The Sunday Telegraph, 29 October 2006

Voting against Bush won't save a Republican up north

By Toby Harnden in Providence, Rhode Island

IF POLITICS was fair, Lincoln Chafee, a maverick who declined to cast a ballot for President George W. Bush at the last election and was the only senator in his party to vote against the Iraq war, would be cruising to victory.

Instead, the blue-blooded scion of a prominent New England family who is the most popular politician in his state is staring defeat in the face in next week’s mid-term vote because of one most inconvenient fact – he is a Republican.

America’s smallest state, Rhode Island, home to a well-heeled yachting set and peppered with sumptuous mansions once frequented by the Astors, Vanderbilts and Kennedys, prides itself on being insulated from the grubby machine politics of the rest of the country.

Mr Chafee, who inherited his Senate seat when his father John died in office in 1998, has typified this by repeatedly bucking the party whip. But with Mr Bush slumping to a 22 per cent popularity rating in Rhode Island – the lowest of all 50 states – the Chafee balancing act appears to have come to an end.

The Democrats need to gain six seats to take control of the Senate and Rhode Island, where Mr Chafee trails narrowly in the polls, is firmly in their sights.

Arriving for an ABC-6 television debate in the state capital of Providence, Mr Chafee was greeted by a man wearing flight overalls and a President George W. Bush mask who was wielding a sign depicting an Iraqi being tortured at Abu Ghraib.

“Chafee’s an enabler,” said the Bush impersonator, who identified himself as Pat Crowley, a local blogger. ‘He tries to play the independent game but in the end he’s just another Republican. He’s Bush’s guy.”

This is the message that Mr Chafee’s Democratic opponent Sheldon Whitehouse is pushing relentlessly. “The most dangerous vote of all is to put the Republican majority back in place,” he said in the debate. “It means George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld making decisions about Iraq.”

When challenged by a questioner to speak for three minutes without mentioning Mr Bush or the Republicans, Mr Whitehouse responded: “That’s a asking a lot with the stakes as high as they are and you-know-who and you-know-which party causing all the problems.”

Mr Chafee protested plaintively that he had had nothing much to do with Mr Bush. “There were 29 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war,” he said. “The Majority Leader was a Democrat. I was the only Republican who voted against it.”

Having long been derided by conservatives as a RINO – Republican In Name Only – Mr Chafee conceded that the name itself could be enough to sink him. “It’s the only issue my opponent brings up,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “It’s all about the Bush agenda and Rhode Island’s a very Democratic state.”

The Sunday Telegraph, 29 October 2006

Conservative Democrat Woos the MidWest

By Toby Harnden in Terre Haute, Indiana

CENTRIST DEMOCRATS, in the wilderness since the Clinton years, are leading their party’s charge towards seizing control of the House of Representatives by distancing themselves from their liberal leaders in Washington.

Deep in Indiana, a conservative heartland known as the crossroads of America, Sheriff Brad Ellsworth outlined the traditional agenda that polls predict will unseat his incumbent Republican opponent and elect him to Congress in nine days’ time.

An advocate of gun rights, opponent of gay marriage and staunchly anti-abortion, he urges a “plan for victory” in Iraq. “I’m opposed to what they’re calling cutting and running.

“My father was in the Navy, my grandfather served in World War One and I had an uncle who was shot down over the Pacific in World War Two. We’re in wartime right now. We need to protect our troops with everything we have.”

Known as the “bloody eighth” because of its ferocious election battles, Indiana’s 8 th District is odds on to become one of the 15 seats that Democrats need to regain the 435-member lower house for the first time in a dozen years.

His opponent Congressman John Hostettler, a Christian fundamentalist first elected in the “Republican revolution” of 1994, is one of the most conservative politicians in America.

He has won the backing of the National Rifle Association even though two years ago he narrowly escaped jail after a loaded 9mm Glock pistol was found in his briefcase as he boarded a plane in Kentucky. He told police he had forgotten it was there.

But his attempts to portray Mr Ellsworth as a soggy liberal have failed. The 25-year law enforcement veteran appears in his latest advertisement in uniform, driving a patrol car and stating that he sees the world as “a sheriff not a politician”. During campaign appearances, he stresses he is “not Washingtonised” or tainted by the sexual and financial scandals that have dogged Republicans.

“In Indiana they want to know you are accessible and responsive,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “I don’t want to say it’s backward but this is a home grown area with long family lines and a good work ethic. They want to feel like you’re one of them. It is a conservative district.”

Robert Springer, a Vietnam veteran supporting Mr Ellsworth, said he was tired of liberal Democrats from California or New York. “The national Democrats are not too much in touch with our values and our needs. John Kerry [the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004] was way too far to the Left to be acceptable here.”

Senator Evan Bayh, a centrist Democrat from Indiana who is likely to run for president in 2008 as an alternative to Hillary Clinton, was on the campaign trail with Mr Ellsworth, 48, whom he proclaimed to be part of a new breed.

“Brad’s not an ideologue,” he said. “He’s a pragmatist. He’s for what works. There are 10 or 12 per cent more of the American people who call themselves conservatives than call themselves liberals.

“The right thing for us to do is also the politically shrewd thing for us to do - to try and build bridges that unite not only Democrats but independents and a few moderate Republicans.”

One of Mr Ellsworth’s biggest problems in coming across as an honest-to-goodness Mid-Westerner has been his matinee-idol looks, which featured on the front page of the “Washington Post” in an article about “the politics of beauty”.

Beth Ellsworth , his wife of 24 years, said he had been “very embarrassed” by the article because he had long suffered from not being taken seriously because of his good looks. “He’s had to fight that his whole life. Ultimately, you just have to prove yourself.”

The sheriff agreed. “It’s not the way you want to get your publicity,” he said. Instead, he wanted to be known as an honest hard-worker who could things done and bring about change in Washington. “When someone dials 911, they send me.”

The Sunday Telegraph, 8 October 2006

US secretly woos Khatami

By Toby Harnden in Washington

THE BUSH administration made secret overtures to former President Mohammed Khatami of Iran during his visit to the United States last month in an attempt to establish a back channel via the ex-leader.

Diplomatic sources said that “third parties” were authorised by Nicholas Burns, US Under-Secretary of State and the American diplomat responsible for relations with Iran, to talk to Mr Khatami in a new move towards engagement with senior Iranian figures.

American officials made the approach as part of a strategy to isolate the hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Khatami’s successor, by using the former president as a conduit to the Iranian people.

They also hoped that Mr Khatami would also report his conversations to senior members of its theocratic regime who are wary of the current president.

The clandestine contacts with Mr Khatami reflect a significant shift in American policy away from preparation for military action and towards a stepping up of diplomatic pressure on Iran, which is defying the world over United Nations demands for it to suspend its nuclear programme.

A Western diplomat said: “The message basically was that the US is prepared to engage with Iran beyond the nuclear issue and the very fact we are approaching you illustrates that that is what we want to do.”

He added that possible subjects for discussion could include access to the international economy, Iranian entry into the World Trade Organisation and an end to a ban on spare parts being supplied for Iran’s ageing fleet of Boeing aircraft.

Mr Khatami was the highest-ranking Iranian to visit Washington since Islamist revolutionaries in Iran overran the US Embassy in 1979 and held Americans hostage for 444 days. Since then, diplomatic relations have been suspended.

President George W. Bush personally approved a visa for the former president, regarded by Western officials as a “reformist” who is more pragmatic than his successor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so that he could take part in a United Nations conference in New York and speak in Washington, Charlottesville, Chicago and Boston.

Contacts between the Bush administration and such a senior Iranian figure are highly sensitive because the US and the European Union insist that there can be no talks with Tehran until Iran’s uranium enrichment programme is suspended.

Senior Pentagon figures and some in the White House were adamantly opposed to any overtures, which the CIA as well as the State Department supported.

“I'm not aware of any contacts, either direct or indirect, between U.S. Government officials and President Khatami,” Tom Casey, a US State Department spokesman, told The Sunday Telegraph.

Diplomatic sources, however, confirmed the contacts. “I can categorically tell you it happened,” said the Western diplomat. “It’s about isolating Ahmadinejad, who is not the real power in the government anyway. The theocratic leadership is very sceptical about him.”

Patrick Clawson, an Iran specialist with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is close to White House policy makers, said: “There was a lot of back and forth between the State Department and Khatami’s people about security arrangements for the visit and I’m sure that provided opportunities for chat.”

He doubted, however, whether overtures to Mr Khatami would affect the Iranian regime’s nuclear policy and said any message passed via him might be counter-productive. “He’s totally despised by the current government. He’s not respected by the reformists. The only thing the US could get out of this is looking good in the eyes of the Europeans.”

But he said there was a recognition within the Bush administration that there was an opportunity for diplomatic avenues to be explored.

A key part of this would be to persuade the EU and the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran.  International talks in London about what measures to take against Iran ended without agreement on Friday.

“There’s a general feeling that so long as the nuclear programme is proceeding slowly we’ve got time on this,” said Mr Clawson. Iran has been experiencing problems with the overheating of the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium.

After Mr Khatami’s visit, during which he drew fire from Iranian leaders for calling the Holocaust a “historical fact”, condemning Osama bin Laden and advising American Muslims to be “good citizens”, Mr Bush said he was “interested to hear what he had to say”.

Mr Bush added: My hope is that diplomacy will work in convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions. And in order for diplomacy to work, it's important to hear voices other than Ahmadinejad's."

The Sunday Telegraph, 8 October 2006

White House reels as aide quits over links to disgraced lobbyist

By Toby Harnden in Washington

REPUBLICANS HAVE been dealt a fresh blow in their increasingly frantic struggle to cling to power in next month’s mid-term elections by the resignation of a key White House aide over links to a disgraced lobbyist.

Already reeling from a Capitol Hill sex scandal, the White House was bracing itself yesterday for further fallout over a financial scandal that forced the departure of Susan Ralston, executive assistant to Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s chief political strategist since he first entered politics.

She stepped down after congressional investigators documented her extensive dealings with Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who has pleaded guilty to multi-million bribery charges involving Republican members of Congress.

Her departure was announced late on Friday – traditionally a time for releasing bad news – as the scandal surrounding the alleged cover-up of the sexual approaches made by Congressman Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, intensified.

Democrats, who need to gain 15 seats to regain control of the 435-member House of Representatives and six seats in the Senate in the November 7 th poll, believe that the drip drip of scandal will hand them victory.

A “Time” magazine poll released on Thursday found that republican support had sunk to 39 per cent and two-thirds of Americans aware of the lurid e-mails sent by Foley to congressional pages believe Republican leaders tried to cover up the scandal.

Privately, Republican strategists concede that they are fighting a losing battle in an atmosphere akin to the one that preceded the 1994 mid-terms, in which Democrats were ousted, or the 1997 election in Britain when Tony Blair defeated John Major amid public disgust over Tory “sleaze”.

More allegations surfaced yesterday that the senior aide to Congressman Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives and a long-time Republican leader on Capitol Hill, had been aware of Foley’s predatory activities with male teenage pages as early as 2003.

A congressional staff member close to the Foley investigation told The Washington Post that Scott Palmer, Mr Hastert’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful people on Capitol Hill, had confronted Foley three years ago.

Mr Hastert has insisted he knew nothing of Foley’s activities until nine days ago while his staff has maintained they were not aware until November 2005.

Republicans are bracing themselves for the release of a “Lavender List” of senior officials on Capitol Hill who are gay. Republican sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that a network of gay party members had protected Foley for several years.

“There is a Lavender mafia that covered up for Foley,” said a former Capitol Hill staffer. “They sat on the allegations and prevented them from reaching people like Hastert because they didn’t want to see one of their own get into trouble.”

The Capitol Hill website wonkette.com, which specialises in political scuttlebutt and has a cult following among congressional aides, tantalised its readership by ending an item about a key figure in the scandal with: “ Also he is GAY. Gay gay gay. Tomorrow we’ll let you know which other Foley scandal players are also gay. Here’s a hint: all of them.”

It emerged last week that Jeff Trandahl, clerk of the House of Representatives from 1999 until last year and the person who oversaw the page programme, was openly gay and a close friend of Foley.

Foley checked himself into an alcoholics’ rehabilitation programme when the scandal broke and announced through a lawyer that he was gay – an open secret in Washington – and had been molested by a priest when he was a child.

Miss Ralston, an aide to Abramoff before she joined the White House in 2001, was found to have been involved in more than half of her former boss’s 66 recorded contacts with President George W. Bush’s staff. Records showed that Abramoff’s lobbying colleagues contacted her 69 times.

Congressional investigators indicated Miss Ralston had accepted tickets to nine events, including professional basketball, hockey and baseball games and a performance Andrea Bocelli, the Italian tenor, from Abramoff.

In October 2001, Abramoff asked through a series of memos and e-mails that the White House withhold backing for a candidate in the tiny Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which his lobbying form represented.

Miss Ralston eventually responded: "You win :). KR [Karl Rove] said no endorsement." In other emails, she appears to have discussed entering into a business deal with Abramoff.

"It would take a significant amount of money for me to be lured away [from the White House] so unless you're really serious and can make it worth my while, let's wait until 2005," she wrote to Abramoff in November 2002. Abramoff replied: "I am not in a position to offer you serious money for this right now."

There was no suggestion that Miss Ralston acted illegally and it is not known whether she declared her dealings with Abramoff or paid for the tickets he gave her.

"She recognised that a protracted discussion of these matters would be a distraction to the White House and she's chosen to step down," said a White House spokesman.

The Sunday Telegraph, 8 October 2006

Scandal puts page tradition in doubt

By Toby Harnden in Washington

PAGES, first introduced on Capitol Hill in 1829, are facing explusion by US congressmen who regard the presence of teenage aides as an inconvenient temptation for the more lascivious among their number.

The early pages were teenage boys employed to stoke fireplaces and fill inkwells. In 1939, they appeared in the film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

Girls joined their ranks in 1971 and their duties include running messages, delivering documents and holding doors open for politicians. They could be as young as 14 until 1983 when two congressmen admitted having sex relations with underage pages.

That year, Representative Dan Crane, a Republican, was ousted by voters after revelations he had sex with a female page. Gerry Studds, a Democrat and the first openly gay national politician in America, was censured for having sex with a male page but was re-elected five times.

Since 1983, they have been at least 16, closely supervised in page dormitories and subject to a strict curfew. They are currently paid $1,568 a month, minus $400 for room and board. Several former pages have been elected to Congress.

But Congressman Mark Foley’s antics in preying on male pages, who are scattered around the Capitol dressed in navy blue suits and ties, could have dealt a death blow to the scheme, which is now officially under review.

Congressman Ray LaHood of Illinois has led calls for the page programme to be wound up because it is "antiquated" and subject to insidious influences. “Some members betray their trust by taking advantage of them,” he said. “We should not subject young men and women to this kind of activity, this kind of vulnerability.”

Former pages have defended the programme and described moves to end it as an act of craven political expedience that would punish the victims of sexual abuse even as Mr Foley appears likely to escape prosecution.

More than 100 high school pupils from around America serve as pages in Washington each year. They have to apply through their local senator or congressman and submit an essay on how they see their role.

Once they are selected, they face a punishing schedule, attending a special page school at the Library of Congress at 6.45am each day before starting work at 9am and continuing sometimes into the small hours of the next morning.

“One of my jobs was to raise and lower the American flag over the chamber when the House was in session,” said James Kotecki, 20, who served as a page in 2003. “It was an uplifting and terrific experience to be so close up to the political action.

“There were a lot of small but important tasks. We were like the grease in the cogs of Congress. It would be very sad if something that meant so much to me in terms of getting me excited about politics were to be abolished because of this.”

