In an Internet essay on recent turmoil inside the Times, Archibald also confirmed claims by some former Moon insiders that the cult leader has continued to pour in $100 million a year or more to keep the newspaper afloat. Archibald put the price tag for the newspaper's first 24 years at "more than $3 billion of cash."

At the newspaper's tenth anniversary, Moon announced that he had spent $1 billion on the Times - or $100 million a year - but newspaper officials and some Moon followers have since tried to low-ball Moon's subsidies in public comments by claiming they had declined to about $35 million a year.

The figure from Archibald and other defectors from Moon's operation is about three times higher than the $35 million annual figure.

The apparent goal of downplaying Moon's subsidy has been to quiet concerns that Moon was funneling vast sums of illicit money into the United States to influence the American political process in ways favorable to right-wing leaders - and possibly criminal cartels - around the world.

Though best known as the founder of the Unification Church, Moon, now 86, has long worked with right-wing political forces linked to organized crime and international drug smuggling, including the Japanese yakuza gangs and South American cocaine traffickers.

Moon insiders, including his former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, also have described Moon's system for laundering cash into the United States and then funneling much of it into his businesses and influence-buying apparatus, led by the Washington Times.

The Times, in turn, has targeted American politicians of the center and left with journalistic attacks - sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonate through the broader right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media.

Washington Times articles are routinely cited by C-SPAN, for instance, without explanations to viewers that the newspaper is financed by an ultra-right religious cult leader, a convicted tax fraud and a publicly identified money-launderer. Most American listeners just think they're getting straightforward news.

The Times also has led attacks on investigators who threatened to expose crimes committed by Republican and right-wing operatives. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Times targeted Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who recounted in his memoir Firewall the importance of the Times in protecting the Reagan-Bush administration's legal flanks.

When journalistic and congressional investigations began uncovering evidence of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contra rebels, the Washington Times counter-attacked, too, although in that case the Moon organization may have had a direct interest in containing the probes that could have exposed its relationship with South American drug lords.

Buying Influence

Besides the estimated $3 billion-plus invested in the Washington Times, Moon has spread money around to influential right-wingers, often coming to their rescue when they are facing financial ruin as happened with Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell in the mid-1990s. [See below.]

Moon also has paid lucrative speaking fees to political figures, such as former President George H.W. Bush who has appeared at Moon-organized functions in the United States, Asia and South America. At the launch of Moon's South American newspaper in 1996, Bush hailed Moon as "the man with the vision."

Moon has key defenders, too, in the U.S. Congress, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2004, Moon was given space in the Senate's Dirksen building for a coronation of himself as "savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent." [See The Hill, June 22, 2004]

Though primarily allied with the Republican Right, Moon has tossed money to some African-American ministers to gain favor with a key Democratic constituency.

Moon's multi-billion-dollar political investments, in turn, have shielded him from sustained scrutiny since 1978 when he was identified by the congressional "Koreagate" investigation as part of a covert Korean influence-buying scheme. As a result of those findings about his finances, he was convicted in 1982 of tax fraud.

Ironically, however, as Moon implemented the influence-buying blueprint exposed by the "Koreagate" probe - investing in U.S. media, politicians and academia - he became an untouchable. He founded the Washington Times in 1982 and quickly put it into the service of Republican power.

President Ronald Reagan hailed Moon's publication as his "favorite newspaper"; it even helped raise money for the Nicaraguan contras; and President George H.W. Bush invited its editor Wesley Pruden to the White House in 1991 "just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day."

Washington Times defenders argue that the newspaper is independent of Moon's religion and doesn't proselytize for his faith.

But the argument misses the point because Moon's organization is only a religious entity on one level. More substantively, it is an international conglomerate with investments in fishing, restaurants, gun manufacturing, tourism, banks, real estate and media.

Since its finances often operate on the shady side of the law, Moon's organization requires, most of all, political influence for protection.

Similarly, Moon's operation is not really "conservative" in the normal sense of the word. While it has worked with everyone from right-of-center Republicans to neo-fascist organizations, it also has joined forces with the reclusive communist leaders of North Korea when that was to Moon's advantage. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Moon, North Korea & the Bushes."]

Power Struggle

Veteran Washington Times journalist Archibald as well as other Times employees who recently spoke to The Nation magazine have described a bitter internal struggle at the newspaper.

Times president "Douglas" Dong Moon Joo is standing by Pruden and other right-wing editors who have run the Times for years, while other influential Moon operatives believe it's time to abandon the newspaper's hard-right positions.

"A nasty succession battle is now heating up at the paper, punctuated by allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct, that have implications far beyond its fractious newsroom," wrote Max Blumenthal in The Nation.

"According to several reliable inside sources, Preston Moon, the youngest son of Korean Unification Church leader and Times financier Sun Myung Moon, has initiated a search committee to find a replacement for editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden - a replacement who is not Pruden's handpicked successor, managing editor Francis Coombs.

"Preston Moon wants to wrest control of the paper from Pruden and Coombs, according to a Times senior staffer, in order to shift the paper away from their brand of conservatism, which is characterized by extreme racial animus and connections to nativist and neo-Confederate organizations. A Harvard MBA, Preston Moon is said to be seeking to install an editorial regime with more widely palatable politics."

Archibald's essay describes Pruden as "an unreconstructed Confederate from Little Rock, Arkansas, who still believes the South and slavery were right and Lincoln was wrong in saving the Union."

Pruden's father, Wesley Pruden Sr., was a Baptist minister and chaplain to Little Rock's segregationist Capital Citizens Council, which spearheaded the opposition to President Dwight Eisenhower's order in 1957 to integrate the city's Central High School.

In the 1990s, Pruden's Washington Times continued to tap into those old segregationist ties, such as "Justice" Jim Johnson, to get salacious allegations about President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. The mainstream press soon followed, setting the stage for the Republican congressional sweep in 1994 and Clinton's impeachment in 1998.

In 2000, the Washington Times again was at the center of the assault on Al Gore's candidacy - highlighting apocryphal quotes by Gore and using them to depict him as either dishonest or delusional. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Al Gore vs. the Media."]

By then, however, the Washington Times had the help of a rapidly expanding right-wing media as well as mainstream journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post who had come to realize the career advantage of tilting their reporting to the right.

Arguably one of the measures of the Washington Times' success was how the major U.S. news organizations increasingly seemed to march to the same drummer, even when not under direct pressure to do so.

Over the past half dozen years, it has often been hard to distinguish between the fawning coverage of George W. Bush from the Washington Times and from the Washington Post. Both major Washington dailies bought into Bush's false claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with almost no skepticism.

Currently, the Washington Times seems inclined to continue serving as a leading defender of Republican power and thus of President Bush. Calling itself "America's Newspaper," the Moon-financed Times also has championed the cause of anti-immigration activists, another hot-button issue on the Right.

But the Times and other right-wing news outlets risk a credibility crisis as more and more Americans turn away from the Bush presidency and are turned off by the right-wing rhetoric demonizing citizens who have objected to Bush's policies.

Nevertheless, history will surely record that Moon's $3 billion-plus investment succeeded in buying a remarkable degree of Washington influence - and legal protection - for his dubious political/business/religious empire.

The extraordinary rise of Sun Myung Moon also tells a cynical story about how "respectability" is just one more Washington commodity that can be purchased with enough money.

Known for crowning himself at lavish ceremonies and ranting for hours in Korean about the proper use of sex organs, Sun Myung Moon may have the distinction of being the most unusual person ever to gain substantial influence in the U.S. capital. He has proved that in Washington, money talks.

When Moon became a major benefactor of the American conservative movement starting in the latter half of the 1970s, it was a time when the conservatives desperately needed money to build what they called their counter-establishment.

From a mysterious and seemingly bottomless slush fund, Moon ladled out cash to sponsor lavish conferences, to finance political interest groups and to publish the Washington Times.

Despite his strange goals - including the need to replace democracy and individuality with his own personal theocratic rule over the most intimate details of every person's life - Moon lured into his circle some of the most prominent political figures of the modern era, including George H.W. Bush who grasped Moon's value as a deep pocket for the conservative movement and for the Bush family.

Moon began building his political influence in Washington at a time when he was best known to Americans as the leader of the Unification Church, called the "Moonies." Moon was blamed by thousands of American parents for brain-washing their children and transforming them into automatons who gave up their previous lives to devote nearly every waking hour in the service of Rev. Moon.

Gradually, however, Moon's money gained him access to the nation's ruling elite. The worst of the negative press coverage subsided. But few Americans, even those who took his money, knew much about his life and his true allegiances.

Who Is Moon?

Moon was born on Jan. 6, 1920, in a rural, northwestern corner of Korea, a rugged Asian peninsula then occupied by Japan, an occupation that would continue through the first 25 years of Moon's life. Allied forces liberated the peninsula from the Japanese in 1945 and then divided Korea into two sections, the south controlled by the United States and the north occupied by Soviet troops.

In this post-war period, Moon, who had been raised within a Christian sect, moved to southern Korea and joined a mystical religious group called Israel Suo-won. The group preached the imminent arrival of a Korean Messiah and practiced a strange sexual ritual called "pikarume," in which ministers purified women through sexual intercourse, the so-called "blessing of the womb."

