"This is 1935, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as close to Adolf Hitler as we've seen," said Newt Gingrich to a startled editor at Human Events.

"We now know who they are – the question is who are we. Are we Baldwin or Churchill?"

"In 1935 ... Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini intimidated the democracies," Newt plunged ahead. "The question is who is going to intimidate who." Yes, a little learning can be a dangerous thing.

A few facts. First, when Hitler violated the Versailles Treaty by announcing rearmament in March 1935, Baldwin was not in power. Second, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald quickly met with Il Duce to form the Stresa Front – against Hitler. Third, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in October 1935, Baldwin imposed sanctions.

But Churchill did not wholly approve.

Abyssinia, said Churchill, is a "wild land of tyranny, slavery and tribal war ... No one can keep up the pretense that Abyssinia is a fit, worthy and equal member of a league of civilized nations."

As late as 1938, Churchill was still proclaiming the greatness of Il Duce: "It would be a dangerous folly for the British people to underrate the enduring position in world history which Mussolini will hold; or the amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, self-control and perseverance which he exemplifies."

But back to the new Hitler.

The Iranians, said Newt, "have been proactively at war with us since 1979." We must now prepare to invade and occupy Iran, and identify a "network of Iranians prepared to run their ... country" after we take the place over.

"I wake up every morning thinking we could lose two major cities today and have the equivalent of the second Holocaust by nuclear weapons – this morning."

What about diplomacy?

"We should say to the Europeans that there is no diplomatic solution that is imaginable that is going to solve this problem." Newt's reasoning: War is inevitable – the longer we wait, the graver the risk. Let's get it over with. Bismarck called this committing suicide out of fear of death.

My own sense of this astonishing interview is that Newt is trying to get to the right of John McCain on Iran and cast himself – drum roll, please – as the Churchill of our generation.

But are the comparisons of Ahmadinejad with Hitler and Iran with the Third Reich, let alone Newt with Churchill, instructive? Or are they ludicrous? Again, a few facts.

In 1942, Hitler's armies dominated Europe from the Pyrenees to the Urals. Ahmadinejad is the president of a nation whose air and naval forces would be toasted in hours by the United States. Iran has missiles that can hit Israel, but no nuclear warheads. Israel could put scores of atom bombs on Iran. The United States, without losing a plane, could make the country uninhabitable with one B-2 flyover and a few MX and Trident missiles.

Why would Ayatollah Khameinei, who has far more power than Ahmadinejad, permit him to ignite a war that could mean the end of their revolution and country? And if we were not intimidated by a USSR with thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on us, why should Ahmadinejad cause Newt to break out in cold sweats at night?

Currently, the "nuclear program" of Iran consists of trying to run uranium hexafluoride gas through a few centrifuges. There is no hard evidence Iran is within three years of producing enough highly enriched uranium for one bomb.

And if Iran has been at war with us since 1979, why has it done so much less damage than Gadhafi, who blew up that discotheque in Berlin with our soldiers inside and massacred those American kids on Pan Am 103? Diplomacy worked with Gadhafi. Why not try it with Iran?

The author is Paul Craig Roberts, one of the creators and champions of "supply-side economics," the great conservative cause of the early 1980s. As a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and then assistant secretary of the treasury under President Reagan, Roberts was a true believer and an effective advocate. His political stance is pretty well summed up in the title of his newest book: "The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice."

Roberts is a syndicated columnist now, an honorable profession, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a temple of talented political thinkers devoted to all the Right things, beginning with Reaganism. His essay, "My Epiphany: From Reaganaut to Anti-War Radical," is, as they say these days, sweeping the Internet. (You can read the text on VDARE.com, the Web site of the Lexington Institute.)

Roberts begins by emphasizing that he does not believe he is betraying old friends or old causes, saying that he never considered himself a slave to party or ideology. Apparently not. He has been writing strong stuff:

"Americans have forgotten what it takes to remain free. Instead, every ideology, every group is determined to use government to advance its agenda. ... The United States is undergoing a coup against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and democracy itself. The 'liberal press' has been co-opted. ... Media concentration permitted in the 1990s has put news and opinion in the hands of a few corporate executives who do not dare risk their broadcasting licenses by getting on the wrong side of government, or their advertising revenues by becoming 'controversial.'"

