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His family, who were based in Brighton, were at their wits end.

Omar, their son and brother was being held in Guantanamo Bay.

The United States deemed him to be a terrorist. The evidence? A jihadi video from Chechnya in which Omar Deghayes was said to feature.

The family had not seen the video, which had been found in an apartment in Madrid.

The formidable Spanish judge, Balthazar Garzon, was demanding the Americans hand Omar Deghayes to Spanish police so he could help with their inquiries - the notion was that he had been linked to the cell responsible for the Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people.

Omar, who had only recently become a devout Muslim and headed east, was in deep trouble.

Later that day, through contacts in Madrid, I secured a copy of this all-important video.

His brother, Taher, watched as the murky, ill-focused footage revealed jihadists in conference around a table and then roaming outdoors, mugging for the camera on the Chechen hills.

We came to a close-up of a well-fed, bearded character on whom the Spanish police had superimposed the name "Omar Deghayes".

Taher exhaled and beamed: "That's not him! No, it's not him."

He then went through all the different reasons this was most certainly not his younger brother - the nose, the eyes - there was no resemblance.

And wouldn't he recognise his own brother? He'd known him literally all his life, even before the family had fled their home in Libya after the assassination of their father, a prominent lawyer and opponent of President Gadaffi.

We put out a film on Newsnight telling the story of Deghayes, showing the video and letting Taher state his case.

But this was a brother supporting a brother (and I use the word in the familial sense). He would proclaim mistaken identity wouldn't he? We could not reach any firm conclusion.

A few days later I received a call from the BBC's monitoring service at Caversham, the people who follow with diligence the fine detail and daily shifts of international affairs.

Paul Tumelty, a researcher with great expertise in the waning fortunes of Chechen jihadists, said he had seen our Newsnight piece and had instantly recognised the man named in the video.

He was "100% certain" this was in fact a notorious jihadist. And that he certainly was not Deghayes but one "Walid", a warlord who had been much feared. Past tense. Walid had been dead for a year or more, killed fighting the Russians.

At this point one would like to say we ran that story and Deghayes was on the next plane home from Guantanamo Bay. Sadly, only the first part of the sentence is true.

It was almost three more years before Omar Deghayes was released.

As he tells it, his US captors simply replaced one set of false allegations with another - a pattern he claims was familiar throughout his incarceration.

His account of what happened during his years of imprisonment - in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantanamo - is both fascinating and troubling.

It poses further serious questions as to how the US behaved in the War On Terror and to what extent British intelligence was complicit.

Omar says it is good to be back in Brighton. After so often being the subject of interrogation, now he would like some answers of his own.

Watch Peter Marshall's interview with Omar Deghayes on Newsnight on Friday 19 June, then online at the Newsnight website.

Rep Pelosi is one of the more polarising personalities to occupy a post which, in America, is always intensely party political. After all, the US Speaker leads their party in Congress and is thus expected to embody exactly what the UK Speaker must avoid: political bias.

But Ms Pelosi, a California liberal and always a lightning rod for Republican ire, has left herself wide open to attacks from opponents of all stripes over her recent confusion over the CIA and torture.

The issue, as ever, turns on what the politician knew and when she knew it.

Ms Pelosi has been a long standing critic of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" fostered by the Bush administration for suspected terrorists.

She, like many others, condemned the measures as torture and led the demands that those responsible be held accountable.

But then it was revealed that Ms Pelosi herself might be considered "responsible". As the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee it has emerged that she was briefed on the interrogations, and most significantly on the use of simulated drowning - or waterboarding - more than six years ago by the CIA.

She hadn't uttered a word of dissent.

While Ms Pelosi's initial denial and subsequent embarrassment has rumbled on for weeks the CIA has today been in court defending its right to keep its secrets over the interrogations.

At Westminster, Michael Martin's successor will be chosen before the month is out. Ms Pelosi, the Speaker across the ocean, will probably outlast Speaker Martin.

But even if the row over when she was in the loop doesn't prove her downfall, the torture issue lives on, more publically than ever, in a variety of court cases and congressional committees. It isn't going away.

