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Hillary Clinton's advisers 'in a state of panic'


Telegraph

Obama will be assassinated if he wins: Nobel winner Lessing yahoo

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ABC News

'They will kill Obama if he becomes US president': Outcry over Nobel Prize winner's assassination warning Mail

'They all had to be eliminated'

Kang Khek Ieu was known as 'Cambodia's Himmler', a torturer who oversaw the deaths of 17,000 people. As he prepares to go on trial, he gives a chilling insight into the Khmer Rouge – the most detailed account yet from a top henchman


Exclusive by Valerio Pellizzari, Phnom Penh


He was Pol Pot's trusted henchman, the brilliant mathematician who calmly fashioned an efficient apparatus of torture and death out of a Phnom Penh high school and who oversaw, during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, the interrogation and cudgelling to death of some 17,000 Cambodians.

In the West he has been called "Cambodia's Heinrich Himmler"; since Pol Pot himself and his lieutenant Ta Mok cheated justice by dying, he is the most vivid symbol of the Khmer Rouge left alive. His name is Kang Khek Ieu, but he is better known by his nom de guerre, Duch (pronounced "Doik"). This spring, 28 years after fleeing Cambodia ahead of the Vietnamese army, his trial for mass murder may finally get under way.

Now, in the first interview he has given since his capture more than eight-and-a-half years ago, he talks freely about how and why he sent 17,000 Cambodians to their deaths in the killing fields.

And even as he waits to confront the proof of his crimes, it is clear that, for him, there was never any choice: anybody who was thought to pose a threat to the revolution had to be tortured and killed. Asked whether he had any moments of uncertainty, any doubts or feelings of rebellion while he set about wiping out his country's entire intellectual class, he answered: "There was a widespread and tacit understanding.

"I and everyone else who worked in that place knew that anyone who entered had to be psychologically demolished, eliminated by steady work, given no way out. No answer could avoid death. Nobody who came to us had any chance of saving himself."

The command had come from above, he said. "All the prisoners had to be eliminated. We saw enemies, enemies, enemies everywhere." He could not have rebelled or fled, he insisted. "If I had tried to flee, they were holding my family hostage, and my family would have suffered the same fate as the other prisoners in Tuol Sleng. If I had fled or rebelled it would not have helped anyone."

Between 1975 and the beginning of 1979, under Pol Pot, two million men and women, almost a third of the Cambodian population, were brutally eliminated by the Khmer Rouge – an extreme Marxist movement that aimed to take Cambodia back to "Year Zero", cutting it off from the outside world and imposing their leaders' vision of an "agrarian utopia".

Of its two million victims, more than 17,000 – party officials, diplomats, Buddhist monks, engineers, doctors, teachers, students, musicians and dancers, were brought to a former school in the heart of Phnom Penh that had been converted into a torture centre. Only six came out of it alive.

Codenamed S-21, the centre was run by Duch, a former maths teacher who had become the head of the regime's secret police. In the former classrooms, over a period of 40 months, Duch oversaw the extermination of the entire Cambodian intellectual class with mathematical rigour.

Confessions were extracted by primitive torture: prisoners were strapped to iron beds, suspended upside down from ropes, threatened with drowning, tormented with knives and pincers, locked in tiny cells. Then, at night, they were taken by lorry to the outskirts of Phnom Penh and killed in the rice fields. The Khmer Rouge were obsessed with killing by night.

Now at last, after years of argument between the Cambodian government and the United Nations, the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy are finally being brought to justice. They will be tried under a hybrid UN-Cambodian tribunal known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia; the pre-trial hearings began in November and are still going on. Pol Pot, of course, is long dead, having died under house arrest before he could be tried in 1998. The bloodiest of his comrades, Ta Mok, died in 1996. But five senior leaders including Khieu Sampan, the Khmer Rouge president, await trial.

Duch made his first appearance in court in November when his lawyer asked for him to be let out on bail because his "human rights had been violated, even if he was not beaten or tortured". A ripple of ironic laughter ran round the courtroom. The request was rejected.