He talks of "years of illegal spying" giving the White House the power of "blackmail" over media and political opposition. I might not use the same words, but I do believe that we, the people, are in jeopardy: New spying and eavesdropping technologies and their delighted abuse by intelligence-gathering organizations and their political masters are turning the United States into an emerging police state.

"Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are not our protectors," he adds. "Americans need to understand that many interests are using the 'war on terror' to achieve their agendas. The Federalist Society is using the war on terror to achieve its agenda of concentrating power in the executive and packing the Supreme Court to this effect. The neoconservatives are using the war to achieve their agenda of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Police agencies are using the war to make themselves less accountable. Republicans are using the war to achieve one-party rule ..."

"Debate is dead," Roberts concludes. "One certainty prevails. Bush is committing America to a path of violence and coercion, and he is getting away with it."

I asked Roberts what has been the reaction since these words were published 10 days ago.

"I have had thousands of e-mails, about 99.9 percent favorable, full of praise from Democrats and Republicans alike," he answered. "They say the country is desperate for a straight talker. ... People want to hear more. People want me to run for the Senate or for president."

I, for one, would consider voting for him, though I would hope he will finally give up on supply-side theory.

On February 26, 2003, the day that Dhafir was arrested, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that “supporters of terrorism had been apprehended.” Since that day senior government officials have continued to paint Dhafir as a terrorist, and Judge Norman Mordue denied Dhafir bail on four occasions. Yet local prosecutors successfully lobbied Mordue to prevent the charge of terrorism from being part of the trial. This ruling turned into a brick wall that the defense kept hitting during the proceedings: prosecutors could hint at more serious charges, but the defense was never allowed to follow this line of questioning. Despite denying Dhafir the right to address the charge in court, Mordue allowed prosecutors to bring the charge to his sentencing.

Although the government continues to characterize Dhafir as a criminal supporting terrorism, the only context in which this case makes any sense is the overwhelming humanitarian crisis created by the brutal U.S. sanctions on the country of Iraq.[3]

Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness (VITW), speaking about mainstream U.S media coverage before the Iraq War had begun, said, “I try to point out to the mainstream journalists that they have succeeded enormously in informing the U.S. public about the horrors committed by the current regime in Iraq while for the most part neglecting the horrors the United States has committed. That the regime here has used chemical weapons, engaged in torture, and violated the political and civil rights of Iraqi civilians is repugnant to all who cherish human rights. And yet, what the U.S. public doesn’t understand and will possibly never comprehend is that the greatest violations of human rights in Iraq since the Gulf War have happened as a result of U.S.-led UN economic sanctions against Iraq.”[4] Indeed, three senior UN officials living and working in Iraq resigned because they considered the sanctions to be a “genocidal” policy.[5]

Talking about her return to the U.S. after a 1998 visit to Iraq, Kelly said, “Upon our return to the U.S., customs agents turned my passport over to the State Department, perhaps as evidence that, according to U.S. law, I’ve committed a criminal act by traveling to Iraq. I know that our efforts to be voices in the wilderness aren’t criminal. We’re governed by compassion, not by the laws that pitilessly murder innocent children. What’s more, Iraqi children might benefit if we could bring their story into a courtroom, before a jury of our peers.”[6]

IRAQ UNDER SANCTIONS

During the course of the proceedings the government did its utmost to prevent any discussion of the state of Iraq under the sanctions from being part of the trial. Government employees, including Susan Hutner, of the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), testified to having no knowledge of the effects of the sanctions. As the government attorney addressing the situation in Iraq, she helped draft the initial legal documentation to implement the sanctions and then worked on the sanctions for 12 years. When the defense attempted to question Hutner about the Oil for Food program, the court ruled the line of questioning irrelevant.[7]

Several government witnesses of Iraqi descent broke down on the stand when they began to talk of the effects of the sanctions on their families.[8] Each time this happened the prosecution immediately interrupted the testimony.[9] The only newspaper reporting on the proceedings, the local Syracuse Post-Standard, failed to address the sanctions as they pertained to the case.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 1, 1990, and on August 2, U.S. sanctions against Iraq were put in place. On January 17, 1991, the first bombs of the Gulf War were dropped on Baghdad. Before this war the people of Iraq had a standard of living comparable to many Western countries. Although a brutal dictatorship, the government provided universal healthcare and education including college for all its citizens. There was virtually no illiteracy and the education system and health system were the best in the region.