Last week, pages were suffering the same ridicule experienced by interns duringt he Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. But Congressman Tom Davis said his time as a Senate page had allowed him to be a “witness to history” and “interact with numerous political icons” on Capitol Hill.

“Countless young men and women continue to come to Washington through the page programme to share similar experiences. This should continue.”

The Sunday Telegraph, 1 October 2006

By Toby Harnden in Denver

AN UNEMPLOYED Transylvanian mine worker who is flown across the globe to confront Western green activists has become the gold industry’s new weapon against militant environmental groups battling their projects.

Gheorghe Lucian, 23, a plain-speaking resident of the village of Rosia Montana in western Romania, is the unlikely star of Michael Moore-style documentary film that gold mining executives argue will expose the hypocrisy and dishonesty of their environmentalist foes.

He is dismayed that the project, which would bring a £400 million investment and generate 600 jobs in an area where unemployment is 70 per cent, is being blocked by green activists.

There are a growing number of big-screen documentaries being produced, most of them associated with the Left. Mine Your Own Business, however, has excited conservative and libertarian groups.

In June, the environmentalists brought out Vanessa Redgrave –  wearing a fetching gold necklace – to denounce the Rosia Montana project with the declaration: “Our planet is dying and we have no right to destroy an ecosystem.”

But Phelim McAleer, director of the film, shown for the first time in a private viewing attended by The Sunday Telegraph at the Denver Gold Show last week, branded Redgrave and other wealthy protesters from the West were the real enemies of the poor. “Our answer to her is Gheorghe,” he said.

Yearning for a job, Mr Lucian is frustrated by the delay in the go-ahead being given for Gabriel Resources, a Canadian company, to begin mining. But when he is flown to see similar projects, also being opposed by environmentalists, in Chile and Madagascar he realises he is not alone.

In Madagascar he listens with barely disguised horror as Mark Fenn, country representative of the World Wide Fund for Nature, shows off his luxury catamaran, which he bought for pounds20,000, and then asks him: “How do we perceive what is rich and what is poor?”

People in Fort Dauphin – where he is opposing a mine project - were “economically disadvantaged” and many had no jobs, he acknowledged, but: “I could put you with a family and you count how many times in a day that that family smiles, if you could measure stress.

“Then I bring you back to Romania and I put you with a family well off or in New York or London and you count how many times people smile and measure stress and you look at how those people interact. Then you tell me who is rich and who is poor.”

In the Andes, Mr Lucian is dismayed when he is told by Rodrigo Rivas, from Barrick, the world’s largest gold company, that “anti-mining movements all over the world are present here in Chile and Argentina”.

Mine Your Own Business , made by New Bera Media, an Irish company, electrified a gathering of senior gold industry executives in Denver last week. “This is the first time I have seen the gold industry fight back,” enthused Patrick Chidley, a mining analyst with Barnard Jacobs Mellet.

“The opposition portrays mining companies as cowboy thieves who want to rape the earth. Over the past two years it’s reached a peak, stopping projects and keeping prices higher.

“It’s just a great shame because it has nothing to do with helping local people – these are environmentalists who don’t want anything to be changed.”

Using a style reminiscent of Michael Moore, McAleer, a shambolic Irishman with a disarmingly low-key interviewing technique, lures environmentalists into making statements that are false or patently ridiculous.

Francoise Heidebroek, a Belgian opponent of the Rosia Montana mine, tells him that Romanian villagers prefer to use horses rather than cars and that locals rely on “traditional raising cattle, small agriculture, wood processing” to live.

McAleer and Mr Lucian then interview locals who chuckle with bemusement at this depiction, retorting that the land is too poor for agriculture, that they all aspire to own cars and are desperate for the investment that the mine will bring.

Alan Hill, the British president and CEO of Gabriel Resources, was so moved that he wiped away tears the first time he saw the documentary, the production of which Gabriel partially funded but had no editorial control over.

“Before, the environmentalists would lob mortars at us and we would keep our heads down and keep marching. Now, there is a big push back with this film.”

Thor Halvorssen, of the Manhattan-based Moving Picture Institute, which provided almost $200,000 to help produce the film, is overseeing a tour of 20 American university campuses to show the documentary.

“This film rips the blinkers off a swindle of epic proportions,” he said. “Radical environmentalists have taken the moral high-ground and pursued their warped agenda with a zeal that is akin to religious fervour.”

Gabriel Resources argue that their investment will transform the Rosia Montana area, which was decimated by unregulated Communist-era mining, and leave it less polluted than before.

McAleer disputes the notion that the film is Right-win. "I go to the poorest parts of the world and talk to the poorest people in the places and ask them about their lives. For me there is nothing more left wing than that"

Richard Young, Gabriel’s chief financial officer, said: “The environmentalists will do anything to prevent the project moving forward. They tried to blackmail the Romanian government by saying they would not get into the European Union if funding went ahead.

“It’s crazy, it’s preposterous and it’s environmental terrorism. The film takes their lies one by one and blows their credibility.”

But the film, gold executives, said was merely the latest salvo in a long battle, the outcome of which is uncertain.

Back in Rosia Montana, the new mine has still not been approved and Mr Lucian – who had never travelled abroad or been on a plane before the film was made – is living with his parents and four siblings in a dilapidated one-bedroom apartment.

“Rosia Montana is very interesting for everybody like Greenpeace and NGOs,” he said, vowing he would trade his chance for movie-star status in return for a job. “These people do not ask what we need. People here have no food to eat, no money. It is very difficult.”

The Sunday Telegraph, 24 September 2006

My religion is a distraction, says Muslim poised to enter Congress

Gathering his teenage players around him, the high school basketball coach urged them to take notice. "This is a moment in history," he said. "This is the first Muslim, and the first African-American from Minnesota, to represent you in Congress."

Keith Ellison looked uncomfortable. He is indeed poised to become the first follower of Islam to enter the United States House of Representatives, but he feels that the focus on his religion has become a distraction from what he wants to achieve as a politician.

"I'm not really enamoured with the whole 'first' stuff," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "I'm not making an appeal on the basis of faith. I do hope, though, that people who have felt that they were on the margins, not included in the American body politic, can now feel they can play a greater part."

Mr Ellison's religion, however, has become central to the mid-term congressional race in Minneapolis where, having won the Democratic Party nomination in the primary election this month, he is the overwhelming favourite for the November 7 vote.

In the backlash against their faith after the September 11 attacks, the number of Muslims seeking elected office across America's 50 states plummeted, despite the fact that the Muslim population now stands at an estimated four million.

Some on the Republican Right have sought to make Mr Ellison, a lawyer specialising in representing impoverished blacks, a national election issue. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, has branded him a "radical Left defender of cop killers" who exposes the Democratic Party as "unacceptably radical at home and weak abroad".

Unabashedly liberal, Mr Ellison rejects President George W Bush's argument that there is a "clash of civilisations" between Islam and the West, insisting that Muslims have the same aspirations as everyone else. "It's dangerous to promote that concept," he said. "Muslims in America mostly want to get an education, start a business, get married, build a mosque, live life."

But he wants Mr Bush to be impeached for going to war based on a "fabricated case" and advocates the immediate withdrawal of American troops from the "quagmire" of Iraq.

Born a Roman Catholic, Mr Ellison, 43, was a 19-year-old economics student when he converted – and became associated with the Nation of Islam, the radical group that promotes black rights and whose leader, Louis Farrakhan, has made racist statements.

Mr Ellison, who previously used the names Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison Muhammad, insists that he was never a member of the group.

But Alan Fine, his Republican opponent, who is Jewish, denounced Mr Ellison as a liar. "Anyone who joins a hate group during his adulthood, we should question the character of that individual," he said, to boos, at a candidate forum. "The Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi party and the Nation of Islam are not things that are positive."

There were claps and whoops as Mr Ellison responded: “I have never been involved in any hate group in my entire adult life. I have fought tirelessly for the civil and human rights of all people. And even though he hasn’t asked for it, I forgive Mr Fine for his statements.”

When Right-wing bloggers exposed the extent of his links with the Nation of Islam, Mr Ellison wrote to the local Jewish Community Relations Council apologising for failing to "adequately scrutinise the positions" of Mr Farrakhan and others. "They were, and are, anti-Semitic and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did."

He has condemned Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups and described " Israel's security needs" as "an absolute rock bottom necessity". Many prominent Jewish Democrats have warmly endorsed him.

Mr Ellison has been a state representative in the - Minnesota legislature for four years, with a constituency where most voters are from ethnic minorities, including many Somali -refugees. But the much larger -congressional district that he hopes will elect him is only 13 per cent black, with an even smaller proportion- of Muslims, so he must also win votes from the majority white population.

Imam Markram El-Amin, head of the Masjid An-Nur mosque, where Mr Ellison worships, said: "The time is right. Keith is proud to be a Muslim but he doesn't want to hold the banner so high that people see him only in that light.

“He’ll arrive unannounced for Friday prayers and sit down with the common believers. He comes very low key, without fanfare. He’s very strong on inter-faith dialogue.”

Mr El-Amin, who has travelled to the Vatican for a papal audience as well as to Saudi Arabia for the Haj pilgrimage, said that his parents had been members of the Nation of Islam. "I wouldn't class it as a hate group but I can understand how, for the outsider looking in, it would appear that way.

"It was more about building up the black man than tearing down whites and others. Now it's time to embrace a universal, more open Islam.

Young blacks, he said, were increasingly attracted to convert to Islam by the ideas of “redemption, the recreating of yourself to start again anew” rather than because of anger against the West.

"We have a great opportunity and an obligation to play our part as Muslims in America, to show the good face of Islam.

''We believe that America is the greatest nation on earth and the freedoms that we have are greater than many Muslims have in Islamic countries."

Back with the basketball team, all but one of them black, Mr Ellison played down his faith. “The reason I think this is historic is for the first time we’ve been able to pull the whole community together – Christian, Muslim, Jewish, even some Hindu folk, Buddhists. People of all colours, people of all cultures.”

The Sunday Telegraph, 17 September 2006

'Born fighting' - the Vietnam vet battling for the Democrats

TOBY HARNDEN in Falls Church, Virginia

AS A FORMER US marine officer who won a Silver Star in Vietnam, served in the Reagan administration and voted for President George W. Bush in 2000, Jim Webb has all the credentials of the ideal Republican candidate.

He supports gun-owners' rights, once argued against women serving in combat and has expressed scepticism about affirmative action programmes designed to advance blacks. Last week, his son Jimmy, 24, a marine lance corporal, arrived in Iraq - the latest in a long family line of military men.

But Mr Webb is a Democrat. His dismay over Mr Bush's Iraq policy prompted him to switch sides and now his unlikely candidacy could secure control of the Senate for his new party in November.

Addressing a politics class last week at the J.E.B. Stuart High School three of his children attended, Mr Webb, 60, debated the philosophies of Machiavelli and Locke with teenagers but also delivered a tough message on the central issue of the election - Iraq.

He opposed the invasion for practical rather than moral reasons, he said. "It was a huge strategic mistake to put so many resources in one country. The more of a physical presence we have in a land mass in that region the less able we are to affect the problem and there is only so much you can do with military force."

The Democrats need a gain of six seats to wrest the 100-member chamber back from Republicans. Until recently, Virginia - a traditional Southern state - looked out of reach as Mr Webb trailed by 16 points in the polls to Senator George Allen, who aspires to succeed Mr Bush in the White House in 2008.

With his distinguished military service inoculating him against the kind of charges of being weak on terrorism that led to John Kerry’s 2004 defeat, however, the Vietnam veteran is suddenly looking like a potential winner.

Mr Webb surged to almost a dead heat after Mr Allen made a calamitous mistake. Spotting S.R.Sidarth, a  young Webb campaign worker of Indian origin, videotaping one of his rallies, he referred to him as "macaca" and told him: "Welcome to America and the real world of Virgina."

The word "macaca" is the name of an Eastern hemisphere monkey and was widely viewed as a racial slur against Mr Sidarth, who was born and raised in Virginia.

A month after his "macaca moment", Mr Allen still apologises for the comments almost every day. The perception of him as mean-spirited has been hard to shake off and his tobacco chewing and fondness for Western wear have begun to seem like affectations rather than signs of a common touch.

But Mr Webb is a diffident, almost reluctant campaigner. At the school, a young press aide had to remind him to say hello to the children as they trooped into the classroom. In contrast, Allen, 54, has a well-honed bonhomie and is an enthusiastic glad-hander.

On the campaign trail, Mr Webb sports a pair of battered desert-coloured combat boots, given to him by his son Jimmy, who is stationed in Ramadi, in the heart of the Sunni triangle. "I see people staring at my shoes," he said to the class of teenagers in Falls Church.

"My son, who is much better at politics than me,” he said, “'Dad, why does George Allen wear cowboy boots when there are no cowboys in Virginia. You ought to wear my boots.' So I started wearing his boots and I'll be very happy when he gets back in February and I can take them off."

While Mr Allen, who by June had raised $6.6 million in campaign funds compared to his opponent' Webb's $424,000, travels by limousine and helicopter, Mr Webb goes everywhere in a jeep painted in camouflage colours and emblazoned with the message: "Born Fighting".

His driver has one arm. Mike "Mac" McGarvey, who was Mr Webb's radio operator as a young marine nearly 40 years ago, lost the other in Vietnam. The candidate himself walks with a slight limp from a grenade attack at An Hua Basin in 1969. Mr Allen avoided Vietnam service by securing a student deferment.

Mr Webb, who is being given increased financial backing by the Democratic Party now that he has a serious chance of beating Mr Allen, also has the advantage of the imprimatur of President Ronald Reagan - a revered figure on both sides of the political divide.

Appointed Mr Reagan's Navy Secretary in 1987, Mr Webb has run a television advertisement of the then president praising him. “James' gallantry as a Marine officer in Vietnam won him the Navy Cross and other decorations," Mr Reagan says in the advertisement.

Nancy Reagan, the former First Lady, objected to the use of the footage of her late husband in what amounted to an endorsement from the grave. But her protests and those of the Allen campaign served only to publicise Mr Webb’s link to Mr Reagan.

Pam Martinov, head of social studies at the J.E.B. Stuart school – named after a Confederate general - and who taught Mr Webb’s son, said the Democrat could be elected despite Virginia’s conservatism. “He’s got a shot because there’s growing discontent over the Iraq war.”

A former classmate of Jimmy Webb, Cpl Andy Anderson, 24, was killed in Ramadi in June. “The church was full and it brought it home to us,” said Ms Martinov. “I’m a little worried for Jimmy. I just hope he takes care of himself and makes it back.”

The Sunday Telegraph, 17 September 2006

Website attacked over propaganda videos of soldiers' deaths in Iraq

TOBY HARNDEN in Washington

A US ARMY soldier steps out of a Humvee and is engulfed in flames as a radio-controlled bomb explodes. An armoured vehicle near Baghdad is blown up by a massive device, killing its crew. A sniper in Iraq fells an American marine as he chats to children.

These graphic insurgent videos are being broadcast not on an Islamist website in the Middle East but on YouTube.com, a phenomenally successful video-sharing site based in California that boasts that 70 million of its clips are viewed each day – mainly by young people.

Relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq are calling for the snuff videos to be removed or the site shut down. YouTube executives declined to comment on why the footage was being permitted on the site despite its terms stating that it “d oesn't allow videos with nudity, graphic violence or hate".

One video, filmed just three weeks ago, shows a 16-ton Stryker armoured vehicle being flipped over by a bomb buried in a road west of Baghdad. Private Daniel Dolan, 19, the driver, from the town of Roy, Utah, was mortally wounded, while the other soldier inside was killed instantly.