My quest to interview Duch had begun nearly three years ago. I first visited S-21, soon after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Since his arrest more than eight years ago, nobody from the outside had even clapped eyes on him. Now, finally, I was looking at this frail, 66-year-old man with his protruding, irregular teeth, bug eyes and washed-out grey clothes. I was confronting the mystery of the banality and the innocence of evil.

Throughout our interview, his voice was low, respectful like a mantra, a Buddhist prayer, rather than what it really was; the soundtrack of a nightmare still freighted with questions. His mild-mannered almost frail appearance in no way suggested the role of a mass murderer.

For the interview, the rules were strict: no tape recorder, no camera, no talking to him directly in French or English but only through a Cambodian interpreter. General Neang Phat, Cambodia's Secretary of State, and other generals were sitting in the same room, listening to and scrutinising this indefinable and unfathomable man. Some of them, too, have evil memories of the Khmer Rouge years. But Duch was the exact picture of the banality and innocence of evil.

Duch, the nickname he assumed when he was young and joined the guerrillas, told me that the torture centre at Tuol Sleng was set up in August 1975, four months after the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, and began work two months later.

"I was given the task of creating it and starting it up, although I never found out why they chose me. Before 1975, when the Khmer Rouge lived in hiding, in the jungle, or in the liberated zones, I was the head of Office 13, I was the chief of police in the special zone bordering on Phnom Penh."

He described a routine of bureaucratic monotony. "Every day I had to read and check the confessions. I read from seven in the morning until midnight. And every day, towards three in the afternoon, Professor Son Sen, the minister of defence, summoned me. I had known him since my time as a high school teacher. It was he who had asked me to join the guerrillas.

"He would ask me how my work was going. Then a messenger would arrive, an envoy, who collected the confessions that were ready and took them to Son Sen. These messengers were the only links between one office and another."

I wanted to know if Duch had any moments of uncertainty, doubts, feelings of rebellion while he was wiping out his country's entire intellectual class.

He admitted the idea had crossed his mind. "When the work started at Tuol Sleng, I asked my bosses now and then, 'Do we really have to use all this violence?' Son Sen never answered. Nuon Chea, the No 2 Brother in the power structure, who was above him, told me: 'Don't think about these things.'

"I personally had no answer. Then with the passing of time, I understood. It was Ta Mok who had ordered all the prisoners to be eliminated. We saw enemies, enemies, enemies everywhere.

"I was cornered, like everyone in that machine, I had no alternative. Pol Pot, the No 1 Brother, said you always had to be suspicious, to fear something. And thus the usual request came: interrogate them again, interrogate them better."

Sometimes Duch was tempted to be merciful, he claimed – and his superiors began to mistrust him. He recalled the time a cousin was brought to S-21.

"I knew him well, we had formed sincere family ties but I had to eliminate him anyway. I knew he was a good person but I had to pretend to believe that confession extorted with violence. So in order to protect him I didn't analyse those statements too rigorously. And on that occasion my superiors began to lose full trust in me. At the same time I didn't feel safe any more."

But the moment of official doubt passed. The interrogations and executions continued, remorselessly until the end.

"You kept your post until the end," I said. "Did you always carry out your orders thoroughly?"

Duch answered: "I obeyed. The work carried on until 7 January 1979, when the Cambodian liberation forces, supported by the Vietnamese, conquered Phnom Penh. There was no escape plan, no pull-out plan ..."

But, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the executioner blended back in among his countrymen, and disappeared, as so many did in the post-war chaos, swallowed up by the void.

Many years later he was converted to Christianity by American missionaries. His true identity was discovered in 1998 and soon afterwards he was arrested. He remains the most disquieting witness of the political madness planned by the Khmer Rouge, after the death of Pol Pot and Ta Mok, the one-legged "butcher".

I asked him how he converted to Christianity and why that happened. "I became convinced that Christians were a force, and that this force could beat Communism. At the time of the guerrilla war, I was 25 years old, Cambodia was corrupt, Communism was full of promise and I believed in it. But that project failed completely."

So if Duch has repented now, what is his attitude to all those thousands of victims of his violence? There was no alternative for people like himself, trapped inside the machinery of the Khmer Rouge, he said.