The result of the war was total devastation: more bombs were dropped on Iraq in a six-week period than were dropped by all parties together in the whole of World War II. Taken together, these bombs are at least six times more powerful than two atomic bombs. Many types of bombs were used including ones containing depleted uranium (DU), the waste matter from nuclear plants; hundreds of tons of DU ammunition now lie scattered throughout Iraq. The DU dust has entered the food chain through the soil and the water, and as a result many formerly unknown diseases have become prevalent in Iraq. Many pregnant women are delivering their babies as early as six months, and many babies are born with terrible deformities. Cancer rates have skyrocketed, and if current trends continue 44% of the population could develop cancer within the next ten years. [10]

All major bridges and communication systems were bombed, making any communications both inside and outside the country extremely difficult. The water purification system was bombed and the UN has never allowed it to be repaired; as a result 15 years of raw sewage has piled up in the streets. This has been the cause of much disease and death, particularly among the young and very old. Hospitals and schools were not spared and, as a result of the bombing and the sanctions, the health and education systems in Iraq went from being the best in the region to being the worst. [11]

Robert Fisk in his new book about the Middle East says, “There was one final scourge to be visited upon the Iraqi people, a foul cocktail in which both our gunfire and our sanctions played an intimate, horrific role, one that would contaminate Iraqis for years to come, perhaps for generations. In historical terms, it may be identified as our most callous crime against the Middle East, against Arabs, against children. It manifested itself in abscesses, in massive tumours, in gangrene, internal bleeding and child mastectomies and shrunken heads and deformities and thousands of tiny graves.”[12]

In 1998 Denis Halliday, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations resigned from the UN after thirty-four years of distinguished service. At the time he was serving as the humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad, and his resignation was a direct result of the conditions he witnessed. He said, “I had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price of economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of treated water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out of control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter, and the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will slaughter those responsible.”[13]

Hans Von Sponeck succeeded Denis Halliday as humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad and, and in early 2000 he too resigned from that position. Von Sponeck, talking about the Oil for Food program, said that it was impossible for each person to live on the $100 per year that was being allocated, especially because of the conditions prevalent in Iraq at the time. He said, “Set that pittance against the lack of clean water, the fact that electricity fails for up to 22 hours a day, and the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, the sheer trauma of trying to get from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.”[14]

And in a report to the UN Secretary General, Professor Marc Bossuyt, an authority on international law, stated that the “…sanctions regime against Iraq is unequivocally illegal under existing human right law and could raise questions under the Genocide Convention.”[15]

WHAT HELP THE NEEDY DID

Over the course of 13 years, from 1990 until 2003, HTN sent food and medicines that reached millions of starving Iraqi civilians. The aid was first sent to Maher Zagha in Jordan. Zagha is a former Onondaga Community College and Utica College student who lived in the Upstate New York area for several years before returning to Jordan.[16] He is listed as a co-conspirator with Dhafir on the indictment.

On the day of Dhafir’s arrest, Zagha was arrested in Jordan and then held in solitary for 21 days. The Jordanians interrogated him and released him and since then he has gone about his normal life, including traveling internationally. After Dhafir’s conviction in February 2005 the remaining HTN money in Jordan, $138,564.53 was confiscated along with $25,000 of Dhafir’s personal money.

Throughout the period of the sanctions container loads of food were shipped by HTN from Jordan to Iraq. Receipts from the purchase of food were shown in court. For example, an invoice from January 29th, 1997, showed the purchase of 25 tons of Thailand rice, 35 tons of flour and 2000 cans of cooking oil. Invoices from other days and years list tons of; American rice, Turkish sugar, Iranian flour, chickpeas and Iraqi lentils. Tea and tomato paste was also shipped.[17] Zagha sent the aid into Iraq using the correct official channels required by the Jordanian authorities. When he was unable to comply, he gave the aid over to the authorities. In 1990 when Dhafir sent 900 kilograms of medicine to Zagha without the correct paper work, Zagha had to give the medicine to the Iraqi embassy in Jordan. It was the only way to get the medicine into Iraq and he could only hope that it would reach the people for whom it was intended.