Speaker Pelosi, facing accusations of humbug and hypocrisy, has to steel herself for months more duckings on the political waterboard.

We've had the election and inauguration and nearly five pell mell months of announcements and mission statements.

We've seen Barack Obama play the role of US president with ease and elan (and yes, he took the French in the same way he wooed the rest of Europe and South America and, most impressive of all, the Muslim world).

His style has been a success to exceed expectations.

As Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin learned the hard way last autumn, this is a politician who is good with words.

But the speechifyin' derided by the lady from Alasaka is only part of the job. For all his full marks for presentation, he cannot be properly assessed until he has followed through.

The challenges Mr Obama faces remain undiminished. Indeed they grow by the day. From Israel-Palestine to Af-Pak, from the nuclear ambitions of Iran to the nuclear capability of North Korea, this is a dangerous world.

But it is at home, where the economy languishes and 1.6m jobs have disappeared since February, that Mr Obama must now perform following "the eventful prologue of his presidency".

He has just announced 600,000 new jobs after repackaging his stimulus plan. You don't need to be Larry Summers or more than vaguely numerate to understand that this still leaves a shortfall of a million since the stimulus was introduced.

The president has to shore up and then rebuild America's financial base while simultaneously delivering on his promise for health care reform.

What would be a formidably difficult task in times of economic strength (ask Bill Clinton) now looks positively Sisyphean. But that campaign too begins afresh today.

And of course the world outside keeps on turning. The "Dear Leader's" North Korea has just opened another front in his campaign to try the patience of all - Chinese friend and US foe alike.

And a court in Pyongyang has sentenced two US journalists to 12 years' hard labour for illegally entering the country.

With his ongoing programme of nuclear tests, his eccentric and unpredictable un-diplomatic style and his apparent determination never to relinquish his post as The World's Most Dangerous Man, Kim Jong-il is shaping up to be Mr Obama's biggest problem of all.

Given what else is going on, that's some claim.

It's also where, just over two years ago, I saw Barack Obama launch his own hopes amid the ruins. As he'd later put it, the bigger the troubles, the greater the scope for change...

Beset by the economic crisis, Obama has used the opportunity to be busy across the board. He's promised wholesale reforms in health care, education, energy and conservation. Polls show that, so far, most Americans are happy enough with the direction: After all, they voted for it.

But others - a sizeable wedge - remain unconvinced. Obamaism, whatever it may be, is still taking shape, but it's leaving some Americans very uneasy.

These are the people who've been attending the so called Tea Parties - they claim their inspiration from the Boston revolutionaries.

All over the country conservatives have turned out in their thousands to protest against taxes and what they see as Obama's creeping socialism.

And it's not just economic policy which concerns them. From the reversal of Republican policies on abortion and stem cells to talking to America's adversaries, they feel Obama's taking their USA to Hell.

We met a group who'd run a tea party on the north shore of Lake Pontchatrain, across from New Orleans. They freely admitted yes, they were fearful.

Kevin Elliot says he's never before been politically active: "It looks like they're taking a crisis and using it to enable that progressive agenda, in a Blitzkrieg fashion.

"It seems that every day there's something coming out that we disagree with on a visceral level."

They speak of freedom under threat, of having to apologise to their children for what they're about to lose.

Two things strike you: the Tea Party people are almost exclusively white. And they all say America hasn't had a conservative president since Ronald Reagan.

In fact Obama agrees Reagan changed America and has cited him, admiringly, as a predecessor who seized his moment.

Of course Obama's solutions are very different to Reagan's. He has spoken of the "silent storms of poverty and joblessness, inequality and injustice" which Hurricane Katrina exposed in New Orleans but which "for far too long have ravaged" parts of the nation.

Liberals in the Democratic Party believe they now have a mandate to help the victims of those storms, to roll back a generation of conservatism.

The new president's great selling point is his intellect. He may run bigger government but it will be smarter government. That's the boast.