"If someone goes looking for guilt, and the various degrees of guilt, I say that there was no way out for anyone who entered the power system conceived by Pol Pot. Only at the top did they know the real situation in the country, but the intermediate functionaries did not know. And then there was that obsession with secrecy.

"Of course, you are asking me whether I could have rebelled, or at least fled. But if I had tried to flee, they were holding my family hostage, and my family would have suffered the same fate as the other prisoners in Tuol Sleng. If I had fled or rebelled it would not have helped anyone."

Independent

U.S. seeking death penalty for six 9/11 suspects - including 'mastermind' - in Guantanamo trial Mail

Drawing the line courier-journa

9/11 Guantanamo tribunal will be a show trial, warns UN chief as America seeks the death penalty Mail

US accused of using 'kangaroo court' to try men accused of role in September 11 attacks


By Andrew Gumbel


The United States military announced yesterday that it was bringing death penalty charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other men suspected of orchestrating the September 11 attacks, and intended to try them under the Bush administration's much-criticised military tribunal system, which is subject only to partial oversight by the civilian appeals system.

The decision to use Mohammed and the others as guinea-pigs in a constitutionally dubious legal proceeding is likely to trigger a firestorm of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world and spark a fractious domestic debate in an already highly charged presidential election year.

Concerns were raised last night of political interference by the White House in the military's decision to go to trial in the middle of an election campaign in which the Republican frontrunner, John McCain, has made the fight against al-Qa'ida central to his election bid.

"What we are looking at is a series of show trials by the Bush administration that are really devoid of any due process considerations," said Vincent Warren, the executive director head of Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents many Guantanamo detainees. "Rather than playing politics the Bush administration should be seeking speedy and fair trials," he said. "These are trials that are going to be based on torture as confessions as well as secret evidence. There is no way that this can be said to be fair especially as the death penalty could be an outcome."

While few doubts have been raised, domestically or internationally, about the men's involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington, just about everything else about their treatment has been bitterly contested and is likely to continue to be contested, inside the courtroom and out. Everything is laden with potential controversy – the decision to try the six men together rather than individually, the proposed venue at Guantanamo Bay, where all six are being held, the threatened use of the death penalty, and perhaps the most controversial question of all: the admissibility of evidence gathered through waterboarding and other coercive techniques generally defined as torture.

Even Brig-Gen Thomas Hartmann, the Pentagon official co-ordinating the case, acknowledged yesterday that it could be several months before a trial begins and months more, if not years, before any death penalty – assuming it is enforced – is carried out.

General Hartmann was careful to say that he wanted the trial proceedings to be "as completely open as possible", with lawyers and journalists present in the courtroom – barring the possibility of some closed sessions to consider classified information. He stressed that the men would be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, just as they would in a civilian court. And he promised to provide "every piece of evidence, every stitch of evidence, every whiff of evidence" to the defendants' lawyers so they would be fully able to prepare for trial.

That did little to stop Clive Stafford Smith, the British lawyer who has worked on behalf of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo, to issue a condemnation of the "kangaroo court". He said: "Anyone can see the hypocrisy of espousing human rights, then trampling on them. We will infuriate our allies who firmly oppose the death penalty. We will anger the world."

Aside from Mohammed, alleged to be the mastermind who planned and coordinated the September 11 attacks, the defendants are Mohammed al-Qahtani, labelled by US officials the "20th hijacker" who never made it on board any of the planes that were crashed; Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, an associate of Mohammed Atta's in Hamburg who is believed to have acted as an intermediary between the hijackers and the al-Qa'ida leadership; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a nephew of Mohammed's suspected of acting as his chief lieutenant; Waleed bin Attash, believed to have trained the hijackers; and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi.

But contrary to General Hartmann's assurances, it is far from clear what rights any of these men will have. The Supreme Court, which struck down an earlier version of the military tribunal system, is expected to rule before July on whether the protections of the US Constitution apply to them.

