank. He was originally put in place by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in the country until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Baghdad is the only city in Iraq that is its own province, and the city council had previously appointed Mr. Tahaan as governor of Baghdad province, with some responsibilities parallel to Mr. Tamimi’s. But the mayor’s office was clearly the more powerful office, a fact that proved to be a painful thorn in the side of Mr. Makkia, who believed that the council, which he controls, should hold sway in Baghdad.

Mr. Makkia provided a phone number for Mr. Tahaan, but the phone did not appear to be turned on. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad said that he was aware of the developments but that he had no immediate comment.

When asked whether the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a politician with another Shiite Islamic party, Dawa, was concerned about developments at the municipality, a spokesman, Laith Kubba, said, “My guess is, yes, he is.”

Mr. Kubba said he had not yet had a chance to talk with the prime minister about the issue. But gave clear indications that the prime minister would not stand in the way of the move.

Weeks ago, Mr. Tamimi had offered to resign or retire, saying that the budget he had been given was not adequate. For a city of six million people, the central government had given him a budget of $85 million; he had requested $1 billion.

As of Tuesday, the prime minister still had not formally accepted the offer, Mr. Kubba said. But he said the offer could be used to find a way to formally remove Mr. Tamimi.

“It’s more or less a fait accompli that he’s not going back to office,” Mr. Kubba said. He added that Mr. Tahaan would be considered an interim mayor until the prime minister settled on someone to take the post permanently.

Leaders of the country’s major political parties, meanwhile, resumed a summit meeting to break the deadlock over Iraq’s new constitution, which was delayed by the same sandstorm on Monday.

The deadline for the constitution is in five days and the parties have so far failed to resolve several crucial issues like the role of Islam in the government, the future of the ethnically mixed and oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the scope of self-rule for regions outside Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the meeting, the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said discussion focused mainly on the issue of autonomy and the distribution of oil revenues. He expressed confidence that the group would complete the constitution on time, but added, “As the English people would say, the devil is in the details.”

The four American soldiers killed in northern Iraq on Tuesday were under the command of the 42nd Infantry Division of New York, the military said today. Six others were wounded in the attack.

The three Iraqi policemen were members of a group on patrol in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, an Interior Ministry official said. A fourth officer was wounded.

Insurgents also fired a mortar round into Antar Square in the Adamiya neighborhood, killing a traffic policeman and wounding seven other people, the ministry official said.

In other violence on Tuesday, an American soldier was killed and two were wounded when a car bomb exploded as a patrol passed through a crowded square in central Baghdad, the military said. An official at the Interior Ministry said at least three civilians were killed and 54 wounded in the same blast. Mortars landed near a mosque in southern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four, the official said.

At least nine security officials were killed in four separate shooting incidents around Baghdad on Tuesday. An American marine was killed by small-arms fire on Monday in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the military said.

In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Iran had become a conduit for weapons smuggled into Iraq and used by insurgents, and he criticized Tehran for not doing more to prevent the smuggling.

“Weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq,” he said at a Pentagon briefing. He added: “It’s a big border. It’s notably unhelpful for the Iranians to allow weapons of those types to cross the border.”

Defense officials have said recently that components and fully manufactured bombs from Iran began appearing about two months ago and that a large shipment was captured last month in northeast Iraq after coming across the border.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s comments were the first confirmation by a senior American official that such smuggling was occurring. Mr. Rumsfeld said it was not clear who in Iran was responsible for the shipments, which some specialists have said could be the work of smugglers or splinter insurgent groups, rather than the government of Iran.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said at the briefing that Iraqi and American forces have made arrests in Haditha, where 20 marines were killed in two ambushes last week, after tips from Iraqis in the area. “The public came forward and said these are the folks,” General Myers said.

Mr. Tamimi, the ousted mayor, said he believed that Shiite political parties had forced the takeover in Baghdad in order to position themselves for the elections once a constitution is agreed upon.