He's also trying to tap into the American sense of community, to get the people to do their bit and lend their neighbours a hand.

Fifty years ago they came from the north to help build the civil rights movement in the southern states. Today they're arriving to help rebuild the city of New Orleans after the flood.

Zack Rosenberg is a Washington lawyer who came to New Orleans to lend a hand three years ago and never left. His St Bernard project can rebuild an entire house for $15,000 - a sixth of the normal contractor's cost.

The labour is provided by volunteers and the material is funded by small government grants and private donations. It's non-partisan, not for profit and, he believes, it could be replicated across the country.

Perhaps Obama sees this as a model for rebuilding America. But those at the Tea Parties would be sceptical. Where's the free enterprise, the American spirit of the individual? Where's the profit in what sounds to them like naive liberal idealism?

The President's appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice is met with suspicion in the gun stores which have seen sales rocket since November. There's now a national shortage of ammunition.

The increased trade - up 100% in the Louisiana store we visited - has been driven by Obama's promise to reimpose controls on assault rifles and by that general, wide ranging anxiety identified by the people at the Tea Parties.

Obama's political savvy has now led him quietly to shelve his planned gun legislation.

Therein lies a lesson in Obamaism, both for those who fear it and for others who've invested in him such hope.

With battles ahead on so many fronts, President Obama is apparently choosing to fight only those he thinks he can win.

Obama's United States doesn't do torture, a principle he established and clearly stated on day two of his administration. Yet here he is, not yet at day one hundred, and torture is an issue which is causing him increasing damage.

Obama's troubles began earlier this month when he sanctioned the release of four memos in which Bush administration lawyers had given legal advice explaining that, for the purposes of interrogating suspected terrorists, exercises like waterboarding and headbanging (the head of the prisoner; against a wall) were pretty much OK.

It was also permissible to put Abu Zubaydah into a small box. And it was fine to put an insect in that box. It might be even better if Zubaydah, supposedly a former big noise at al-Qaeda who apparently fears insects, were wrongly to infer that the insect could sting, perhaps kill. But what would not be right or proper or legal or "within the statute's required predicate acts" would be to tell Zubaydah that the insect could do him harm (which, of course, it couldn't).

The best course, for a CIA man in a hurry, would seem to be to put Zubaydah in the box, drop the insect in there too, say nothing and wait for the screams.

President Obama may have no problems with insects but his room for manoeuvre is severely restricted. When the president ordered the release of the CIA memos it was in the belief that legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union would soon lead to their emergence anyway. He hoped swiftly to put the matter to rest and then "move the country on" as he put it, avoiding the distractions of partisan rancour.

What's happened is the Republican party has accused him of betraying national secrets and undermining the CIA while the liberal wing of his own party is pressing for a full blown truth commission. Their aim is to call to account the Bush administration lawyers who gave "enhanced interrogation techniques" legal cover.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and one of the most respected figures on Capitol Hill, told me: "I don't agree with people who say let's turn the page if we haven't taken time to read the page. We can learn from our mistakes."

He mentions the Watergate hearings and how they left America "a better country". President Obama might feel a chill at that, recalling that America was also riven and demoralised after its Long National Nightmare of the early '70s.

The affair gives us our first glimpse of how the new, activist president runs things. We're told by the Washington Post that he chaired a night time meeting of officials both for and against letting the memos out before reaching his decision. He'd earlier sent a bipartisan deputation to the CIA to ask how the techniques had been applied. They were shocked at what they heard.

One of them, the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, David Boren, described the CIA briefings as "one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I've had... I wanted to take a bath... I was ashamed."

The release of the memos, at this point, looks like a political blunder which the president could have easily avoided. Perhaps they would have emerged - just as photographs of "enhanced interrogations" will soon be released (another ACLU legal action - this could be Abu Ghraib with knobs on) - but Obama didn't need to issue the order himself.

George Bush was criticised for being a lazy president, he delegated and sat back, preferring to clear brush down in Crawford. Barack Obama is, yet again, Bush's opposite. He's super busy, ever on the move, doing. Will he stand condemned for doing too much?