First issued by a Sunni insurgent group calling itself Jaish al-Mujahedeen or the Army of Holy Warriors, the video is accompanied by Islamic music and the recitation of Koranic verses.

Tim Dolan, Pte Dolan’s father, said it was “deplorable” that YouTube was allowing such videos to be posted by its members. “It’s a propaganda tool, a recruiting tool and putting it on the internet like this is rubbing it in our faces. It just infuriates me. Watching it was horrible.

“My son was hanging in there but he died eight hours after the explosion. He was only a kid. These videos stir things up here in America as well as in Iraq and Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. The next thing is, there’ll be another 9/11.”

By yesterday(Sat),the video had been viewed 346 times since it appeared on the site a week ago. It was posted by a person using the username ZEROMX87. He responded to an email from The Sunday Telegraph stating that he was Jorge Hernandez, 18, from Mexico, and had been inspired by Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 film.

“I post them so people in the world will be able to see that the US is not having a good time in Iraq,” he wrote. “My message for the families of the soldiers would be – that’s the kind of thing that happens when the heroic people of a country defends their own families from an invader country that only tries to make money from war.”

YouTube is popular with soldiers, many of whom post their own videos, some of it graphic combat footage showing insurgents being killed. But the use of the Stryker video prompted a furious response from some of Pte Dolan’s comrades, who are still in Iraq. “You’ll get yours in the end,” one warned. “Our guys will finish the job.”

The site, which in July registered 16 million unique American visitors and 3.5 million from Britain, is among the top 50 most popular websites in the world despite being just 18 months old. Its advertisers include The New York Times and the US Department of Health and Human Services.

By uploading videos from Islamist websites, YouTube users are spreading insurgent propaganda across the globe. A US intelligence official said that this helped fulfill the aims of groups such as al-Qa’eda. “The video is as important as the attack itself because it can be used to incite and inspire young Muslims everywhere.”

A video cameraman is an integral part of an insurgent team carrying out a major attack. US snipers in Ramadi told The Sunday Telegraph last year that they would shoot cameramen on sight if they believed they were filming insurgent activity. US forces have inadvertently killed a number of journalists in Iraq.

One video of an American soldier being caught in a huge fireball after a bomb exploded as he emerged from a Humvee had been viewed 55,257 times by yesterday(Sat). One of another soldier keeling over after being hit by a sniper had been seen 10,207 times.

Many of the insurgent videos have been on YouTube for several months and some Islamist videos on the site include still photographs of British soldiers on fire during an attack in Basra.

Some relatives of soldiers declined to comment because they felt that giving the insurgents further publicity would only promote their cause. But Mr Dolan said he hoped that speaking out would lead to the videos being removed. “My wife says that it’s just another form of terrorism.”

The Spectator

16 September 2006

Bill Clinton on Tony and Gordon

By Toby Harnden in Little Rock, Arkansas

What can be done to bring order to a fractious Labour party? Inside Little Rock’s Alltel Arena, home of the Arkansas Twisters football team and filled with local Democrats greedily consuming mounds of deep-fried frogs’ legs washed down with vats of iced tea, the question was hardly a burning one.

It was a balmy evening and no one seemed much exercised by the travails of Tony Blair or the overweening ambition of Gordon Brown. Indeed, there was talk of nothing much beyond the borders of a Southern state still viewed by most of the rest of the union as a poor, illiterate cousin.

Except from one man. As he roared with laughter, signed autographs and waited with cheerful indulgence as clammy-fingered fans struggled to operate their digital cameras at the crucial moment, Bill Clinton was only too happy to offer his opinions on Labour’s future.

Clinton, who had arrived on stage to the strains of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Rising’, delivered a pitch-perfect 12-minute stump speech without notes before descending to commune with the crowd.

‘May I feel your arms around me,’ belted out Bruce, who was being given a reprise. ‘May I feel your blood mix with mine.’ Now 60, the kid from Hot Springs who went all the way to the White House did the first bit literally and, instinctive politician that he is, the second metaphorically for a few minutes shy of an hour.

‘I just want them to stay together, to decide what to do and keep the Labour party together,’ he told me as his Secret Service agents fought a losing battle to keep the sweaty mass of ordinary folks from engulfing him. ‘The political difficulties of the moment should not obscure for the British people the fact that this government has been good for their country.’

The question I had asked him was whether he had a message for Tony Blair. But the former US president chose not to mention the Prime Minister by name or to refer to his accomplishments in anything but general terms.

But he brought up Brown unprompted. ‘You’ve got a great economy, better growth than America has and less inequality than America,’ he said. ‘Gordon Brown has been a great Chancellor of the Exchequer. They just have to work this out. You can make too much of the politics and too little of the substance. The point is that New Labour has served the British people well.’

Later this month Clinton is expected to be the headline act in another arena half a world away — the G–Mex Centre in Manchester. Four years after he left delegates spellbound at Labour’s party conference in Blackpool, he is being enticed back.

With the Conservatives having bagged John McCain for their October bash in Bournemouth, expect the transatlantic party relationships to begin to revert to their traditional axes of Labour/Democrats and Tories/Republicans — David Cameron’s criticism of Bush notwithstanding — after the Blair/Bush years.

Clinton ’s Arkansas remarks indicate that he had already considered Labour’s future and concluded that it is Brown. Was the Chancellor worthy of the top job? I asked. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he responded. ‘I have known him since 1990 and I think he’d be a good prime minister.’

In fact, Clinton, then governor of Arkansas and considered a rank outsider for the 1992 presidential race, first met Brown in June 1991 at the Bilderberg conference in the Black Forest resort of Baden-Baden. By all accounts, the two clicked.

‘Late at night, a small group of us chatted for hours about the challenges of the 1990s — and about new ideas he and others had for a new generation,’ Brown wrote, with starry-eyed enthusiasm, 18 months later when Clinton was elected commander-in-chief. ‘ Clinton’s “big idea” is the New Covenant, a unifying vision of America where there is such a thing as a society.’

In the intervening period, Brown — as Labour was still smarting from Neil Kinnock’s defeat at the hands of John Major — had travelled to the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in New York to watch Clinton triumphantly accept his party’s nomination. He might have slipped with the exact year but Clinton’s mention of just how long he had known Brown was no accident.

He did not meet Blair until November 1995, at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. Essentially, Clinton is uttering the Brownite line, as expressed by Harriet Harman and others over the past fortnight: it’s Brown now; we’ve got a good record in government; let’s shut up and get on with things or else the Tories will beat us. Unspoken in this formula is the need for Blair to step down sooner rather than later.

Anyone as politically astute as Clinton knows that the manoeuvring and backbiting will not cease until Tony has gone. That will surely be what Clinton will advise in Manchester. Publicly, expect fulsome praise of Blair (particularly if he has already accepted the glass of whisky and the pearl-handled revolver), warm words for Brown and a heartfelt plea to move on.

But an underlying message will be to the wider electorate. As he put it to me: ‘When you look at the achievements of the [Blair] administration — the Gleneagles summit, the aid to Africa, the economy and all those things — it’s hard to argue with the proposition that the British people have been well served over the last decade.’

Plainly, Clinton disagrees with Blair on Iraq — although he has been gracious enough to acknowledge the bind the Prime Minister was in after the quest for a second United Nations resolution failed. ‘You know what I think about Iraq,’ he snapped when I asked him if Blair had done the right thing there. ‘I think the inspectors should have been allowed to stay in. You want me to say something that’s going to cause one hell of a stink back home.’

Though Iraq is ‘a bigger problem for the Republicans’, Clinton emphasised, he acknowledged that it threatens to split the Democrats, many of whom — including one Senator Hillary Clinton of New York — voted in October 2002 to give President George W. Bush authorisation to invade.

The squabbling, he feels, lets Bush off the hook. ‘I keep telling everybody that whatever you voted nobody is responsible for what happened afterwards — the tactical mistakes, the taking the eye off Afghanistan. But what we need to talk about is what we do from here forward and I just don’t want to see our party divided on this.’

I suspect that Clinton is sorely disappointed that Blair aligned himself so closely with Bush. He has still not forgiven Al Gore, squeamish about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, for declining his formidable services on the 2000 campaign trail. Gore was following the advice of the Democratic strategist Bob Shrum — who, incidentally, has been telling Brown to distance himself from Blair.

Bush’s leaden address to the nation to mark the September 11 anniversary underlined what most voters feel: that he has run out of ideas on Iraq and is already acting like the lame duck he will become after the mid-term elections.

In this environment there is a wave of Clinton nostalgia across America and the former president is basking in the new atmosphere. Since his heart surgery two years ago, he has slimmed down and is a picture of rude health. But while his hair is now almost completely white, he still sees himself as a player rather than an elder statesman above the fray.

‘I try to stay out of politics,’ he fibbed to his Little Rock audience. ‘But the Republicans won’t leave me alone and I keep being dragged back in.’ Having never faced the challenges Bush has since 9/11, Clinton feels he was cheated of the chance to prove himself while president. So he is anxious to cement his legacy after leaving office.

Hillary is the major plank of this. Her aides say that he is more determined than she is to go all out for a Clinton victory in 2008. A danger for Senator Clinton is that her husband’s talents on the campaign trail are unmatchable, so she pales whenever they appear together. But Bill’s ability to raise funds and his encyclopaedic knowledge of America’s political landscape make him a political ally to die for.

For many Labour supporters, watching Clinton in Blackpool will be a reminder of what Blair could have become before the sincerity came to be seen as fake and the connection he had with ordinary Britons was severed.

Brown, dour at the best of times, will doubtless be overshadowed too. But most important for the Chancellor is that Clinton has the rhetorical talents and the charisma to coax Labour out of its self-destructive mood and smooth his path to No. 10.

That means Brown accepting from Clinton the Third Way torch that Blair once clasped. If Brown succeeds, then he will vindicate Clinton just as, perhaps, Hillary will do on the other side of the Atlantic. It is a deal that will suit both men.

10 September 2006

Clinton enjoys renaissance and a shot at revenge

By Toby Harnden in Little Rock, Arkansas

Six years after he left office Bill Clinton is back with a vengeance. Campaigning tirelessly to secure a Democratic victory in the autumn mid-term elections, he is once again his party's undisputed star and fund-raiser-in-chief.

"I'm working harder than ever," he told The Sunday Telegraph at a $100-a-head Deep South dinner of fried catfish and frogs' legs attended by more than 1,500 people last week. "It's such a joy for me to be here with my folks."

By the end of the day, he had raised $1 m (£530,000) for the Democrats, who are poised to win back control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, from the Republicans on November 7.

Mr Clinton is also assiduously helping to lay a foundation for his wife Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign which, if successful, would mean a triumphant Clinton return to the White House after an interregnum of eight Bush years.

"We love you, Bill," screamed a middle-aged woman among a throng of supporters when he returned to his home state of Arkansas last week. Mr Clinton reached for her hand and pulled her towards him.

"We need you back," she whispered in his ear as he gave her a full body hug. "It's so good to see you," said Mr Clinton. "If it wasn't for you all I would have had no political life."

Their embrace was only broken when a Secret Service agent prised the woman's hand away from his head. President Clinton, with lipstick smudges on his tanned cheeks, plunged back for more, posing for photographs and signing anything thrust in front of him.

The old Clinton, loved and hated in equal measure, was there. "Tell Bob I was asking, is his wife still beautiful?" he laughed, trading reminiscences with an old friend. "I remember when she was a single young woman, working on my first congressional campaign."

Drawing strength from the adulation as if it were adrenaline shot into his veins, Mr Clinton lingered for 55 minutes. He was more than an hour late for his next event - a $1,000-a-head concert - and almost had to be dragged to it by Mike Beebe, the gubernatorial candidate he was there to support.

"We've got to go," urged Mr Beebe, tapping his watch. President Clinton grinned. "You guys had better be quick," he told the clamouring well-wishers. "I'm in trouble with Beebe."

Mr Clinton did not stop until after midnight, rounding things off with a $5,000-a-head event at Nu Cuisine, a Little Rock restaurant, before retiring to his suite above the William J Clinton Presidential Library.

It is a far cry from January 2001 when he left the White House. The youngest ex-president in American history struggled to find a new role.

Vice-President Al Gore had spurned his help in the 2000 election, fearing that the Monica Lewinsky scandal would be a distraction.

"When I got out of the White House and she [Mrs Clinton] wound up in the Senate I wondered what my assignment was," he told the Little Rock crowd.

He seemed almost irrelevant after the 9/11 attacks. But as Mr Bush's fortunes slumped in the aftermath of the Iraq war, Mr Clinton, who turned 60 last month, experienced a new lease of life.

A Time magazine poll gave him a 70 per cent approval rating last month, making him almost twice as popular as Mr Bush.

As his friend and Third Way ally Tony Blair contemplates being banished to the political wilderness, Mr Clinton is enjoying a renaissance and a welcome opportunity for pay-back. Mr Beebe's opponent for Mr Clinton's old job of Arkansas governor is Congressman Asa Hutchinson, who helped to lead the attempt to impeach him. The Republican is trailing Mr Beebe by about 10 percentage points, even though Mr Bush won the state in 2000 and 2004.

Mr Clinton said Mr Hutchinson represented a "narrow slice of the Republican Party" and was part of a Washington clique that wanted "to concentrate wealth and power and make sure we're divided and scared enough to leave them in power in every election".

Now it is Republican candidates who are keeping their distance from President Bush, while every Democrat craves a full-throated endorsement from Mr Clinton. Mr Beebe was almost giddy with excitement after Mr Clinton praised him as an old friend with whom he had "worked together for a dozen years in Arkansas".

Appearing from New Jersey to California and Minneapolis to Florida, Mr Clinton has put aside his work to tackle Aids and Third World poverty to tour the country. He spends no more than two weeks a month with his wife, though the two are in constant contact over political strategy.

"Hillary's tough, but Bill is slicker," said WH Cotton Fuller, 70, a long-time supporter and former owner of a local trucking firm. "They both know where they're going and how to get there. She'll be the next president. This is something they've been working for since they first met and they decided they could both do it."

Mr Clinton chuckled when asked by The Sunday Telegraph if he was looking forward to being back in the White House. "I'm just trying to get through this election for my side - including my wife,” he said. “One election at a time. That's my rule. We have no idea what's going to happen."

10 September 2006

CIA spies fear prosecution over secret prisons

By Toby Harnden in Washington

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE Agency officers involved in the Bush administration’s secret prisons programme have consulted lawyers after being warned they could face prosecution for illegally detaining and interrogating terrorist suspects.

Spies at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia fear they will be made scapegoats for the now politically-discredited covert scheme. President George W. Bush announced last week the remaining 14 prisoners in CIA had been transferred to Guantanamo Bay to face military trials.

The CIA officers will have to pay for their own defence if they face legal action. CIA recruits are now advised on joining to take out private liability insurance to protect themselves against lawsuits. In some cases, the CIA reimburses part or all of the insurance costs.

“It’s bad,” said Robert Baer, a former CIA operative specialising in the Middle East. “You get the [White House] Office of Legal Counsel telling the CIA something is legal and then someone changes their mind. But it’s not the counsel that’s held responsible, it’s the CIA employee.”

Some CIA officers, concerned about their careers being ended by their becoming embroiled in a scandal, refused to take part in meetings about the secret prisons, controversial interrogation methods that could be in breach of the Geneva Convention and the “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners between countries.

Details of the prisons, known as “black sites” and believed to have been countries including Poland, Romania, Afghanistan and Thailand, were leaked by the Washington Post last year, Mr Bush came under increasing pressure from European countries and Democratic opponents to close them.

Mr Baer said the revelation of the scheme and the possible legal action against CIA officers had seriously affected morale at the spy agency and threatened to undermine its activities.

