Julian Borger

In 2000 Nader took almost 100,000 votes in Florida. Al Gore lost (after Supreme Court intervention) by 537 votes. That is why the Democratic Party, abetted by many former Nader’s Raiders, shock troops of the civic activism Nader pioneered, have spent six months desperately trying to keep him off ballots.

Like all civil wars, it has been nasty. “It’s beyond bitter,” said Toby Moffett, formerly one of Nader’s oldest friends and now leader of the legal campaign to stop him. “He likes to say whoever used to be in his movement and is now against him is corrupt and a sellout. We think he has totally lost his bearings.”

The Nader campaign has been helped by right-wingers well aware of its potential to split the progressive vote. Naderites have also resorted to dubious means to obtain signatures on state petitions to get his name on the ballot. Homeless people were paid for every signature they collected; and thousands of signatures were found to have been forged in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, scrawled alongside names and addresses copied out of a phone directory.

Anti-Nader forces, meanwhile, have fought a legal war of attrition, bringing one case after another with the intention of driving him out of the race.

They have not succeeded. The 70-year-old candidate is an independent in every sense. Political isolation only deepens his martyr’s sense of righteousness. “I always thought that running for elective office is the consummate expression of the right to free speech, assembly and petition under our First Amendment. It shouldn’t be that difficult in a democracy to get on the ballot,” he told University of Minnesota students. He has fought his way onto the ballot in nearly 40 states. But legal objections to the dodgy signatures in Ohio and Pennsylvania have kept him out of two of the tightest and biggest battlegrounds, and the legal struggle has drained his resources. The anti-Nader campaign, combined with Kerry’s powerful performance in the debates and outspoken opposition to the Iraq war, has helped erode Nader’s backing in the polls from 5 percent in the spring to the current 1 percent rump.

Anna Greenberg, a pollster with Democratic Party ties, said the Nader vote is now very different from four years ago. Its profile now more closely resembles the voters who backed Ross Perot, the maverick conservative Texan who ran in 1992 and 1996.

“In 2000 you had younger college-educated males who were progressive and interested in environmentalist issues,” she said. “This time it’s more like the Perot vote in the ’90s: economically populist, anti-corporate, blue-collar. They are much more conservative than Nader 2000.”

According to recent Gallup figures, when Nader supporters were asked who they would vote for if he were not on the ballot, 52 percent opted for Bush. Greenberg disagrees. Her polling tells her Nader still hurts Kerry more than Bush, although by a much smaller degree than a few months ago.

In swing states where Nader has slightly more backing — Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Florida — most pollsters believe he still poses a greater threat to the Democrat. The Democrats certainly think so. More than 75 former Nader’s Raiders published an open letter: “As the recipient of financial and political support from rightwing campaign donors, Ralph is party to a disingenuous effort to split the progressive vote in key states. With the major party candidates in a dead heat, Nader is poised to tip the election to Bush — again.” The ex-Raiders will be using phones and chat rooms to convince like-minded Americans to switch their votes.

Yet Nader soldiers on, Thursday kicking off a tour of a dozen states with a trip to Florida. His sheer determination is a testament to his single-mindedness. He has never married, and has few interests other than political reform. It was bred in the bone. His father, Nathra, a Lebanese immigrant, ran a restaurant in Winsted, Conn., where his forthright political views were served up along with the food.

Around the dinner table, the young Ralph was called on to explain and defend his beliefs. “I spent countless nights around that table eating wonderful Arabic food, and talking to his father and mother,” his old friend Moffett, a fellow Lebanese-American recalls. “They were very principled people, very idealistic people, but they were also out there. They were not interested in marginal victories; only the absolute will do.”

The young Ralph hated working in a small Connecticut law firm. Restless, he spent his summers hitchhiking across the country talking to truckers and traveling salesmen. What struck him was how dangerous their work was. Their vehicles were deathtraps. Getting a job as a congressional aide in the early 1960s, he researched the car industry, and in 1965, produced “Unsafe at Any Speed,” an indictment of modern cars, particularly the Chevrolet Corvair.

For years it was Ralph Nader against General Motors, which went so far as to hire private detectives to discredit him. It even sent a prostitute to try to seduce him at a food counter at Safeway’s, but he turned her away. So the gumshoes tried to prove he was homosexual, but were caught as they tried to follow him into Congress. The scandal made Nader into a hero overnight. The car makers were ultimately forced to introduce air bags.

In the 1970s, Nader toured the country again, this time urging students to set up public interest research groups for consumer and environmental reform. Ken Ward was a Massachusetts student in 1976. “He was talking to people afterwards, and there was a professor talking about this method of turning cow manure into methane and using it for energy,” Ward said. “And we got into a car and drove out in the middle of nowhere to go look at cow manure, at 1:30 in the morning. Most college speakers and politicians don’t do that.”