As he developed his own theology, Moon returned to the North, to communist-ruled North Korea, where he soon ran into legal troubles. North Korean authorities arrested him twice, apparently on morals charges connected to his sexual rites with young women. Moon's supporters, however, have tried to portray Moon as the victim of communist repression, claiming that he was arrested not for sex charges but for espionage.

Whatever the real story about his detention in North Korea, Moon's luck soon changed. On Oct. 14, 1950, with war raging on the Korean peninsula, United Nations troops overran the prison where Moon was held, freeing Moon and all the other inmates. According to Unification Church histories, Moon then trekked south, carrying on his back an injured prisoner named Pak Chung Hwa.

For years, church officials even published a photograph purportedly showing Pak piggy-backing on Moon across a river. But much of that story appears to be propaganda. Several church sources have since admitted that the photo was a hoax, that Moon is not the man in the picture and the location is not where Moon was.

Moon's southward journey ended in the South Korean port of Pusan, where he resumed his missionary work. He later moved to Seoul, South Korea's capital, where he founded his own church in May 1954. He called it T'ong-il Kyo, or Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. It became known as the Unification Church.

At the center of Moon's theology was a new twist to the Old Testament story about the Fall of Man. Instead of biting into a forbidden apple, Eve copulated with Satan and then passed on the sin by having sex with Adam.

Thousands of years later, God sent Jesus to restore man to his original purity, Moon taught. But Jesus failed because he was betrayed by the Jews and died before he could father any sinless children.

Sex, therefore, remained at the center of Moon's theology, the need for a Messiah to purify the human race through the reversal of the contamination caused by Satan's seduction of Eve.

Moon taught that the failure of Jesus to begin this purification process by fathering children forced God to send a second Messiah, who turned out to be Moon himself. Moon saw his task as starting this sexual purification process and thus establishing God's Kingdom on Earth.

The ultimate goal would be a worldwide theocracy ruled by Moon and his followers cleansed of Satan's influence. Political power and religious authority went together, Moon lectured. "We cannot separate the political field from the religious," Moon said.

But in South Korea, Moon found that government continued to be an obstacle to his religious plans. When he began to concentrate his religious recruitment on young idealistic college students, especially from an all-girls Christian school, Moon landed in legal hot water again.

The South Korean government arrested Moon in 1955 for allegedly conducting more sexual "purification" rites, according to several U.S. intelligence reports which are now public. Moon was freed three months later because none of the young women would testify for fear of public humiliation, according to an undated FBI summary, released under a Freedom of Information Act request.

"During the next two years in the national news media of South Korea, Rev. Moon was the butt of scandalist humor," the FBI report said.

Six Marys

Church officials repeatedly have denied the reports of Moon's sexual rituals. But the charges received new attention in 1993 with the Japanese publication of The Tragedy of the Six Marys -- a book by the early Moon disciple, Pak Chung Hwa, whom Moon supposedly carried to South Korea.

According to Pak's book, Moon taught that Jesus was intended to save mankind by having sex with six already-married women who would then have sex with other men who would pass on the purification to other women until, eventually, all mankind would have pure blood.

Pak contended that Moon took on this personal duty as the second Messiah and began having sex with the "six Marys." But Pak alleged that Moon began to abuse the practice by turning the "six Marys" into a kind of rotating sex club.

Pak wrote that Moon's first wife divorced him after catching him in a sex ritual. In all, Pak estimated that there were at least 60 "Marys," many of whom ended up destitute after Moon discarded them.

According to the testimony of one "Mary," named Yu Shin Hee, she met Moon in the early 1950s and became a follower along with her husband. Devoted to the church, her husband abandoned her and her five children, whom she then put into an orphanage. She, in turn, agreed to become one of Moon's "six Marys."

But Yu Shin Hee claimed that Moon tired of her after just one "blood exchange," a phrase referring to sexual intercourse. Still, she was required to have sex with other men. Seven years later, a broken woman with no money, she tried to return to her children, but they also rejected her.

When Moon impregnated another one of the women, Moon sent her to Japan where she gave birth to a baby boy, according to Pak's account. Moon later admitted fathering the child, who died in a train crash at the age of 13. But Pak wrote that Moon refused to admit responsibility for other illegitimate children born to the women.

"By forwarding this teaching, he violated mothers, their daughters, their sisters," Pak wrote. (After The Tragedy of the Six Marys was published, the Unification Church denounced the allegations as spurious. Under intense pressure, the aging Pak Chung Hwa agreed to recant. However, his book's accounts tracked closely with U.S. intelligence reports of the same period and interviews with former church leaders.)

Moon's history of sexual liaisons out of wedlock also was corroborated by Nansook Hong, one of Moon's daughters-in-law who broke with the so-called True Family in 1995 over abuse she suffered at the hands of Moon's eldest son, Hyo Jin Moon, during their 14-year marriage.

Nansook Hong reported in her 1998 book, In the Shadow of the Moons, that family members, including Moon himself, acknowledged that he had "providential" sex with women in his role as the Messiah. Nansook Hong said she learned about Moon's sexual affairs when her husband, Hyo Jin, began justifying his affairs as mandated by God, as his father claimed his affairs were.

"I went directly to Mrs. Moon with Hyo Jin's claims," Nansook Hong wrote. "She was both furious and tearful. She had hoped that such pain would end with her, that it would not be passed on to the next generation, she told me.
"No one knows the pain of a straying husband like True Mother, she assured me. I was stunned. We had all heard rumors for years about Sun Myung Moon's affairs and the children he sired out of wedlock, but here was True Mother, confirming the truth of these stories.

"I told her that Hyo Jin said his sleeping around was 'providential' and inspired by God, just as Father's affairs were. 'No, Father is the Messiah, not Hyo Jin. What Father did was in God's plan.'" Later, in a discussion about the extramarital sex, Moon himself told Nansook Hong that "what happened in his past was 'providential,'" she wrote.

As for the sexual purification rituals, Nansook Hong said the rumors had followed the church for decades, despite the official denials.

"In the early days of the Unification Church, members met in a small house with two rooms," Nansook Hong wrote. "It was known as the House of the Three Doors. It was rumored that at the first door one was made to take off one's jacket, at the second door one's outer clothing, and at the third one's undergarments in preparation for sex."

As for Chung Hwa Pak's Tragedy of the Six Marys, Nansook Hong said Moon succeeded in persuading his old associate to rejoin the church and then got him to disavow the memoirs. "I've always wondered what the price was of that retraction," Nansook Hong wrote.

Madeleine Pretorious, a Unification Church member from South Africa, also had worked closely with Moon's temperamental son, Hyo Jin, and had learned from him that the long-denied accounts of Moon's sexual rites with female initiates were true.

"When Hyo Jin found out about his father's 'purification' rituals, that took a lot out of wind out of his sails," Pretorious told me in an interview after she left the church in the mid-1990s.

In late 1994, during conversations in Hyo Jin's suite at the New Yorker Hotel, "he confided a lot of things to me," Pretorious said. Hyo Jin also had discovered that the Reverend Moon fathered a child out of wedlock in the early 1970s. Moon arranged for the child to be raised by his longtime lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, Pretorious said.

The boy - now a young man - had confronted Hyo Jin, seeking recognition as Hyo Jin's half-brother. Pretorious said she later corroborated the story with other church members.

Intelligence Ties

The alleged sexual rituals, which involved passing around women, would become a point of embarrassment later, but the practices apparently helped the Unification Church in recruiting men in the early days.

By the late 1950s, Moon had managed to build a small cadre of loyal followers and was reaching out beyond Korea. By the early 1960s, the church also was pulling in better educated young men, including some with connections to South Korea's intelligence services.

Kim Jong-Pil and three other young English-speaking army officers became closely associated with Moon's church during this transitional phase as the institution evolved from an obscure Korean sect into a powerful international organization.

Beyond his association with Moon's sect, Kim Jong-Pil was a rising star in South Korea's intelligence community. In 1961, he founded the KCIA, which centralized Seoul's internal and external intelligence activities. Another one of the promising young KCIA officers was Colonel Bo Hi Pak, also a Moon disciple.

With these KCIA officers, however, it was never clear whether the benefits of the religion were paramount or if they simply recognized the potential that an international church held as a cover for intelligence operations.

In many countries, especially the United States, churches are granted broad protections against government interference. With missionaries traveling around the world and with church members attending international religious conferences, a church also provided an effective cover for spying, money-laundering or passing on messages to agents.

In 1962, KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil traveled to San Francisco where he met with Unification Church members. According to an account later published by a congressional investigation, Kim Jong-Pil promised discreet support for Moon's church.

At the same time of his contacts with associates from the Unification Church, Kim Jong-Pil was in charge of another sensitive negotiation: talks to improve bilateral relations with Japan, Korea's historic enemy.

Those talks put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two other important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who once hailed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "the perfect fascist."

Kodama and Sasakawa were jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II, but a few years later, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.

The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in the intensifying Cold War battles with European communists.

Kodama and Sasakawa obliged U.S. intelligence by dispatching right-wing goon squads to break up demonstrations, according to the authoritative book, Yakuza, by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.

Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to the Unification Church, which had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Kaplan and Dubro.

"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.

The church's growth spurt did not escape the notice of U.S. intelligence officers in the field. One CIA report, dated Feb. 26, 1963, stated that "Kim Jong-Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which had a membership of 27,000, as a political tool."