So how is it going? Well, quietly.

The Obama style on show at the Gordon-Barack news conference was at the dull end of the laid back spectrum. He opened with bromide about the lovely weather, looked momentarily stumped by Nick Robinson's opening question on who is to blame for the economic melt down, but then prevaricated so effectively that one had quite lost track by the time he reached the end of his answer... something along the lines of let's look forward, not back (what else).

But that is the thing with Obama, he takes his time. Before his election, indeed before he began campaigning, it was an integral part of his appeal. He would take a question, reflect, apparently giving it real thought, and then respond. The interlocutor would be flattered: this is a guy taking my concerns seriously. The candidate, having created the right impression, would glide away.

I have likened him to a class athlete, a top footballer, a Zinedine Zidane or a Kenny Dalglish, who, in the pell mell midst of a match would receive the ball and appear to stop the clock. All around them would be transfixed, spellbound as ZZ or Kenny would choose the perfect touch, or pass, or shot. The great players seem to make time. Obama, by any measure a great candidate, is the same.

The obverse of this is that Obama may also be accused of using this contemplative talent to avoid a subject, to stall. That is what has happened occasionally in his 70 days in the White House. What the president's supporters see as his cool intellect his detractors have interpreted as a classic politician's avoidance tactic. For example, he took a political age, over 24 hours, to condemn the bonus pay-outs to executives of AIG, a company bailed out with tax dollars.

When asked why he had been so slow to speak he said he liked to know what he was talking about before opening his mouth. It was a cool answer, one intended to draw a sharp distinction with his predecessor. But it didn't wash with the critics.

Obama may be habitually unflustered, but even his supporters are getting fretful at the absence of key appointees to his economic team. He has been taking his time, and so has Congress in approving his nominees.

As for his introductory performance at the Foreign Office, those unused to the Obama show were saying he seemed "tired". He is often that way, it is part of his style, relaxed.

Perhaps he overdid it today, to the extent that Gordon Brown looked like the leader with charisma, but then Obama was on foreign soil.

As Kenny Dalglish or Zinedine Zidane would tell you, in the first leg, away from home, the priority is to avoid errors, not to concede and to keep the crowd quiet.

On that basis President Obama can consider today's press conference a success.

Some of the crowd were nodding off.

Immediately on taking office, Barack Obama was ostensibly able to start wiping clean the slate. As the head of a new administration, the president could deny responsibility for what had gone before. Gordon Brown, lumped with Tony Blair's legacy and own part in it, has no such advantage.

Which brings us back to the the case of Binyam Mohamed, late of Guantanamo Bay and various hell hole prison cells in Afghanistan, Pakistan and, Morocco. Binyam is in many ways the personification of the War on Terror and all its ambiguities. He is both an alleged perpetrator and a victim. He was supposedly bent on destroying Western democracy yet the west denied him civil, legal and democratic rights and then allegedly did far worse, putting him to torture.

Binyam was arrested at Karachi airport trying to leave Pakistan with a false passport in April 2002, having fled from Afghanistan and the American invasion. He says he'd gone to Afghanistan pre 9/11 to get off drugs and investigate Islam. While such a claim may be met with scepticism it remains wholly plausible: many ardent converts will turn to religion after struggling with an addiction or personal trauma.

It is likely, however, that it will have been a radical and fundamentalist Islam that Binyam was following up: Afghanistan was under the iron rule of the Taliban. So Binyam's contacts in the UK, where he'd first found God, would have been of considerable interest to MI5. At this time - early 2002 - the shoe bomber, Londoner Richard Reid (former drug addict and recent convert to hard line Islam), had just been prevented from blowing up a Transatlantic airliner.

Where things get sticky for the British government - the current British government - is when Binyam is detained in Pakistan, under CIA control, and is interviewed by an MI5 officer. The officer, we know from various telegrams and reports revealed on Newsnight, warns Binyam to cooperate with his captors if he knows what's good for him. On May 17 2002 the officer reported as much back to London.

