"Live Free or Die" is not just a cheesy licence plate slogan in this tiny New England state. But even New Hampshire is not immune to the national erosion of civil liberties that has permeated every part of the United States since terrorists forced their way into airline cockpits almost five years ago, taking away a nation's bravado and replacing it with fear.

The exploitation of that fear by an administration intent on inflating the powers of the presidency, at the expense of a cowed Congress and with the tacit approval of an anxious nation, may be a cautionary tale for Canadians should some of that U.S.-style fear find its way north of the border in the wake of Toronto's recent terrorism arrests.

In recent years, it has become a truism that Americans will trade away some liberties because they have been attacked. Canadians have not.

But where is that rugged U.S. individuality that had helped define this nation?

"Canadians, over the past couple of decades, appear to be much more aware of civil liberties. They have the balance just about right between the sense of community and individualism," says Phillip Cooper, an expert on separation of powers at Portland State University in Oregon.

"I hope this politics of fear doesn't gravitate across the border. One hopes that your country won't see the polarization we have here. Canadians look down here and see this U.S. individuality, but it has become a fearful, combative individuality."

Since Bush declared his global war on terror, "it has become a war on American citizens," says Dan Belforti, who is running for the U.S. Congress as a Libertarian candidate in New Hampshire.

It started with the country - those of all political stripes - rallying around a leader who cast the U.S. as victim, declaring the rest of the world was either with him or against him. Bush and his inner circle allowed to stand the perception that the Iraq war was linked to Sept. 11, 2001 - a belief still held today by a substantial number of Americans.

With the threat of another attack foremost in their minds, Americans looked the other way as "enemy combatants" were held without due process at Guantanamo Bay, shrugged amid revelations their government was secretly picking up terrorist suspects and flying them to countries with ugly human rights records, yawned when they were told the CIA might be holding prisoners in secret sites in Eastern Europe.

But more surprising has been the lack of pushback when they were told the Bush administration had ignored a law requiring court approval and had begun wiretapping international calls of Americans and assembling a massive databank of phone records of Americans.

In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service must get court approval before conducting any electronic surveillance, and the Communications Security Establishment needs written authorization from the minister of defence. Here, Bush argued his constitutional power overrode the need to go to a court that took too long to give approval anyway.

More quietly, Bush has claimed, some 750 times, the authority to disobey laws he has signed - including a much-publicized ban on torture - if they conflict with his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. No U.S. president has ever invoked that right so many times.

The U.S. Congress has passed legislation that essentially establishes a national ID card, and there are calls for a national DNA registry of Americans.

The Bush administration believes it is on the winning side when it comes to the tug between security and liberty.

"When you push even the harshest critic, even they say, 'Yeah, we should be listening to Al Qaeda,'" a senior administration official told The Washington Post, making a reference to the wiretapping program. "So from that perspective, that's a winning (issue) and we're on the side of the public."

But there have been recent signs that the beginning of a pushback may finally be at hand.

"The Bush administration has been bent on a scheme for years of reducing Congress to akin to an extra in a Cecil B. DeMille political (movie) extravaganza," Bruce Fein, a justice official in Ronald Reagan's administration, told Congress recently.

"(It includes) the assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress any authority to oversee executive branch operations; a claim of inherent presidential authority to flout any statute that he thinks impedes his ability to gather foreign intelligence, whether opening mail, conducting electronic surveillance, breaking and entering, or committing torture."

Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch of the libertarian Cato Institute have written that Bush has conferred upon himself the power to pursue any tactic he wishes to win the war on terror, simply by telling audiences he will use any "legal" means to protect the country.

"That is what most Americans want to hear and believe," they write. "Unfortunately, the president appears to believe that he is the ultimate arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal - at least in matters relating to national security."

Cooper says there is nothing unusual or wrong about people rallying around leaders in times of stress. What is wrong, he says, is when they stop paying attention to what the government is doing.

"There is not much doubt the administration has utilized the fear of another 9/11 and the war on terror to expand the executive power," Cooper says.

But he says the wakeup call might have been sounded. "People are starting to ask questions," he says. "In a way, I'm a little bit surprised that things as obscure and arcane as presidential signing statements appear to have had some staying power in the media."

Bush's predilection for presidential signing statements, which give him the right to ignore portions of the laws he signs, had largely gone unnoticed until late last year, when he signed an amendment to a military spending bill that banned cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of foreign prisoners.