Though Moon's church had existed since the mid-1950s, the report appeared correct in noting Kim Jong-Pil's key role in transforming the church from a minor Korean sect into a potent international organization.

New Worlds

With alliances in place in Tokyo and Seoul, the Unification Church next took aim at Washington.

In 1964, Bo Hi Pak, who was emerging as one of Moon's most able lieutenants, moved to America and started the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, a front that performed the dual purpose of helping Moon meet important Americans, while assisting the KCIA in its international operations.

Bo Hi Pak named KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil to be the foundation's "honorary chairman." The foundation also sponsored the KCIA's anti-communist propaganda outlets, such as Radio of Free Asia, according to the congressional report on the "Koreagate" scandal.

Moon's church also was active in the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with former Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American "death squad" operatives.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. John K. Singlaub, a former WACL president, told me that "the Japanese [WACL] chapter was taken over almost entirely by Moonies."

By the 1970s, the U.S. public was aware of Moon and his church, but much of the attention was negative. Parents complained that the church brainwashed their children and pressured them to cut off contacts with their families, while proclaiming Moon their "True Father."

The totalitarian nature of Moon's church stood out in his staging of mass marriages, or "blessings," in which he would pair up husbands and wives who had never met. Moon also regulated the sexual behavior of even his married followers, a practice that replaced the more personal method of "blessing the womb" that allegedly had prevailed in the church's early days.

In 1973, amid American reversals in Indochina, alarm began to spread within Seoul's right-wing dictatorship about the strength of the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea in case of aggression from the communist North. Those fears led the KCIA, long known for its gross human rights violations, to begin plotting how to bolster its friends in the United States and undermine its enemies.

Lee Jai Hyon, the chief cultural and information attaché at the South Korean embassy in Washington, later testified before the U.S. Congress that he sat in on a series of meetings chaired by the KCIA's station chief, involving senior embassy officials.

Lee Jai Hyon described six sessions over a five-week period in spring 1973 at which a conspiracy was outlined to "manipulate," "coerce," "threaten," "co-opt," "seduce," and "buy off" political and other leaders of the United States. Lee Jai Hyon said one of the South Koreans participating in the operation was Moon's top aide Bo Hi Pak.

At the time, Moon was raising concerns among U.S. immigration authorities for bringing hundreds of foreign followers to the United States on tourist visas and then assigning them to mobile fund-raising teams.

But Moon, who owned property outside New York City while maintaining a residence in South Korea, somehow managed to secure a "green card" from the Nixon administration on April 30, 1973. The permit making Moon a "lawful permanent resident" also granted him more legal rights than would be available to a foreign visitor.

"The advantages of using the First Amendment were seen early," wrote Robert Boettcher, the former staff director of the House Subcommittee on International Relations, in his 1980 book, Gifts of Deceit. "Before Moon moved to the United States in 1971, he and his small band of followers realized the operation would have the most flexibility if it was called a church. Businesses, political activities, and tax-exempt status could be protected."

As Moon stepped up his activities, however, the FBI soon began to suspect that Moon's activities had a political motive. The FBI summary of its evidence about Moon's church was marked by a number indicating that the Unification Church was under a counter-intelligence investigation in the 1970s.

Although blacked-out portions obscured who was stating some of the conclusions - an individual source or the FBI - the report described the church as "an absolutely totalitarian organization" which was part of an international "conspiracy" that functioned by its own rules.

"One of the central doctrines of the Moon relig[i]ous aspects is what they call heavenly deception," the FBI report said. "It basically says that to take from Satan what rightfully belongs to God, you may do most anything. You may lie, cheat, steal or kill."

Making Friends

Despite the FBI's concerns, Moon began making friends in Washington the old-fashioned way: by spreading around lots of money. Moon also had his followers cozy up to government officials.

According to the FBI summary, Moon designated "300 pretty girls" to lobby members of Congress. "They were trying to influence United States senators and congressmen on behalf of South Korea," the FBI document read.

"Moon had laid the foundation for political work in this country prior to 1973 [though] his followers became more openly involved in political activities in that and subsequent years," a congressional investigative report on the "Koreagate" influence-buying scandal stated in 1978.

The report added that Moon's organization used his followers' travels to smuggle large sums of money into the United States in apparent violation of federal currency laws.

Moon organized rallies in support of the Vietnam War and in defense of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Moon sponsored a National Prayer and Fast Committee, using the slogan: "forgive, love, unite." The public rallies earned Moon a face-to-face "thank you" from the embattled President on Feb. 1, 1974.

Intercepted Message

In late 1975, the CIA intercepted a secret South Korean document entitled "1976 Plan for Operations in the United States." In the name of "strengthening the execution of the U.S. security commitment to the ROK [South Korea]," it called for influencing U.S. public opinion by penetrating American media, government and academia.

Thousands of dollars were earmarked for "special manipulation" of congressmen; their staffs were to be infiltrated with paid "collaborators"; an "intelligence network" was to be put into the White House; money was targeted for "manipulation" of officials at the Pentagon, State Department and CIA; some U.S. journalists were to be spied on, while others would be paid; a "black newspaper" would be started in New York; contacts with American scholars would be coordinated "with Psychological Warfare Bureau"; and "an organizational network of anti-communist fronts" would be created.

Several months later, in summer 1976, Moon returned to the United States and delivered a flattering pro-U.S. speech at a red-white-and-blue flag-draped rally at the Washington Monument.

"The United States of America, transcending race and nationality, is already a model of the unified world," Moon declared on Sept. 18, 1976. Calling America "the chosen nation of God," Moon said, "I not only respect America, but truly love this nation."

While professing his love for America in public, Moon shared with his followers a very different sentiment in private. He despised American concepts of individuality and democracy, believing that he was destined to rule through a one-world theocracy that would eradicate all personal freedoms.

"Here's a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-world theocracy," Steve Hassan, a former church leader, told me. "Yet he's wined and dined very powerful people and convinced them that he's benign."

In 1976, Moon's search for growing influence in the United States seemed to be following the KCIA script.

Moon started a small-circulation newspaper in New York City that featured a column by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Moon promoted the anti-communist cause through front groups which held lavish conferences and paid speaking fees to academics, journalists and political leaders.

In 1976, Moon, Bo Hi Pak and other church members deepened their investments in the U.S. capital, buying stock in the Washington-based Diplomat National Bank. Simultaneously, South Korean agent Tongsun Park was investing heavily in the same bank.

But the South Korean scheme backfired in the late 1970s with the explosion of the "Koreagate" scandal. Rep.Donald Fraser, a Democrat from Minnesota, led a congressional probe which tracked Tongsun Park's influence-buying campaign and exposed the KCIA links to the Unification Church.

The "Koreagate" investigation revealed a sophisticated intelligence project run out of Seoul that used the urbane Park as well as the mystical Moon to cultivate U.S. politicians as influential friends of South Korea - and conversely to undermine politicians who were viewed as enemies.

Though it's clear the church did collaborate with the KCIA during the 1960s and 1970s, it's less clear whether Moon was using the KCIA or it was using him. Most likely, the relationship was symbiotic, each using the other to advance their overlapping but different interests.

The alliance with the KCIA gave Moon political protection and business opportunities, while the KCIA got a cover for promoting South Korean interests inside the United States, the country responsible for South Korea's defense.

The "Koreagate" investigation traced the church's chief sources of money to bank accounts in Japan, but could follow the cash no further. In the years since, the sources of Moon's money have remained cloaked in secrecy.

In the mid-1990s when I inquired about the vast fortune that the Unification Church has poured into its American operations, the church's chief spokesman refused to divulge dollar amounts for any of Moon's activities.

"Each year the church retains an independent accounting firm to do a national audit and produce an annual financial statement," wrote the church's legal representative Peter D. Ross. "While this statement is used in routine financial transactions by the church, [it] is not my policy to make it otherwise available."

In 1978, Fraser got a taste of the negative side of Moon's propaganda clout as the South Korean religious leader's new U.S. conservative allies mounted a strong defense against the "Koreagate" allegations.

In pro-Moon publications, Fraser and his staff were pilloried as leftists. Anti-Moon witnesses were assailed as unstable liars. Minor bookkeeping problems inside the investigation, such as Fraser's salary advances to some staff members, were seized upon to justify demands for an ethics probe of the congressman.

One of those letters, dated June 30, 1978, was written by John T. "Terry" Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). Dolan's group was pioneering the strategy of "independent" TV attack ads against liberal Democrats. In turn, Moon's CAUSA International helped Dolan by contributing $500,000 to a Dolan group, known as the Conservative Alliance or CALL. [Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1984]

With support from Dolan and other conservatives, Moon weathered the "Koreagate" political storm. Facing questions about his patriotism, Fraser lost a Senate bid in 1978 and left Congress.

Though Moon had helped defeat his chief congressional critic, the evidence unearthed by Fraser became the foundation of a tax-fraud conviction of Moon in 1982 and his sentencing to two years in federal prison.

A Media Empire

Despite his felony conviction, Moon pressed ahead with his boldest bid for political influence. In 1982, Moon launched the Washington Times.

The Times was just what the Reagan administration wanted, a reliable voice for its version of events that would push the message into the public debate.