Ward became a follower and has spent his career as a consumer activist. Like so many other Raiders, he has joined the stop-Ralph effort. “In his own mind, he thinks the risk of four more years of George W. Bush is worth it to him. But how does that work, if by every single indicator it’s done nothing?”

Some critics put Nader’s perseverance down to sheer ego. But an egoist would be unnerved by the rising chorus of denigration. Nader’s certainty is so strong that defeat only reinforces it. “We lose to win, eventually,” he told the New York Times. “That’s the story of social justice. You have to be willing to lose and fight, and lose and fight, and lose and fight. Until the agenda is won.”

However, former supporters see only a stubborn old man running on pride. “It’s the whole St. Ralph syndrome. He’s pure, and we’re all corrupt. He’s just out there somewhere where it can’t be reached,” Moffett said. “He’s afraid something might be won in a marginal way. He’s only for overwhelming victory.”

In Monday’s court hearings, supporters argued that “intelligent design” does not stipulate what that guiding force might be, and is therefore not a religion. Its opponents derided it as a mere repackaging of creationism, the religious dogma that God brought life into being in its present form a few thousand years ago.

The case is a test of strength that secularist organizations hope will prove decisive in destroying the scientific credibility of intelligent design once and for all. They are therefore determined to pursue it as far as the Supreme Court if necessary.

Witold Walczak, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union arguing the case Monday, told the Guardian before the trial: “It’s the first vigorous review of intelligent design. They have so far refused to enter the forum where scientists publish their theories.”

The contest was joined Monday under the weak light bulbs of a federal district court in the state capital of Harrisburg. In a chamber more accustomed to hearing arguments over taxes and copyright, lawyers debated the meaning of science and the origins of life.

The defendants are the members of the school board of Dover, Pa., which last year became the first district in the country to require its teachers to question the scientific underpinning of evolution.

“The theory [of evolution] is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence,” Dover teachers had to tell their students. “Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

The plaintiffs are 11 parents who claim that statement is religious and therefore a violation of the constitutional separation between church and state. Their legal team, backed by the ACLU, launched an assault on intelligent design, describing it as a “clever, tactical repacking of creationism,” which the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 could not be taught alongside evolution.

“It is a wedge strategy to overturn the rules of science,” argued Eric Rothschild, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs. “It’s creationism with the words God and Bible left out. Intelligent design is not science in its infancy. It’s not science at all.”

The case for intelligent design was argued by three lawyers from the Thomas More Legal Center, a Christian foundation founded by Thomas Monaghan, a Roman Catholic multimillionaire and founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain. In his opening statement yesterday, Pat Gillan, the lead attorney for the defense, argued that the case is “about freedom in education, not about a religious agenda.”

Pointing out that the Dover statement asked schoolchildren to keep “an open mind,” Gillan said: “The primary effect of the policy would be to advance science education. It is not religion. Intelligent design is really science in its purest form — a refusal to close avenues of exploration in favor of a dominant theory.”

In the United States, the case is being portrayed as a replay of the Scopes trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee biology teacher was fined for breaking a state law banning the teaching of evolution. It was known as the “Monkey Trial” because the teacher, John Scopes, was derided for believing humans were descended from apes.

Secular science has won all the big legal battles since then, but not the struggle for American minds. In an echo of the Scopes trial, some of the Dover parents involved in the case were recently mocked at a local fair by opponents who performed a monkey dance around them.

Jeffs is also being sued by lawyers for six of the lost boys for conspiracy to purge surplus males from the community, and by his nephew, Brent Jeffs, who accuses him of sexual abuse.

Warren Jeffs’ whereabouts Monday were uncertain, but Utah officials said they believed he may be hiding in an FLDS compound near Eldorado, Texas, and they have contacted the Texan authorities.

Some have voiced concern that an attempt to corner the sect leader could provoke a tragedy like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas. Jim Hill, an investigator in Utah’s attorney general’s office, told the Guardian Monday: “From everything I’ve been able to discern about Warren Jeffs, he is someone who is capable of some very different things. Whether that includes a mass suicide, I don’t know. But I worry about it all the time.”

FLDS officials and the sect’s lawyer, Rodney Parker, did not return calls seeking comment, but they have previously argued that the lost boys were exiled from their communities because they were teenage delinquents who refused to abide by the sect’s rules.

Hill said although the boys may have been rebellious, their expulsion had more to do with the ruthless sexual arithmetic of a polygamous sect. “Obviously if you’re going to have three to one or four to one female-to-male marriages, you’re going to run out of females. The way of taking care of it is selectively casting out those you don’t want to be in the religion,” the investigator said.

Dave Bills, who runs Smiles for Diversity, a foundation in Salt Lake City set up by an ex-FLDS member to look after the lost boys, said it was difficult to estimate their numbers because they had been scattered. But Bills said the figures could be “as low as 400 and as high as 1,000.”