During this period, Binyam says, he was regularly being strapped to the ceiling by Pakistani interrogators. He suggests the MI5 agent must have been aware of this treatment.

Later, we now know, Binyam was spirited away to Morocco. It's here, he says, over eighteen months the torture intensified while he was asked questions supplied to the CIA by MI5. The information ranged from the identity and nature of his kick boxing instructor in North Kensington to his exam results; he was also shown "hundreds and hundreds" of photographs of Muslim men based in the UK and asked who he recognised and what he knew of them.

Complicity?

This information, Binyam and his lawyers believe, can only have been provided by the UK with the implication that Britain was at the very least complicit in Binyam's treatment. And we know MI5 was aware he had been "disappeared" by the CIA because on October 25, 2002 at MI5 headquarters in Thames House, London, they asked the Americans where Binyam had been taken and were told in effect to mind their own business.

British officials, apparently having decided they could do no more to locate Binyam Mohamed and ask him questions directly, then asked the CIA to put some further questions on their behalf. They continued to provide information for their U.S. colleagues to put to Binyam - wherever he was and under whatever conditions he was being held - over the following weeks.

Does this make Britain complicit in Binyam Mohamed's treatment? Does it suggest they've colluded in torture? For all their bluster about opposing torture and rendition, no minister has so far denied complicity. This may be significant.

Meanwhile Gordon Brown, saying he wants to restore public faith in the security services, has asked the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee to help draw up new guidelines on interrogation "in order to have systems that are robust". The Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, you may note, are appointed by and report directly to the Prime Minister and are frequently criticised for their secrecy and refusal to discuss their work.

Earlier this year High Court judges suggested the committee had been misled by intelligence chiefs over Binyam Mohamed and that they should reopen their investigation into his case. Now the committee has announced it has taken the judges' advice.

Barack Obama has announced the end of the War on Terror, an abstract noun that was as inane as it was counter-productive. No more the concept of "enemy combatants" or "enhanced interrogation techniques". The fall out, however, will be with us for a long while yet.

With typical understatement he's been comparing his arrest in December on corruption charges to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, calling it a "complete surprise". We might have guessed as much since, on the day itself (the arrest day, not the bombing which brought America into World War Two), he'd responded to the FBI raid by asking "Is this a joke?".

Blagojevich's impeachment trial opens in the Illinois Senate today. Later he'll face a criminal trial on various charges, most notably trying to sell Barack Obama's senate seat. He has told the AP news agency he has no intention of mounting any defence at the impeachment because he feels the process is unfair.

"Give me a right to call witnesses, give me a right to subpoena witnesses and documents, to properly prepare a case - and I'll be the first one there," said Blagojevich. Otherwise, "I'm not going to be a party to a process like that. And if it means I have to sacrifice myself to a higher cause, for the people of Illinois and for the principle of due process and the right to call witnesses, then so be it."

His lawyers have been complaining they can't question people they claim would help his case, such as President Barack Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. This will be a relief to Obama's avowedly ethical White House, which wants to maintain as much distance as possible between itself and Hot Rod.

And his antagonists in his home state? "The reason is they want to get me out fast so they can put a huge income tax increase on the people of Illinois," said the governor, who reiterated he would never resign.

He added that he'd turned to religion to help cope with the pressure. "I'm not the first person this is happened to, all you have to do is read the Bible and see other people who this has happened to."

While I couldn't find any direct references to previous Illinois governors in the Good Book, Blago is mentioned a couple of times in the splendid "America All Better", the current satirical show from Chicago's Second City. The theatre troupe, which spawned generations of U.S. Comedians from Joan Rivers to John Belushi to Tina Fey, is in excellent fettle and leaves one questioning why, in comparison, so much satire on American TV remains so weak.

It is of course hard to satirise Blago. Today he apologised for the colourful language he's accused of using in wiretapped conversations saying he would have used different words had he known he was being taped. As the wiretap has it: "F***in' golden!