Though Moon would have to subsidize his publications with hundreds of millions of dollars from his seemingly bottomless pool of cash, the newspaper - over the next two decades - would change the parameters of how the U.S. press corps works and affect the course of U.S. presidential campaigns.

Where all that money came from, however, would remain one of Washington's least examined secrets.

Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.

The five were Taiwan's dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea's dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, and Moon, "an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of 'Heavenly Deception,'" the Andersons wrote.

WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that "would further Moon's global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade," the Andersons wrote.

Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.

Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.

In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the major Allies - the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union - the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War, helping both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.

Some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, but others managed to make their escapes along "rat lines" to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States.

Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.

In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.

Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.

Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the United States. Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord's accomplices as some of Paraguay's highest-ranking military officers.

Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin, David also "took on assignments for Argentina's terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance," Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup.

During President Nixon's "war on drugs," U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.

By the time the French Connection was severed, however, powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America's military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place.

Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the CIA's training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations. Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia soon filled the void left by the broken French Connection and its mostly Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.

Enter Rev. Moon

During this time of transition, Sun Myung Moon brought his evangelical message to South America. His first visit to Argentina had occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires. But he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.

Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.

"Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church's political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America," the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.

"As an international money laundry, ... the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent."

In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America when a right-wing alliance of Bolivia military officers and drug dealers organized what became known as the Cocaine Coup. WACL associates, such as Alfred Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent putsch.

Right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with a contingent of young European neo-fascists collaborating with Nazi war criminal Barbie in carrying out the bloody coup that overthrew the elected left-of-center government.

The victory put into power a right-wing military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords. Bolivia became South America's first narco-state.

One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon's top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza.

After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, "I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world's highest city."

According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia's WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, one of Moon's anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.

Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers, including Trafficante's Cuban-American smugglers. Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work protecting Bolivia's major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the border.

"The paramilitary units - conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS - sold themselves to the cocaine barons," German journalist Kai Hermann wrote. "The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America." [An English translation of Hermann's article was published in Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986]

A month after the coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League. Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.

As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.

On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel's Hall of Freedom in La Paz. Moon's lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a prayer for President Reagan's recovery from an assassination attempt.

In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, "God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism." According to a later Bolivian intelligence report, the Moon organization sought to recruit an "armed church" of Bolivians, with about 7,000 Bolivians receiving some paramilitary training.

But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia's military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point.

"The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived," Hermann reported.

The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too. Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder. Barbie was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He died in 1992.

But Moon's organization suffered few negative repercussions from the Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican administration in Washington. An invited guest to the Reagan-Bush Inauguration, Moon made his organization useful to President Reagan, Vice President Bush and other leading Republicans.

Domestic Spying

An early concern of the Reagan administration was the possibility that a popular movement - similar to the anti-Vietnam War protests - would undermine the hard-line policies that the new U.S. government considered indispensable for stopping the spread of Soviet influence in Central America.

Staunch anticommunists in the administration also suspected that some groups opposed to U.S. intervention in the region could be discredited for holding suspect political loyalties. Though Moon's organization itself had been exposed by the "Koreagate" investigation as a foreign intelligence operation, the administration still turned to it to help probe the loyalty of Americans.

Starting in 1981, the FBI cooperated with one of Moon's front groups during a five-year nationwide investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a domestic organization critical of Reagan's policies in Central America.

According to FBI documents obtained by Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan, the FBI collected reports from Moon's Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), which was spying on CISPES supporters. The reports came from CARP members at 10 university campuses around the United States and included commentaries on the purported political beliefs of Reagan's critics. [Boston Globe, April 20, 1988]

One CARP report called a CISPES supporter "well-educated in Marxism" while other CARP reports attached "clippings culled from communist-inspired front groups." The Globe investigation reported that Frank Varelli, who worked for the FBI from 1981 to 1984 coordinating the CISPES probe, said an FBI agent paid members of the Moon organization at Southern Methodist University while the Moon activists were raiding and disrupting CISPES rallies.

"Every week, an agent I worked with used to go to SMU to pay the Moonies," Varelli said in an interview. Because of the CARP harassment, CISPES closed its SMU chapter.

While Moon's organization was helping to spy on American citizens, the case against Moon as a suspected intelligence agent for South Korea was petering out. It's still not clear why.

"I don't think there was any doubt that the Moon newspaper took a virulently pro-South Korea position," Oliver "Buck" Revell, then a senior FBI official in the national security area, told me. "But whether there was something illegal about it..." His voice trailed off. As for the internal security investigation of Moon, Revell added only: "It led its full life."

Mysterious Money

Where Moon gets his cash has been a long-time mystery that few American conservatives have been eager to solve.

"Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking," wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. "Others feel that, despite the disclosures of Koreagate, the Church has simply continued to do the Korean government's international bidding and is receiving official funds to do so."

While Moon's representatives have refused to detail how they've sustained their far-flung activities - including many businesses that insiders say lose money - Moon's spokesmen have angrily denied recurring allegations about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.

In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, Moon's representative Ricardo DeSena responded, "I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love." [Clarin, July 7, 1996]

Without doubt, however, Moon's organization has had a long record of association with organized crime figures, including ones implicated in the drug trade. Besides collaborating with Sasakawa and other leaders of the Japanese yakuza and the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia, Moon's organization developed close ties with the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who were permeated with drug smugglers.

Moon's organization also used its political clout in Washington to intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists who tried to investigate those criminal activities. In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of contra-connected drug trafficking, they came under attacks from Moon's Washington Times.

An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in an April 11, 1986, front-page Washington Times article with the headline: "Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy."

When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra drug trafficking, the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry's probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. "Kerry's anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain," announced the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.

But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, the Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry's staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth.

"Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe," said one Times article that opened with the assertion: "Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said." [Washington Times, Jan. 21, 1987]

Despite the attacks, Kerry's contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units - both in Costa Rica and Honduras - were implicated in the cocaine trade.

"It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers," Kerry's investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989. "In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter."

Kerry's investigation also found that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war.

"Elements of the Honduran military were involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on," the report said. "These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue." [Drug, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy - the Kerry Report - December 1988]

The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been named by President Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System.

In short, Bush was the lead official in the U.S. government to cope with the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed a national security threat.

If the American voters came to believe that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists in Central America, that judgment could have threatened the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family.

By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this touchy subject, the Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President.

Drug Evidence

The evidence shows that there was much more to the contra drug issue than either the Reagan-Bush administration or Moon's organization wanted the American people to know in the 1980s.

The evidence - assembled over the years by investigators at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies - indicates that Bolivia's Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever drug smugglers that tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Reagan's favorite covert operation, the contra war. [For details, see Robert Parry, Lost History, or for a summary of the contra-drug evidence, see Consortiumnews.com's "Gary Webb's Death: American Tragedy."]

Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, cozying up to the contras and sharing some of the profits, as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies.

The contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.

The drug traffickers' strategy also worked. In some cases, U.S. intelligence officials bent over backwards not to take timely notice of contra-connected drug trafficking out of fear that fuller investigations would embarrass the contras and their patrons in the Reagan-Bush administration.

For instance, on Oct. 22, 1982, a cable written by the CIA's Directorate of Operations stated, "There are indications of links between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms."

The cable added that the participants were planning a meeting in Costa Rica for such a deal. When the cable arrived, senior CIA officials were concerned. On Oct. 27, CIA headquarters asked for more information from a U.S. law enforcement agency.

The law enforcement agency expanded on its report by telling the CIA that representatives of the contra FDN and another contra force, the UDN, would be meeting with several unidentified U.S. citizens. But then, the CIA reversed itself, deciding that it wanted no more information on the grounds that U.S. citizens were involved.

"In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout, agree you should not pursue the matter further," CIA headquarters wrote on Nov. 3, 1982. Two weeks later, after discouraging additional investigation, CIA headquarters suggested it might be necessary to knock down the allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal as "misinformation."

The CIA's Latin American Division, however, responded on Nov. 18, 1982, that several contra officials had gone to San Francisco for the meetings with supporters, presumably as part of the same guns-for-drugs deal. But the CIA inspector general found no additional information about that deal in CIA files.

Also, by keeping the names censored when the documents were released in 1998, the CIA prevented outside investigators from examining whether the "U.S. religious organization" had any affiliation with Moon's network of quasi-religious groups, which were assisting the contras at that time.

Red Flags

As Moon continued to expand his influence in American politics, some Republicans began to raise red flags.

In 1983, the GOP's moderate Ripon Society charged that the New Right had entered "an alliance of expediency" with Moon's church. Ripon's chairman, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, released a study which alleged that the College Republican National Committee "solicited and received" money from Moon's Unification Church in 1981. The study also accused Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media of benefiting from low-cost or volunteer workers supplied by Moon.

Leach said the Unification Church has "infiltrated the New Right and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well." Leach's news conference was disrupted when then-college GOP leader Grover Norquist accused Leach of lying. (Norquist is now a prominent conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the highest levels of George W. Bush's administration.)

Despite periodic fretting over Moon's influence, American conservatives continued to accept his deep-pocket assistance. When White House aide Oliver North was scratching for support for the Nicaraguan contras, for instance, the Washington Times established a contra fund-raising operation.