“If you’re in the CIA, the last thing you want to do is get involved in interrogations or covert action. You just don’t want to go near it. That makes the CIA risk averse.”

Senior Bush administration officials have said they intend to introduce legislation giving CIA officers immunity from prosecution for involvement in any activities later judged illegal. But Democrats, who may win back control of Congress in November, are likely to block any such move.

Clare Lopez, a former clandestine CIA officer who focused principally on eastern Europe and the Balkans during her spying career, said: “These secret prisons were an integral and valuable part of the war on terror and it is the leakers who should be prosecuted.

“How do you motivate the next generation of our intelligence community if you are saying - there’s a great benefits package but by the way you really should take out liability insurance in case something you’re ordered to do gets leaked to the press.”

She added that the scheme had “proper congressional oversight” and was legally constituted but the leak had put “our friends and allies in an impossible situation”.

More than 100 detainees passed through the secret prisons, the existence of which was not acknowledged until Mr Bush’s speech on Wednesday. Mr Bush said that although the prisons were now empty they could be used again if high-level suspects were captured.

Mr Bush argued that harsh CIA interrogations in the prisons had elicited vital information from al-Qaeda figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida, among the 14 transferred to Cuba.

It remains unclear, however, whether any of their statements under interrogation can be admissible in even a military court.

Human rights groups contend that the scheme was deliberately conceived to create a legal black hole so that abuse and torture could be carried out unchecked.

The determination of some Democrats to hold the Bush administration to account for the scheme could lead to hearings on Capitol Hill reminiscent of those held two decades ago after the Iran-Contra scandal. CIA officers would almost certainly be compelled to testify.

10 September 2006

Rumsfeld a casualty of his own 'war on terror'

By Toby Harnden in Washington

Once considered among the most impressive politicians in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, who has overseen the "war on terror", is being singled out by Democrats as the epitome of all that is rotten in the Bush administration.

On the campaign trial, they assail Mr Rumsfeld at every turn – even Republicans view him as an easy target, using criticism of him to distance themselves from President Bush's foreign policy.

When American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Mr Rumsfeld dashed from his office to help junior staff load the injured onto stretchers as the building burnt.

Later, in the command centre, with smoke still in the air, he ordered United States Navy ships to proceed to New York and Washington. As the sun set on that cataclysmic day, with fighter aircraft circling overhead, he declared the Pentagon was "still functioning" and would be open for business in the morning.

In the months afterwards, Mr Rumsfeld, who holds the unique distinction of having been both the youngest US defence secretary in 1975, when he was 43, and the oldest, at 74, today, became the closest thing the Bush administration had to a rock star.

As American troops swept into Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban, his new doctrine of fast, light forces seemed to have been vindicated. With supreme self-confidence, he goaded reporters and ridiculed anyone who questioned his war strategy.

The former White House chief of staff to President Gerald Ford became, much to the amusement of his wife Joyce, an unlikely sex symbol in Washington as women of a certain age swooned over his acerbic wit and folksy exclamations such as “my goodness gracious” and “by golly”.

Fox News described him as a "babe magnet", and The Wall Street Journal said he was "the new hunk of homefront airtime". President Bush jokingly addressed his Pentagon chief as "Rumstud".

The speed with which US troops swept through Iraq to capture Baghdad in April, 2003, seemed further to burnish his reputation. But in the wake of events in Iraq – the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the virulence of the insurgency – Mr Rumsfeld's image changed from one of lustre to tarnish.

His remarks that "stuff happens", reflecting on looting in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, or that "You go to war with the army you have…not the army you might want," when asked by a soldier about the lack of armour on vehicles, soon began to be seen as arrogance.

Along with the vice-president Dick Cheney, his closest ally in the Bush administration, Mr Rumsfeld is also closely associated with the controversial interpretation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraqi war. That approach received fresh criticism on Friday from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee.

On the vexed question of the failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to the report, the CIA concludes: "There comes a point where the absence of evidence does indeed become the evidence of absence."

That observation is a direct riposte to the comment Mr Rumsfeld made frequently in the months before the war – that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

The committee also highlighted the controversial role of intelligence supplied by the opposition Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmad Chalabi. Many of their claims were channelled through an intelligence analysis office overseen by Doug Feith, Mr Rumsfeld's number three.

But perhaps the most potent charge from the defence secretary's critics is that by focusing so many resources on Iraq, US forces have been distracted from their search for Osama bin Laden – the architect of the attacks five years ago – and spread too thinly in Afghanistan to prevent a steady Taliban encroachment. The allegation has increasing resonance in America ahead of the November elections.

Mr Bush's strong sense of personal loyalty and his belief that admitting errors amounts to weakness meant that the clamour for Mr Rumsfeld's resignation helped to ensure his survival. Democrats now see this as a political gift.

Last week, they tried to push through a no confidence vote on Mr Rumsfeld.

"Time and time again he has been wrong about Iraq," said Sen Barbara Boxer. "And time and time again, he's responded to his own mistakes by playing politics and attacking the American people."

Some senior Republicans are abandoning him. “The president has a right to pick his team,” said Senator John McCain, a powerful runner for the republican nomination for the White Hosue in 2008. “I've been asked a number of times if I had confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld and the answer is no.”

3 September 2006

Videogames pay off for 8-year-old

By Toby Harnden in Mastic, New York

WIELDING HIS plasma sword with merciless authority, Victor De Leon III – one of the world’s most sought-after videogame tutors – smites his slow-witted foe. “You should relax and slow down,” he counsels. “And learn to reload your grenades.”

He is poised in front of a 52-inch television screen, his fingers working the game consol with practiced ease. While this is a one-on-one personalised lesson, he normally teaches remotely via the internet to pupils sometimes more than 1,000 miles away.

At the end of the session, he hops off his black leather sofa and goes to attend to his hamster, Cortana, named after a character in the Halo 2 game of which Victor is a grand master. Just as begins explaining that “more practice” is the secret of success, his mother summons him for tea.

Though he is every inch the professional gamer from the seams of his personalised embroidered shirt – provided by his principal sponsor – to the tips of his Nike trainers, Victor is just eight years old.

He sees little hope for the skills of his pupil, and vanquished opponent, from The Sunday Telegraph, 32 years his senior. “I would give him an F,” he says, giggling, when asked to award a grade of A, B or C.

Using his on-line moniker of Lil Poison, Victor teaches adults across the United States how to manoeuvre heavily-armed Halo 2 ninja characters around a stone fortress as they battle to the death. America’s child labour laws limit him to giving three one-hour lessons each week, fitted around his homework, but his earnings are rising.

Mike Brooks, 22, from Juneau, Alaska, who is among those who have paid for lessons from Victor, said: “He plays with the mindset of some of the most veteran pros in the game,” he said. “ E ven if you get the first shot on him, beware, because the boy knows how to strafe quicker than almost anyone.”

Victor is about to sign a major licensing deal that will lead to a Lil Poison clothing line. “I guarantee he will make a million by the time he’s 18,” said his father, Victor De Leon II, 30. “He started playing when he was two and I soon realised he had a special talent. He picked it up really fast and soon he was destroying me.”

Charging $25 per lesson, Victor he has saved up to buy a black Labrador he will call Eddie and is contemplating splashing out on a mate for Cortana (bought with tournament winnings) called Master Chief – the main character in Halo 2.

With impeccable logic, he explained that he had ruled out buying a cat. “The cat would eat the hamster and the dog would eat the cat.”

Victor also enjoys swimming and is an accomplished speller. “He very smart,” said Mr De Leon, who works at the Mitsubishi forklift truck company on Long Island owned by his Puerto Rican family and began gaming with Atari when he was eight.

“He knew the names of all 50 states when he was three. At school, he’ll memorise the answers and get 100 per cent before he knows what the questions mean – I have to stop him doing that.”

Victor has competed in gaming tournaments throughout America. Mr DeLeon said his son had "won thousands of dollars in prize money" but declined to reveal an exact figure. “W e try to encourage him to divide his time and do other things,” said Mr De Leon. “When there was a tournament in Dallas, we took him to the rodeo. In California, we went to Disneyland.”

The youngster is also learning lessons about sportsmanship. “Some older kids, when they lose to him they cry or they throw their consol away and go nuts,” said Mr De Leon. “One man who got beaten smashed his console and said he was quitting playing. Then he went outside, smoked a cigarette and thought about it, and came back in to shake Victor’s hand and thank him for the game.”

He is careful, he said, not to allow Victor to play games that are too violent. “he’s quite against joining the Army,” he said. “His cousin went to Iraq and he was very worried. He watches tv and picks up on these things.” Victor said he knew the games were just pretend. “If it was a real war, I’d be scared.”

Tom Turner, 18, who operates the website www.gaming-lessons.com and recruited Victor as one of his nine Halo 2 instructors, says the eight-year-old is a phenomenon. “He’s definitely got a God-given talent.

“The first time I played him was on-line and I didn’t know he was just four. My stereotype of a four-year-old was someone who could barely hold the console. For someone as popular as Lil Poison, the earning potential is limitless.”

Those signing up for lessons could be anything from Victor’s age to nearly 50. “But the peak is 17 to 24. That’s when your reflexes are at their peak. I don’t see many people over 24 that are playing really well.”

Mr Turner, a high-school dropout from Jupiter, Florida, is just about to sign a $250,000 contract with Major League Gaming, which organises videogame tournaments, and teaches up to 35 lessons a week.

Victor’s winnings are going to be managed by a vice-president of Merrill Lynch who currently looks after the affairs of the rapper Eminem and the singer Beyonce.

Dan “Shoe” Hsu, 32, editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly, described how Victor had humiliated him in an exhibition match. “This kid just took control of the show and whupped me pretty good. It was 25 to 0. I was in disbelief.”

Whether Victor remains committed to the gaming world remains to be seen. “He used to say he wanted to design games,” says his mother Maribel, 30, who was born in Mexico. “Now he wants to work in McDonald’s. He thinks that’s a big thing.”

The Spectator, 26 August 2006

Stone's 9/11 is conventional, but still insulting

Toby Harnden in New York says that ' World Trade Center' ditches Oliver Stone's left-wing conspiracy theories, but dishonours one of the heroes of 11 September

Staff Sergeant David Karnes was working as an accountant at DeLoitte & Touche in Wilton, Connecticut, on 11 September 2001 when the first plane flew into the World Trade Center. He and his colleagues watched it on television. Karnes announced that America was 'at war' and drove home in his Porsche 911 (he saw this as an omen from above) to don his old marine uniform. He got a buzz cut at the barbers, picked up equipment at a storage facility that he rented and went to a church to pray before driving to Manhattan, stopping for a McDonald's on the way.

Once there, his uniform got him through checkpoints outside Ground Zero, which had been declared unsafe for rescue workers. 'God made a curtain with the smoke, shielding us from what we're not yet ready to see, ' he said as he set out alone to find survivors. He located two Port Authority cops, Sergeant John McLoughlin and Officer William Jimeno, trapped in the rubble and, after helping save them, reflected on New York's losses with the observation, 'We're going to need some good men out there to avenge this.' And this is just what Karnes did. After 9/11 he re-enlisted for active duty and, now 48, has served two combat tours in Iraq.

Staff Sergeant Karnes is a supporting character in Oliver Stone's 9/11 movie World Trade Center, which opens in London next month. He is hardly your typical Stone hero — being a God-fearing patriot rather than an agonising left-liberal — but he is not at all happy about the way he has been portrayed: as a religious zealot.

The news that Oliver Stone was to direct Hollywood's first take on 9/11 sent the blood pressure of red-state Americans into orbit. He was, after all, the man who brought us JFK, based on a baroque conspiracy theory, and has also been a bitter opponent of the wars in Vietnam — where he was a US grunt — and Iraq. In October 2001, furthermore, at a film symposium in New York, Stone compared Osama bin Laden's jihadists to the French revolutionaries of 1789. 'This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy, ' he theorised enthusiastically. 'All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood.' He mused that the 'revolt of September 11' might never have happened if it hadn't been for Florida's hanging chads and the Republican Supreme Court justices who robbed Al Gore of his rightful place in the White House.

The flag wavers need not have worried, however. In Stone's World Trade Center the badly-injured cops pray together, talk of their love for their families and are dug out by a group of all-American heroes while their wives weep helplessly at home. In his utter conventionality, Stone manages, bizarrely, to make something close to a feelgood movie as the gruff Sergeant McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and chipper Officer Jimeno (Michael Pena) bond over reminiscenses of the theme tune of Starsky and Hutch.

The only mention of those who might have been responsible for what happened is in a diner in Wisconsin, where someone denounces 'those bastards' (the same words my father used when in 1979 I told him the IRA had blown up Lord Mountbatten — the first time I heard him swear). The movie's mundane, ground-level images make it much less dramatic than what actually happened that day — or even the version that appeared on our television screens.

The Left has lambasted Stone for slavishly following a script that could have been penned by President George W. Bush. Yet the portrayal of Karnes is double-edged. As played by a steely-eyed, lantern-jawed Michael Shannon, he is a scary fanatic. Karnes himself is distinctly unimpressed by this. Extremely wary of the spotlight, he has declined to make any public comment since seeing a private screening of the movie.

James Barker, the pastor who prayed with Karnes on 9/11, was one of four people who accompanied him to the screening. 'He feels he comes across as an oddball, a zombie, ' he told me. While the mainstream politics of Stone's film are a break with his leftliberal past, he stuck to his practice of taking liberties with the facts. Whereas United 93, directed by the British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, was an austere, documentarystyle movie, in which every detail was minutely researched, World Trade Center has some embarrassing lapses.

The other former marine who bumped into Karnes at Ground Zero and joined him on his search is identified only as Sergeant Thomas and is played by a short white man. After the show's premiere, a 6ft 3in, 17-stone black man called Justin Thomas popped up to declare that he was marine number two. Neither was Karnes consulted.

'He was in Iraq but they [ Paramount] could have made more of an effort to get him, ' said Barker. Perhaps they didn't want to find him. McLoughlin and Jimeno were mega-heroes even before the film. But looking coolly at what happened, their actions, while commendable, were limited to rushing to the scene as their duties demanded. Before they could do anything, the south tower had come down on them.

Karnes, who responded to a national emergency with almost preternatural determination and ingenuity, is relegated to being a marginal, kooky presence — a 'nutbag', as one fireman calls him in the film.

Depressingly, Karnes believes that the men he saved, and who were courted by Stone, want to hog all the glory. 'It seems Jimeno and McLoughlin wanted to make a movie without Dave's input, ' said Barker. The two policemen have not spoken to the marine since 2002.

The schmaltz and star-spangled religiosity of World Trade Center will prompt snorts of derision in post-Christian, anti-Bush Britain when it opens there on 29 September. But America is still raw over 9/11. A sanctity still surrounds almost everything connected to that day and this has insulated the film from criticism — even down to its linking, through Karnes, of 9/11 to Iraq.

Driving past the Grace Bible Church in Accident, Maryland, recently, I saw a Karnesian sign that read, 'Freedom is Always Purchased With Blood.' The growing disenchantment with Mesopotamian events notwithstanding, it is a sentiment that is not uncommon. Perhaps Stone was using the character of Karnes — a person he seems not really to want to understand — to undermine, even subconsciously, the overt rah-rah message of his own film. Or maybe he just wanted the money.

20 August 2006

Republicans back Vanquished Democrat

Senior Republican strategists have thrown a politcal lifeline to Joe Lieberman, the Democratic senator ousted by a Left-wing challenger over his support for the Iraq war, by supporting him through a military veterans group.

