POLITICAL PUNCHES flew in Congress today ahead of President Bush’s State of the Union address, in which Mr Bush is expected to tackle the thorny issue of state pension reform and bask in the success of Sunday's election in Iraq.

Democrat Senators laid traps for his nominees for Homeland Security Secretary and Attorney General. After delaying the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State last month to register their anger at being "misled" over the war in Iraq, they turned their guns on two men they accuse of overzealously cracking down on innocent foreigners after the September 11 attacks.

First on the block was Alberto Gonzales, who will almost certainly become the nation’s first Hispanic Attorney General despite criticism from Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy today that he had "tarnished our country’s moral leadership in the world and put American soldiers and American citizens at greater risk".

Republican John Cornyn of Texas accused the Democrats of seeking a "bully pulpit" from which to taint Mr Gonzales "with the perceived sins of the Bush administration" – a reference to the brutal treatment and torture of detainees in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail and the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.

But Democrats were unrepentant, saying that they planned extensive debate on his role in the treatment of foreign detainees, meaning that his nomination would not be approved in time for the State of the Union speech tonight.

Democrats complain that as White House counsel, Mr Gonzales approved a memo on August 1, 2002 that ruled out only the most severe types of torture but was later withdrawn. It said that "physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions or even death".

They have accused him of continuing to take a wobbly stance on the rule of law since his nomination by denouncing torture on one hand but then saying that the US may have the right to hold and abuse foreigners in secret locations overseas.

Michael Chertoff, a senior judge put forward to run Homeland Security after the head of New York police pulled out of the job over a nanny employment scandal, came under similar scrutiny during a hearing in the Senate today.

Democrats questioned the role he played as head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in approving interrogation techniques and other mistreatment of detainees. After the September 11 attacks, the US detained more than 760 men of Arab and South Asian descent for immigration violations, often minor, and held them for an average of about three months - although sometimes for far longer - without access to lawyers and without charge.

Carl Levin of Michigan demanded to know what role he had in the development of a legal theory that apparently allowed Americans to ignore normal rules on torture, since he was consulted on how he, as chief federal prosecutor, would apply the law of torture.

Mr Chertoff said today that he had always declined to answer hypothetical questions about treatment of detainees and told the CIA that its agents should ensure they were on solid ground if they had any doubts. He said he was not involved in decisions about detentions and was unaware that the men had been denied access to lawyers.

He defended the men accused of abusing detainees, pointing out that they were under "emotional stress" after seeing colleagues killed in New York. But the abuse, he added, was "regrettable." In a remark that is guaranteed to draw criticism from civil rights advocates, he stressed that the men were all detained legally, even though their violations were all related to immigration, not terrorism.

The 51-year-old is also expected to win approval and has the support of two New Jersey Democrat Senators for opposing racial profiling in their state.

The show of muscle on Capitol Hill was clearly intended to spoil Mr Bush’s State of the Union address tonight, which Republicans are seeing as an opportunity to celebrate the Iraqi elections. Some of the president's supporters are reportedly planning to waving fingers dipped in purple ink in the air, an echo of the method used at Iraqi polling stations to identify people who had voted.

Mr Bush is expected to call for a bipartisan approach to his plan for private retirement accounts, but Democrats are predicting that it will fail. They oppose his plan to allow workers to invest their savings in the stock market and claim it will only worsen America’s record budget deficit.

They also want Mr Bush to announce a clear exit strategy for Iraq. But Mr Bush’s aides have resisted this, saying that announcing a withdrawal date would only prompt a wave of new attacks.

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