By the mid-1980s, Moon's Unification Church had carved out a niche as an acceptable part of the American Right. In one speech to his followers, Moon boasted that "without knowing it, even President Reagan is being guided by Father [Moon]."

Yet, Moon also made clear that his longer-range goal was destroying the U.S. Constitution and America's democratic form of government.

"History will make the position of Reverend Moon clear, and his enemies, the American population and government will bow down to him," Moon said, speaking of himself in the third person. "That is Father's tactic, the natural subjugation of the American government and population."

In September 1987, conservative columnist Andrew Ferguson cited some of Moon's anti-American sentiments as cause for concern, despite his appealing anticommunism.

"There is little else in Unificationism that American conservatives will find compelling," except, of course, the money, Ferguson wrote in the American Spectator. "They're the best in town as far as putting their money with their mouth is," Ferguson quoted one Washington-based conservative as saying.

Though Moon's money sources remained shrouded in secrecy, his cash undeniably gave the Right an edge over its political adversaries.

After the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in fall 1986, the Washington Times and other Moon-related organizations rushed to the battlements to defend Reagan's White House and Oliver North.

Ronald S. Godwin, who was a link between Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Moon's Washington Times, raised funds

But the president indicated Wednesday that he has already made his choice, hinting to reporters at his year-end news conference that he will send more U.S. troops to Iraq.

It doesn't seem to occur to him that some of the escalating violence in Iraq stems from opposition to the U.S. military occupation there. So it's up to the American people and the Democratic-controlled Congress to play a role in these crucial decisions while there is still time.

Bush has engaged in a lot of theatrics in his high-profile consultations with administration officials and past policymakers. He also is awaiting a report from new Defense Secretary Robert Gates who made a quick visit to Iraq.

Some of the military commanders are opposed to an injection of more troops around Baghdad and believe the move would compound the folly. Some powerful members on Capitol Hill also are calling for a phased withdrawal from Iraq.

In a noticeably good mood, the president has hosted a series of yuletide parties and has displayed none of the signs of soul-searching about war that marked Lyndon B. Johnson's agony over Vietnam.

But he told reporters "my heart breaks every night" for those who have died in Iraq. He also said that "the next president" may have to deal with the "radicals and extremists" in the region.

"They can't run us out of the Middle East," he declared.

The drive for more troops in Iraq is being supported by key Republican senators.

For example, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., wants as many as 35,000 more troops. For a presidential candidate, he is out of step with the American mainstream.

But former Secretary of State Colin Powell -- who also served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- said he is not certain more U.S. forces could turn the tide in Iraq.

Bush has given short shrift to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., especially the suggestion that he start a phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, starting next year.

Sometime early in January, the president plans to lay it all out. Maybe then he will finally tell us why he invaded a Third World country under false pretenses. He may even explain why U.S. forces continue to be there.

The nearly four-year war has already lasted longer than World War II.

The president is obviously frustrated that most Americans no longer see it his way. He has been quoted as saying he may be dead before Americans "get it."

These days Bush is likening himself to President Harry S Truman, who left Washington under a cloud as a result of scandals involving members of his administration and the stalemate in the Korean War. His popularity polls were down to 23 percent when he went home to Independence, Mo., in 1952.

But historians have resurrected Truman's place in the presidential panoply for his great contributions to collective security treaties in the aftermath of World War II.

Bush has a long way to go to catch up with Truman.

(Helen Thomas can be reached at the e-mail address hthomas(at)hearstdc.com).)

Snow rebutted the notion that Bush is casting about for legal advice in the wake of his party's loss of control of the Congress.

"We don't have a war room set up where we're ... dialing the 800 numbers of law firms," he said.

Still, in the days after the elections, the White House announced that Bush had hired two replacements to plug holes in his counsel's office, including one lawyer, Christopher G. Oprison, who is a specialist in handling white-collar investigations. A third hire was securities law specialist Paul R. Eckert, whose duties include dealing with the Office of the Special Counsel. Bush is in the process of hiring a fourth associate counsel, said Emily A. Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman.

"Obviously, if we do have investigations, we'll have to make sure we have enough people to be prepared to answer questions that come our way," Lawrimore said. "As of right now, I wouldn't say it's anything special."

Republicans close to Bush say any such moves would not come until the White House sees how aggressive Democrats are in trying to pry the lid off the inner workings of the administration.

"They just think it's inevitable that there will be some investigations that will tie up some time and attention," said Charles Black, a strategist with close ties to the White House. But there's no panic in the ranks of Bush's team, he added. "They don't think they have anything to hide."

Bush still must do what he can now -- before Democrats take over the majority in Congress next month -- to prepare, legal specialists say.

"At a time like this, the experienced people in the White House view themselves as in a race they hope to win, of organizing and coordinating their defenses to have them in place in time to slow down or resist oversight before the oversight can get organized," said Charles Tiefer of the University of Baltimore Law School, a former House counsel and veteran of congressional investigations.

People familiar with the counsel's office caution against reading too much into the new additions, saying that Bush has yet to go on a hiring spree akin to President Bill Clinton's when he faced impeachment. But White House officials know of the potential challenges, they said.

"It's certainly not lost on them that there will be more investigative requests and more things for them to respond to, but I don't think that you're going to see any dramatic changes," said Reginald Brown, a former associate in Bush's White House counsel's office who is now in private practice.

Democrats' stated intention to conduct more rigorous oversight of the Bush administration "simply will mean that [White House officials] need a few more people to manage the paper flow," Brown said.

Veterans of investigative battles between the White House and Congress predict that Bush ultimately will need to add staff members -- or at least borrow some from government agencies -- to contend with Democrats with subpoena power on Capitol Hill.

"Like any White House that has to deal with a Congress run by the other party, this White House has to bulk up its staff to deal with the inevitable flood of subpoenas. They're also going to have to coordinate with lots of friends and supporters," said Mark Corallo, a former top Republican aide to the House committee that issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to the Clinton camp.

Corallo and Barbara Comstock, another Republican public-relations executive with broad experience in Hill investigations, are launching a crisis-communications firm to serve officials and corporations who, Corallo said, could end up as "drive-by victims" in a new round of probes.

Snow said the firm is "certainly independent of the White House."

Republican lobbyist David M. Carmen has added an oversight practice to his firm's menu of services, tapping Frank Silbey, a veteran of congressional investigations, to minister to companies and public figures caught in the web of expected probes.

Democrats are reluctant to reveal their investigative plans, but they have made it plain that they want to conduct more oversight of the Bush administration.

It is clear, though, that Democrats will be beefing up their staffs. With control of Congress comes twice as much funding, which will allow Democrats to double their staffs, including hiring new lawyers and investigators to face off with the Bush administration.

Bush will need "people who have experience in responding to subpoenas, overseeing document production and preparing witnesses," said Amy R. Sabrin, who defended several Clinton administration officials during the investigations of the 1990s.

The president might want to launch internal investigations of his own, legal experts and analysts say, to turn up anything untoward before Democrats do. Some suggested that the administration was doing that last month when the Justice Department announced that it would look into the use of information gleaned from the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program, an investigation that Bush thwarted earlier by refusing to grant security clearances.

"It's quite common that a White House, anticipating congressional investigations, will prefer to let previously blocked internal administrative investigations go ahead as a preferred alternative way of trying to deprive the upcoming congressional investigation of exciting things to discover," Tiefer said.

An example from recent history was the Reagan administration's Tower Commission, set up to "steal the thunder" of the congressional probe into the Iran-contra scandal, Tiefer added.

White House adviser Black noted that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been careful to guard executive secrecy, a stance that is unlikely to change in the face of new congressional zeal for information.

"That means if a committee wants to investigate a Cabinet agency, they cooperate. If they're asking to get information about who the president and the vice president are getting advice from and meeting with, the answer is no," he said.

None of which will make life easier for White House lawyers who will be fielding Democrats' requests.

Fulfilling congressional oversight requests is always tedious and time-consuming. When the investigations become partisan, it can be even worse.

"The oversight work was among the most stressful and least-rewarding work in the office," said Bradford A. Berenson, a former counsel in Bush's White House. "When you're playing defense against investigations that are, to one degree or another, politically motivated in an environment where there are very few rules and very little prospect of judicial relief, it can be very frustrating."

By any measure-secrecy, arrogance, venality, contempt for the Constitutional process-the administration of George W. Bush is far worse than that of Richard M. Nixon. It is natural that its opponents should wish to seek remedy by impeaching the president, especially now that he no longer enjoys the cover offered by a pliable Republican congress. Should not, many Democrats ask, we take this opportunity, at last, to show future chief executives that there are limits to the power any president can co-opt?

Yet 2007 is different from 1974 because the political arena has become so much more ideologically divided. Bill Clinton was impeached simply because a Republican House wanted to test its newfound power. That event was a travesty on its face; worse, it also ensured that the next Republican president could never be impeached, since it would be easy to convince a distracted public that any attempt to do so was nothing more than cheap political payback. The Clinton impeachment effectively inoculated Bush against the consequences of any misconduct he wished to engage in.

Vice presidents, however, do not have the political gravitas of chief executives. They serve at the pleasure of the president, not of the people, and are consequently more vulnerable in the court of public opinion. This is especially true in the case of Dick Cheney, who is unarguably the least admired vice president in the nation's history. It is probably true that his approval ratings are so low even among supporters of the administration because he represents the sort of political being who is most distrusted by Americans: the shifty, cunning power behind the throne. Dick Cheney is not the sort of person-straight-talking, no-nonsense, but nonetheless engaging and friendly-who embodies the ideal American politician.