Mr Lieberman's 18-year Senate career appeared to be at an end after Connecticut's Democratic primary earlier this month when he was narrowly defeated by Ned Lamont, a millionaire newcomer who ran on the single issue of opposing the Iraq war.

But his new strategy of running in the November Senate elections as an independent candidate who would appeal to Republican voters is already paying off after the White House declined to back the official Republican candidate and a poll last week gave Mr Lieberman a 12-point advantage over Mr Lamont.

In an increasingly bitter election battle, the new Veterans for Freedom group has begun running advertisements for Mr Lieberman and senior Democrats have warned that he risks being shunned by his former colleagues in Washington if he is re-elected.

The group hopes to split the Democratic vote in Connecticut - traditionally a staunchy liberal state - and give the Republicans a better chance of winning.

All three Republican Congressional candidates in Connecticut have praised Mr Lieberman while failing to endorse their own nominee, Alan Schlesinger. Mr Lieberman's candidacy has also been enorsed by Newt Gingrich, the Republican who once served as House speaker.

Angry Democrats are comparing the veterans' campaign group to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an organisation that was widely credited with helping undermine John Kerry, who stood against President George W Bush in the 2004 election, by casting doubt on his Vietnam war record. The group is led by Wade Zirkle, a former US Marine Corps lieutenant who was badly wounded in Fallujah two years ago. But its advisers include Dan Senor, a former White House aide who was chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and William Kristol, a leading neo-conservative.

Mr Zirkle said that people were sick of anti-war activists purporting to speak for American troops. "Our goal is to give a voice to active duty troops and veterans of the global war on terror. Joe Lieberman was an obvious person to support - he gets it when it comes to the long war."

"Netroots" - grassroots Left-wing activists who mobilise via the internet - have been using weblogs to point out the group's Republican links as they try to ensure that Mr Lamont does not share the same fate as Mr Kerry. George Jepson, a senior Lamont aide, said the "swift-boating" of Mr Lamont had begun with the group aiming "to make opposition to the war in Iraq somehow unpatriotic". Despite the unpopularity of the war, many anti-war Democrats remain vulnerable to charges of lack of patriotism.

Within hours of Mr Lieberman's defeat at the hands of Mr Lamont, Republicans were seeking to portray the vote as a sign of the moral decadence of Democrats. Vice President Dick Cheney said it showed Democrats believed "that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won't".

In retaliation, the bloggers are hitting back at what they see as cynical Republican politicking. On the popular Huffington Post site, one blogger named "Seriously" commented: "The Vets for Freedom are another band of Hired Liars who should be out raising cash for American troops who have sacrificed life and limb during the invasion of Iraq."

Another contributor, "Betsy", agreed. "Yet more truth-twisting Republican scum making money off the blood of our troops. This country needs an enema to purge us of these people. Let’s give it to them come November...TAKE AMERICA BACK!"

But the wounds and decorations for bravery earned by so many of the Veterans for Freedom mean that their views will not be easy to dismiss. One member, Joseph Worley, a former medic, lost his left leg in Iraq while another, David Bellavia, a former staff sergeant, has been recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honour, America’s equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

Mr Zirkle, who worked for a Republican gubernatorial candidate after he left the US Marines, insisted: "We are non-partisan and include Republicans and Democrats. The people saying we are like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are the Left-wing radical fringe, the netroots. The moderate, mainstream, far-sighted people of America understand."

30 July 2006

Senior Democrat branded a Judas in row set to split the party over Iraq

By Toby Harnden in Washington

LIKE A drowning man, Senator Joe Lieberman, one of the Democratic party's most respected figures, is clutching on to former president Bill Clinton in a desperate effort to save his political life.

But some Lieberman supporters believe Mr Clinton is acting only to protect his wife's own political fortunes and that he could eventually help seal the demise of the Connecticut senator's career.

Mr Lieberman, who in 2000 came within a whisker of becoming America's first Jewish vice-president, is facing defeat in a Senate primary by a political newcomer challenging from the Left of his own party.

The ugly battle threatens to split the Democrats into two camps - a traditional, moderate and hawkish one represented by Sen Lieberman, who strongly supports the Iraq war, and a young, liberal, anti-war one that supports his opponent, Ned Lamont.

Mr Lamont, a multi-millionaire scion of the J.P. Morgan banking family, has successfully painted Mr Lieberman as a lackey of President George W. Bush who has lost touch with his party's roots.

Mr Lieberman has been mocked for what has become known as "the kiss'' when Mr Bush embraced him after last year's State of the Union speech and appeared to peck him on the cheek.

Lamont supporters have characterised this as a "Judas'' or "Godfather'' kiss and a papier maché float caricaturing the moment has dogged Sen Lieberman at campaign events.

In a sign of the seriousness of his plight, Mr Lieberman announced he would run as an independent in the November mid-terms if he lost against Mr Lamont.

Last week, Mr Lieberman stood beaming as President Clinton, still one of the most popular politicians in America, urged Democrats in Connecticut to vote for the veteran senator when the party chooses its Senate nominee next Wednesday.

"Joe Lieberman is a friend of mine,'' Mr Clinton told a rally of more than 2,000 Democrats who had been swaying to the tune of Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop, the Clinton anthem during his victorious 1992 presidential campaign. "I love him. He's in a tough race,'' he said.

But the smile on Mr Lieberman's face looked distinctly strained. Not only had two new polls showed Mr Lamont with a narrow lead, unthinkable just a month ago, but he also knew that Mr Clinton's agenda might be far from straightforward.

The two men have a complicated history. In 1970, when he was a student at Yale law school, President Clinton worked for Mr Lieberman when he was running for a state senate seat.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Mr Lieberman became the first senator from outside the South to back Mr Clinton for the White House. The pair were key members of the centrist New Democrat strain of the party that swept to power.

But the relationship soured six years later when Sen Lieberman, a devout Jew whom his detractors denounce as sanctimonious, declared in the Senate that he was "personally angry'' about Mr Clinton's "immoral'' and "disgraceful'' behaviour with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

It looked briefly as if that speech would spell the end of Mr Clinton's presidency, a fact that was never forgotten by the occupants of the White House, including Hillary Clinton.

What some Clinton aides saw as Mr Lieberman's treachery was cemented in 2000 when he accepted an invitation to become Al Gore's running mate - a move widely viewed as Vice-President Gore's attempt to distance himself from the Clinton scandals.

Four years later Mr Lieberman was a presidential candidate himself. During the 2004 primaries he was in turn betrayed by Mr Gore who endorsed Howard Dean, the firebrand surprise front-runner and darling of the "netroots'' - the liberal bloggers who are becoming increasingly influential in the Democratic party.

At the time, Mr Lieberman said: "I don't have anything to say about Al Gore's sense of loyalty. I have no regrets about the loyalty that I had to him.''

He added that a vote for Mr Dean would be "a ticket for nowhere''.

Mr Dean is now Democratic party chairman and there have been concerns within the Lieberman camp about his backing for their man. His brother Jim is one of the leading Lamont supporters - jokingly dubbed the "Nedroots''.

Both Mr and Mrs Clinton have made it clear that their support for Mr Lieberman will only stretch so far. If Mr Lamont prevails next week, they will switch their backing to him because he will then be the official Democratic candidate.

Mrs Clinton fears that a Lieberman defeat would embolden and empower the liberal Democrats who are furious at her support for the Iraq war. But an independent Lieberman candidacy could damage her even further and some Democrats believe President Clinton's appearance was partly calculated to place him in a position where he could urge the senator not to run against Mr Lamont in November.

In his speech, Mr Clinton described the Iraq war as the "pink elephant in the room'' during the Democratic primary. Mr Lieberman's staunch backing for Mr Bush's foreign policy could well make him the first candidate to be crushed by it.

30 July 2006

Muslim shoots six in the US and blames Israel

JEWISH groups across the United States urged their members to step up security yesterday after a Muslim man burst into a Jewish Federation building a shot six women, killing one of them.

Naveed Afzal Haq, 31, of Pakistani origin, forced his way into the Seattle headquarters of the Jewish Federation and opened fire after shouting: "I'm a Muslim American. I'm angry at Israel."

One woman died and three, one pregnant, were critically injured. Another jumped from a first-floor window, escaping with only scrapes and bruises, as others cowered behind desks. Three of the victims were not Jewish.

“I worked very closely with these people,” said Carol Gown, the organisation’s Seattle vice-president told The Sunday Telegraph. “They were wonderful women. I love them. It is a horrific act and a terrible loss.

“We did have security on the building. Now, Jewish organisations have urged everyone to be very vigilant and to revise their procedures.” It was not thought he had deliberately targetted women.

Mayor Greg Nickels said the shootings were “a crime of hate”. Last weekend, the Jewish Federation had led a large rally in support of Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Haq, from Pasco, 220 miles east of Seattle, telephoned police himself to tell them what he had done. He has been charged with one count of murder and five of attempted murder.

Police said he had been receiving medication for a bipolar disorder and had charge of lewd conduct charge pending after he allegedly exposed himself in a shopping mall.

“This event came out of the blue,” said Mrs Gown. “We pay attention to security but we had no way of knowing a crazy man would come and do something like this.”

Yesterday, a protective police cordon was thrown around Seattle’s Seward Park area, the city's traditional Jewish neighborhood and home to three major synagogues.

Arsalan Bukhari, president of the local chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations condemned the attack."The events that are happening in the Middle East should not spill over into our city," he said.

The Anti-Defamation League offered security advice to Jewish organisations across America. Robert Jacobs, its Washington state regional director, recommended it would be best for Jews "not to congregate in one location that might be an obvious site".

The Spectator, 29 July 2006

Compassionate Redneck takes Texas by Storm

By Toby Harnden in Lubbock, Texas

The candidate is clad in a black Stetson, dark pearl-buttoned shirt and blue jeans, like a shambolic outlaw in some spaghetti western. But if he is inhibited by the audience of corpulent, stony-faced sheriffs glaring out from beneath their ten-gallon hats, he does not show it.

Within the first two minutes of his stump speech, the ageing cowboy with Frank Zappa facial hair and a history of substance abuse proudly confesses to lewd conduct and breaking a state law.

‘I’m a member of the Mile High Club,’ declares Kinky Friedman, the former country and western singer, to delegates at the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas conference, where stalls advertise professional ‘tragedy clean-up’ services and a commemorative handgun auction. ‘I’m a solo member.’

Allegations by political opponents that he had sipped from an open liquor can while driving at the head of a recent St Patrick’s Day parade in Dallas are true, he continues, clutching an unlit Montecristo No. 2 Cuban cigar. ‘It was Guinnessgate 2006. I admit I did drink the Guinness —but I did not swallow.’

Friedman, whose nickname derives not from any sexual antics, airborne or otherwise, but from his now-thinning ‘Jewish Afro’ hair, used to be best known first as the singer with the Texas Jewboys. Then he became a writer of off-beat detective novels (starring himself) with titles like Armadillos and Old Lace and Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned.

The Jewboys’ cult hits managed to upset just about every group imaginable. ‘They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More’ contained every ethnic slur imaginable. ‘Proud to be an Asshole from El Paso’ (a skit on Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee’) cast aspersions on some Texans’ affinity with sheep. ‘Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed’ prompted campus protests from feminists.

Friedman is still doing his best to offend people but he is achieving new notoriety as an insurgent candidate for governor of Texas, the post held by George W. Bush for six years. On 7 November he hopes to achieve what Arnold Schwarzenegger did in California and the pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura did in Minnesota by winning a statewide election as a celebrity political neophyte. His pitch is encapsulated by his slogans ‘Why the Hell Not?’ and ‘I Can’t Screw Things Up Any Worse Than They Have’.

Only 29 per cent voted in the last gubernatorial election, and those who stayed at home, disillusioned with politicians — not least the Republican incumbent Rick Perry — are his target audience.

Outside the Lubbock Civic Centre, where the sheriffs’ conference is being held, is Chris Bell, the Democratic candidate and a man so bland that it seems Friedman might have invented him just to prove his point. He is sipping from a can of Dr Pepper and adjusts his hair in the mirrored glass of the exit door as he talks.

‘Kinky’s funny and I like him,’ he says sourly. ‘But we don’t need a joke for a governor. I just think people will realise they need a governor who takes a serious approach to fixing problems.’

Friedman accuses his three rivals of having had a ‘humour bypass’ and cites their combined 88 years in politics as the reason. ‘Musicians can better run this state than politicians,’ he tells a crowd of some 250 crammed into Bleacher’s Sports Café in downtown Lubbock. ‘Now we won’t get a lot done in the mornings probably, but we’ll run late and we’ll be honest.’

Lubbock , the remote west Texas birthplace of Buddy Holly, is rock-solid conservative. When Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, another of its musical offspring, said she was ‘ashamed of being from the same state’ as President George W. Bush, Lubbock disowned her. ‘She stirred up a lot of s***,’ explains Tom Ward, a Friedman supporter. ‘Is she welcome here? Hell no, not at all.’

But high federal government spending and the running sore of Iraq make the national mood music for Republicans less than favourable. In the Lone Star state, the indictment on corruption charges of Tom DeLay, a Texan former Republican congressional leader, and Mr Bush’s willingness to compromise on immigration in order to woo Hispanic voters have also driven conservatives away from the Grand Old Party.

Friedman’s first action on becoming governor, he says, would be to list his phone number publicly so any Texan can call to shoot the breeze. Then he would legalise casino gambling and funnel the funds into education — ‘slots for tots’. The state lotto funds should also be redistributed. ‘What has six balls and screws Texas? The lottery. We’ve got to get these money-changers out of the temple.’

Single and 61, Friedman’s companions in the governor’s mansion would be his five mutts Mr Magoo, Perky, Brownie, Chumley and Fly. ‘Dogs can teach us a lot,’ he says. ‘How to be loyal, how to be friendly, how to love, how to be always ready for fun, how to forgive, all of that.’ On foreign policy he’s a neocon: ‘The Israelis and the Texans have a lot in common. They both have a John Wayne spirit.’

He is a keen environmentalist — he pledges to convert all 35,000 Texas school buses to biodiesel fuel — supports low taxes and has a strong libertarian streak, but he defies categorisation. He is probably the only candidate in America who supports both gay marriage and compulsory prayer in public schools.

‘My plan is to bring back the Ten Commandments and call them the Ten Suggestions. I’m for gay marriage — they have as much right to be miserable as the rest of us. I’m an independent thinker. Nobody tells me what to think and I haven’t sold myself to the highest bidder like a career politician.’

He expresses bemusement about some issues. ‘The death penalty? I’m all over the map. I’m not anti it but I’m anti the wrong guy getting executed. And I do ask the question, “When was the last time we executed a rich guy?” If I’m governor there won’t be anybody executed — except for the few that really need to die.’ His immigration stance is significantly to the right of Mr Bush’s.

Bleacher’s is decorated with homemade placards declaring ‘Kinky Time’ and ‘There is Something Kinky Going On’. Afterwards, Friedman spends more than two hours signing books, bumper stickers and anything else put under his nose, including a teenage girl’s sign that reads ‘I Prefer to be Erotic but Kinky Will Do Just Fine’, written in felt pen. The crowd is loud, in many cases drunk and decidedly mixed.

There are bikers, students, a neuro-surgeon, an elderly lawyer who was once the town’s Democratic chairman and a Native American called Roger who ran for Republican chairman. Friedman is unfazed when a six-foot transvestite christened Bruce but calling herself Laura, complete with miniskirt, smeared lipstick and stubble, asks for an autograph.

Back in his room at Lubbock’s soulless Embassy Suites, Friedman is on the phone trying to persuade the actor Robert Duvall to do a radio spot for him. Without the money and backing of a party machine, he needs cash for advertising. ‘If we rob a bank, we can do it,’ he says, adding that he hopes his friend Bob Dylan will come down to lend a hand.