For his part, he said, he had lost the sense of enthusiasm that had brought him back to Iraq after nearly a decade in exile.

“When I left in 1995, every day, it is years for me,” Mr. Tamimi said. “But now when I leave I don’t think I will be sorry. I leave because I cannot live in such conditions.”

Dexter Filkins, Khalid al-Ansary and Kirk Semple contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and David S. Cloud from Washington.

VIENNA, Austria — Nuclear diplomacy can be as delicate a business as trying to defuse a bomb. Press too hard, and a regime suspected of trying to build atomic weaponry may harden its resolve and move its operations deeper underground. Back off too far, and a suspect nation feels it has a free hand.

Unwilling to use their weapon of last resort against Iran — reporting it to the U.N. Security Council, which could slap Tehran with crippling economic and political sanctions — diplomats held out hope Wednesday of negotiating an end to the standoff.

But with the Islamic republic already having spurned a European offer of economic and political incentives it won’t be easy, despite an offer by new hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to return to the bargaining table.

“They have to think, they have to return to negotiating — the temperature has to be lowered,” European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana told the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Iran raised the stakes Wednesday by breaking U.N. seals on its uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, resuming full operations at the facility despite U.S. and European calls to maintain a suspension.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation board of governors postponed Wednesday’s tentative session of an emergency meeting on the Iran crisis so diplomats could confer on the best way to deal with Tehran.

“They need more time,” IAEA spokesman Peter Rickwood said. Delegates continued private talks, and a resolution on the matter was expected to be taken up at a board meeting Thursday.

Reporting Iran to the Security Council might seem like the easiest and most effective measure. But getting consensus from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency’s board, which includes nations like Brazil and Argentina that don’t want to see their own nuclear programs subject to restrictions, would be difficult if not impossible.

Among the more influential IAEA board members is Russia, which has a $800 million contract to build a reactor in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr. Russia also is a permanent member of the Security Council, and — along with China — almost certainly would veto any move to sanction Iran.

“I don’t think that it’s something which is going to happen in the near future,” Algeria’s U.N. ambassador, Abdallah Baali, said when asked about a possible referral to the Security Council.

“It simply won’t fly,” said a Security Council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because he had no authorization from his government. “If you have one or two veto-power countries say `no,’ how can you expect anything to happen?”

The best that could be expected from the Security Council would be a resolution using strong language, without threatening or imposing sanctions, the diplomat said.

With little real risk of sanctions, Tehran may be gambling that it hold onto its nuclear program — which Iran says is only aimed at producing electricity — as long as it continues going through the motions of engaging in dialogue.

Still, envoys remained hopeful that Iran would reconsider the EU offer presented by Britain, France and Germany.

“We think it is still possible to negotiate. We are still reaching out our hand,” said French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy.

The German government “hopes Iran will still take the sensible path and look seriously and constructively at the offer from the EU3 and return to the so-called ‘status quo ante,'” said Bela Anda, a spokesman for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

“Negotiations, in the view of the government, are the only constructive way to a solution of this question,” Anda said. “In this way, the international community can feel confident in Iran’s statements that its nuclear program serves only peaceful intentions.”

Ahmadinejad’s indication of a willingness to continue negotiations with the Europeans threw a twist into efforts to end the standoff. So did his appointment of Ali Larijani, one of the most hard-line elements in the Islamic government, to head the negotiations.

President Bush greeted the offer as a positive sign, though he cautioned that if Iran does not cooperate, U.N. sanctions are “a potential consequence.”

The choice, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said, “is Iran’s to make.”

“There is a lot of rhetoric — the arrival of a new president has contributed as well,” Solana said. “National pride is being appealed to and it is very difficult to make the first decision giving way on the nuclear issue. We have to be firm … and make Iran see that it has taken the wrong decision.”

* __

Associated Press Writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report. William J. Kole is Vienna bureau chief for The Associated Press.