There is, of course, no lack of charges to be brought against Dick Cheney, from outing a covert CIA agent for political purposes to manipulating intelligence about WMD programs in Iraq. On the other hand, Cheney has consciously arrogated to himself as vice president all of the protections inherent in presidential privilege. It is immaterial whether, constitutionally speaking, he can make this claim. As the Libby case shows, the mere assertion of privilege by anyone in the West Wing can effectively stymie an investigation, or at least drag it out for so long that its political effects are minimized. And all matters of privilege aside, Cheney and his associates have woven such a tangled skein around their activities (the energy commission, for instance) that any investigation into them will be so laboriously involved as to eventually confuse and bore the American electorate.

As the investigation of Spiro Agnew showed, however, American politicians, even cunning ones, are most vulnerable to charges of low crimes and misdemeanors. This is Cheney's Achilles heel: His close association with Halliburton and the great financial gains he has made from it during his two terms in office can easily be shown to be criminal. Even a short congressional investigation can uncover damning documentary evidence proving that the vice president's office was instrumental in awarding vast no-bid contracts to Halliburton in both Iraq and the Gulf Coast. Why Cheney benefits is equally easy to prove (and equally damning): The company's stock has tripled in value since he took office. Cheney and his lawyers will attempt to cloud the issue, but charges of straightforward graft proffered on the floor of either the House or the Senate are likely to stick, at least politically, to a figure who is so widely reviled. (And charges can be brought in the Senate against Cheney in his capacity as a de facto member of that body-a simple majority is all that is required to do so.)

Impeaching and convicting Cheney on charges of graft would at the least force him out of the West Wing. All other eventualities-a presidential pardon chief among them-are secondary. Absent the protection of his office, Cheney cannot assert privilege in future civil suits brought against him; nor can he afford to ever leave the country, since any number of foreign powers would be likely to seize him and bring him to trial for war crimes or violations of human rights. And the Bush administration would be fatally contaminated-and so politically neutered for the next two years-by mere association.

Whatever else he might be is unimportant; the vice president is demonstrably a crook. With luck, his resignation or impeachment might lead to graver consequences for him, but at the very least it will ensure that future presidents choose their seconds in command more judiciously. A sure outcome is that no Republican in 2009 will be able to accuse Democrats of playing partisan football with Dick Cheney, because no one cares enough about the vice president to make that charge plausibly stick

More than 775 detainees have been held in Guantanamo since January 11, 2002. After five years, no Guantanamo detainee has been convicted of a criminal offense. According to an American Forces Information Service News article dated October 17, 2006, "Bush Says Military Commissions Act Will Bring Justice," the majority of the detainees held in Guantanamo will not face military commissions. "Only detainees who will be charged with law-of-war violations and other grave offenses - about 75 detainees, officials estimated - will be subject to the commissions."

So what has happened to the other 700 detainees during these five years - those who will not be prosecuted by military commissions?

Finally, after more than two years of detention, between August 2004 and March 2005, Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT), composed of three US military officers, reviewed the cases of 558 detainees. However, the detainees had no access to lawyers or to secret evidence used by the CSRT. The CSRT could use coerced evidence. The CSRTs judged 520 detainees to be "enemy combatants."

What is an enemy combatant? The general definition of an enemy combatant is "a person engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners during an armed conflict." But a September 5, 2006, Department of Defense directive on the Detainee Program added another sentence to the definition of unlawful combatant: "For the purposes of the war on terrorism, the term Unlawful Enemy Combatant is defined to include, but is not limited to, an individual who is or was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."

According to Amnesty International, in an analysis of 500 detainees, a remarkably low number, only 5 percent, or about 25 detainees, were captured by US forces. Eighty-six percent, or about 430 detainees, were arrested by Pakistani forces or the Afghan Northern Alliance and turned over to US custody - often for a reward of thousands of dollars. The other 9 percent are not discussed in the Amnesty report. Many were sold to the United States to even scores or just for the money. Anyone living in Afghanistan - young or old - was fair game for sale to US forces. The oldest detainee shipped to Guantanamo was 75 and the youngest 10.

It is an understatement to say that the majority of those sent to Guantanamo were sent due to poor interrogation and investigation by US forces and the CIA during their detention in Afghanistan. Once at Guantanamo, they remained for years because of pressure for interrogation "results" from the civilian political leadership at the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House.

As of December 18, 2006, almost half - about 379 of the 775 detainees - have been released after years in prison. They were sent home without being charged with a crime or being told why they had been detained. About 396 detainees from 35 countries are still held at Guantanamo; this includes 14 detainees who were transferred there in September 2006 after being held incommunicado in secret CIA prisons for up to four and a half years. (When President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act (MCA) into law, he said that the MCA authorizes the CIA secret-prison program to continue. He also said that the 14 cannot reveal to their lawyers or the International Committee of the Red Cross the location of the detention facilities, conditions of confinement, and interrogation techniques.)

Sixteen detainees from Saudi Arabia were released on December 14, 2006, after King Abdullah summoned Vice President Cheney to Saudi Arabia and took him to the woodshed over the plight of Sunnis if the United States withdraws from Iraq. Another 75 Saudis remain in Guantanamo. More detainees were released on December 17, according to a Department of Defense news release with the same date: Seven detainees were transferred to Afghanistan; six were returned to Yemen; three went to Kazakhstan; one went to Libya, and one to Bangladesh. This resulted in thirty-four detainees being released in three days. The news release said that 114 detainees have been released in 2006 and 85 detainees, whom the US government has determined are eligible for transfer or release, are still being held at Guantanamo.

Seventeen detainees were under 18 years old when they were taken to Guantanamo. The youngest were 10, 12, and 13 when they were "captured." At the end of 2006, four of these juveniles still are detained. They have spent one-fourth of their lives in Guantanamo. There was a fifth, but he was one of three detainees who committed suicide in June 2006. More than 40 detainees have attempted suicide, and up to 200 detainees have staged hunger strikes to protest the conditions of detention.

Incredibly, at the end of five years of being in the world's human-rights doghouse, the US Congress in October 2006 again trusted and complied with President Bush's wishes and passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA). The MCA denies detainees habeas corpus (the right to challenge the lawfulness or conditions of detention); denies the presumption of innocence; denies the right to trial within a reasonable time; denies the right to a lawyer of choice, and denies the right to challenge and present evidence. The MCA allows the admission of evidence coerced by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

While co-authoring memos on torture, presidential legal advisor Alberto Gonzales, now attorney general, advised President Bush in January 2002 that a benefit of not applying the Geneva Conventions to detainees coming from Afghanistan, and imprisoning the detainees outside the United States, would be to make it more difficult to prosecute US personnel under the US War Crimes Act. The administration's "gloves off" attitude toward interrogations resulted in inhumane treatment in Bagram, Kandahar, and other prisons in Afghanistan, and later in Guantanamo. That abusive environment led to painful incidents at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, as Guantanamo prison commander Major General Geoffrey Miller went to Iraq to teach more-aggressive techniques to the interrogators. Gonzalez continued to make it harder to prosecute US personnel for prisoner abuse under the War Crimes Act by convincing Congress - through the Military Commissions Act - to provide a free pass for criminal acts dealing with detainees if the acts were committed before December 31, 2005.

As a retired US Army colonel with 29 years of service on active duty and in the US Army Reserves, and as a US diplomat for 16 years, I firmly believe that there must be accountability and responsibility for criminal actions that we know have occurred - whether the perpetrators are in the Pentagon, the CIA, the Justice Department, or the White House. Speaking as a military officer, I believe our military is not served well by escaping responsibility for criminal acts. Our soldiers and officers are taught what behavior is legal and what is not. I would think that the same distinction also is taught to CIA personnel. When the Bush administration and Congress retroactively protect those who knowing commit criminal acts, they undermine the "order and discipline" of the military and of the CIA. Ultimately this undercuts the foundations of our rule of law.

I firmly believe that to regain some respect in the international community, for the sake of our national spirit and soul, and for the integrity of the US military, the prison in Guantanamo must be closed. The US military must be removed from adjudicating "enemy combatants" cases. Instead, I believe the federal courts must administer the laws of the United States against persons charged with "terrorist" crimes, as the courts have done in the past. For the United States to ever hope to salvage some modicum of its stature in the area of human rights, the legal process for those accused of criminal terrorist acts must be transparent and fair. The "Guantanamo process" is neither. I call on the new Congress to acknowledge the capabilities and history of our civilian legal system, to abolish the Military Commissions Act, to designate the federal courts to hear the cases, and to close Guantanamo.

On January 11, 2007, the fifth year that detainees from Afghanistan have been in Guantanamo, organizations all over the world will call for Guantanamo to be closed. For the sake of our integrity and conscience, each one of us must take action: Organize vigils, show the movie "The Road to Guantanamo" or have readings of "Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" (www.bordc.org).

Act on January 11 to end torture, stop violations of international law, and CLOSE GUANTANAMO! (Check www.witnesstorture.org for events.)

Colonel Ann Wright, retired, spent 29 years in the Army and Army Reserves and 16 years as a US diplomat serving in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She resigned from the US Department of State in March 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq.