From 1996 through 2003 Zagha sent money to Iraq and local exchangers were used because there were no banks operating at that time. The money was sent to Dhafir’s brother Najim in Baghdad (also a physician) and two other men, Mustapha and Ammar. By getting money into Iraq from Jordan HTN was able to provide starving civilians with meat protein. The three men in Baghdad bought animals at the open markets surrounding the city, and these purchases usually coincided with the major holidays of the Muslim faith. For example, in January 2003, for one of the most holy of Muslim holidays, Eid, Zagha sent four lots of money totaling $285,000. This money bought about 4,000 lambs and cows which were sacrificed, and the food was distributed to the needy.[18] Looking at the quantities of aid provided to Iraqi civilians by HTN, it is easy to believe that they were indeed feeding more people in Iraq than all the other aid agencies put together.[19]

An email read in court showed that Dhafir believed that the U.S. government was not opposed to Iraqi civilians receiving humanitarian aid of the form that HTN was supplying. HTN and other groups, like VITW, openly advertised that they were sending aid to civilians. They did this through leaflets, websites and fundraising events. For 13 years the government took little action against people who sent aid to Iraqi civilians, and this tacit approval must have helped confirm Dhafir’s belief.[20]

Since the day of his arrest, using unfair tactics and innuendo, the
government has managed to transform Dhafir from a compassionate humanitarian into a crook and supporter of terrorists. They have done this with the aid of a complicit press and a willfully ignorant public.

THE GOVERNMENT APPROACH

From the outset in this case the approach of the government has been one of circumambulation. Michael Powell of the Washington Post said, “There is a shadow-boxing quality to the terror allegations lodged against Dhafir. In August [2004], Gov. George E. Pataki (R) described Dhafir’s as a ‘money laundering case to help terrorist organizations . . . conduct horrible acts.’ Prosecutors hinted at national security reasons for holding Dhafir without bail. But no evidence was offered to support the allegations.”[21]

In April 2004 the U.S. government brought new charges against Zagha to Interpol, and Zagha had to give up his passport. It was returned so that he could make a business trip to Syria, but on December 20, 2005, the authorities again took his passport.

To this day no evidence has been offered to link Dhafir to terrorists. And yet, on November 15, 2005, the government presented a lecture at Syracuse University’s law school entitled, “A Law Enforcement Approach to Terrorist Financing,” in which Dhafir’s case was highlighted. [22] The three prosecutors from the case, Michael Olmstead, Greg West and Steve Green were present along with Jeff Breinholt, Deputy Chief, Counterterrorism Section United States Department of Justice who was the main speaker.

Breinholt asserted that the Dhafir case had been “under prosecuted,” this despite the fact that the government brought 60 counts against Dhafir and gained conviction on 59. He cited HTN’s use of tax exemption numbers other than its own as an example of how charities functioned in their criminal activity. Many of Dhafir’s convictions on tax evasion and fraud charges are based on the assumption that people who gave money to HTN used the tax exemption number of another charity and therefore did not pay tax. The government is holding Dhafir responsible for this lost tax revenue.

One of the two numbers Dhafir used was from a charity that is the Saudi Arabian equivalent of the American charity United Way.[23] The use of another charity’s number is not an uncommon practice. What is uncommon is the fact that it resulted in a criminal prosecution. Barrie Gewanter, Director of the Central New York ACLU, has explained the normal procedure for this type of situation in numerous interviews about the HTN case. Ordinarily the state government intervenes and shuts the charity down until the situation is sorted out to their satisfaction. When and if this is achieved, the charity continues its work.[24]

The government’s philosophy in prosecuting this case was made clear in the course of the lecture. Olmstead, the head prosecutor of the Dhafir case, cited the philosopher Emmanuel Kant’s imperative, “To obey the law because it is the law.” He added that “if you break the law, you must pay the price,” apparently regardless of the unfairness of the law and the humanitarian nature of the act. Compassion comes with a very high price.

Dhafir is undoubtedly paying the price of breaking the genocidal policy of U.S. sanctions against Iraq. However, the government was unwilling to prosecute him for this without the attendant obfuscation and cover provided by the laundry list of charges that he faced. A clear message is being sent that humanitarian acts like this will not be tolerated and will be punished accordingly.

