LETTER FROM AMERICA: This week there has been yet more heated argument over the questions of what did the President know, and when did he know it? No, not George Bush and the hype over the threat from Saddam Hussein, but Richard Nixon and the Watergate break-in, writes Conor O'Clery.
In the 30 years since he resigned, there has never been any concrete evidence that Nixon personally ordered the burglary of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex that led to his downfall.
But the question still fascinates America. Most historians give Nixon the benefit of the doubt and charge him only with the cover-up. Now a former campaign aide has come forward to say that Nixon did indeed give the go-ahead for the break-in.
Jeb Stuart Magruder said in an interview for a television documentary that he was present with attorney general John Mitchell when Mitchell took a call from Nixon in which he heard Nixon saying: "John . . . you need to do that."
Magruder was deputy director of Nixon's 1972 Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) and regularly met G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the burglary. As historian Daniel Greenberg pointed out, the new evidence wouldn't stand up in court.
There is no tape-recording of the call, nor was it logged. Another Nixon historian, Richard Reeves, said it was believeable but up to now Magruder had lied about it.
Nevertheless Magruder was convincing in television interviews he gave during the week. He said there was a simple reason he held back the information. He hoped Nixon would pardon him, and with good reason: a tape exists on which Nixon said "We'll take care of Magruder."
But Nixon didn't look after him. By the time Magruder had served seven months for obstruction of justice people had stopped asking the question.
He then became a Presbyterian minister on his release and did not want to draw attention to himself by charging Nixon with something that the former president and Mitchell would likely deny.
But they have since died, and Magruder said he wanted to set the record straight before he, too, departed the scene.
ONE of the remarkable things about the current White House is how it has given top jobs to several former officials who faced charges of wrongdoing in previous administrations.
Elliott Abrams, for example, who misled Congress over the Iran-Contra affair and was pardoned by George Bush snr, is now Assistant Secretary of State. Otto Reich, who spread covert pro-Contra propaganda, is also Assistant Secretary.
Retired admiral John Poindexter, who was national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan when he planned the illegal sale of missiles to Iran to get cash to buy arms for the pro-American Contras in Nicaragua and who was convicted of lying to Congress (though his six-month sentence was overturned in an immunity deal) was given a highly sensitive post in the Pentagon last year.
He conceived a project to create a database on every US resident as part of the war on terrorism, with the Orwellian title of Total Information Awareness.
This would use information from e-mail and telephone accounts, credit cards, ATMs, school records, travel bookings, toll payments and library records to build a file on every citizen.
Congess vetoed using the programme against Americans. Now it turns out that Poindexter is the person behind the ghoulish scheme by the Pentagon to set up a programme called Policy Analysis Market, which amounted to a futures market on terrorism.
Investors would trade in predictions about Middle East events so the Pentagon could assess the probability of events. Owners of futures contracts who predicted correctly could collect from investors who forecast wrongly.
The programme's web page suggested that players might bet on the chances of Yasser Arafat being assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II being overthrown.
Registration of an initial 1,000 investors was to begin yesterday. That was until some senators got to hear about it and expressed outrage at the $3 million programme.
The Pentagon hastily pulled the plug. The surprise is that it wasn't just sponsored by Poindexter's Pentagon operation, which comes under the umbrella of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
The publisher of the prestigious Economist magazine was also involved in the wacky scheme.
The Policy Analysis Market website disclosed that it was a joint programme of the Pentagon and two private companies, Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the publisher of the Economist magazine.
THE big brother thinking behind John Poindexter's designs was probably at work when Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez received a visit from the Secret Service for a cartoon he published on Sunday.
It was a rehash of the famous 1968 photograph showing the South Vietnamese police chief executing a Viet Cong guerrilla. In the cartoon the executioner is called "politics" and he is holding a gun to the head of a kneeling George Bush.
Ramirez explained to National Public Radio that it was appropriate "because metaphorically I was saying that there are people currently engaged in the political assassination of our President."
On Monday morning a Secret Service agent turned up at the LA Times editorial office, but the paper turned him away.
There the matter rests. Ramirez said the President should not feel threatened, especially as the cartoon came down on his side. The Secret Service said the inquiry was "routine".
The cartoonist told NPR: "It makes me wonder about the intelligence in our intelligence services".
He said he planned a new cartoon replacing the South Vietnam police chief with a Howitzer labelled "Secret Service," and himself instead of the President, with a bubble saying: "Over-reacting a little bit, aren't you?"
ELEVEN years ago New York lawyer John Connorton was a key figure in getting the Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, to meet the Irish community and commit himself to helping the Northern Ireland peace process if elected president.
In subsequent years Connorton regularly hosted Irish and Northern Ireland political representatives visiting the United States to help push the process along.
On Wednesday evening the Wall Street lawyer was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws by the University of Ulster, conferred in a rare off-campus ceremony hosted by Fordham University School of Law in New York City.
University of Ulster president, Dr Gerry McKenna, praised Connorton for his "vital contribution to peace and reconciliation" in Northern Ireland, and Nobel laureates John Hume and David Trimble sent messages of congratulation.