http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=449834Mr Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative deputy Paul Wolfowitz may have plotted the foreign campaigns in Mr Bush's war on terrorism. But on the home front, John Ashcroft the paleo-conservative has been in command - the prime architect of the infamous Patriot Act rushed through by Congress in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and which is described by his legion of critics as the gravest assault on American civil liberties since Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
But now he could have an even more direct hand in the fate of the suddenly troubled Bush presidency. The Ashcroft Justice Department is handling the investigation into precisely who at the White House leaked an undercover CIA agent's name to the press, an affair which is quickly turning into the juiciest Washington scandal since Bill Clinton left town.
As Attorney General, he must decide whether or not to appoint a special outside prosecutor. Ashcroft is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. To refuse to take a step supported by 70 per cent of the public, according to one poll this week, would reek of a cover-up. But to bring in an outside prosecutor would strike at one of Mr Bush's most cherished selling points: that after eight years of Clintonian sleaze he has restored integrity and dignity to the Oval Office.
John Ashcroft calls himself a "common-sense conservative". But for liberals, gays, minority groups, and civil libertarians of every hue, he is a stubborn, strait-laced fanatic, the very antithesis of common sense, who is waging a one-man war against secular America. In their eyes, he is emblem of how zealots of the religious right are tightening their grip on a Republican Party in which moderates are an endangered species.
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