By hosting this lecture on terrorist financing, Syracuse University Law School provided the government with a platform that gives credence to an accusation that is wholly lacking in evidence. They have become the most recent government accomplice. The “shadow boxing” continues with the media, public and the local law school as willing participants in the charade.

The journalist John Pilger writes, “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it”[25] It is also not enough for citizens in a democracy to see themselves as mere receptors of information. As citizens in a democracy we have an obligation to seek justice for each other. In this case it means actively going beyond the government’s obfuscation and seeking hard facts and other sources of information. If this can be achieved, Dhafir and the other HTN defendants will be vindicated; but it is no easy task.

ACHIEVING JUSTICE

Many people are reassured by the fact that Dhafir can appeal against his conviction and sentencing. But most have no idea what this means in terms of practicalities. Under the best possible circumstances the chances of a successful appeal are slim.

Seven government agencies investigated this case for five years. The prosecutors presented the case in minutia over the course of the seventeen weeks of proceedings. What was expected to be a 6-week trial turned into a 17-week trial and the three defense lawyers have received a fraction of their fee. Due to this lack of finances a request for transcripts was made at the beginning of the trial.[26] Judge Mordue denied this request and so one of the three defense lawyers typed the proceedings on his laptop.

But official transcripts are essential to an appeal and even if ordered today, it would take two years to get the transcript in full. The cost would be around $60,000. before any lawyer fees or other costs are taken into account.

Dhafir has been bankrupted by this course of justice and has no money for an appeals lawyer. His only hope is that people who care about compassion and justice will be able to raise enough money for him to have a viable chance of a successful appeal.

——————-
Katherine Hughes is a potter and a voracious reader of history and current events. She responded to a request from the ACLU for court watchers and attended virtually all of the Dhafir trial. To find out more about this case, please visit her website: www.dhafirtrial.net.
—————————-
[1] Write to Dr. Dhafir: Rafil Dhafir, 11921-052, FCI-Fairton, PO Box 420, Fairton, NJ 08320.

[2] We learned in the proceedings that a HTN volunteer was killed
by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

[3] The first 15 counts of Dr. Dhafir’s 60-count indictment involve
violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), commonly known as the sanctions. The full indictment is available on my website:
http://www.dhafirtrial.net/static/indictment.pdf

[4] Kathy Kelly, “Other Lands Have Dreams” (Oakland: Counterpunch and AK Press, 2005), p.51.

[5] John Pilger, “The New Rulers of the World” (London: Verso 2002), p.54.

[6] Ibid, Kelly. P.37.

[7] From my witness of the proceedings and official transcript of Susan
Hutner’s cross examination by the defense, November 10, 2004.

[8] One witness broke down on the stand when testifying that his mother had died because she did not have access to necessary blood pressure medicine.

[9] A video of an HTN fundraising event was shown early in the proceedings. The government intended to play only the first few minutes, but the defense insisted that the whole video be shown.

[10] John Pilger, “The Impact of the Sanctions,” found at
http://pilger.carlton.com/iraq/impact

[11] Information about Iraq under the sanctions can be found on the Voices in the Wilderness website. A video of a fundraising event in which Dr. Dhafir describes conditions of Iraq using the Pentagon and UNICEF as his sources is available at the address below.
The file is 12 MB: QuickTime version:

http://www.a39.net/Dhafir/Dhafir.html

Flash version:
http://www.a39.net/Dhafir/DhafirFlash.html

[12] Robert Fisk, “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2005) p.727.

[13] John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso 2002), p.53.

[14] Ibid, Pilger, p.59

[15] Ibid, Pilger, p.95.

[16] In Syracuse, New York, and Rome, New York, respectively.

[17] From my witness of the proceedings

[18] Maher Zagha sent me pictures of the animals being slaughtered. A sign in each photograph shows that the animals were purchased by HTN.

[19] From my witness of the proceedings, correspondence with Maher Zagha and Dr. Dhafrir’s sentencing statement to the media.

[20] The government’s tacit approval in this case reminds me of the way that people are granted dual-citizenship: this is achieved by taking the Oath of Allegiance (and swearing away their original citizenship) and keeping the country of origin passport. This is the “accepted” practice and the media write freely about “dual-citizens.” But what if the government decides to prosecute this action in years to come?