“They live every day like it’s their last day and they don’t care about anything,” Bills said. “They’re told they won’t have three wives, and they’re doomed. But they all want to go back to their moms.”

One of the boys, Gideon Barlow, said he was expelled from a FLDS community in Colorado City, Ariz., for wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. He said his mother rejected him on orders from the sect’s leaders. “I couldn’t see how my mom would let them do what they did to me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. After his expulsion, he attempted to give her a Mother’s Day present, but she told him to stay away. “I am dead to her now,” he said.

Joanne Suder, a lawyer representing some of the boys in a case against the sect, said there had been “a conspiracy to excommunicate young boys to change the arithmetic so there are more young girls available for polygamy.” She said some of the boys were simply driven out of town and dumped on the side of the road, leaving them traumatized. “I think anyone who finds themselves ousted from the only environment they ever knew and left in the middle of nowhere, and then is not allowed to be with their family and loved ones, and is led to believe that they can no longer go to heaven, is going to be troubled,” Suder told the Guardian.

Polygamy is illegal in the United States, but authorities have been wary of confronting the FLDS for fear of provoking a siege or inviting political attacks for religious persecution.

State investigators have also found it hard to persuade FLDS members to give evidence against Jeffs. However, authorities in Utah and Arizona have recently increased the pressure on the sect’s leader. Last week, a Utah judge froze FLDS assets, and the attorney’s office in Mohave County, Ariz., charged Jeffs for arranging a marriage between a 28-year-old married man and a 16-year-old girl. If convicted he could serve up to two years in prison.

Jeffs inherited the leadership of the FLDS three years ago after the death of his father, Rulon. Since then, he has ruled its enclaves on the Arizona-Utah border, in Texas and in Canada with fearsome discipline. At the age of 49 he has reportedly fathered at least 56 children by 40 wives.

There have been no confirmed sightings of Jeffs for over a year, but a photograph of a man resembling the sect leader was taken in January at the FLDS 1,700-acre Texas ranch near Eldorado.

Randy Mankin, the editor of the local newspaper, the Eldorado Success, said: “People on the ranch don’t have contact with the outside world. Two men only do whatever is necessary to do their business.”

The directive will replace a 1996 directive signed by Bill Clinton that was vaguely worded but that emphasized the peaceful use of space, in line with almost unanimous global opinion. Plans for potential space weapons were vetoed by the Clinton White House.

Space warfare experts said they expected the Bush administration directive to be similarly vague but also to signal a shift in attitude toward exploring ways of affirming U.S. dominance in space militarily. “Up to now, this has been a campaign by the Air Force to have the freedom to do what they want to do in space,” said Theresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information. “This will, for the first time in U.S. history, give them the go-ahead.”

Hitchens says the directive would trigger an arms race in space. “Let’s think of a world where the U.S. has ‘death stars’ everywhere in space that are going over countries every 10 minutes. Do you think other countries are going to accept that?” she said.

The new push to develop space weapons comes as the Earth-based missile defense system, which is intended to hit an incoming missile with another missile and was heavily promoted by the Bush administration, has been set back by technical problems and failed tests. The Air Force’s intentions were spelled out last September by Gen. Lance Lord, head of its space command, who said satellites had given U.S. military power a decisive advantage with their spying, communications and targeting capacities. That advantage had to be maintained by “space superiority.” “It can be our destiny if we work it hard and continue to aggressively follow that,” he said.

The potential weapons fall into two main categories as defined by a 2002 Pentagon planning document: “space control,” or anti-satellite warfare, and “space force application,” or attacking the ground from orbit. The Air Force claims that it can design military satellites that could protect U.S. military and civilian satellites already in orbit. However, most space experts argue that the satellites are aimed at destroying other country’s satellites.

“Space force application” weapons include the global strike program, which envisages a space plane armed with half a ton of munitions. The “rods from God” scheme would aim tungsten, titanium or uranium cylinders at targets on the ground from a position in low Earth orbit. By the time they hit the Earth they would be traveling at around 7,500 mph, with the impact of a small nuclear warhead.

Another option would use mirrors to focus an intense laser beam onto terrestrial targets, referred to as a “death star” by its critics. According to one estimate, a space-based laser would cost $100 million per target. “It’s an enormously expensive way of hitting the ground,” said Laura Grego, a space weapons expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She said the “space control” satellites were more likely to be deployed, but even they could trigger an arms race.

“We’re legitimizing the idea of attacking other people’s satellites, and we have the most to lose. This technology is diffusing rapidly,” Grego said. “To be the masters of space you’d have to not allow anyone else to launch into space. But you can’t blow up everyone’s launch pads.”