Baghdad Mayor Is Ousted by a Shiite Group and ReplacedBy James Glanz, New York Times   BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 – Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

“This is the new Iraq,” said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.”

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq’s capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

“If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that,” said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.

“We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone,” Mr. Makkia said. “This is not a coup.”

Mr. Makkia confirmed that he had entered the building with armed men but said that they were bodyguards for him and several other council members who accompanied him. Witnesses estimated that the number of armed men ranged from 50 to 120. Mr. Makkia is a member of a Shiite political party that swept to victory during the across-the-board Shiite successes during January’s elections.

Mr. Tamimi, the deposed mayor, was appointed by the central government and held ministerial rank. He was originally put in place by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in the country until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Baghdad is the only city in Iraq that is its own province, and the city council had previously appointed Mr. Tahaan as governor of Baghdad province, with some responsibilities parallel to Mr. Tamimi’s. But the mayor’s office was clearly the more powerful office, a fact that proved to be a painful thorn in the side of Mr. Makkia, who believed that the council, which he controls, should hold sway in Baghdad.

Mr. Makkia provided a phone number for Mr. Tahaan, but the phone did not appear to be turned on. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad said that he was aware of the developments but that he had no immediate comment.

When asked whether the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a politician with another Shiite Islamic party, Dawa, was concerned about developments at the municipality, a spokesman, Laith Kubba, said, “My guess is, yes, he is.”

Mr. Kubba said he had not yet had a chance to talk with the prime minister about the issue. But gave clear indications that the prime minister would not stand in the way of the move.

Weeks ago, Mr. Tamimi had offered to resign or retire, saying that the budget he had been given was not adequate. For a city of six million people, the central government had given him a budget of $85 million; he had requested $1 billion.

As of Tuesday, the prime minister still had not formally accepted the offer, Mr. Kubba said. But he said the offer could be used to find a way to formally remove Mr. Tamimi.

“It’s more or less a fait accompli that he’s not going back to office,” Mr. Kubba said. He added that Mr. Tahaan would be considered an interim mayor until the prime minister settled on someone to take the post permanently.

Leaders of the country’s major political parties, meanwhile, resumed a summit meeting to break the deadlock over Iraq’s new constitution, which was delayed by the same sandstorm on Monday.

The deadline for the constitution is in five days and the parties have so far failed to resolve several crucial issues like the role of Islam in the government, the future of the ethnically mixed and oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the scope of self-rule for regions outside Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the meeting, the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said discussion focused mainly on the issue of autonomy and the distribution of oil revenues. He expressed confidence that the group would complete the constitution on time, but added, “As the English people would say, the devil is in the details.”

Violence also continued around the city. One American soldier was killed and two were wounded when a car bomb exploded as a patrol passed through a crowded square in central Baghdad, the military said. An official at the Interior Ministry said at least three civilians were killed and 54 wounded in the same blast. Mortars landed near a mosque in southern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four, the official said.

At least nine security officials were killed in four separate shooting incidents around Baghdad on Tuesday. An American marine was killed by small-arms fire on Monday in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the military said.

In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Iran had become a conduit for weapons smuggled into Iraq and used by insurgents, and he criticized Tehran for not doing more to prevent the smuggling.

“Weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq,” he said at a Pentagon briefing. He added: “It’s a big border. It’s notably unhelpful for the Iranians to allow weapons of those types to cross the border.”

Defense officials have said recently that components and fully manufactured bombs from Iran began appearing about two months ago and that a large shipment was captured last month in northeast Iraq after coming across the border.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s comments were the first confirmation by a senior American official that such smuggling was occurring. Mr. Rumsfeld said it was not clear who in Iran was responsible for the shipments, which some specialists have said could be the work of smugglers or splinter insurgent groups, rather than the government of Iran.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said at the briefing that Iraqi and American forces have made arrests in Haditha, where 20 marines were killed in two ambushes last week, after tips from Iraqis in the area. “The public came forward and said these are the folks,” General Myers said.