Analysts attribute this to internal divisions over how far to roll back controversial counter-terrorism practices - including torture, secret prisons, detention without trial, and renditions - as the price for rekindling transatlantic relations.

Washington was particularly stung by a report last month by a committee of the European parliament that condemned the alleged complicity of governments in the CIA's illegal detention and transportation of prisoners.

It concluded that there were at least 1,245 overflights or stopovers by CIA aircraft in Europe, and that some probably involved prisoner transfers. Several highly publicised cases were documented.

Delegations from Europe visiting Washington since then have been assured that "extraordinary renditions" ended, or mostly ended, in 2003. US officials note that the lawsuits brought against the US by former detainees relate to events in 2003 or earlier, when even Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, has admitted that "mistakes" happened.

The European committee defined "extraordinary rendition" as an "extra-judicial practice whereby an individual suspected of involvement in terrorism is illegally abducted, arrested and/or transferred into the custody of US officials and/or transported to another country for interrogation which, in the majority of cases, involves incommunicado detention and torture".

Visiting Europeans have been told that the US reserves the right to carry out renditions, but - as Ms Rice declared in a major statement a year ago - it would respect the sovereignty of other countries and would not send detainees to countries where the US believed they might be tortured.

John Sifton, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, strongly disputes the assertion that extraordinary renditions stopped in 2003. He said there had been people arrested in 2006 who were still unaccounted for, and others transported by the US from Pakistan, outside all judicial process, to the Middle East.

Human rights groups believe there are large numbers of prisoners in US custody who are unaccounted for and were not included in the 14 transferred to Guantánamo when President George W. Bush acknowledged for the first time in September the existence of secret CIA detention facilities, which he then ordered to be closed.

The US had also crafted a concept of "constructive custody" or "proxy detention", Mr Sifton said. This involved allies, such as Pakistan, Jordan and Morocco, holding detainees at the request of the US and allowing the US free access to them.

Andrew Tyrie, a British opposition MP who recently visited Washington, said the Bush administration was engaged in a fierce debate over the impact of more controversial US practices in the wake of the September 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda. "It is vital we send a message to moderate Muslims that these practices are no longer in our armoury against terrorism," he said, adding the US was also keen to revive the strong transatlantic bonds that existed before the invasion of Iraq.

Mr Bush says he wants to close Guantánamo, which will be five years old next month. But it is far from clear how or when this will happen.

Low-risk prisoners are being sent to other countries, following complex negotiations over conditions of their release or continued detention. According to the Pentagon, about 380 prisoners have left the prison since 2002. About 395 remain, of whom some 85 are now eligible for transfer or release.

The Military Commissions Act, signed by Mr Bush in October, was intended to speed the process of putting on trial Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and other prominent militants before special tribunals. Experts believe, however, that constitutional challenges will set this back a very long time.

Believing that only some 50 detainees would be tried, allies are concerned that 200 other prisoners, designated as high-risk, would be detained indefinitely without trial and barred from challenging their detention in the federal courts. Complicating the process is Washington's fear that releasing more detainees will lead to a flood of legal cases against the US.

Diplomats say Ms Rice has been influential in advocating change to detention policies she sees as damaging relations with allies, while Dick Cheney, vice-president, and David Addington, his chief of staff, are seen as obstacles. The removal of Donald Rumsfeld as defence secretary this month may have undermined the hardliners, however.

"We have no desire to be the world's jailer and do not hold detainees for any longer than necessary," said Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.

But he also said there was a "significant amount of evidence" to justify holding "unlawful enemy combatants" and prevent their return to the battlefield.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

On November 7, however, it was voters doing the cleansing, washing their hands of the Bush-Cheney regime. Yes, I know that Bush & Gang are still there, and they'll be trying to do all the damage they can in their remaining two years. But by losing the House and Senate majority, they have hit a serious speed bump.

Toward the end of the campaign, the White House insisted that Republicans would retain control of Congress because voters were focused on local issues and candidates, not on Bush or his policies. "We have succeeded in making these races choices between two local candidates," bragged Karl Rove. And when a reporter suggested that Bush's disastrous war in Iraq was dragging down GOP congressional candidates, Cheney chimed in with his two cents' worth of political insight: "We're not running for office."

Wrong, Karl. Wrong, Dick. In its exit polls, The New York Times found that Bush's war, Bush's economy, and Bush himself were foremost on voters' minds as they entered the voting booths to toss out the Republican Congress.

68 percent said that the Iraq war was either "very" important or "extremely" important in how they voted (only 10 percent said it was "not at all" important).

83 percent said the economy was very or extremely important in how they voted (and 68 percent said that their family was either falling behind financially or barely staying even).

In fact, George has become so unpopular that only the GOP candidates in the reddest of red spots asked him to campaign with them. The cruelest blow came on the campaign's last day. Bush was to appear in Pensacola, Florida, at a Republican rally featuring the party's gubernatorial hopeful, Charlie Crist. Ten thousand partisans turned out for Bush but one person who decided at the last minute not to come was...Charlie. Seeing Bush's poll numbers in Florida below 40 percent, Charlie suddenly remembered that he needed to be over in Palm Beach that day. Jilted, poor George had to call in Brother Jeb to do the introduction.

Spin it as they will, this election was a resounding rejection of the Bushites' agenda. As an independent voter in New Jersey said as she headed into her polling place, "I don't care if I vote for Happy the Clown, just so it's not who's there now." She added that she was voting "against the powers that put us in this situation" in Iraq.

Progressive surge

The establishment media pundits, clueless as ever, have tried their damndest to contort the Democratic sweep into a victory for conservatives! They claim that the Dems who won in red areas were victorious only because they adopted Republican-like positions on guns, abortion, or religion.

Your average rutabaga has a sharper analytical ability than that. If these pundits would venture out and talk with anyone besides themselves, they'd find that people aren't one-dimensional stick figures. Being a hunter and a defender of gun rights in a so-called red state, for example, doesn't turn you into Dick Cheney.

Take Jon Tester, the new senator from Montana. He's a big burly guy, with the boots, belly, and buzzcut that makes him appear to be a rural conservative caricature. To add to the stereotype, he's pro-gun and antigay marriage.

But let's fill in this stickman drawing of Tester. He's an organic farmer. He took time off in the heat of the campaign to go home to harvest his crops. He's a working guy who's missing three fingers from a tangle he had with a meat grinder. He's been a teacher, soil-conservation leader, and president of the state senate (where he established a solidly progressive record of siding with common folks against the corporate interests).

Jon defeated three-term incumbent and corporate favorite Conrad Burns by running a flatout populist campaign that took these stands: raise the minimum wage to a livable level, provide health care for all, fight the drug giants for lower prescription prices, stop big interests from selling off or locking up our public lands, halt the use of the Patriot Act to invade the lives of innocent Americans, oppose NAFTA-like trade scams, ban lobbyist-paid gifts and travel, make college affordable, promote renewable energy and conservation, save Social Security from the privatizers, battle railroad monopolies that hold rural communities captive, focus tax relief on the middle class instead of on millionaires, and--a big one--give military control of Iraq to the Iraqis, bring our troops home, and fully fund veterans' health care.

Conservative? On the kitchentable issues that matter to people (issues that require a political leader to side with ordinary folks against the corporate and governmental elites), Jon Tester is the kind of populist progressive that America needs.

The good news is that voters not only took out Bush's rubber- stamp congressional majority, but they also brought in a crop of real progressives who'll add badly needed energy and more of an "outsider" attitude to what has been a lackluster, tired, corporate-coddling Democratic party. In addition to Tester, the Senate will feel the progressive surge that will come from Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), and Bernie Sanders (Vermont)--all of whom ran campaigns centered on economic populism.

Likewise, the House majority will be invigorated by a new class of Democrats who campaigned on a core progressive agenda, including minimum wage, health care, Social Security, and Bush's Iraq war. Meet a few of them.

Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire is a teacher, social worker, and staunch war opponent. Short on money but strong in volunteer support, she had to battle her own party's establishment to win the nomination. Then her shoe-leather, issue-oriented, no-nonsense, populist approach upset the GOP's entrenched incumbent, making her the first New Hampshire woman in history to go to Congress.

Tim Walz is a high-school teacher, football coach, 24-year member of the Army National Guard...and passionate defender of liberty and justice for all. In 2004, he escorted two of his students to a Bush rally in his hometown of Mankato, Minnesota. At the checkpoint, however, George W's security thugs barred them from entering because one of the students had a Kerry-Edwards sticker on his wallet. "This is not how America is supposed to be," Tim said. So he has now paid Bush back by running a populist campaign that upset a six-term incumbent who was a Bush apologist and servant of special interests. John Hall is a rock musician (founder of the band Orleans) and longtime environmental activist who lives in New York's Hudson Valley. In 2004 the Bushites lifted one of his tunes, "Still the One," as their presidential campaign song, not bothering to get permission. Hall protested their thievery and forced them to stop. This year -- with the enthusiastic backing of labor, environmental, and antiwar groups -- John lifted the Republican incumbent from Congress.

Jerry McNerney is a California alternative-energy entrepreneur, an engineer ... and now a giant killer. With strong grassroots support from environmentalists and other progressives, McNerney had a stunning victory over Richard Pombo, the arrogant, corporate-hugging, antigovernment absolutist who was chair of the natural resources committee.