Like many funny men, Friedman’s string of quips masks a somewhat maudlin temperament. When people fail to take him seriously, he gets cranky — but it seems he can’t quite bear it when they do. He calls himself a ‘dealer in hope’, and there is an endearingly childlike quality about him, but also a cynical tinge to his anti-politician message.

He is at once supremely confident about winning (the latest polls put him at 21 per cent compared with Perry’s 35 per cent — still an outsider but definitely in with a shout) and racked with self-doubt. ‘The young people are really starting to inspire the Kinkster and the feeling’s mutual,’ he says at Bleacher’s. But later, pondering voter turnout, he confides: ‘I think the young people are going to f**k us. They always do.’

He mourns the decline of traditional values, an America gone by. ‘ Texas is the last resort of wussification, which is the weakening of fibre, spiritual and moral,’ he says. ‘I’m a compassionate redneck. Someone who cares about the little fellers, not the Rockefellers, who follows not the easy way but the cowboy way. It’s honesty, leaving a place cleaner than you found it, knowing that courtesy is owed, respect is earned and love is given.’

As he walks me down to the hotel lobby, Friedman reflects on his life. ‘I was stoned a lot when I was a musician and I was involved with a lot of beautiful women. I raised a lot of hell and I don’t regret it. At least I never killed anybody. Even Ted Kennedy can’t say that.’

But he does seem regretful, even a touch lonely. The ‘love of my life’, he explains, was killed in a car crash in the 1980s — ‘she kissed a windshield at 95 miles per hour in her Ferrari’ — and a romance with Miss Texas 1987 fell apart. ‘I was too young to get married, then I was too stoned and now I’m old enough to sleep alone.’

Recently he has embarked on a romance with a British businesswoman he met while she was driving across the United States in a pick-up truck. ‘She’s a lady, a real one,’ he says. ‘I had hopes she was an extremely wealthy person.’ A future First Lady of Texas, perhaps? ‘Could be. But as I’ve waited this long I hope not to make a tragic mistake so late in the game.’

The Sunday Telegraph, 23 July 2006

Phoenix in terror as serial killers compete for notoriety

The desert city of Phoenix, the fastest-growing metropolis in the United States, is being terrorised by two serial killers operating separately and melting back into the night after striking at random.

Police believe there is no link between the two murderers, who have been branded the "Baseline Killer" and the "Serial Shooter", though some criminal profilers claim that they might be feeding off each other's notoriety.

Two victims have been picked off by a single bullet while cycling. A man was shot dead as he dozed off while waiting for a bus. A woman was abducted while vacuuming her vehicle at a car wash and her body was later found dumped in an alley.

Phil Gordon, the mayor of Phoenix, Arizona, told The Sunday Telegraph that it was the first instance that he knew of in American history of two such killers being at large in one city at the same time.

"But this is a city that isn't letting these two monsters hold them prisoner. They're the ones being hunted. They now know there is no place they can hide," he said.

He said that there were 130 of the "best of the best" police officers dedicated to the cases, supported by 3,000 regular officers in Phoenix, which recently overtook Philadelphia to become America's fifth largest city, with 1.5 million inhabitants.

The Baseline Killer is a black man whose crimes started late last summer with a series of rapes and robberies before he progressed to murder. He has attacked men and women and once robbed a group of 11 people.

Operating on foot or using a victim's car, he has been described by witnesses as wearing dreadlocks and a floppy fishing hat, probably a disguise. In one attack, he wore a Halloween mask.

"He is a predator who is very brazen and violent when he strikes," said Sgt Andy Hill of the Phoenix Police Department. "There have been occasions when he has exchanged a few words with a victim so it's very important not to engage with a suspicious person. There may still be a chance to get away."

Named after the Baseline Road, where he first marauded, he has murdered six people and committed another 15 crimes across an area of 80 square miles.

His victims are shot, usually at very close range. He normally strikes just after sunset and estimates of his age range from 25 to 40, height from 5ft 6in to 6ft and weight from 10 to 14 stone.

Details of the Serial Shooter are even more sketchy. "Nobody has seen the suspect," said Sgt Hill. "We believe all the shooting occurs from a vehicle. He's just driving around waiting for that opportunity for a victim to be alone."

Normally emerging between 10pm and 4am, he has carried out 34 shootings in the past 14 months, killing five people, five dogs and three horses and wounding a burro, a wild ass of the type introduced to the American south-west in the 16th century by Spaniards who had first encountered the animal in Africa.

He has been linked to a light-coloured saloon car but police, mindful that in 2002 erroneous reports of the Washington DC snipers using a white van delayed their capture, have warned people to beware of all vehicles.

The Serial Shooter has also fired his weapon into a Burger King restaurant.

Glenn Notsch, 44, who runs a swimming pool supplies company, called the police last May when he saw drag marks and dried blood in the gravel in his delivery area. Police searched the premises but found nothing.

Four days later, he noticed a pungent smell that at first he thought was tar. "I was walking my dog Bella between our building and a big shed. I pulled back some black paper that was there and I saw a person's arm and leg. I just ran."

The body was that of Nicole Gibbons, 26. "She was the fifth victim of the Baseline Killer and there has been one more since," he said. "This was the only body hidden and the only one that was nude. She was also a known prostitute." Mr Notsch said that he carries a 9mm Czech pistol for protection.

"I have always been a gun owner but I have friends who have bought firearms for the first time because of this," he said. "I just hope they're practising."

Mr Gordon said that since a reward of $100,000 (£54,000) was offered 11 days ago the number of tips from the public had risen from a dozen a day to 1,000 before averaging out at 500.

"The police are working 24/7. They're doing shifts of 12 hours and then going over to volunteer their time to man the tip lines. We don't want people to be afraid or embarrassed to call. The littlest thing is probably what the police need."

Sgt Hill said the lack of information made apprehending either suspect very difficult. "With the Serial Shooter, it could conceivably be more than one suspect. We've got to build these cases one brick at a time," he said. "We need a breakthrough. We know that we're racing against time and we don't want there to be another victim."

Evening Standard, 18 July 2006

The Day Alan Died

By Toby Harnden in Washington

A MOCK Star Trek email from my friend Alan Senitt to his chums back home confirmed that the West Wing aficionado and political junkie was having the time of his life in Washington.

Dubbing himself "Agent NW4" of the "Starship Senittprise", he announced: "I can confirm that life does exist here, although they lack some of our more advanced skills.

"Nevertheless, I have managed to settle into their way of life, and have begun my mission to help the simple local population elect a leader who can string more than two words together without insulting a foreign culture or starting a war."

Within three weeks, he had already become a key cog in the embryonic presidential campaign of Mark Warner, a centrist Democrat vying to succeed George W. Bush in 2008. The job would involve "telling the next president of the United States what to think", regaling them in emails with tales of who he had wined and dined. "It is a hard life I am living!"

He had recently met a young woman in South Africa and was to link up with in Britain after his sojourn in America. There were grand plans to start a think tank in London and ambitions to become an MP - perhaps one day Prime Minister. No one who knew Alan doubted he could have done it, while still managing to play football on Wednesday nights and make time for his friends.

For me, Alan's arrival in Washington was a welcome chance to continue a friendship that begun in Israel and developed in London. A big, lovable character invariably ready with a quip, he always knew the political inside track and was superbly entertaining company.

Tragically, it was not to be. Before we had had a chance to meet up, Alan was dead. His throat was slit in a horrific robbery and rape attempt on a female American friend Tybee in the heart of Georgetown, the leafy, well-to-do area long inhabited by the Washington's movers and shakers.

Since buying a house lived in Georgetown seven years ago, I had always felt infinitely safer there that anywhere in London. The street crime of the 1980s and early 1990s seemed to be a thing of the past, now confined to the ghetto areas miles away.

I would often forget to lock my front door overnight or accidentally leave my wallet on my car passenger seat - like Alan, who habitually misplaced his passport, I can be a tad absent minded. But in Georgetown, it did not seem to matter. I still cannot fathom how it came to be that Alan was killed there, just around the corner from the idyllic church where I was married in March.

A cheery email in my inbox last month announced Alan's imminent arrival and a suggestion we "grab a beer" as soon as we could. The last time we'd seen each other had been in Israel in January when we both happened to be in Jerusalem in the midst of a political crisis.

It was the Sabbath and Alan laughed at me as I tried in vain to get something to eat in my kosher hotel as he imparted the nuggets he had gleaned from meetings with top Israeli politicians jockeying for position as Ariel Sharon lay in a coma.

I jokingly cursed him for not standing me dinner after I'd picked up the tab the last time over a long lunch at Al Duca in Piccadilly when he'd toasted my forthcoming marriage and congratulated me on what he assured me would be wedded bliss. Others were bemoaning my imminent loss of bachelorhood but everything was positive with Alan.

The senselessly random nature of Alan's death was supremely ironic because the 27-year-old from Pinner had always had a knack of being in the right place at the right time.

A leading Jewish activist, he had met political leaders across the globe. Everywhere he went, Alan met the people who mattered. "You know what I'm like, always managing to haplessly end up meeting very cool people," he told a friend in an email from Washington.

In his three weeks here, he had built contacts with members of Bill Clinton's White House staff, secured a tour of the Pentagon and lunched with diplomats from the Israeli Embassy.

But the thing about Alan's missions is that they always involved having one hell of a lot of fun along the way. In Washington, he made sure to attend the International Wine Festival. "I can confirm that none of the many hundreds of varieties of wine on offer were in any way dangerous," he reported. "I tasted them all to be sure and deemed the area to be secure, yet somewhat blurry."

He had decided Georgetown was the place to live and, in typical Alan fashion, had secured the perfect place straight away with a kindly family who "are trying to help me blend in further by finding me a wife". Alan was always bemoaning his single status while firmly believing that "the one" was waiting for him around the corner.

Alan achieved more than many do in a lifetime. A former chairman of the Union of Jewish Students, he had just completed a master's in diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He lost a bid for a council seat in Barnet in May but was undeterred. A pragmatist, he was a Labour candidate but admired David Cameron and would have worked for a moderate Republican if the Warner opportunity had not opened up.

Joanna Vos, a friend from Birmingham University who subsequently lived near Alan in Hendon, described him as "someone who was totally normal but with an extraordinary other side".

And so it was in the final hours of his life that began with an ordinary evening out on Saturday and ended with remarkable heroism. Alan, Tybee and Dan Sacker, 24, from Stanmore and studying for a master's in political management at George Washington University, had decided to go the cinema on Saturday.

Dan and Alan had their hearts set on the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" but all late-night showings at Georgetown's Loews Cinema were full so they were forced to acquiesce with Tybee's choice of "The Devil Wears Prada". They teased her when they got a one-dollar student discount and she didn't.

Afterwards, there was a debate about whether to have a drink but it was past 1am. Dan headed off to his pad in Foggy Bottom while Alan walked Tybee home to her apartment on Q Street at one of the most select addresses in Georgetown.

As Alan helped unload some bottled water from Tybee's car, they were set upon by a gang of three black men and a woman, armed with guns and knives. Alan cried out that he had been stabbed, telling his friend to hand over her purse.

But then one of the assailants made plain his intention to rape Tybee, 26. In his struggle to prevent this happening, Alan's throat was cut, killing him instantly. "It was typical of Alan," said Dan. "He was trying to save her and he did."

As Alan died, Tybee was able to run away and flag down a taxi. Within hours, four people, one a woman and another a boy of 15, had been arrested and confessed to the attack. It was the most shocking murder in white, gentrified Georgetown for nearly a decade.

Dan learned the news at 6am when, surreally, he father telephoned him from London, where the terrible news had already broken. On Wednesday, he had the heart-breaking task of packing up his friend's belongings from the apartment he had been so pleased to have found last month.

They had planned to spend Sunday together watching the Wimbledon and World Cup finals before seeing Pirates of the Caribbean - booking ahead this time. If I hadn't been one of those strange Englishmen who is left cold by football, I might have been due to join them. "I've still got the beers in the fridge," said Dan.

Back in London, more than a thousand people are expected at Alan's funeral. Danny Stone, a close friend and former colleague at the Political Council for Coexistence, a body dedicated to fostering peace between Jews and Muslims, said: "The thing I will remember Alan for is how good he made people feel about themselves. That humility and willingness to sacrifice himself summed up what he was about."

I will miss Alan's jokes, consummate networking and his acute insights on the Middle East. It seems bizarre that I will never hear his insider's take on the Warner campaign or be introduced to some Washington person that he just knew I should meet.

Time after time, the friends of Alan's I talked to this week mentioned his toothy smile, his cheeky sense of humour and readiness to drop everything to help someone. As happens in death, I have learned so much more about a man that I would have cherished discovering for myself in the coming years.

Jo Vos remembers him loving pizza, Starbucks and once posting a spoof entry on J-Date, the Jewish internet dating service, bearing her picture and the words "voluptuous, vivacious vixen with the assets to adjust to any situation". Years later, the 23-year-old is still getting smitten emails from men 30 years her senior.

In her grief, she draws comfort from the knowledge that Alan would have revelled in the tributes that have poured in. "She [Tybee] has wrongly been described as his girlfriend," she laughed. "He would have liked people to think he had a girlfriend.

"In one paper, news of his death was sandwiched between stories about Jody Kidd and Abi Titmuss. He would have enjoyed that. That's exactly where Alan would have wanted to be."

16 July 2006

'Police... open up, we know you've made a mess in there'

By Toby Harnden in Arlington, Virginia

Sam Shipkovitz viewed his home as his castle, a place where he could pile his possessions from floor to ceiling and answer to no one. Unfortunately, his local hoarding task force saw things a little differently.

The latest victim of what he brands " America's neatness police", Mr Shipkovitz, a patent lawyer, returned home one evening to find that the locks on his apartment door had been changed. A bright yellow sign stated: "Unfit for Human Habitation."

While his friends considered him a likeable eccentric with a penchant for accumulating junk, to the task force - one of a growing number in America - Mr Shipkovitz was a danger to himself and his neighbours.

In Arlington, just across the Potomac River from Washington DC, the local task force has investigated 34 hoarding cases in the past year, almost all of them after tip-offs from members of the public.

Capt Tom Polera, an assistant fire marshal and member of the task force, said that reports of hoarding soared after a case in nearby Fairfax County last July in which an 82-year-old woman was found to have 488 cats, 222 of them dead, in her home.

In January, Marie Rose, 62, was found dead in Washington state after her husband reported her missing. She had suffocated under piles of clothes, apparently while looking for the telephone.

"There is a difference between a property which is messy and one that can't be used for the purpose for which it was built," said Capt Polera. "We're talking about a room in which you would not be able to find the TV or the couch. It becomes a collateral problem for adjacent neighbours."

At first, Mr Shipkovitz was allowed back for five hours a week to tidy things up. But then the landlord evicted him, and his belongings were loaded into three vans and taken to a storage facility.

The man who describes himself as "the king of mess" is now fighting in the courts for the right to be a hoarder. "It may have looked disorganised, but it was logical, with things of the same type together.

"Now, it's a nightmare. It's a total soup - the stuff I had in the kitchen is mixed with the stuff I had in the bedroom. It just shows the craziness of these goons. They came storming in without a warrant, like a Swat team."

For a month afterwards, Mr Shipkovitz found himself sleeping on a sofa in a friend's basement. Things haven't improved much since then. "I have a client who owns a couple of houses. I wouldn't call it abandoned, but I'm staying in one of his junk piles he's going to rip down."

