But there was insufficient support, and the issue will be taken up again next month.The rush of gay weddings in San Francisco began after Mr Newsom granted officials permission to marry a lesbian couple who had been together for 50 years.Once word got out that the two women were to be joined in marriage, a parade of hopeful gay and lesbian couples turned up asking for the same treatment. "A barrier to true justice has been removed," Mr Newsom said.The legal value of the documents outside San Francisco was not clear. But the decision to start marrying same-sex couples - in disregard of a law approved by voters in California in 2000 which said marriage should be between a man and a woman - was seen as a step forward by gay and lesbian advocates.Inevitably, the drama in San Francisco - where scores of couples queued outside City Hall to go through the brief ceremony - will intensify an already fraught political debate in America. The confusion over gay marriage in the United States deepened last night after city officials in San Francisco performed more than 100 same-sex weddings in defiance of state laws, and members of the Massachusetts legislature suspended efforts to pass a constitutional amendment to ban homosexual nuptials. To the astonishment of even the gay community, the new Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, instructed staff at City Hall to issue marriage licences to gay couples on Thursday.

Nor, given his rank, is it likely he had access to secrets of any great value. According to officials last night, Mr Anderson had signed on to extremist Internet chatrooms, and was trying to contact members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, to offer services and information. Whether he even made contact is unclear.But critics said the US authorities might be overreacting - as has happened with several US personnel at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where more than 600 al-Qa'ida and Taliban suspects are held. They include Captain James Yee a former chaplain at Fort Lewis who was accused of espionage, only for the charges to be reduced to mishandling classified information and other lesser infringements.But this latest case could fuel new concerns at the Pentagon and in the public about the reliability of Muslims in the armed forces - as the US is trying to attract more Muslims and Arabic-speaking servicemen to help in Iraq.. Mr Kerry is left with the more potent line, that "I know something about landing on aircraft carriers for real" Thus Vietnam and Iraq have subtly merged. Bush supporters reject the notion that only war heroes are qualified to wage war: where would that have left Franklin Roosevelt? But the converse is also true, that those without real war service cannot claim to have a monopoly of wisdom.Events on the ground in Iraq in 2004, rather than any embarrassing new discovery about Mr Bush's Guard service between 1968 and 1973, will decide how much the controversy will damage him politically. If, miraculously, Iraq does become a success then the whole thing will not much matter.

But the more Iraq grows to resemble Vietnam, the argument over what Mr Bush did or did not do in Texas and Alabama 30 years ago will ­ like the dispute over Saddam's WMD ­ be a malign and constant companion along a very hard road back to the White House.. An American National Guardsman who converted to Islam has been arrested on suspicion of trying to pass information to al-Qa'ida. He was held after a surveillance operation at his base at Fort Lewis in Washington state.A Pentagon official said Mr Anderson was suspected of aiding the enemy "by wrongfully attempting to communicate with, and give intelligence to, the al-Qa'ida network." He was arrested after a joint investigation by the Army, the FBI and the Justice Department.But it appears unlikely that he actually passed on information. Today the "Mission Accomplished" stunt looks a massive act of hubris, and which becomes more massive still when seen through the prism of Vietnam. The pilot, who chose not to fight a mistaken war when he could have, has been caught play-acting in a war which he ordered and which increasingly seems a mistake. Barely six months ago his made-for-campaign ads, landing in a US Navy plane aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it returned from duty off Iraq, seemed to have locked up his re-election there and then.