Vigorous antiestablishment campaigns like these have brought renewed progressive strength to Washington. More importantly, though, this year's campaigns have greatly strengthened our grassroots power, even in areas where our candidates didn't make it. We've added more and better-trained campaign activists, gained experience, spread the populist message where it has long been unheard, attracted new voters (including many who had dropped out or had considered themselves conservative), and created frameworks to sustain a continuing movement.

Seizing the initiative

While this was a "throw the bums out" year, it was just as clearly a "change America's direction" year, with the majority finally rising up to throw off the rightwing plutocracy, autocracy, theocracy, and kleptocracy that Bush & Company have hung around America's neck.

One sign of this fed-up sentiment was the total repudiation of a bit of corporate-backed ugliness called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Known as TABOR, it's more like a Bill of Wrongs, for it's essentially another ploy by the antitax, hate-government elites to defund even essential public services from education to public safety. It's the creature of the ultranutty Grover Norquist and receives its main financing from a multimillionaire New York developer named (you won't believe this!) Howie Rich.

TABOR was put forth as ballot initiatives in nine states this year, but six states stripped it from their ballots because of fraud and assorted wrongdoings by the initiative's pusher.Then, by convincing margins, the voters of Maine, Nebraska, and Oregon said no to TABOR's ideological malevolence.

Meanwhile, there was widespread positive news on the initiative front. The most resounding victories came in all six states which had initiatives to increase the minimum wage. Voters said "yes" in Arizona (66 percent approval), Colorado (53 percent), Missouri (76 percent), Montana (73 percent), Nevada (69 percent), and Ohio (56 percent). In all the states but Nevada, the initiatives also required that the minimum wage be adjusted annually for inflation. Voters in Arizona and Nebraska (supposedly antitax, bright-red states) approved initiatives to increase funding for early childhood education. Washington State voted to require that big utilities produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Oregon expanded access to a prescriptiondrug program for the uninsured, and Missouri okayed funding for stemcell research.

Secretaries of state

Amazingly, America still can't seem to get this democracy thing down. People are actively discouraged from voting, and votes aren't counted as the voter intended. There were no total meltdowns this year (à la Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004), but serious problems persisted. Outrageous electronic voting "glitches," disgraceful voter intimidation and suppression, and crass purges of voter rolls continue to be a plague on our country's democratic pretensions.

Some of the problems turned comical. In Ohio, Republican Congress critter Steve Chabot was turned away from voting because the address on his ID differed from the one on his registration card; the top election official in Missouri was asked three times to show a photo ID in order to vote, even though state law does not require one; and Gov. Mark Sanford was sent away from his South Carolina polling place because he showed up without his registration card.

Then there's the ghost of Katherine Harris. As Florida's secretary of state in 2000, she infamously rigged the vote count for George W. She then went to Congress, and this year she ran for (and lost) a U.S. Senate seat. But her bad mojo reached out and touched the election to replace her in the House. Touch-screen voting machines which she had championed as secretary of state appear to have malfunctioned on November 7 in her old congressional district, erasing the votes of some 18,000 people. Only 373 votes separated the two candidates, so a recount is underway. However, since there's no paper trail to these machines, it'll be hard to prove that all those people didn't just fail to vote in this particular race. This sort of ridiculous stuff is why the little-known office of the secretary of state is key to getting a grip on our democracy -- and why progressives ran for these offices in seven states this fall, winning in Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio. In Minnesota, my old friend Mark Ritchie ousted an eight-year incumbent who had turned the office into an electioneering wing of the Republican party. Crisscrossing the state, Mark tapped into a deep well of anger about the lack of fairness and integrity in the voting system and will now do the work needed to restore people's faith.

What now?

On the plus side, some good people are going to be in positions to do good things in Congress. Speaker-tobe Nancy Pelosi has come out with a "First Hundred Hours" agenda that ranges from passing a new minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to breaking the corruption ties between lobbyists and legislation. And nearly everyone except "Slow Joe" Lieberman seems to realize that Bush's war is wrong and we must get out of it--pronto.

Also, there are some promising changes in who runs Congress's committees, such as John Conyers (Judiciary), David Obey (Appropriations), George Miller (Education and the Workforce), Henry Waxman (Government Reform), Nydia Velázquez (Small Business), Bennie Thompson (Homeland Security), Bob Filner (Veterans' Affairs), and Charlie Rangel (Ways and Means).

On the down side, there are still too many go-slow, don't-rock-theboat, weak-kneed, money-grubbing, corporatized Democrats who won't break their habits of bedding down with the lobbyists and even the Bushites. They will push hard from inside the Democratic Caucus (while the White House, the money interests and the establishment media pushes from outside) for the majority to "be nice," move to the corporate right, and agree from the start to surrender half of what they want (and then compromise down from there).

Now is the time for progressives to be more vigilant than ever -- focus on what the Democrats are doing and not doing, make loud and clear demands that they do more, and keep organizing at the grassroots level. Just a few months ago, George W. declared, "I'm the decider." No, he's not. Neither are the Democrats. You are.

From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, December 2006. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of "Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time to Take It Back."

U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy's evil twin took Ambien, a sleeping pill, and a nausea pill before driving to Capitol Hill in a blackout in the middle of the night "for a vote" in May and crashing his Ford Mustang.

"I simply do not remember getting out of bed, being pulled over by the police or being cited for three driving infractions," said the Rhode Island Democrat though he did remember, "I consumed no alcohol prior to the incident." Whew!

Ambien, it turns out, also had an evil twin that made people sleep walk, sleep drive, sleep eat and apparently sleep vote with no recall and Sanofi-Aventis was forced to run ads reminding people to only take it if they were going to bed and staying there. (Or you'll break out in handcuffs, as the joke goes.)

Disgraced former Florida congressman Mark Foley -- the only Republican to get a mandate after the last election quipped Leno -- wasted no time in blaming his salacious emails to underage pages on an evil twin who was an alcoholic and abused by a priest.

And the accused priest, Rev. Anthony Mercieca, wasted no time in blaming his evil twin for the alleged abuse. "I had a nervous breakdown and was taking some pills and alcohol and maybe I did something that he didn't like."

Even convicted Enron financial officer Andrew Fastow had an evil twin who was hooked on tranquilizers to "cope with the implosion of his company, the imprisonment of his wife and his prosecution," reported the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. And come up with names like Raptors and Chewco you can't help but wonder?

The former Rev.Ted Haggard did not blame an evil gay twin for the services and drugs he admits buying from massage therapist Mike Jones. That's because he was already blaming gay people for unwholesome lifestyles before he got caught.

Nor did talk show giant Rush Limbaugh blame his evil twin who abused pain pills and went to rehab in 2003 for his Viagra airport contretemps on his way back from the Dominican Republic. No, he said his luggage must have been switched with Bob Dole. (see: Dying is easy; comedy is hard.)

Of course the 2006 Hall of Shamers benefit from the Oprah dividend -- the public's desire to seek reasons to reprieve bad behavior.

You may have been able to preach, appraise legislation, invent off the book partnerships or address a radio audience, goes the logic, but you weren't really responsible because of addiction and/or childhood abuse.

And while the forgiven get another chance by this reasoning and forgivers get to think they're Oliver Wendell Holmes, no one brings up the fact that almost everyone behind bars suffered childhood abuse and substance addiction. That's practically the definition of a criminal.

Even Richard Speck was in a drug and alcohol blackout when he killed eight nurses and when told, allegedly said, "If you say I did it, I did it."

Still, as 2006 ends, it seems like everyone is blaming an evil twin for bad behavior. Everyone, that is, except factually challenged author of "A Million Little Pieces" James Frey who is looking for some actual bad behavior to blame.

Almost immediately, Washingtonienne shut down, but not before millions had read about "X = Married man who pays me for sex", "K = A sugar daddy" and "YZ = The current favourite". But YZ - aka Robert Steinbuch, a legal counsel working for the same senator - objected to the revelations about his private life.

While Cutler lost her job with Republican senator Mike DeWine, Mr Steinbuch moved to a teaching post in Arkansas and filed a lawsuit alleging invasion of privacy and seeking $20m (£10.1m) in damages.

The case dating from the 2004 blog is expected to go to trial soon. In establishing whether people who keep online journals are obliged to respect the privacy of those they interact with offline, the case could have a profound effect on the content of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

"Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. "It's a different question when you reveal someone else's private life."

Mr Steinbuch's attorney, Jonathan Rosen, told a judge in a pre-trial hearing that his client, who teaches in Arkansas, wants to restore his good name. "It's not funny and it's damaging," Mr Rosen said. "It's horrible, absolutely horrible."

Cutler's attorney, Matthew Billips, had a different view: "I have no idea what he wants," he said. "He's never said, 'This is what I think should be done.'"

The judge, too, seemed bemused by the case. "I don't know why we're here in federal court to begin with," Judge Paul Friedman told attorneys in April. "I don't know why this guy thought it was smart to file a lawsuit and lay out all of his private, intimate details."

While legal scholars relish the setting of case law, Washington's gossip community is looking forward to hearing all the lurid details of the spanking, handcuffs and lunch-hour prostitution that made Washingtonienne a hit first time round.