Court documents state that there was only a 15in-wide path through the two-bedroom flat, which he shared with a friend and which was heaving with "rubbish, debris, paper, boxes, bags and all manner of containers".

Mr Shipkovitz disputed many of the details. The bumper, seat and steering wheel of a Mustang car that were in the sitting room were not his, he said. Neither were the boxes in the bath.

"I have a large amount of engineering and law books. And there were a lot of client files in the kitchen. I guess I had lots of electrical items - thousands, I guess. I'm a techie freak." He conceded that power tools were stashed in the cupboards. "I used to run a construction company," he explained.

"But there was nothing unsafe. During the previous fire inspection, the fire marshal said some of my boxes that were side by side should be stacked so there was a 28in-wide path, which was done." His case has been thrown out by a United States district court, but he has lodged an appeal.

Henry St John Fitzgerald, a lawyer and friend of Mr Shipkovitz, who is helping him with his case, said: "Sam is a smart guy. He has a PhD in electrical engineering and a law degree. He's odd and a hoarder. It's an aberration to have that much junk for absolutely no reason. But whose business is it?"

Randy Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, who specialises in obsessive compulsive behaviour, said that up to 1.4 million Americans suffered from an irrational desire to hoard.

"Hoarders tend to concentrate on non-essential details and have difficulty making any kind of decision. They tend to organise things visually and spatially. The problem is that it's too taxing on the memory, because you cannot remember everything you own and where it's located."

Mr Shipkovitz sees things more simply. "They've screwed up my life big time and they're not going to get away with it," he said. "I'm going to sue every one of these jackasses."

16 July 2006

Murder of Briton Protecting Woman Sparks Georgetown Tension

By Toby Harnden in Washington

THE HORRIFIC killing of a young Briton and a wave of attacks on tourists has prompted Washington DC's police chief to declare a "crime emergency" amid fears that the city could once again become America's murder capital.

Alan Senitt, 27, an aspiring politician who had arrived in the US three weeks earlier to work for a Democratic presidential candidate, had his throat cut during a mugging and attempted rape of his friend in the heart of historic Georgetown, Washington's most exclusive neighbourhood.

His murder, allegedly by a black gang, has led to racial tensions, always simmering just below the surface in a 60 per cent black city where wealthy whites overwhelmingly predominate in Georgetown and its environs, boiling over.

Insp Andy Solberg, the Georgetown police commander, who is white, was reassigned to other duties when he told 400 people gathered for an emergency community: "They were black. This is not a racial thing to say that black people are unusual in Georgetown. This is a fact of life."

Some black residents of Washington, however, have complained that the emergency was only called because a white man was murdered.

"That police officer was very unfair to blame this on black people," said Gloria Gaskins, 52, whose son Joseph Allen, 32, was the victim of an unsolved murder two years ago. "If my son had been Caucasian they would have really stepped up their efforts.

"It would have been all over the television and stuff. That's not to diminish what happened to this British man but the police need to look after all the DC people and not just one area where the people have money and are real influential."

Since the murder, the atmosphere has more closely resembled that of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, a biting satire about race and greed in New York, than Elliott Roosevelt's sedate Murder in Georgetown, in which a banker is found dead in his home with his mistress's earring beside the body.

Four blacks, one a boy of 15 and another a woman, were arrested within hours of Mr Senitt's murder and allegedly confessed to the crime, which took place at 2.15am on Sunday as he walked a female American friend home following a trip to the cinema.

Hours after Mr Ramsey declared the "crime emergency" on Wednesday two groups of tourists were held up on the National Mall, close to the Smithsonian museums and the US Capitol. Georgetown, home to the city's political and social elites, is also a major draw for visitors.

Dan Sacker, 24, a British student who had been to see The Devil Wears Prada with Mr Senitt and his friend just before the fatal attack, said it was the crime's location as well as its brutality that had shocked Washington. "This is like Mayfair. These things don't happen in Georgetown."

Some Georgetown residents were outraged to learn that detectives already had evidence linking the accused killers, one of whom was out on parole after serving 15 years for armed robbery, to other violent crimes in Washington. The gang should already have been in custody, they argued.

There was further dismay at the reassignment of Insp Solberg by Charles Ramsey, Washington's police chief, who is black. "Chief Ramsey is obviously more interested in knee-jerk obeisance to those who play the race card at every opportunity that he is in actually fighting crime," wrote Margaret Tomlinson, who lives close to the murder scene, in a letter to the Washington Post.

Mr Senitt was the 11th of 14 murder victims in Washington so far this month, a particularly violent spell for the city. All the others were black. There have been 96 murders in Washington so far this year, only two more than at the same stage in 2005.

But Chief Ramsey said there had been a marked increase in armed muggings. "Now we're starting to see a trend where more and more people are being arrested in neighbourhoods they do not live in," he said.

The current murder rate is still a far cry from those during the crack cocaine wars that peaked in 1991 when 482 were killed. Mr Senitt's killing was the highest-profile crime in Georgetown since 1997, when three workers were shot dead execution-style in the Starbucks opposite what is known as the "social Safeway" on Wisconsin Avenue.

Georgetowners had tried to insulate themselves from the previous violence by blocking plans for a metro station there. "But the bad people don't take the subway, they use wheels," said Carol Joynt, owner of Nathan's Bar in Georgetown.

"We've been hearing for a while that crime from the other part of town had started coming over here and their modus operandi was having a car and a driver and two people on the street."

Georgetown community groups have sent out emails recommending residents take steps such as leaving porch lights on at night, cutting back shrubbery, walking in groups and volunteering as citizen "block captains" to coordinate anti-crime efforts.

Ed Solomon, an elected neighbourhood commissioner in Georgetown, said there were proposals for a text message crime alert system to be introduced." Police could send out a message and description of suspects that could be out to everybody in the community within 20 seconds.

"At the moment there's sadness and anger and outrage here and people are feeling vulnerable." There are concerns that businesses could be hit by a decline in tourism.

The one thing that seems to unite Washingtonians on either side of the racial divide is the worry that the authorities are not tackling the problem. "I don't like what's happening in the city," said Mrs Gaskins, who was out shopping in Georgetown.

Mrs Joynt said Insp Solberg had fallen victim to political correctness. "You are not allowed to talk about race in Washington DC. It is just taboo. Ramsey overreacted but that's the way the game is played in this city."

9 July 2006

‘My hope is that it will turn out not to be true'

By Toby Harnden in Midland, Texas

In the six years since President Bush was first elected, Midland, a dusty oil town in the Texas desert, has marketed itself as the wholesome, God-fearing place where the values that make America great were instilled in him.

At 1412 West Ohio Street, which was opened to the public as the "George W. Bush Childhood Home" in April, exhibits declare Midland to be an idyll of "neighbourhood schools, church and community, babies and children and wide open spaces".

Now, though, the town has discovered that it has another famous son - Steven Green, 21, the US Army private discharged from the 101st Airborne Division and charged with the rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her and three of her family.

Pictures of him being led into court wearing baggy shorts, flip-flops and a Johnny Cash T-shirt were beamed around the globe last week, causing fury in the Arab world and guilt and horror in the West.

At 2601 North A Street, two miles from the well-appointed bungalow where the Bush family resided in the 1950s, a forlorn figure with a droopy moustache, a Texas Rangers cap - the baseball team Mr Bush once co-owned - and the same jug ears apparent in Green's mugshot, opened the door.

He was John Green, a courteous, softly-spoken man who is finding it hard to grapple with the enormity of the crimes of which his son is accused. "I think there's definitely another side to this, but my lawyer and his lawyer have advised me not to speak," he said apologetically.

Midland , now a sprawling town of shopping malls and fast-food chains making the most of the current high oil price after its 1980s bust, is decidedly reluctant to claim ownership of Green. But a picture has begun to emerge of a forlorn, disturbed youth. When he was 15, his mother, who divorced Mr Green when their son was four, was jailed for six months for a drink-driving offence.

Two years later, Green dropped out of Coleman High School, an institution for troubled children. Days before he joined the army last year, Green spent three days in custody after being arrested for underage possession of alcohol. Only the military, it seemed, could save him from further prison time. Relatives who attended his graduation ceremony in Georgia believed that he had at last found some direction in his life. By December, a picture of him (left) about to blast open the door of an abandoned Iraqi house was featured beside a US Army public relations article.

"The searches are thorough, yet the soldiers still respect people's rights and property," the article trumpeted. Three months later, it is alleged, Green and others used house searches to identify a girl of 15 as their rape victim, honing their plan as they drank alcohol at the checkpoint they were manning.

Within weeks, Green had been discharged from the military after being diagnosed as having an "anti-social personality disorder" - defined by psychiatrists as chronic behaviour that manipulates, exploits or violates the rights of others and often manifests itself as lying, fighting or lack of remorse.

Military officials insist that the discharge had nothing to do with his alleged crimes, which came to light only during "combat stress" counselling sessions after the kidnapping and beheading of two soldiers from the same unit last month. Green was arrested on his way back from the funeral of one of them.

In Midland, few are ready to pass judgment on Green. "We love our troops," said Christopher Havins, the executive director of the Bush Childhood Home. "We're flag-wavers. My hope is that it will turn out not to be true."

In the American Legion bar on the edge of town, Hal Allcorn, 60, a former US Navy Seal and Vietnam veteran, reflected on his own service. "I've been shot once, stabbed twice and hit by shrapnel three times," he said. "I've had the clap, I've had gonorrhea and I've got cancer.

"Now, I'm able to sit here with a cold beer because the boys are over in Iraq doing what needs to be done. But war makes your ass grow up pretty quick and bad things happen."

He paused to take a sip from a bottle of Bud Light. "I don't know if this young gentleman - and he is a gentleman, because he wore the uniform - did what he's accused of. But, if he is found guilty, then he should be taken out and shot."

25 June 2006

Velvet Elvis Diplomacy

By Toby Harnden in Washington

HE WEARS his hair slicked back, his favourite Elvis Presley song is "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You", and he shares a birthday with the King.

But the Japanese tourist who will fulfil a lifelong ambition by making a pilgrimage to the late singer’s Graceland home in Memphis, Tennessee on Friday will be no ordinary visitor.

Not only is Junichiro Koizumi his country’s prime minister but he will be accompanied on his tour of the shag-piled monument to 1970s bad taste by President George W. Bush. It will be one of the more unusual state visits to America.

For good measure, the tour will be led by Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie and her mother Priscilla. It is not known whether Mr Koizumi will offer another rendition of "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You", as he did at a birthday party for Mr Bush in Gleneagles last year.

Mr Bush is understood to prefer Country and Western to rock and roll but he has gone one up on his predecessor Bill Clinton, a Presley aficionado whose Secret Service codename was Elvis, by taking Mr Koizumi to Graceland.

Not since Nikita Khrushchev, who was blocked from visiting Disneyworld in 1959 because of security concerns, had White House officials received such an unusual request from a foreign dignitary.

Mr Bush’s aides, anxious to boost his flagging poll ratings, saw an opportunity for some memorable images of the president with a foreign leader whose loyalty to America has been second only to that of Tony Blair.

He should, at least, fare better than his father President George Bush, who in 1992, vomited on Kiichi Miyazawa, then the Japanese premier, before fainting at a state banquet in Tokyo.

In 2001, Mr Koizumi, a karaoke fan who at 64 is exactly seven years younger than Elvis would have been, released a compilation CD of his favourite Elvis songs, posing for its cover beside a digital reincarnation of the King.

"I never tired of listening, no matter how many times I hear him over more than 40 years in my life,” said Mr Koizumi, who steps down in September, in an interview recorded by the president of the Elvis Presley Fan Club in Japan. “Since I took office I have been so busy that I literally have not had time for sleep. His voice eases my fatigue."

His musical preferences have often been analysed for political clues. After his CD was released, an HSBC Securities ( Japan) Ltd report stated: “His choice of Elvis songs for the compilation is instructive. “’The Impossible Dream' perhaps sums up his policy programme. `Any Way You Want Me' may explain his populism.

“Sceptics might argue, in the light of his lack of progress so far, `Return to Sender' should have been in the selection, too."

25 June 2006

'I'm a paedophile and it is only fair that all of my neighbours should know. I would like to know, too'

By Toby Harnden in Phoenix, Maryland

CARLOS BEDOYA is a paedophile and everyone knows it. When he moved into a neatly tended upmarket ranch home at 41 Windemere Parkway in the village of Phoenix, deep in rural Maryland, his new neighbours received official flyers warning them he was in their midst.

The 41-year-old's mug shot, above, stares out from a state website listing his crime as "child sexual abuse'' and giving his address and date of birth. Like 540,000 other registered sex offenders across America, on his release from jail he became subject to a version of "Megan's Law'', requiring that the public be kept informed of his whereabouts.

The law, introduced in 1996, was named after Megan Kanka, seven, who was lured into the house of a repeat sex offender on the promise of seeing a puppy. She was raped and her head smashed against a dresser before she was driven away, sexually assaulted again and strangled. Her body was dumped in a park.

Now, John Reid, the Home Secretary, has indicated that similar legislation will be considered in Britain. Gerry Sutcliffe, a junior Home Office minister, is to travel to the United States to study the American experience.

If he visits Windemere Parkway, he will find universal support for Megan's Law. The only doubt expressed last week was by Bedoya himself - who declared that the law did not go far enough.

Wearing just a pair of shorts, his bodybuilder's chest shaved, adorned with a gold chain and rippling in the sunshine, he was working on his truck last week when The Sunday Telegraph approached. Deeply uncomfortable, he spoke reluctantly and seemed on the verge of tears.

"The law is necessary,'' he said. "But I wish it would be more specific. People see 'child sexual abuse' and their mind wanders to the worst thing possible. My offences were at the lowest end. I served 45 days in jail.

"It's only fair that people know. I'd like to know, too. I have some nice neighbours. I have a moron neighbour who shot my dog, but life is hard all over and I deal with things as they come.'' Bedoya, who refused to say exactly what his crime was, has two immediate neighbours with very different opinions of him. "He has a nice, educated significant other at the moment,'' said Bill Whitmore at number 39. "She seems to be dealing with it, so we have to deal with it. I understand the offences were against teenage girls.''

At number 43, Debbie Janka, 52, said: "He's a difficult person who has three boxers that attacked our dogs. He accused us of shooting them when we don't even have a gun. We'd like him to leave but he has his rights. We tend to be private here and we have never spoken to him.''

But both neighbours support Megan's Law. "We should know,'' said Mr Whitmore softly. According to Mrs Janka, although Bedoya "moved into the neighbourhood and everybody feels uncomfortable except him'', she preferred to be scared than to be ignorant.

Further down the road, Sam Rothblum, 65, said that the public register had enabled him to tell his grandson Bryce, 14, never to go near Bedoya's house again after he learned that the boy had gone there to sell chocolate to raise money for a Boy Scouts' trip to England. "It's a great law. Just knowing means you can take precautions.''

Versions of Megan's Law vary across the 50 American states. In Maryland, the details provided are fairly sparse. Neighbouring Virginia records the date of the offence - a key fact, because the longer a child molester goes without re-offending, the less likely he is to commit a similar crime.

In New Jersey, where Megan was murdered, the online registry gives each offender's vehicle details and modus operandi: "Assaulted child whom he babysat''; "Successfully engaged in sexual conduct with a male by grabbing him in a choke hold from behind'' or "Sexually assaulted two young girls who lived next door while they were over at his house''.

It is considered a model law, because it gives full and pertinent facts rather than encouraging the blanket fear that can be prompted by partial information. There has been a profusion of supplementary laws designed to bolster Megan's Law, some banning paedophiles from living within a certain distance of schools, others mandating that they be electronically tagged.