Then, after a highly publicized signing ceremony with the man behind the ban, Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, Bush quietly put a statement in the U.S. register giving him the right to ignore the ban if he felt it was protecting Americans from terror.

A litany of court challenges have been issued by civil liberties groups over the reported data-mining by U.S. phone companies and arguments were heard in a Detroit court last week in a legal challenge to the wiretapping program.

A Supreme Court ruling on Bush's plan to try "enemy combatants" under special military tribunals at Guantanamo could come this month and if the court rules the tribunals invalid, it could begin the process of closing the prison camp.

Revolt may finally be brewing within the ranks of Congress where Republicans facing mid-term elections in the fall are finding backbone.

Revolt is brewing in New Hampshire, too. It is the first state to openly challenge the so-called Real ID Act, approved last year and scheduled to come into effect in May 2008. Many believe it is the precursor to a national ID card.

The bill requires states to check whether driver's licence applicants are in the country legally, and to require documents showing their birthdate, social security number and home address. The act also requires that states find a way to verify the documents are valid.

If New Hampshire rejects the law, its residents will no longer be allowed to use driver's licences as required identification at airports, federal buildings and, potentially, the Canadian border.

"The view here is 'get off my motorcycle, get out of my car, stay away from my guns and get out of my bedroom,'" says Michael Dupre, a professor of political sociology at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

"The culture of liberty is still very strong here."

The deployment comes just months after the Guard pulled its last post-Hurricane Katrina units out of the city and follows requests from law enforcement officials, Mayor Ray Nagin and the City Council, who are growing alarmed at statistics that indicate the murder rate in recent weeks has shot above the city's pre-storm pace.

Nagin and council members said Monday they are also likely to re-establish a juvenile curfew, a measure that was credited with helping to curb the city's top-in-the-nation murder rate in the mid-1990s.

The mayor and council members announced their remarkable request for state law enforcement help at an unusual joint news conference in City Hall on Monday morning, at which the group decried the killings and declared war on what Councilman Oliver Thomas christened the equally dangerous offshoot of Hurricane Katrina: "Hurricane Crime."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco called Saturday's Central City killings "shocking" as she approved the city's request, which had been in the works for weeks, on Monday afternoon. The city initially asked for 300 Guard soldiers and 60 troopers, and the Blanco administration said late Monday that the deployment will build up to that number in the coming weeks. Leaders of the various agencies involved will meet today to discuss patrolling strategies.

For now, the plan calls for stationing troops mainly in desolate areas devastated by Katrina, Police Superintendent Warren Riley said in his own news conference late Monday. Their presence in those areas should curb looting, and will allow police to focus on "hot spots" in more heavily populated sections of town where most of the violence is occurring, he said.

Deadly force if necessary

That said, Riley noted that the added troops will have the power to arrest and detain suspects and to use deadly force if necessary.

"They will be armed, locked and loaded and prepared," he said.

Riley said the city first asked the state for law enforcement help in March -- well before last weekend's bloodbath, but just as the murder rate began a stubborn uptick after a post-Katrina lull. Officials said the National Guard troops were to arrive July 1, but as the murder count kept climbing, Blanco accelerated the deployment at the city's request.

As of early Monday night, 53 people had been murdered this year in the city, well below the more than 134 killed in the first six months last year, according to NOPD figures. But accounting for New Orleans' reduced population, this year's murders are occurring at or above the same pace as before Katrina, depending on what population estimate is used.

And the killings have accelerated since the beginning of April, with 36 of this year's 53 murders taking place in the past 12 weeks, police figures show. Even if the current population is 220,000 residents, a generous figure according to most experts, the 12-week total represents 16 murders per 100,000 residents, more than the 15.1 killings per 100,000 residents in the same period last year.

Nagin and council members Monday made it clear that if violent crime is not brought into check, it will suffocate New Orleans' nascent recovery.

"This is a great city," newly elected City Councilman Arnie Fielkow said. "But if we don't make people feel safe in their homes and their communities, nothing else is going to matter."

The power to fix the problem lies with residents, Thomas said, challenging New Orleanians to take their city back from criminals.

'Rise up'

"Are we going to rise up and protest against the thugs? Are we going to march on them? Are we going to tell them it's unacceptable? Or are we scared?" Thomas asked. "I can pick on the mayor, but I can't pick on the drug kingpin. I can pick on the police chief, but I can't pick on the hit man. 'Cause guess what? If you live in this community scared, you're dead anyway!"

To address the problem, officials prescribed several solutions, ranging from a juvenile curfew to increasing economic opportunities in poor neighborhoods to the reinstitution of night recreation leagues.