Enjoy a brief clip of Second City's "America All Better". Blago doesn't feature but the main character is supposed to be Chicago's Mayor Daley, the man at the heart of the City Machine (who, you should note, has never been charged with any offence). He also has a reputation for interesting locutions.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the men who brought down the President. And while that may be a simplistic recalling of the events which did for Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal it's also fundamentally accurate. It was their dogged pursuit of the story behind the story which led to the impeachment proceedings and the resignation.

First as a student and later as a young journalist, I followed Watergate in what these days is known as real time i.e. I saw it unfold as it happened nearly four decades ago. With ever-growing avidity we watched incredulous as Tricky Dick Nixon, this stage villain from across the Atlantic, declared he was NOT a crook and that there'd be No Whitewash At The White House. Of course he was lying and was proved to be lying, which left us feeling even more thrillingly outraged and self righteous.

By the time that Nixon was long gone and Hollywood took over the story, I was working in the Holy City (Liverpool) on local radio, doing the daily grind - or rather the night shift. I remember going to see All The President's Men at the Odeon one Sunday afternoon, watching in awe as Redford and Hoffman met Deep Throat in glamorous underground car parks, followed the money and started to knock the dominoes down. At the end, exhilarated I was desperate to go to work.

Enjoy! I did...

While Blago fights that case and protests his fxxxin' innocence, he's outflanked his detractors by using gubernatorial authority to appoint the unlikely Mr Burris to the seat. In all his 71 years Mr Burris has achieved many things. We know this because his accomplishments have been chiselled in marble on the large mausoleum he's had built in a Chicago cemetery.

Beneath the name BURRIS we read the heading "Trailblazer", an interesting word when you spot the very modest, traditional grave next door (a tenth of the size?) and see that it's occupied by Jesse Owens, the Hitler-defying Olympian.

Mr Burris, we read, was Illinois's first African-American attorney general and the state's first African-American comptroller. His memorial even notes Mr Burris was the first African-American exchange student to Hamburg University in Germany from Southern Illinois University in 1959.

Not to worry, he's not the man for understatement. It's all helped feed the Burris ego which is renowned throughout the state. His son, Roland ll, and his daughter, Rolanda, will no doubt be proud to witness their Dad become the first Chicagoan nominated rather than elected senator by the first governor impeached for corruption.

One local critic noted, unkindly, that Governor Blagojevich could have chosen Bozo The Clown and no one could have stopped him. But he chose Roland Burris and Mr Burris, happily enough, has left room on his tombstone for the words "U.S. Senator".

He could also add the testimonial we heard from Laura Washington, a former official at Chicago City Hall and a canny observer of the state's extraordinary political terrain: "He's a go-along to get-along guy, a long time part of the Democratic Party machine, not particularly respected by his peers. But he's not corrupt. He's never done anything illegal."

And in Chicago politics, that's an accomplishment worth chiselling in marble.

-----------------------------------------
Here's the report from Chicago:

I'll be in the Windy City next week reporting on the murky world of the Chicago Political Machine. But for now, the allegation is that under Hot Rod/Blago/Governor Rod Blagojevich business and government practice in Illinois was no less corrupt than it had been under his three predecessors who've served jail terms since 1970. Indeed, if the charges stick (and he insists he's innocent) Blago may well be the most egregiously corrupt governor. A record holder!

Somehow Obama has emerged from Illinois without blemish. There's no suggestion he knew anything of Blago's alledged attempts to sell his Senate seat ("It's f***in' golden! I'm just not giving it up for f***in' nothing!" - according to the affidavit - download it here (pdf)). And Obama's closest political aides, Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod - all veterans of the Chicago school of politics - will, if he is found guilty, have missed Blago's apparently brazen hustling. In those circumstances the question will surely be asked how did these, the sharpest political brains in the country, fail to see what was happening in their home town? It's a big question and a potentially embarrassing one for all concerned.

While we mull over that let's leave the final word to Illinois' greatest contemporary playright, David Mamet, a writer whose characters are almost as profane as Governor Blagojevich and his First Lady on the wiretap tapes.