Sen. Norm Coleman, the Republican committee chairman who has taken the lead in making allegations against Galloway, repeatedly insisted that the hearing was “not a court of law.” But the early stages were nothing if not lawyerly, with Coleman very much in the role of chief prosecutor. In a low, businesslike voice, the senator from Minnesota read out an indictment of Galloway running through the evidence against him.

“Senior Iraqi officials have confirmed that you, in fact, received oil allocations and that the documents that identify you as an allocation recipient are valid,” Coleman said. “If you can provide any evidence that challenges the veracity of these documents or the statements of former Iraqi officials, we’d welcome that input.”

Then it was the Respect Party leader’s turn, and any sense of judicial propriety was instantly shattered. The courtroom became a vaudeville theater, as the M.P. lampooned his interrogators, accusing them of making “schoolboy howler” mistakes.

Galloway insisted that he was entirely innocent. “Senator, I am not now nor have I ever been an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf,” he declared, in language that deliberately echoed that of Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunt conducted half a century ago just meters from the chamber used for Tuesday’s hearing. “I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf,” he said.

The wide, wood-paneled room was packed with journalists and spectators. A group of politics students stood at the back. The turnout among senators was less spectacular, however. Only four appeared for the start of the hearing. By the time Galloway took the microphone, there were only two left, Coleman and Carl Levin, the leading Democrat on the panel.

Witnesses in this august setting, a little below and surrounded by the horseshoe bench of powerful senators, are usually awed and almost always on the defensive. Galloway was on the attack from the first moment. He entered the hearing room with guns blazing, telling journalists his inquisitors were “crazed,” “pro-war” “lickspittles” of the president, and predicting he would turn the tables on them. “I want to put these people on trial. This group of neocons is involved in the mother of smokescreens,” he said.

That was the common theme in a feat of bare-knuckled rhetoric not often witnessed by U.S. senators, who are accustomed to considerably more reverence for their positions. CNN called it a “blistering attack on senators rarely heard or seen on Capitol Hill.”

Galloway deflected every charge against him and flung it back at the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress. For example, he denied the committee’s claim that he had met Saddam many times, asserting there had been only two such meetings — and that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had met the then Iraqi president the same number of times, to sell arms, Galloway said.

“Now, you have nothing on me, senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad.”

The senators mostly soaked up the punches, reserving judgment until a press conference later, when Coleman claimed Galloway’s credibility was “very, very suspect.” In the hearing, however, the senators struggled to pin down Galloway with Iraqi oil sales documents with his name on them.

“What counts is not the names on the paper; what counts is where is the money, Senator?” Galloway said. “Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them here today.”

A jubilant Galloway later told an American television interviewer that his appearance marked a victory for the “British parliamentary style” over the more sedate Senate. Galloway used antiwar rhetoric far more raw than most politicians are accustomed to in America, where shared patriotism normally trumps outrage. He said that 100,000 people had paid with their lives for false assumptions on Iraq, “1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.”

In their cross-examination, the senators focused on Galloway’s relationship with Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian businessmen with extensive dealings in prewar Iraq who served as chairman of and as principal contributor to Galloway’s charity, the Ma-riam Appeal. They suggested Zureikat had been oil trading in his name and the M.P. must have known about it.

Once more, the accused sought to turn the tables on his accusers. When Coleman asked how he could have failed to be aware of Zureikat’s oil deals, Galloway turned the attention to Coleman’s campaign fundraising. He said: “Well, there’s a lot of contributors, I’ve just been checking your Web site …”

“Not many at that level, Mr. Galloway,” the senator interjected.

“No, let me assure you there are,” Galloway went on. “I’ve checked your Web site. There are lots of contributors to your political campaign funds — I don’t suppose you ask any of them how they made the money they give you.”

Coleman stuck to his task. “If I can get back to Zureikat one more time, do you recall a time when you specifically had a conversation with him about oil dealings in Iraq?”

“I’ve already answered that question,” Galloway replied. “I can assure you, Mr. Zureikat never gave me a penny from an oil deal, from a cake deal, from a bread deal or from any deal.”

He danced around many of the questions, frequently responding, “I can do better than that” and answering a slightly different question. His biggest stumble came when he mistakenly assumed Sen. Levin had backed the war.

Levin’s investigation of the U.S. government’s own failure to police sanctions provided Galloway ammunition for his counterattack. But he made no more headway than his Republican counterpart in his cross-examination of the witness. When Levin invited Galloway to say whether he was alleging the documentary evidence was forged, the British M.P. replied: “Well, I have no way of knowing, sir.”

“That’s fine. So you’re not alleging,” Levin persisted.

“I have no way of knowing.”

“Is it fair to say, since you don’t know, you’re not alleging?”

“Well, it would have been nice to have seen it before today,” Galloway said.

The minuet of exchanges played on for a few more minutes before the senators gave up frustrated. They had come equipped for a trial and found themselves in the role of stooges for a man accustomed to playing to the gallery.