Mr. Tamimi, the ousted mayor, said he believed that Shiite political parties had forced the takeover in Baghdad in order to position themselves for the elections once a constitution is agreed upon.

For his part, he said, he had lost the sense of enthusiasm that had brought him back to Iraq after nearly a decade in exile.

“When I left in 1995, every day, it is years for me,” Mr. Tamimi said. “But now when I leave I don’t think I will be sorry. I leave because I cannot live in such conditions.”

Dexter Filkins and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and David S. Cloud from Washington.

Saddam’s germ war plot is traced back to one Oxford cow

By Dominic Kennedy, Times On Line, August 9, 2005

A BRITISH cow that died in an Oxfordshire field in 1937 has emerged as the source of Saddam Hussain’s “weapons of mass destruction” programme that led to the Iraq war.

An ear from the cow was sent to an English laboratory, where scientists discovered anthrax spores that were later used in secret biological warfare tests by Winston Churchill.

The culture was sent to the United States, which exported samples to Iraq during Saddam’s war against Iran in the 1980s. Inspectors have found that this batch of anthrax was the dictator’s choice in his attempts to create biological weapons.

The discovery has angered some British politicians. Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, has renewed his call, supported by 126 MPs in the last Parliament, for a UN investigation into whether Washington broke a weapons control agreement. “It just makes them look more hypocritical than ever,” he said.

The odyssey of the Iraqi anthrax was unravelled by Geoffrey Holland, a politics student and antiwar campaigner at the University of Sussex. The exact batch chosen by Saddam was disclosed in the CIA report by Charles Duelfer, the former UN weapons inspector, last autumn.

“Iraq declared researching different strains of B. anthracis, but settled on the American Type Culture Collection strain 14578 as the exclusive strain for use as a BW,” Mr Duelfer said.

A congressional investigation into Gulf War syndrome by Don Riegle had already uncovered invoices showing that this batch was shipped from the United States between 1986 and 1988.

The ATCC is a private, non-profit-making collection of cultures of living micro-organisms, viruses, plants and human and animal cells, stored in Virginia.

Its catalogue shows that batch 14578 consists of “bovine anthrax”, isolated by R. L. Vollum, a professor of bacteriology at Oxford University during the 1930s. It is named after him.

Martin Hugh-Jones, who co-ordinates the World Health Organisation’s Working Group on Anthrax Research and Control, said: “We have traced it back and it would have come in on some contaminated bones from Southern Rhodesia.

“England was importing sun-dried bones from dead animals in the colonies. They would be shipped to London and used to make soap. When they got the fat out, (the bones) were meant to be sterilised and ground as bone meal and fed to cattle. The sterilisation was not always complete. It was the major cause of anthrax for almost 100 years.”

The Vollum anthrax was used in biological weapons tests on the Scottish island of Gruinard in 1942, which had to be quarantined for 48 years. “It killed any number of sheep in Gruinard,” Professor Hugh-Jones said.

“(Saddam) obviously at one point had a programme because he was buying the laboratory’s cultures to underwrite a programme. Why would he want peaceful research with Vollum? Come on!”

DEADLY SPORES

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military’s Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta’s name.

The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.

Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June, in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government Security News, which is published every two weeks and covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The New York Times in Mr. Weldon’s office.

In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by at least three other former intelligence officers with direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had first called the episode to his attention shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was identified by any American government agency as a potential threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers, only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of 2001.

Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the Able Danger team.

The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.

“Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers options for taking out Al Qaeda targets,” the former defense intelligence official said.

He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them,” the former intelligence official said.

The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.

Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he contacted members of the military intelligence team as part of research for his book, “Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It.”

Mr. Weldon’s book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying the Iranian “was a waste of my time and resources.”

Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees were looking into the episode.