In addition, the council, led by Fielkow, plans to hold a "crime summit" within two weeks, involving representatives of the criminal justice system as well as community leaders, Fielkow said. Among other things, that meeting will focus on better coordinating the various arms of the criminal justice system, which was woefully inefficient before Katrina and was left in shambles after the storm.

Nagin said Monday that he believes some thugs are coming home from places like Houston because the judicial system is in such disarray here that they're in less danger of spending long stretches in prison. He said he and other city leaders will try to focus attention on abuses of the system, such as the lenient bond practices of certain judges.

"We are going to as a community watch and monitor much closer what's happening in the criminal justice system," Nagin said. "And if we see some things that we don't like, you may see the mayor and the City Council show up at a hearing and be personally involved in making sure that people are not getting lower bonding so that they can get back out on the street."

The council's crime summit likely also will include talk of how to better integrate the operations of the various law enforcement agencies in Orleans Parish, which include the Police Department, two sheriff's offices, and harbor and levee police forces.

Recently elected Councilwoman Shelley Midura noted Monday that on a per-capita basis, New Orleans has the sixth-highest ratio of law enforcement officers to residents in the country, but that those high numbers for whatever reason do not translate into low crime statistics.

Likely the most concrete of the ideas pitched Monday was the re-establishment of the juvenile curfew, something former Mayor Marc Morial championed shortly after he took office in the bloody days of the mid-1990s. The curfew, along with police reform and falling crime rates nationwide, was seen as a key to the halving of the murder rate that occurred under the watch of Morial and then-Police Superintendent Richard Pennington.

Housing the violators

City officials were optimistic Monday that the juvenile curfew could be quickly re-established. The main sticking point appears to be figuring out where offenders would be housed for the night.

During the mid-1990s, curfew violators were taken to a building on Tulane Avenue operated by then-Criminal Sheriff Charles Foti, the city's jailer. The building was not part of the Orleans Parish Prison jail complex.

Renee Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman, said the sheriff has told juvenile justice groups that he will not house curfew violators in his jail. The only juveniles taken to the jail are those charged with adult offenses, she said.

However, Gusman is amenable to having his deputies supervise a facility where such offenders are taken, provided it is not a jail, Lapeyrolerie said. For instance, recently elected Councilwoman Stacy Head had proposed the idea of housing curfew violators in a church gym, a solution Lapeyrolerie said could work.

A member of Head's staff said the councilwoman and Gusman are working to come up with a solution "posthaste."

Nagin said he envisions the curfew would last from 11 p.m. or midnight until dawn and would remain in effect at least through the summer.

While city officials, residents and police have been sounding the alarm about rising crime for several months, the killings that occurred in the pre-dawn hours Saturday served as a rallying cry for Monday's events. It was the first time five people were killed in the city in a single violent episode since March 1, 1995, when a man sprayed bullets on a North Roman Street house, a crime for which he was sentenced to life in prison.

Several council members on Monday invoked familiar rhetoric, saying the city's residents need to declare that "enough is enough." But the passion and anger were palpable, recalling the outrage that overtook the city in 1996 after the infamous triple slaying at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen restaurant in the French Quarter.

'Line in the sand'

"The community people I've talked to have said they're not scared," Thomas said. "For some reason or another, this has drawn a line with everybody. OK. Little M.C. Killer don't get a pass anymore. He can't walk around the street. Maybe he might have to shoot all of us."

"This is our line in the sand," Nagin said. "And we're saying we're not going to take it anymore." The mayor said he was contributing $1,000 of his own money to the reward offered by Crimestoppers for information leading to the capture of the killers in Saturday's crime.

Nagin's donation was followed by several others announced at the meeting.

While much of the focus Monday was on catching criminals and keeping them behind bars, there was also some soul-searching about the state of the city's youth, and discussion about spending money on measures that might reduce crime forever.

Thomas bemoaned the diminishing worth of human life, as measured by young hoodlums, and wondered aloud: "What have we produced, that human life is so unvaluable?" Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge Morrell declared that the city was "reaping the benefits" of having "abandoned" the city school system 30 years ago.

To turn things around, Fielkow appealed to the New Orleans Saints, his former employer, and the Hornets for help in financing night recreation programs.

Newly elected Councilman James Carter spoke of the "economic deprivation" that permeates high-crime neighborhoods, and prevailed on business leaders to offer job opportunities to residents of those areas as the city rebuilds.

Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis called for the state to open more schools and to extend their operating hours from 6 a.m. until midnight to allow adults and others to get education and "enrichment."

And Hedge Morrell called on companies that have "made millions" from emergency federal contracts -- firms like the Shaw Group, Fluor Corp. and Phillips and Jordan Inc. -- to contribute some of their earnings to programs to help New Orleanians.

"Step up and put your money into this community," she said. "Because this community is making you rich."

The SkySeer, which has low-light and infrared capabilities and can fly at speeds of up to 30mph, would also be able to spot burglary suspects.

Commander Heal believes it will be the first of many unmanned surveillance crafts which will be used in police work. "Who knew five years ago we would be shooting photos and videos with our phones?" he said. "I can see this drone technology replacing some conventional aircraft in 10 years."

The LA sheriff's department operates 18 helicopters costing £2m to £3m each. The SkySeer costs £15,000 to £23,000.

Although the SkySeer is not yet capable of spying into windows, some critics are uneasy about eyes in the sky monitoring daily life.

"A helicopter can be seen and heard and one can make behaviour choices based on that," said Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "Do we really want to live in a society where our backyard barbecues will be open to police scrutiny?"

Police say the concerns are unwarranted because everybody is already under surveillance.

"You shouldn't be worried about being spied on by your government," said Commander Heal. "These days you can't go anywhere without a camera watching you, whether you're in a grocery store or walking down the street."

The future of law enforcement was launched into the smoggy Los Angeles skies at the weekend in the form of a drone aircraft intended to bring spy-in-the-sky technology to urban policing.

The unmanned aerial vehicle, called the SkySeer, looks like a remote-controlled toy and fits into a shoulder bag. In the air, the craft is guided by global positioning system coordinates, and a camera fixed to the underside sends video to a laptop command station.

A prototype is being tested by the LA county sheriff's department, which says the SkySeer will accomplish tasks too dangerous for officers, and free helicopters for other missions. "This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers or survey a fire zone," said Commander Sid Heal, head of the sheriff's department technology exploration project. "The plane is virtually silent and invisible."

The SkySeer, which has low-light and infrared capabilities and can fly at speeds of up to 30mph, would also be able to spot burglary suspects.

Commander Heal believes it will be the first of many unmanned surveillance crafts which will be used in police work. "Who knew five years ago we would be shooting photos and videos with our phones?" he said. "I can see this drone technology replacing some conventional aircraft in 10 years."

The LA sheriff's department operates 18 helicopters costing £2m to £3m each. The SkySeer costs £15,000 to £23,000.

Although the SkySeer is not yet capable of spying into windows, some critics are uneasy about eyes in the sky monitoring daily life.

"A helicopter can be seen and heard and one can make behaviour choices based on that," said Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "Do we really want to live in a society where our backyard barbecues will be open to police scrutiny?"

Police say the concerns are unwarranted because everybody is already under surveillance.

"You shouldn't be worried about being spied on by your government," said Commander Heal. "These days you can't go anywhere without a camera watching you, whether you're in a grocery store or walking down the street."

"The CIA doesn't respect the NSA's polygraph and the NSA doesn't respect the CIA's polygraph," said Wilk, a computer engineer from Arnold, Md. "Nobody knows who the boss is, and they all think they are the most important."

The government recognizes the problem and plans to harmonize the process across the intelligence community, but Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte cannot say when that will happen, said spokesman John Callahan. "The goal is to streamline and fix things and make things better," he said.

"The legislation which founded the DNI actually requires the DNI have as one of its goals to unify this process," he said.

Even those who believe in the value of polygraphs acknowledge that they are far from objective. Using a polygraph device, which measures changes in heart rate and breathing as well as other cues to detect anxiety, is like searching in a dark room for an object whose shape is unknown. It is the examiner's job not only to figure out if someone is a spy but also to search for character flaws or past actions -- drug use, for instance -- that might make a person unfit to handle sensitive information.

Since polygraph examiners typically do not know what to look for in a candidate, they tend to home in on anything that hints at reticence or nervousness, said John Sullivan, who spent three decades at the CIA administering the tests and still supports them. During his career, he said, he used the tests to unmask seven double agents and spotted numerous criminal and character problems.

But Sullivan said that after the agency's polygraphers failed for years to detect the duplicity of Aldrich H. Ames, who compromised dozens of CIA operations by passing information to the Soviet Union before being sent to prison in 1994, agency examiners ratcheted up the level of intimidation during tests.