Several commentators noted yesterday that the Bush administration is taking a risk by trying to press ahead with the trials. Its previous efforts to pursue justice against suspected terrorists have been patchy, if not downright disastrous.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the French national previously labelled the 20th hijacker, escaped the death penalty at his civilian trial and emerged as a deeply disturbed individual scarcely capable of participating in a sophisticated guerrilla operation – much to the embarrassment of the federal prosecutors who tried him in civilian court in Virginia.

Jose Padilla, the US citizen accused of wanting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb", won the argument that he could not be held indefinitely in military custody without trial and went on trial in civilian court. He received a far lighter sentence than his prosecutors were seeking – 17 years instead of 30 to life.

The Bush administration appears to believe that, politically at least, it can win the argument by stirring up the country's emotions about the worst peacetime attack on its own soil.

Facing execution

* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The Pakistani, educated in the US, claims responsibility for 31 attacks and plots including the 9/11 attacks and the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Accused of being military commander for al-Qa'ida's foreign operations. Captured in Pakistan in 2003 and taken to Guantanamo Bay from secret CIA prison. During interrogation, was subjected to simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

* Ali Adb Al-Aziz Ali

A nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and cousin of jailed 9/11 bomber Ramzi Yousef. Accused of facilitating the attacks by transferring $120,000 to US-based operatives and assisting nine hijackers on their way from Pakistan.

* Ramzi Bin al-shibh

The former room-mate of Mohamed Atta is accused of being a link between al-Qa'ida and the hijackers. The Pentagon says he helped find flight schools for the al-Qa'ida pilots.

* Walid Bin Attash

The Yemeni, who was raised in Saudi Arabia, is accused of running al-Qa'ida camp in Afghanistan where he trained two 9/11 hijackers. Has admitted planning the attack on the USS Cole, and has also claimed involvement in the bombing of the US embassy in Kenya.

* Mustafa Ahmad al-hawsawi

The Saudi national is accused of being a money-man for the 9/11 attackers. The Pentagon says he provided them with cash, Western clothing, credit cards traveller's cheques.

* Mohammed al-Qahtani

Officials say he was meant to be one of the hijackers but was barred from the US by immigration officials at Orlando Airport. Captured at Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan.

Independent

Nicolas Sarkozy: The problem with the president

He swaggered into the Elysée Palace on a promise to reinvent France for the 21st century. But after just eight months, Nicolas Sarkozy's popularity is plummeting – and his personal life is becoming a soap opera. Is he up to the job? John Lichfield reports.

Imagine, for a moment, President Charles de Gaulle in dark glasses and dark roll-top jumper sitting at a café terrace in Versailles with his newly married pop-singer wife.Imagine also le Général in open-neck shirt and jeans on an Egyptian holiday. The tall, austere saviour of France is walking, hand in hand, with Mick Jagger's ex-girlfriend. Her small son sits on his shoulders, looking embarrassed.

Imagine, for a moment, President Jacques Chirac in the Vatican, fiddling compulsively with the buttons of his mobile phone as his companions are being presented to the Pope. The presidential entourage includes, incidentally, France's most vulgar and foul-mouthed comedian, Jean-Marie Bigard, a kind of Gallic Bernard Manning.

Imagine, for a moment, President François Mitterrand receiving ministerial visits to his office in the Elysée Palace with his feet up on his desk. Worse, imagine the suave, icy President Mitterrand addressing almost everyone he meets with the familiar "tu", instead of the dignified and respectful "vous".

In his eight months as French head of state, Nicolas Sarkozy has done all these things and more. Genres have been confused, values muddled, conventions trampled, traditions overturned.

President Sarkozy promised last year to reinvent France for the 21st century, while preserving, or rekindling, "traditional values". He has started by reinventing – or, some say, desecrating – the French presidency.

The aloof, discreet, solemn, haughty, republican monarchy invented by Charles de Gaulle has become a non-stop blur of microphones, photo-opportunities, millionaire's yachts, Rolex watches, dark glasses, mobile phones, jeans, jogging shorts, a divorce, and now a trophy wife.

M. Sarkozy has become a kind of President "moi", governing with a mirror in one hand, seeking permanent, public attention and approval. In the last two weeks, however, events have started to spin out of the control of a man who is desperate to appear always in control.