In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the team first brought it to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about it in a conversation in September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the operation.

Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military’s Special Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it was probably a highly classified “special access program” on which only a few military personnel would have been briefed.

During the interview in Mr. Weldon’s office, the former defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.

He said the original chart, like the new one, had included the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified as members of what was described as an American-based “Brooklyn” cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around the world.

The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men had found that “the software put them all together in Brooklyn.”

According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.

Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a “Brooklyn” cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.

“They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell,” Mr. Felzenberg said. “They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention.”

As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff filed document requests with the Pentagon for information about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding that the staff had not hidden anything from the commissioners.

“The commissioners were certainly told of the document requests and what the findings were,” Mr. Felzenberg said.

At least 17 Afghan insurgents and one U.S. soldier were killed in a fierce clash in southern Afghanistan near the troubled Pakistan border, the U.S. military said Tuesday

U.S. forces were ambushed Monday by insurgents with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades while on a routine patrol near Dai Chopan in Zabul province, U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Cindy Moore said.

“U.S. and coalition aircraft arrived at the scene and provided continuous close air support,” a statement from the U.S. military said.

Moore said follow-up operations were continuing.

The area is a hotbed of activity for the Taliban, who are waging an insurgency against a U.S.-led force that helped overthrow their government in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

The Taliban have stepped up their insurgency in recent months, ahead of parliamentary polls scheduled for Sept.18.

Hundreds of people have died in militant-related violence this year, the bloodiest since the Taliban’s overthrow.

Summertime often produces unexpected media figures, and this is Cindy Sheehan’s season. Ms. Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq last year, is camping out near President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex., and says she won’t leave until Mr. Bush agrees to meet with her to discuss the war. There are many reasons for the flood of media attention she is attracting: she has a poignant personal story and she is articulate – and, let’s face it, August is a slow news month. But most of all, she is tapping into a growing popular feeling that the Bush administration is out of touch with the realities, and the costs, of the Iraq war.

Ms. Sheehan’s 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed in Baghdad. She says she and her family met privately with Mr. Bush two months later, and she is sharply critical of how the president acted. He did not know her son’s name, she says, acted as if the meeting was a party and called her “Mom” throughout, which she considered disrespectful.

Ms. Sheehan has traveled from her California home to Crawford, where Mr. Bush will be spending much of the month, in the hope of having a more substantive discussion. On Saturday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser and the White House deputy chief of staff met with her beside a road a few miles from the ranch, but she is still insisting on a meeting with the president.

Even many Americans who do not share her views about the president – she arrived in a bus bearing the slogan “Impeachment Tour” – share her concerns about his war leadership. President Bush has refused to ask the nation to sacrifice in any way, so the sacrifice gap has never been greater. A few families, like Ms. Sheehan’s, have paid the ultimate price. Many more, including National Guard families, are bearing enormous burdens, struggling to get by while a parent, a child or a spouse serves in Iraq. But the rest of the nation is spending its tax cuts and guzzling gas as if there were no war.

Mr. Bush obviously failed to comfort Ms. Sheehan when he met with her and her family. More important, he has not helped the nation give fallen soldiers like Casey Sheehan the honor they deserve. The administration seems reluctant to have the president take part in events that would direct widespread attention to soldiers’ funerals or to the thousands who have returned with serious injuries.

Perhaps most troubling, Mr. Bush is not leveling about where things stand with the war. He continues to stay on message, as he did with the platitude he offered last week: “We will stay the course; we will complete the job in Iraq.” The public knows that things in Iraq are not going well on any number of levels, and deserves a fuller, more honest discussion led by the commander in chief.

Just 38 percent of the respondents in a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, a new low, approved of Mr. Bush’s handling of Iraq. That does not mean the remaining 62 percent agree with Ms. Sheehan that the troops should come home immediately. But it does mean that many Americans are with her, at least figuratively, at that dusty roadside in Crawford, expecting better answers.