Sullivan believes polygraphers can elicit useful information without resorting to threats and harassment. But after Ames's case, he said, CIA examiners were told that if their subjects did not complain about rough handling, the examiners probably were not doing their job correctly: "People in many cases are too aggressive . . . we were so afraid of getting beat."

Asked why examiners disagree with one another, Sullivan said that interpreting polygraphs is more "art than science" and that examiners at different agencies range from "Rembrandts" to "finger-painters."

"I myself and most of my colleagues caught people who passed other people's polygraph examinations," said Sullivan, who is retired. "I don't want to disparage anyone else's program, but I really feel up until Ames, [the CIA] had the best polygraph program in the government."

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, declined to discuss individual cases. But he said that "large numbers of highly qualified officers" have been cleared and hired after the agency's polygraph tests.

Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, also would not discuss individual cases but said the agency issues clearances based on approvals by other agencies. Slightly more than one in five contractor clearances last year were issued this way, he said. A number of factors influence why the NSA thinks more security procedures are needed for some people, he said.

Vermette, the computer programmer, said the six exams he has taken for three agencies have left him scared, angry and dubious.

Besides being asked whether he had ever revealed classified information, Vermette was quizzed about whether he had paid for sex or had gotten a woman drunk to seduce her. Examiners asked about his computer use, his contacts with foreign students and his volunteer work with junior high students at church -- down to a high-five he had given one teenager.

Vermette describes himself as naturally nervous and said he grew more flustered with each exam. After the second CIA polygraph test, he was called in to see a higher official, who said he wanted to talk "man to man."

After telling Vermette that "there's no way you are not lying to me," the examiner pressed him on whether he was sexually involved with the teenager at church. The examiner then asked Vermette about her bra size. When Vermette said he did not know, the examiner asked him to guess -- after explaining bra sizes.

"He gave me a list of numbers to choose from, and I gave up and guessed one. Then he went on to ask about hair color, eye color, height and weight, all of which I am sure are absolutely vital to national security," Vermette wrote in an account of the episode. "I felt bad afterwards that I answered any of these questions but was under extreme psychological pressure and humiliation."

After the interview, Vermette filed a complaint. An investigation ensued, and the CIA apologized in writing, acknowledged that the questions were inappropriate and gave him his security clearances.

But it was not over. Late last year, Vermette's employer decided he ought to get clearances from the NSA as well. Although Vermette had been given top-secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances by the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates U.S. reconnaissance satellites, the NSA gave him new polygraph tests.

Vermette said the last straw was being asked by NSA examiners to talk about the incident with the CIA. When he refused and explained that the CIA had apologized for the episode, the NSA denied his clearance -- citing his "failure to cooperate with security processing."

Whereas Vermette found himself caught between agencies, Wayne Johnson said he was snared by seemingly conflicting decisions at the same agency. Johnson was stunned to discover there was a problem with his FBI polygraph test, given that the agency had done a recent background investigation that led to a renewal of his top-secret credentials at the White House.

Like Vermette, Johnson said the polygraph made him nervous, even though he had nothing to hide. When asked about drug use, Johnson, who is black, found himself worrying about stereotypes that link blacks to drug use. Johnson said he had never touched an illegal narcotic but believed his examiner, who is white, did not believe him.

The race question was always at the back of Johnson's mind, he said, and his fears may have shown up on the polygraph -- and perhaps were misinterpreted as a sign of deception.

Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman, said that he could not discuss any individual case but that in general the White House makes its decisions on clearances after the agency forwards the results of its investigations. When someone seeks employment at the FBI, the agency uses investigative results to draw its own conclusions, he said.

Wilk, who flunked three tests at the NSA despite her security clearance from the Pentagon, said examiners do not seem to realize that innocent people can be nervous.

"People say if you don't have anything to hide you should not be worried, but I have nothing to hide and I am worried," she said. "A citizen's entire means of making a living boils down to answering one stupid question on a polygraph."

When examiners kept telling her she was hiding something, the thought that eventually went through her mind was: "Should I just make something up?"

Mohammad Salah contends that in 1993 police tortured him into admitting that he was an agent of Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization.

Salah was held and interrogated for almost two months by Israeli authorities, he says, in torturous bondage and subjected to beatings and mental punishment. The confession at the end of it all resulted in his five year prison sentence and the federal money laundering charges now facing him in Illinois.

Salah's lawyers now say the Israeli government and American prosecutors are covering up the evidence of torture and manipulation. In stinging papers filed with the court obtained by the I-Team, Salah's lawyers charge that the "GOI and the prosecution devised a way to ... cover up material evidence which is known to exist," that the "prosecution has stonewalled" legal defense requests for the evidence, and that they are "hiding behind the conspiratorial agreement with the Israelis, attempting to use this court as it's foil."