If you have missed the most recent episodes in the Sarko soap opera, here is a brief update:

Less than four months after the spectacular break-up of his second marriage, the President who wants to restore "Catholic values" has married a beautiful, left-wing, libertarian pop-singer. His new bride, Carla Bruni, once said that she was "bored to death by monogamy".

According to a respected, centre-left magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, President Sarkozy sent a text message to his ex-wife Cécilia eight days before the marriage offering to "drop everything" if she came back to him. M. Sarkozy has brought a criminal action against the magazine for "forgery", but also for "receiving stolen goods". So, was the message a fake or was it "stolen"?

President Sarkozy's control over his own centre-right political party – almost complete two months ago – is under threat. Once again, his tangling of politics and family is to blame. The President tried to parachute his chief press officer, David Martinon, into the town hall of his own former fiefdom of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a millionaires' ghetto just west of Paris. M. Martinon, a close friend of M. Sarkozy's second, now ex-wife Cécilia proved to be a hopeless and unpopular candidate for mayor. He was forced to withdraw yesterday after a revolt by other local centre-right candidates, including Jean Sarkozy, 22, the President's son from his first marriage.

The soap-opera analogy is hardly far-fetched. With almost daily conflicts involving former wives, and confidants of former wives, and sons of previous marriages, the Elysée Palace has started to resemble the Ewing family ranch in Dallas. At first, even some of M. Sarkozy's political enemies found aspects of the informal, self-regarding Sarko style to be refreshing. There were some who argued that the new approach was part of a calculated attempt to change the way that France thinks of itself: to create a cult of success; to break down the old stuffy barriers between the French people and their ruling élite.

Now, many of President Sarkozy's supporters, and nominal allies, fear that the Sarko style may not be a style at all but an absence of style; a nouveau-riche vulgarité; a contempt for the importance of tradition; an arrogant belief that the office-holder is more important than the office.

Jean-Louis Debré, the president of France's constitutional council, part of a political dynasty with impeccable Gaullist and conservative credentials, caused a stir by saying publicly what many centre-right politicians are saying privately: President Sarkozy, as head of state, not a mere head of government, lacks "decorum" and "dignity".

"From the moment that you have been given a certain mission by the people, there are certain manners that you have to observe," said M. Debré, a member of the diehard Chiraquian wing of M. Sarkozy's centre-right party. "The authority of the state, and the legitimacy conferred upon you by the people, implies a certain decorum, a certain dignity of office ... You have to be careful not to desanctify your official function."

Many unpleasant remarks were attributed to the President's former wife Cécilia, by her biographer Anna Bitton earlier this month. She described her former husband as a serial "sauteur" (shagger) and a man who "loves no one, not even his children". She complained that M. Sarkozy had reacted to their divorce last October by holding "karaoke parties" with "bimbos" until four in the morning.

Attacks on an ex-husband by an ex-wife should, perhaps, be treated with caution. However, one relatively restrained comment by the second Mme Sarkozy was, maybe, the most telling of all: "Nicolas does not come over like a President of the Republic," she said. "He has a real behaviour problem. Someone needs to tell him."

For "someone" read a series of disastrous opinion polls. In a new Ipsos survey yesterday, to be published in full on Thursday, the President's approval rating will plunge to 39 per cent – 10 percentage points down in one month. Only President Chirac has ever fallen further and faster. One pollster said that many voters are beginning to wonder whether the Sarkozy of last year's election campaign – energetic, can-do, plain-speaking – had been, quite simply, an "imposter".

The President is losing ground especially among the socially conservative over-60s, precisely the constituency that gave him his handsome victory over the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, last May. If the election had been held among voters aged 18 to 60 alone, Royal would have won.

A youngish député (MP) in M. Sarkozy's party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), told The Independent: "The view of my older constituents can be summarised as follows: 'We could swallow his divorce, even if it was his second one, and even if it happened so soon after he became President. But to marry again, less than four months after a divorce, is the kind of thing that you would be devastated to see your youngest son doing, let alone the President of the Republic.'"

