Last week, after months of stonewalling, Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder finally gave a partial answer to the Senate Republican's request that he identify the DOJ political appointees who have given legal counsel to the terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay.

Holder said that although he had not as yet made a complete study of the DOJ appointees there were at least nine lawyers in the department who had worked on behalf of the terrorists. The estimate given by Holder does not include lawyers who (like himself) had worked for law firms which were engaged in providing pro bono legal services for the Guantanamo Bay terrorists. According to the National Review.

Holder was a senior partner at a Washington firm (Covington & Burling) that proudly boasts of having represented 18 enemy combatants. Working for America's enemies was its most heavily resourced "pro bono" (no fee) project, to which it donated thousands of hours of work (3,022 hours in 2007 alone). Holder did not directly handle the cases. Yet, while his firm banged away on them, he made public statements accusing the United States of having "denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution."

In a six-month investigation by this paper and Channel 4's Dispatches, involving weeks of covert filming by the programme's reporters:

. IFE activists boasted to the undercover reporters that they had already "consolidated...a lot of influence and power" over Tower Hamlets, a London borough council with a 1 billion budget.

. We have established that the group and its allies were awarded more than 10 million of taxpayer's money, much of it from government funds designed to "prevent violent extremism".

. IFE leaders were recorded expressing opposition to democracy, support for sharia law or mocking black people. The IFE organised meetings with extremists, including Taliban allied, a man named by the US government as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a man under investigation by the FBI for his links to the September 11 attacks.

. Moderate Muslims in London told how the IFE and its allies were enforcing their hardline views on the rest of the local community, curbing behavior they deemed "un-Islamic". The owner of a dating agency received a threatening email from an IFE activist, warning her to close it.

. George Galloway, a London MP, admitted in recordings obtained by this newspaper that his surprise victory in the 2005 election owed more to the IFE "than it would be wise-for them-for me to say," adding that they played a "decisive role" in his triumph at the polls.