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.

“The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated U.N. sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing U.N. sanctions,” the report says. “On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

The report is likely to ease pressure from conservative Republicans on Kofi Annan to resign from his post as U.N. secretary-general. The new findings are also likely to be raised when Galloway appears before the Senate subcommittee on investigations Tuesday.

The Respect M.P. for Bethnal Green and Bow arrived Monday in Washington and demanded an apology from the Senate for what he called the “schoolboy dossier” passed off as an investigation against him. “It was full of holes, full of falsehoods and full of value judgments that are apparently only shared here in Washington,” he said at Washington Dulles Airport. He told Reuters: “I have no expectation of justice … I come not as the accused but as the accuser. I am [going] to show just how absurd this report is.”

Galloway has denied allegations that he profited from Iraqi oil sales and will come face to face with the subcommittee in what promises to be one of the most highly charged pieces of political theater seen in Washington for some time.

Monday’s report makes two principal allegations against the Bush administration. First, it found that the U.S. Treasury failed to take action against a Texas oil company, BayOil, that facilitated payment of “at least $37 million in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime.” The surcharges were a violation of the U.N.’s oil-for-food program, by which Iraq was allowed to sell heavily discounted oil to raise money for food and humanitarian supplies. However, Saddam was allowed to choose which companies were given the highly lucrative oil contracts. Between September 2000 and September 2002 (when the practice was stopped) the regime demanded kickbacks of 10 to 30 cents a barrel in return for oil allocations.

In its second main finding, the report said the U.S. military and the State Department gave a tacit green light for shipments of nearly 8 million barrels of oil bought by Jordan, a vital American ally, entirely outside the U.N.-monitored oil-for-food program. Jordan was permitted to buy some oil directly under strict conditions, but these purchases appeared to be under the counter.

The report details a series of efforts by U.N. monitors to obtain information about BayOil’s oil shipments in 2001 and 2002, and the lack of help provided by the U.S. Treasury. After repeated requests over eight months from the U.N. and the U.S. State Department, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control wrote to BayOil in May 2002, requesting a report on its transactions, but did not “request specific information by U.N. or direct Bayoil to answer the U.N.’s questions.”

BayOil’s owner, David Chalmers, has been charged over the company’s activities. His lawyer, Catherine Recker, told the Washington Post: “BayOil and David Chalmers [said] they have done nothing illegal and will vigorously defend these reckless accusations.”

The Jordanian oil purchases were shipped in the weeks before the war, out of the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya, which was operating without U.N. approval or surveillance. Investigators found correspondence showing that Odin Marine Inc., the U.S. company chartering the seven huge tankers that picked up the oil at Khor al-Amaya, repeatedly sought and received agreement from U.S. military and civilian officials that the ships would not be confiscated by U.S. Navy vessels in the Maritime Interdiction Force (MIF) enforcing the embargo. Odin was reassured by a State Department official that the U.S. “was aware of the shipments and has determined not to take action.”

The company’s vice president, David Young, told investigators that a U.S. naval officer at MIF told him that he “had no objections” to the shipments. “He said that he was sorry he could not say anything more. I told him I completely understood and did not expect him to say anything more,” Young said.

An executive at Odin Maritime confirmed the Senate account of the oil shipments as “correct” but declined to comment further.

It was not clear Monday night whether the Democratic report would be accepted by Republicans on the Senate investigations subcommittee.

The Pentagon declined to comment. The U.S. representative’s office at the U.N. referred inquiries to the State Department, which failed to return calls.

“If we could get out of this conference without a major blowup we would be doing well,” said Matt Martin, a deputy director of the British American Security Information Council, a transatlantic think tank.

Both sides agree that the NPT is outdated, but they differ sharply on how it could be strengthened. The United States, with support from Britain and France, wants stricter controls on the transfer of nuclear technology.

The non-nuclear states, which met separately in Mexico City last week to agree on a common position, argue that more emphasis should be put on banning the development of new weapons by the existing nuclear powers.

And there is disagreement on the NPT’s third pillar: the clauses guaranteeing non-nuclear states access to “peaceful” nuclear power technology if they forgo nuclear arsenals.

“The politics of the conference make it clear the treaty cannot continue and cannot be strengthened unless all three legs of the bargain can be preserved,” said Daryl Kimball, head of the independent Arms Control Association.

Iran believes that the NPT’s nuclear power clauses give it the right to enrich its own uranium or produce plutonium as long as it is — as Tehran insists — intended for peaceful use.

The United States says Iran is using the NPT as a cover to go to the brink of weapons production with the intention of withdrawing abruptly from the treaty at a time of its choosing and assembling weapons within weeks. Such a strategy has already been pursued by North Korea. The United States also claims Tehran has forfeited any rights it might have as an NPT signatory by misleading the International Atomic Energy Agency over the extent of its uranium enrichment program.

Britain, France and Germany, which have been pursuing talks aimed at providing Iran with incentives to give up its uranium enrichment program, are concerned that the NPT conference will turn into a shouting match between the United States and Iran and destabilize their precarious negotiations. Tehran said on Friday the talks had made so little progress, it might end its temporary uranium enrichment suspension.

In an effort to find a compromise, the head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has proposed a deal in which states forswearing uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing programs would be supplied fissile material for civilian reactors by the current members of the nuclear club. But the compromise looks dead on arrival. The one thing the United States and Iran agree on is that it would disrupt their nuclear power industries, and they have the support of Japan and France.

At their Mexico City meeting, delegates complained that the IAEA spent its time monitoring compliance by non-nuclear states, while the nuclear powers had failed to live up to the commitments they made in the last two NPT reviews, in 1995 and 2000.

The Bush administration has been trying for two years to persuade Congress to fund research on a new generation of weapons, including small-yield “mini-nukes” and nuclear “bunker busters.” Britain, too, has raised the possibility of replacing its Trident missiles. The United States signed a bilateral arms control treaty with Russia in 2002, aimed at sharply reducing the number of operationally deployed warheads by 2012. But the weapons do not have to be destroyed, only mothballed, and there are no verification procedures.

The United States has also signaled that it has no intention of joining the comprehensive test ban treaty, or signing a verifiable accord ending the production of new fissile material for nuclear weapons. Both were pledges the U.S. government made in 2000.

“If one state begins to reject commitments it made at past review conferences, other states may start to reject prior commitments. The non-proliferation treaty will quickly erode,” Kimball said. “If the states do not take serious action on a number of key fronts in the next five years, it is likely the treaty will not be able to withstand these challenges and we will see additional states withdraw from the NPT. The crisis is not quite here, but it’s fast approaching.”