Most supporters of the law believe that these additions are dangerous, and could force paedophiles to move out of cities or cause them to feel they have nothing to lose by disappearing.

Some judges have been notably zealous in interpreting Megan's Law. Five years ago, a Texas judge sparked a furore when he ordered 14 registered sex offenders to place warning signs in their yards that read: "DANGER: Registered Sex Offender Lives Here.'' For good measure, he stipulated that they should also have bumper stickers with a similar message on any cars they owned.

In Louisiana, sex offenders are required to send postcards to everyone within a mile of their house in rural areas, or within a three-block radius elsewhere. Officials administering Megan's Law in Oregon are empowered to place a sign in the window of a paedophile's home.

But in most of America, Megan's Law is implemented quietly and without recourse to baying mobs or public humiliation.

"When I heard there was a child molester living up the road I thought, 'Jeez Louise, my Lord that's awful close','' said Dave Stewart, a father of two girls, in Towson, near Phoenix.

"We watch our daughters a little more carefully now. We mentioned to them that there was a person who preys on children and approximately where they live so they know to keep away. But there's been no finger-pointing or death threats, no egging or vandalism.''

Charles Onley of the Centre for Sex Offender Management, sponsored by the US Justice Department, said there was "no definitive research on the effects of Megan's Law as far as public safety is concerned'', but several trends were apparent.

"There was probably a lot less vigilantism than was first thought. It's not at a level where all offenders are facing vigilante activity or are placed in fear but those addresses are out there and there is the possibility.''

It was a myth, he said, that Megan's Law led to offenders failing to register. "They're required to register,'' said Mr Onley. "Many of them have to do it in order to be released. They have to renew their registrations and there are penalties for not doing this.''

But Mr Onley said it was possible Megan's Law heightened the danger of some offenders striking again because it cemented their outcast status. "It's difficult for them to get housing and work. A stable home and employment are definitely variables that may increase the chances of them being reintegrated,'' he said.

Fred Berlin, the founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, believes that the law was based on emotion rather than public policy considerations, and said: "In some cases it may be counter-productive.'' He quoted a study that showed re-offending rates dropped to 10 per cent when offenders had a "fresh start'' after release.

"I haven't seen any evidence that it's helping prevention and that's the reason the law was introduced.

"It's easy to notify the public but it begs the question what they're supposed to do with the information.''

In fact, twice in the past year, members of the public have apparently used on-line sex offender registers to track down and murder paedophiles. The most recent killing was in April when Canadian Stephen Marshall, 20, armed himself with two pistols, an assault rifle and the addresses of 29 sex offenders before driving across the border into Maine and shooting dead two paedophiles.

But Bill Bratton, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, told this newspaper: "That's an anomaly - singular exceptions. A more common issue is people picketing outside a home, or making it known in a community that there's a paedophile in the neighbourhood.

"There have been incidents, but considering the scope of the problem - tens of thousands of these individuals - those seeking retribution are probably not much more than those seeking retribution for any other type of crime.''

Megan's Law, he added, was "one tool in the toolbox'' of the authorities, but had "certainly saved lives''.

Laura Ahearn, director of Parents for Megan's Law, said that Marshall, who shot himself, was a psychopath who would have killed anyway. "He thought he would use the register to die a hero.''

Jake Goldenflame, 69, a San Francisco paedophile who served 10 years for molesting a four-year-old and now counsels sex offenders, is a supporter of Megan's Law and insists that most of the drawbacks associated with it can be eliminated if legislation is properly drawn up - avoiding gratuitously punitive or humiliating clauses.

Like Mr Bratton, he also believes Megan's Law is not a panacea and has to be used alongside therapy and law enforcement. He admits he still struggles with an attraction to adolescent boys. "Before, I would get an urge and the urge would become a fantasy,'' he said. "The fantasy would become a plan and the next thing I would be enacting the plan. Now, the therapy I had in prison helps me build an alarm system that triggers responses. I look away and the urge is gone.''

Registering under Megan's Law also helps him avoid a relapse. "It reminds you of the sort of person you were so you don't become him again.

"When I speak to sex offenders in prison, I tell them that when you are released things will not be the same as they were before. But if you accept that, then you can make a life for yourself.''

Additional reporting: Ben Leapman

18 June 2006
'Reformed' gays demand a voice in America's schools

BY TOBY HARNDEN in Washington

ANGERED BY what they see as the promotion of homosexuality in schools, thousands of American parents are banding together to demand their children be taught that it is possible to become “ex-gay”.

Organisations such as Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH) and Inqueery have launched a series of initiatives designed to ensure that their viewpoint is aired alongside gay rights messages.

A high school in New Hampshire allowed an ex-gay activist to address pupils on Civil Rights Day last year. In Colorado, education officials are said to be pondering whether to hand out an ex-gay pamphlet to help teachers deal with queries about sexuality, suggesting that “conversion therapy” can work.

Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, an umbrella for ex-gay support groups, said: “The gay community says that you can’t change. But there is an alternative and now more and more teenagers are able to see there are two sides to this issue.”

Mr Chambers, 34, was drawn to men from boyhood. “I didn’t choose to feel gay. When I was 11 I found myself struggling with same-sex attraction issues. I was told by a school counsellor that there was nothing I could do about it. I had to accept I was gay. That made me want to die.”

At 18, he joined a local Christian group in Florida and was shown a different way. Now, he is married with two children under two. “My life couldn’t be more different. I am one of tens of thousands of men and women who have overcome homosexuality.”

Melissa Fryrear, of Focus on the Family, a Christian conservative group, was a lesbian for a decade. She attributes her former orientation to “having been violated by a man outside my family when I was a child”, a lack of a deep emotional bond with her mother and a frequently absent father.

“I had 30 or 40 relationships in those years. I didn’t see any stability around me. When I was coming to the end of my proverbial rope I discovered there was a biblical sexual ethic outlined in scripture and I started to hear wonderful stories of people who had overcome homosexuality.”

The most striking success of the ex-gay movement has been in Maryland, where a federal judge upheld a lawsuit by PFOX blocking a new sex education curriculum on the grounds its treatment of homosexuality was one-sided.

Regina Griggs, executive director of PFOX, said: “People are not born gay and there’s never been a test that has found a gay gene. It’s a free speech and equal access issue. We want children to have all the facts and not just the outlandish statements and bias of one side.”

She became involved in PFOX when her teenage son announced he was gay. “He still would identify himself as probably homosexual. But he’s at the point where he admits now that change is possible.

“I have never sat him down and handcuffed him and said. ‘I’m taking you to a therapist’. His decision is his decision. We love one another and we’re no different from any other family.”

Miss Fryrear, 40, said she faces far more discrimination as an “ex-gay” than she did as a lesbian. “It seems that gay and lesbian activists want me to go into the closet. I have been called things I could never repeat to my mother.

“I have had death threats. I have to travel with personal security if I go into a secular environment. I get a Christmas card each year with human faeces smeared on it.”

She has not yet experienced marriage – “the pinnacle of transformation” – but said: “I definitely date and treasure the company of men. I am accepting proposals, particularly from a tall, red-headed man in his mid-40s – I could go to 50s – who would look good in a kilt and loves American football.”

Unlike some hard-line Christians, both Mr Chambers and Miss Fryrear reject the notion that homosexual feelings are not genuine, arguing that they are a complex mixture of innate tendencies, childhood factors and personality traits.

Mr Chambers suggested that he would never be able to shake off his past completely. “I would say that I’m not above being tempted. I’m human. I’m not saying I will never have another attraction to a member of the same sex.

“But as far as where I am today it’s not something that rules my life. I am attracted and committed to my wife and I have developed heterosexual feelings in general. I choose to live beyond these things and they don’t control me anymore.”

11 June 2006

Curse of big brother stalks Jeb Bush

BY TOBY HARNDEN in Washington

A POPULAR governor of a pivotal southern state, he has impressed with his leadership of hurricane relief efforts. He is a charismatic speaker and a renowned policy wonk as well as being steeped in political campaigning.

Normally, such attributes and qualifications, along with his small-government, libertarian brand of conservatism, would make him the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

But the governor of Florida, who has a popularity rating of 63 percent in his home state, has one disadvantage that overshadows everything else – his surname is Bush.

Many Republicans fear that Jeb Bush, young brother of President George W. Bush, whose approval ratings hover around a miserable 30 per cent, may never enter the White House because of a family name that has become more curse than blessing

Candidates in the November mid-term elections, in which Republicans face a tough battle to maintain their grip on the Senate and the House of Representatives, have already taken note that linkage with President Bush might not be an asset.

During the 2002 congressional election campaign, when President Bush was riding, Democrats ran campaign advertisements citing their close links with him on the issue of national security.

This year, Democrats are running negative advertisements about their Republican opponents painting them as being in the pocket of the president and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Recognising the damage that a photo opportunity with President Bush could do to them, Republican candidates have been going to some lengths to avoid being seen with America’s commander-in-chief.

Congresswoman Thelma Drake of Norfolk, Virginia announced she had to remain in Washington for an “important vote” on a military appropriations bill and miss President Bush’s visit to her district to raise money for Republicans. The bill passed by 395 votes to 0.

An aide to Judy Baar Topinka, running for the governorship of Illinois, said that a visit from the president would be welcome only “late at night, in an undisclosed location".

Republican candidates all over the country are criticising some of President Bush’s policies and distancing themselves from him to avoid what US political apparatchiks call the “reverse coattail effect”, where the White House occupant’s unpopularity harms those in his party.

Frank Luntz , a leading Republican pollster, said his party had an uphill struggle but all was not lost if candidates boxed clever. “This is the season of public discontent. But Republicans don’t have to lose control of Congress.

“In Britain if people really don’t like the leader they ditch the party.In America you can dislike the leader but vote for the minion. It’s not that all politics are local but all politics are personal.

“ Instead of the photo with the president, you publish photos with the leaders of the chamber of commerce and employee organisations. And the word Republican doesn’t appear in your literature.”

It appears that Jeb Bush could be the biggest loser of all – an irony because he was always considered by their father President George H.W. Bush, in the White House from 1988 to 1992, to be the great political hope of the family.

In a turnaround that has become part of Republican lore, in 1994 Jacob Ellis Bush – his preferred first name is taken from his initials - narrowly lost the gubernatorial race in Florida while George W. Bush, then the black sheep of the family, was unexpectedly elected in Texas.

There have often been hints of friendly sibling rivalry and President Bush, 59, is said to be irritated by frequent commentaries that his brother, 53, is more cerebral and in greater command of policy detail.

At a Chicago event last month, a questioner noted that Jeb Bush, who is much bulkier than his brother, had been “very good to the restaurant industry''. The president joked: “He has been eating a lot, I noticed.''

Jeb Bush, who leaves office in December and is barred by term-limits from seeking re-election, has already turned down an approach to become National Football League commissioner – for many Americans, the ultimate dream job.

Despite having ruled out a 2008 run, speculation still swirls him. In an adulatory profile, GQ magazine gushed. “To find a man like Jeb Bush, positioned where he is in the political landscape, is a rare thing,” it gushed. “He stands at a unique nexus, in a unique moment, with a unique set of talents.”

They add that President Bush’s popularity ratings might be about to build again after the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist leader, near Baquba, north of Baghdad.

“Zarqawi is a huge event,” said Mark McKinnon, a long-time adviser to President Bush. “It sends a massive signal. I don’t expect the numbers [Bush’s poll ratings] to recover overnight but they are likely to rise significantly. I think the worst days are behind us.”

But there are signs that Americans could be tiring of political dynasties, particularly if they are perceived as failed ones. Which means that Jeb Bush might have to settle for being hailed as one of the best presidents America never had.

28 May 2006

Downfall of Democrat with $90,000 in freezer

By Toby Harnden in Washington

PERHAPS they will home in on the half-million dollar bribe offered to an African official “to motivate him real good”. An alternative could be the note with the word “cash” written on it passed to avoid detection by FBI listening devices.

Or there is the small matter of the $90,000 carefully wrapped in aluminium foil, placed in plastic food containers and hidden in Congressman William Jefferson’s freezer a few days after a wealthy businesswoman had handed the money to him in a leather briefcase.

Unfortunately for a Democratic party determined to capitalise on President George W. Bush’s unpopularity to seize back power on Capitol Hill, these are not plot choices being debated by scriptwriters for the Mob drama The Sopranos.

They are options Republican strategists have for advertising campaigns in November’s mid-term elections that they believe will blow a hole in plans by Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to expose a “culture of corruption” within Mr Bush’s party.

The FBI searched Mr Jefferson’s Washington office last week, the first time in American history that federal officials had raided a congressman’s headquarters.

Justifying its actions, the FBI unsealed an 83-page affidavit that had gleeful Republicans trading jokes about “cold cash” and “frozen assets”.

Mr Jefferson, 59, long nicknamed “Dollar Bill” and whose constituency covers much of New Orleans, was criticised last year for using a US Army National Guard escort to retrieve possessions from his home after Hurricane Katrina.

But it was the discovery of $90,000 in $100 bills in a freezer in his Washington home that look likely to end the career of Harvard-educated congressman, the first black to be elected to Congress in Louisiana since the Civil War.

The affidavit described how Mr Jefferson was lured to a meeting in a Ritz-Carlton hotel in northern Virginia by Lori Mody, a businesswoman he was secretly dealing with to promote high-tech ventures in Cameroon , Ghana and Nigeria.

Mr Jefferson was apparently concerned the FBI might be listening and so much of the communication was conducted on scraps of paper.

He allegedly described himself as “ in the shadows, behind the curtain”, referred to cash as “African art” and a t one point exclaimed: "All these damn notes we're writing to each other as if we're talking, as if the FBI is watching."

His caution was well founded because Ms Mody, who had gone to the authorities because she believed she was being swindled, was wearing an FBI wire. The meeting was a sting.

The affidavit said Mr Jefferson described a Nigerian official who had “more deals than the man in the moon" as a key figure who needed half a million dollars to “motivate him real good” to make various bribes.

“He got a lot of folks to pay off…He's a very, well, the word might be corrupt." By paying the official the money, Mr Jefferson would be distanced from questionable dealings. “ We're not paying Minister X a damn thing. That's all, you know, international fraud crap."

Afterwards, Ms Mody handed Mr Jefferson a leather briefcase containing $100,000 in marked notes, most of which were later found in his freezer.

Although both congressmen in both parties, nervous about their constitutional independence, condemned the FBI’s unprecedented moves, Republican strategists are delighted that Mr Jefferson’s antics are dominating the news.

To win in November, the Democrats need six seats in the Senate where the Republicans enjoy a 55-44 majority with one independent. In the House of Representatives, where the Republicans have a 231 to 201 advantage, with an independent and two vacant seats, the Democrats need 15 seats.

The FBI raid diverted attention from the opening of a court case in which prosecutors accused David Safavian, a White House budget official, of having "lied, concealed and misled" federal officials about his dealings with disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to multiple charges, is testifying against his former cohorts. He has implicated Republican congressmen such as Tom Delay, indicted on money-laundering charges, and Bob Ney, at the centre of an investigation into receiving illegal gifts and campaign contributions.

Another Republican congressman, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, has already been jailed for eight years in a separate case.

Republicans have also been embarrassed by FBI raids this month on the home and offices of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who was recently forced to step down as the third-ranking official at the CIA.

The FBI is investigating links between Mr Foggo and Brent Wilkes, a defence contractor and childhood friend who allegedly held poker parties at the Watergate Hotel where Cunningham was provided with bribes and prostitutes.

Stacie Paxton, the DNC press secretary, said the Jefferson case would not save Republicans from defeat in the mid-terms. “There’s a big difference between this one incident and the Republican culture of corruption that goes all the way to the top.”