Salah's lawyers claim the court is aware of the material and that prosecutors are engaged in a "dishonest obstruction of justice," that the court and prosecutors are constantly "consulting with each other so that certain evidence remain secret, which leaves the defense in the dark.."

Salah's lawyers are now injecting controversial former New York Times reporter Judith Miller into the case, saying that in 1993 Israeli officials allowed her to witness the Salah interrogation, and therefore, the governments cannot claim material from what she witnessed is now suddenly classified.

Salah's lawyers want access to Israeli documents that would explain why Judith Miller was allowed to witness the Salah interrogation and even participate in it, playing the good cop as Israeli authorities played bad cop.

It is not the first time Miller is in the middle of a courtroom firestorm. Last year Miller served jail time for contempt of court after refusing to disclose her sources in the White House leaks case.

The Salah hearing on whether to allow his confession as evidence will resume later this month.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Chile is one of the countries under pressure. Washington has agreed to sell the country F-16 warplanes, but has since warned that Chilean pilots would not be trained to fly them if the government backed Venezuela's bid.

The Chilean embassy in Washington had no comment on the report yesterday, but a state department spokeswoman, Amanda Rogers-Harper, said the story was false. However, she added that, while it was up to each country to decide whom to vote for, "it should not come as a surprise that we believe Venezuela would not contribute to the functioning of the UN security council, as evidenced by its behaviour in other international fora".

Ms Rogers-Harper said that Guatemala's contributions to the UN, for example in sending peacekeepers to the Democratic Republic of Congo, showed it was a "viable candidate".

The diplomatic offensive, in which Condoleezza Rice is reported to be playing a leading role, is intended to deprive Venezuela of a vote and a platform in the security council at a time when the Bush administration anticipates a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear programme.

Mr Chávez has expressed support for Iran and announced his intention to visit Tehran. He is also at odds with Washington on other foreign policy issues.

If Latin American countries nominate Venezuela to take the region's seat on the 15-member council, currently held by Argentina, Mr Chávez would not get a UN veto (which are reserved for the five permanent members), but his opposition to UN sanctions on Iran could prove a rallying point for other small countries. Venezuela would also have a one-month turn as the council chairman, when it would have an important role in setting its agenda.

Larry Birns, a Latin American expert at the liberal thinktank the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, predicted the US diplomatic offensive would fail."The Latin American caucus at the UN has always been sensitive to US intervention in their choice of the region's representative," he said. "The US previously attempted to isolate Chávez in the OAS [Organisation of American States] and failed. To my mind, there is no question that it will backfire."

Mr Birns said that Venezuela had its own leverage over its neighbours in the form of cheap oil. "Chávez's petro-diplomacy has made him relatively immune from US pressure."

In Brazil, the presidential assistant for international issues, Marco Aurelio Garcia, said last week that it would be natural for his country, which shares a long border with Venezuela, to back Mr Chávez.

The Venezuelan leader has shown his determination to press on with his bid, declaring on his weekly television show: "Venezuela is a candidate and it will not withdraw."

The country's ambassador to the UN ridiculed Guatemala's rival bid as a thinly veiled proxy for US interests. Francisco Javier Arias Cárdenas told the Los Angeles Times Guatemala's candidacy "is not really its own. It does not defend or promote its aspirations and concerns, but it is rather endorsing foreign interests."

Any vote for Guatemala "is really going to the United States," he said.

No listed phone number for Hopfer was available. A man at her home who declined to identify himself told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Friday that "there's another side to the story," but declined to elaborate.

Hopfer told police she had taken the puppy to a veterinarian, who said it was only four weeks old and needed to be returned to its mother. But before she could return the puppy named Chloe, it died.

Authorities said Hopfer went to the breeder's home, pushed her way inside and began fighting with the breeder as she tried to make her way to the basement to get another puppy, police said.

Linda Hulsey, 33, of St. Peters, wrestled the woman out of her house to the front porch, where the woman then hit the breeder over the head numerous times with the dead puppy, police said.

Hulsey said she was hit with the dead puppy at least 30 times and went to a hospital for her bruises, but had no serious injuries. She said she was upset that Hopfer had accused her of selling the puppy too young and said the puppy was two days shy of six weeks old.

Hulsey said she later returned the $100 US that Hopfer had paid for the dog.