JUST days before the US presidential election, one of America's leading periodicals has published damning evidence linking candidate Senator John McCain to "waste and abuse in Bermuda".

Weekly magazine The Nation, which describes itself as "the flagship of the left", this week published an article entitled 'McCain's Bermuda Triangle', alleging that the Arizona senator used the former Bermuda Naval Air Station in St. David's as his own personal hotel: "Club Fed".

The damning article by filmmaker and freelance journalist Ross Tuttle alleges that Senator McCain visited Bermuda several times before the closure of the US base in 1995, bringing an "entourage" and spending tens of thousands of American taxpayer dollars on each trip.

The Nation reports that each of Senator McCain's trips to Bermuda on military planes cost about $40,000 per flight, plus other costs (including, reportedly, $53,000 to redecorate a cottage on the base).

One such visit in the summer of 1991 saw Senator McCain host a family reunion at the base for at least one week at taxpayer expense. The senator's 11-strong entourage included his wife Cindy and several of his children.

The article in The Nation is based on a never-before-released Navy Inspector General report that mentions "one US Senator", whose name was redacted, who used the Bermuda Naval Air Station as a "vacation site". These reports come as Senator McCain struggles to gain ground on Senator Barack Obama, who has already been named as the next President by media outlets and civilians alike.

Senator McCain's visits to Bermuda ¿ "improper luxury Atlantic-island trips", according to The Nation ¿ were well known in the early 1990s, although the full extent of the "waste and abuse" has just been revealed.

At the time, Senior Petty Officer George Taylor, chief of military police at the base, compared the Bermuda Naval Air Station to a hotel chain in an ABC tv interview: "We're not running a military installation," he said. "We're running a Howard Johnson's."

Mr. Taylor also detailed the extent of Senator McCain (pictured) and his family's abuse of taxpayer dollars ¿ including the use of sailors based in Bermuda to serve as Cindy McCain's personal chauffers.

"Once they arrive they have the government vans here, which provide the transportation. They have the drivers, maid service," Mr. Taylor told ABC.

"Sailors had been assigned to be [Cindy McCain's] driver, and they carried her bags after she went shopping at the expensive shops on the island. It's like they were her servants."

Mr. Taylor told The Nation that the use of Bermuda's base as "Club Fed", as military personnel called it, was disturbing ¿ especially when US bases were closing, resulting in unemployment.

"They were closing all these bases stateside - like in Alabama, where I'm from, and good people were losing their jobs," he said. "And then, here's one that everyone's using, going to do their golfing weekends."

One of Mr. Taylor's lawyers, Tom Devine, spoke to The Nation about why new allegations of corruption in Bermuda could hurt Senator McCain's campaign years later.

"It was Senator McCain who made character an issue for the election," Mr. Devine said.

"He says that Senator Obama should answer questions about associations from his distant past so that we can make a fair assessment about his character. But Senator McCain has some troubling questions to answer about his own behavior. It's one thing to go on a junket. It's another thing to have taxpayers finance a family reunion."

The Nation's article has been picked up by regional US newspapers and popular news blogs alike. The Phoenix New Times, in McCain's home state of Arizona, described the story as having been broken too "late in the game" to seriously influence the election.

"It appears that the family vacation stretched ethical boundaries, but stops short of saying McCain broke any laws," wrote staff writer Ray Stern. Political blog Daily Kos, which receives over 500,000 hits on the average day, has covered the story exhaustively ¿ coming to a wholly different conclusion.

Writes one Daily Kos blogger: "This year, let's get out the vote, watch the returns come in, and then hoist a Bermuda Rum Swizzle to the news that Air McCain has been grounded."