M. Sarkozy's abrupt collapse in the polls is attributed by pollsters to a dangerous chemical reaction between two negatives. First, there is disappointment that President Sarkozy has failed to deliver his promised "shock of confidence" that would boost the economy and disposable income. Second, there is a growing distaste for the President's glitzy, showbiz lifestyle and his casual treatment of the presidential office. French people gave M. Sarkozy a 60 per cent-plus approval ratings only five months ago. They are now beginning to ask, in the words of one pollster, whether he is "all blah-blah and bling-bling". Is Speedy Sarkozy in danger of spinning off the track?



There was nothing wrong, in principle, with a change of presidential style. The old Mitterrand-Chirac act – I'm-all-powerful-but-not-always-responsible – was wearing thin. Both Mitterrand and Chirac upheld the pompous, avuncular traditions of the French presidency, but – as M. Sarkozy is quick to point out – both tainted the office in other ways. President Mitterrand secretly ran a second family. President Chirac manipulated the legal protections of his office to avoid criminal investigation for misuse of public funds.

There is something rather vulgar about M. Sarkozy, but his vulgarity and his energy are inseparable. Although he has been a politician since his twenties, he spent his formative years as mayor of the aforementioned millionaires' suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He is not part of the traditional French ruling class: effortlessly superior and understated, sustained by "old money" or the administrative certainties of the system of the grandes ecoles, or élite colleges.

President Sarkozy represents a Nouvelle France of media and advertising, luxury goods and "new" money. The society in which he moves is brash, self-promoting and full of energy and ideas, although not always good ones. It was not an accident – although it might be read as a provocation – that the witnesses at his wedding came from the world of luxury goods, high fashion and pop music.

Some political analysts, such as Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, a lecturer in political philosophy at the Sorbonne, argue that Sarkozy's "bling-bling" presidency is partly uncontrolled (that's simply the way he is), and partly calculated. M. Sarkozy is obsessed, he says, with the need to break out of the straitjacket of "democratic mediocrity". He wants to seem ordinary but at the same time, extraordinary. He wants to be a pragmatic, can-do politician with a pop-star lifestyle. He believes that this is the way to remain popular in a world in which politicians are doomed to seem mediocre, or powerless, or both. M. Sarkozy detests the suggestion that, in global terms, national politicians are often helpless to control events. He has an almost psychotic need to have an answer, and a policy, and an ideology, for everything.

Fellow centre-right politicians believe that they have the key to this part of M. Sarkozy's personality. He is determined to be seen to be the "anti-Chirac". Where his old mentor was semi-detached, Sarkozy wants to be involved. Where the father-figure that he abandoned had no clear political philosophy, Sarkozy wants to be a political thinker (even if he never seems to think the same thing for very long). Where the president that he outwitted was old, and old-fashioned, Sarkozy wants to be a pop icon of the 21st century.

But where is President Sarkozy going? The much-trumpeted, mould-breaking economic reforms have been rather modest so far. Unabashed by a lack of concrete results, President Sarkozy has made a series of sweeping "vision" statements: on Africa; on religion and social values; and on the need for a new "politics of civilisation", which will dethrone growth and material success as the engines of Western life and politics. There has been much that is intelligent in these statements, and much that is disturbing and confusing.

After eight months in office, we are no closer to answering the questions raised by his presidential campaign. President Sarkozy, the man hailed simplistically by the British and American right-wing press as a Gallic Margaret Thatcher, remains an interventionist and a protectionist at heart.

Two days after his wedding, he was standing outside a threatened steelworks in Lorraine promising the workers that the cash-strapped French state would never let their mill – or any other steel mill – close. Later the same day, he flew to Bucharest, spent only four hours in Romania, irritating his hosts, and flew back again. The day afterwards, it emerged that there was no legal basis on which President Sarkozy could bale out a failing steelworks belonging to a profitable company.

President Sarkozy's friends and political allies hope that his marriage will calm him and take his private life out of the news. (Some hope, you might say, with a beautiful pop-singer for a wife). They believe that the French presidency of the EU in the second half of this year will feed his bulimic need for work and attention. After discovering that he cannot achieve instant results, President Sarkozy is now prepared, they say, to enter a more reflective and calm passage of his presidency. The break-up with Cécilia badly unsettled a man who is agitated at the best of times, they say. The idyll with Carla – genuine, they insist, whatever Le Nouvel Observateur might claim – will help him to adopt a more restrained and thoughtful approach.