"I am from Chicago and, so, having been disillusioned with politics at an early age I do not become involved," said Mamet. "The only reason I vote is because they pay me."

But one left the theatre feeling that events as portrayed weren't quite as one remembered, three decades on, the Frost-Nixon interviews on which the play/film is based.

In the play/film David Frost struggles through a series of encounters with Richard Nixon before finally getting the disgraced former president to crack and effectively confess in front of the cameras. It's all nicely dramatic and rather satisfying.

But wasn't Frost perceived at the time as having blown his opportunity? Hadn't Nixon evaded any real confession of wrongdoing? Weren't we television viewers of the 1970s left feeling a bit cheated and, dare I say, bored by the interview saga?

Of course Frost, during that period, was the butt of criticism from the media, particularly in the UK, which could be attributed to professional jealousy (Frost - "good evening and welcome" - had been a regular target since rising without trace on That Was The Week That Was). And yet Nixon was an interviewee vulnerable in so many areas and we needed the catharsis of seeing him own up to crimes in the White House. He didn't.

Here is Elizabeth Drew's take on Frost/Nixon.

The man who was UN ambassador and energy secretary in the nineties will be rejoining his old Clinton era colleagues, Rahm Emanuel, who's become Obama's chief of staff, and Eric Holder, the Attorney General.

They'll be key figures for America's forty-fourth president who owe their earlier incarnations to the forty-second.

Obama says this experience is invaluable: they know their way around Washington and will be equipped to hit the ground running, avoiding making pratfalls into the pitfalls.

Of course, the most important of all the old Clintonians is the woman who was First Lady. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, will be America's emissary around the world. And there are some who fear the arrangement could become too Clintonian for comfort.

They worry that the spirit which infused Obama's campaign team - "Obama, not drama" - will be forfeited amidst the intrigue, machinations and plots which they characterise as the Clinton circus.

The concern is focused on Bill Clinton's philanthropic and business links and the potential for alleged conflicts of interest. The question is will Clinton's donors believe that if they can get to Bill they get to Hillary?

Since leaving the White House the former president has become an international fundraiser and fixer for multiple worthy causes from HIV-AIDS and poverty relief to global warming.

The William J Clinton Foundation, including The Global Initiative, has raised over $46 billion from some 208,000 donors. Political entities like the Saudi Royals, with their $10 million plus, The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, the King of Morocco and giant corporations like Coke, Pepsi, Kraft and the Virgin group have all been eager to associate themselves with Clinton's good works.

Some argue that still won't kill the problem - you can't legislate against a benefactor's expectations. Will donors, perhaps incorrectly, still assume that connections to the former President will open up access to the current U.S. administration?

Already questions have been asked about the Kazakhstan mining contract given to the Canadian Frank Giustra. Bill Clinton had accompanied Giustra to Kazakhstan and spoke warmly of the Kazakh president, despite his poor human rights record. Later Giustra pledged the Clinton Foundation $31 million dollars with a further $100 still to follow.

So far Bill Clinton hasn't been too sensitive to ethical dilemmas. His works may be noble - for charity and the like - but once more donors are named more questions are likely to follow. Disclosure of a potential conflict of interest doesn't eradicate that conflict of interest - it merely brings it within a computer search of those who have doubts and want to raise them.

You can watch my film Too Clintonian for comfort? below and find out what Democratic Party Chairman and former Presidential candidate Howard Dean thinks of Obama's cabinet appointments here.

He has admitted as much in a Barbara Walters interview.

Of course the last Democrat in the White House didn't inhale and never even lit the cigars (no sniggering at the back) he claimed to brandish in moments of celebration. George W apparently gave up smoking around the time he foreswore alcohol. His critics might argue this shows an inverse ratio between statesmanship and abstinence.

And Obama? For security reasons presidents don't send email. But he has already made it known, despite the convention, he's loath to give up his BlackBerry/CrackBerry habit. We must also now assume President Obama's worries over crises or would be assassins will be sublimated by a quick drag, or toke as he'd say, round the back of the Oval Office.