US:Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani has warned that the US could suffer a second terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 if a Democrat becomes president in 2008. Mr Giuliani, the frontrunner in opinion polls for the Republican presidential nomination, said that only a Republican president could guarantee the US would remain on the offensive against terrorism.
"If we are on defence, we will have more losses and it will go on longer. I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defence. We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-September 11th attitude of defence. The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us," he said.
Mr Giuliani, whose history of liberal positions on abortion, gun control and gay rights put him at odds with many in his party, has made his tough stance on national security and the reputation he won after 9/11 the centrepiece of his campaign.
"They were at war with us before we realised it, going back to the '90s with all the Americans killed by the PLO and Hizbullah and Hamas. They came here and killed us in 1993 and we didn't get it. We didn't get it that this was a war. Then September 11th, 2001, happened, and we got it," he said.
Senator John McCain, the former Republican frontrunner who has been eclipsed by Mr Giuliani in recent weeks, formally announced his candidacy for the presidency yesterday by stressing his experience as a soldier and a statesman.
"I'm not the youngest candidate. But I am the most experienced. I know how to fight and how to make peace. I know who I am and what I want to do," he told supporters in New Hampshire, which will hold the first presidential primary next year.
As a strong supporter of president George Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq, Mr McCain has seen his popularity decline as support for the war has evaporated. He acknowledged yesterday that grave mistakes had been made in the conduct of the war but insisted that he would not change his views on Iraq to gain political advantage.
"I'm not running for president to be somebody, but to do something; to do the hard but necessary things, not the easy and needless things. I'm not running to leave our biggest problems to an unluckier generation of leaders, but to fix them now, and fix them well," he said.
Democrats in Congress yesterday stepped up their investigations of the Bush administration by announcing that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will subpoena secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to testify about claims the administration made before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain uranium from Niger.
"For four years I have been trying to get information from Condoleezza Rice on a variety of issues, including the reference to uranium and Niger in the president's 2003 State of the Union speech . . . I regret - I deeply regret - that the secretary of state is giving us no choice but to proceed with a subpoena," committee chairman Henry Waxman said. A federal agency responsible for protecting federal employees from political coercion said this week it had launched an investigation into the activities of the White House's political operation and Mr Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. The Office of Special Counsel is looking into whether Mr Rove or other aides broke the law by making political presentations to government employees in the run-up to last year's midterm elections.