One of the first outward signs, officials say, is the President's new ideology, the "politics of civilisation" – an appeal for a more ecological, less market-driven approach to the future of the planet and humanity. (Is this also the first sign of the influence of his new left-wing wife?) The policy is far from wrong-headed. It addresses, quite cleverly, the zeitgeist of the "late Noughties". Across Europe, even across the Atlantic, the public mood is slowly turning against the tyranny of growth and markets in favour of softer, greener values.

"We cannot hope to change our ways of doing things and our way of thinking if our definitions of wealth remain the same," President Sarkozy said last month. "We need to take into account quality, not only quantity, to promote a new kind of growth."

The problem is that President Sarkozy had previously promised to be the "president of purchasing power". He had previously promised to make France "work more to earn more". He had previously promised to make France the "fastest growing country in the EU". A politician defined by billionaires' yachts, Rolex watches, Dior engagement rings and trophy wives is perhaps not best placed to preach that happiness cannot be achieved through material possessions.

Contradictions have always been part of the Sarko package. What had once seemed refreshingly original, an ability to straddle the normal boundaries of party and ideology, is now beginning to look merely shallow: an adman's talent for hijacking and exploiting hot-button issues.

When he visited the Pope in December, President Sarkozy made a complex, very thoughtful speech that is still reverberating through French politics and society five weeks later. In a deliberate break with the ideology of a "lay" or secular Republic, which has dominated French politics for the last century, M. Sarkozy said that France needed "moral thinking, inspired by religious convictions".



Another "imposture"? President Sarkozy is said by friends and family to be a fundamentally non-religious man. He rarely attends Mass. A couple of hours before his appeal for Catholic values, he fiddled with his mobile phone in front of the Pope. He brought a foul-mouthed stand-up comic – and devout Catholic – to Rome as part of his official delegation.

Politicians within M. Sarkozy's party – even his long-suffering, honorable Prime Minister, François Fillon – are struggling to keep up with the zigs and zags of "Sarkozisme". The president's inconsistencies, and rhetorical flourishes, are often blamed on his two most influential, unelected advisers, Henri Guaino, his speechwriter and "special councillor" and Claude Guéant, the secretary-general of the Elysée Palace. They are known as Sarkozy's "head and legs". They have become a kind of separate government, interfering – sometimes with unfortunate results – in domestic and foreign policy.

Both are Eurosceptic, market-sceptic, French nationalists. Both come from the old Gaullist tradition of a kind of paternalist, interventionist conservatism. Their influence infuriates the elected politicians in M. Sarkozy's party. So has his policy of "opening" his government to politicians of the centre-left, and inexperienced politicians of North African or African origin. The policy of racial "ouverture" was long overdue. It represents President Sarkozy's most important achievement to date.

All the same, UMP politicians – and not only those who feel cheated of ministerial posts – complain that M. Sarkozy's "openness" has led to an extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of one man. By promoting ministers from nowhere, or literally from left-field, President Sarkozy has excluded, or diminished, other centre-right politicians who had built power bases of their own.

Here is another paradox. By marginalising the Prime Minister, M. Fillon, President Sarkozy has made the presidency more powerful than ever. At the same time, he stands accused of weakening the sacred and symbolic power of the office, with his casual, and sometime thoughtless, behaviour.

"By leaping from one dossier to another, from Disneyland to the Vatican, from the world of politics to the high life, he seems to have no concern for the reputation of his office," said Jean-Pierre Le Goff, a sociologist who has just published a book on the rootlessness of modern France (La France morcelée, published by Gallimard). Sarkozy was elected on a promise to restore the moral bearings of France, allegedly progressively undermined since the student revolution of May 1968. Instead, M. Le Goff says, the President's odd behaviour has deepened the nation's already "profound sense of disorientation".

While M. Sarkozy was popular, his morass of contradictions was forgiven by his own supporters and, up to a point, by the French press. Since his collapse in the opinion polls, all bets are off.

Since the creation of an executive presidency in 1958, it has been the job of the French prime minister to be unpopular and shield the reputation of the president. The hyperactive M. Sarkozy has reversed the roles. He is plunging in the polls; his calm, thoughtful Prime Minister, François Fillon, is rising. This is unprecedented in modern French politics.

A section of the UMP – the party that M. Sarkozy brilliantly stole from under President Chirac's not-inconsiderable nose – is in open revolt. With municipal elections approaching in March, many centre-right candidates are scrambling to take the UMP colours and symbol off their literature and websites. This was happening even before the farcical calamity of M. Martinon's Sarko-inspired candidacy in Neuilly, the President's own power-base.

We have been here before, admittedly by a very different route. A French president sets out to be everything to everyone without doing much. He ends up by being unpopular with almost everybody. President Sarkozy, the anti-Chirac, may be more like Jacques Chirac than he thinks. But all is not lost. The President has more than four years in which to calm the excesses of his glitzy style. There is a difference, the French are telling him, between being youthful, informal, energetic and refreshing, and being inappropriate and annoying.

As France's most readable political commentator, Alain Duhamel, points out, the Sarko approach leaves no room for the undecided: "You worship him or you loathe him." If his reform policies begin to succeed, if the French economy turns upward (a big "if"), M. Sarkozy could become rapidly popular again.

All eyes will be on him and the new Mme Sarkozy when they make their first big state visit, on 26 March, to Britain. Of the two, it is perhaps France's First Lady who is less likely to do, or say, something disconcerting or embarrassing. A failed Sarkozy presidency would be a calamity, and not just for France. He sold himself to the French people as the energetic, pragmatic, democratic antidote to the extremes of both right and left. Except possibly the Prime Minister, M. Fillon, there is no obvious alternative to M. Sarkozy in the rest of the moderate French democratic landscape – on the right or the left.

Louis XV, the penultimate king before the French Revolution, is supposed to have said, "Après moi, le déluge". (After me, the flood or the downpour.) If M. Sarkozy fails, in a blaze of bling, France faces a similarly grim prospect. Après Président Moi, le déluge?
Independent

Mr Obama is doing very well in the race for the White House, at the moment.

It'll be interesting to see what the future holds.

I have no opinion on him one way or the other - just hope that the U.S. chooses a good leader.

All the same, I had to laugh at some American wit, who said that he feared for the future - and came up with this line - 'The United States in future - 'The Obama Nation of Desolation?'.

US aims to shoot down rogue satellite

The US today announced it is planning to shoot down the out of control spy satellite expected to hit the Earth early next month.

Officials said that the preferred option will be to fire a missile from a US Navy cruiser, and blast the satellite before it enters Earth's atmosphere.

Shooting down a satellite is particularly sensitive because of the controversy surrounding China's anti-satellite test last year, when Beijing shot down one of its defunct weather satellites, drawing immediate criticism from the US and other countries.

The broken satellite is in a deteriorating orbit and is expected to hit Earth during the first week of March. Officials said the Navy would probably shoot it down before then using a special missile modified for the task.

Other details about the missile and the targeting were not available. But the decision involves several US agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Defence and the State Department.

A key concern over China's anti-satellite test was the debris created by the satellite's destruction - and that will also be a focus now.

The military will have to choose a time and a location that will avoid to the greatest degree any damage to other satellites in the sky. Also, there is the possibility that large pieces could remain, and either stay in orbit where they can hit other satellites or possibly fall to Earth.

It is not known where the satellite will hit. But officials familiar with the situation say about half of the 5,000-pound spacecraft is expected to survive its blazing descent through the atmosphere and would scatter debris - some of it potentially hazardous - over several hundred miles.

The satellite is outfitted with thrusters - small engines used to position it in space. They contain the toxic rocket fuel hydrazine, which can cause harm to anyone who comes into contact with it.
[/url=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-aims-to-shoot-down-rogue-satellite-782391.html]independent

In Olympic year, China urged to use its influence in Darfur Independent

Fox News Radio's Tom Sullivan aired "side-by-side comparison" of speeches by Hitler and Obama mediamatters