[21] Michael Powell, “High-Profile N.Y. Suspect Goes on Trial: Arrest Was Called Part of War on Terrorism, but Doctor Faces Other Charges,” The Washington Post, October 19, 2004.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43278-2004Oct18.html

[22] The lecture was advertised by the “Institute For National Security and Counterterrorism”, INSCT, which is hosted by Syracuse University Law School:
http://insct.syr.edu/Research_SWP0506.htm

A photograph of Greg West can be seen at this site. It was taken during the lecture and IEEPA violations are chalked on the blackboard behind him.

[23] Elaine Cassel, The War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2004). See the chapter, “Guilt by Association: The Islamic Charities,” pp 87 - 105

[24] See WCNY Public Television, “Access” with George Kilpatrick. This program aired on Wednesday, 26th October at 11pm, the night before Dr.Dhafir’s sentencing. I was part of a three-person panel with Barrie Gewanter (ACLU) and Julienne Oldfield, another of the Dhafir trial court watchers.

[25] John Pilger’s Homepage:http://www.johnpilger.com//

[26] Pages that need to be transcribed cost $5.75 each, and already
transcribed pages cost 50c a page.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."

The draft lays out how some 60,000 already strapped town and county offices must keep the birth and death records under lock and key and report all document requests to Washington. Individuals who show up in person will still be able to obtain their own birth certificates and, in some cases, the birth and death records of an immediate relative, and "legitimate" research institutions may be able to access files. But reporters and activists won't be allowed to fish through records, many family members looking for genetic clues will be out of luck, and people wanting to trace adoptions will dead-end. If you are homeless and need your own birth certificate, forget it: no address, no service.

Consider the public health implications. A few years back, a doctor in a tiny Vermont town noticed that two patients who lived on the same hill had ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. Hearing rumors of more cases of the relatively rare and always fatal disease, the doctor notified the health department. Citing lack of resources, it declined to investigate. The doc then told a reporter, who searched the death certificates filed in the town office only to find that ALS had already killed five of the town's 1,300 residents. It was statistically possible, but unlikely, that this 10-times-higher-than-normal incidence was simply chance. Since no one knows what causes ALS, clusters like this one, once revealed, help epidemiologists assess risk factors, warn doctors to watch for symptoms,and alert neighbors and activists.

Activists in Colorado already know what it is like when states bar access to vital records. For years, they fought the Cotter Corp., claiming that its uranium mining operations were killing residents and workers. Unwilling to rely on the health department, which they claimed had a "cozy" relationship with the polluters, the activists tried to access death records, only to be told that it was illegal in this closed-records state. An editorial in Colorado's Longmont Daily Times-Call lamented, "If there's a situation that makes the case for why death certificates should be available to the public, it is th[is] Superfund area."

Some of state officials around the country are questioning whether the new regulations themselves illegally tread on states' rights. But the feds have been coy. Richard McCoy, public health statistic chief in Vermont, one of the nation's 14 open-records states, says, "No state is mandated to meet the regs. However, if they don't, then residents of that state will not be able to access any federal services, including social security and passports. States have no choice."

But while the public loses access to records, the federal government gains a gargantuan national database easily cross-referenced in the name of national security. The feds' claim that increased security will deter identity theft and terrorism is facile. Wholesale corporate data gathering is the major nexis of identity theft. As for terrorism, all the 9/11 perpetrators had valid identification.

Meanwhile, the quiet clampdown on vital records is part of a growing consolidation of information at the federal level. "That information will dovetail with the Real ID Act of 2005," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Real ID cards are the other shoe that is scheduled to drop in three years." That act, signed into law last May, establishes national standards for state-issued driver's licenses and ID cards, and centralizes the information into a database.

Aside from public health and privacy concerns, closing vital records incurs a steep intangible cost: It undermines community in places where that healthy ethos still survives. In small town America, the local clerk's office is a sociable place where government wears the face of your neighbor. Each year, Vermont's 246 towns distribute their vital statistics to all residents. "It's the first place everybody goes in the Town Report," says state archivist Gregory Sanford. "Who was born, who died, who got married, who had a baby and wasn't married."

This may not be the most dramatic danger to democracy, but it is one of the Bush administration's many quiet, incremental assaults on the health of America's body politic. And it may end up listed on the death certificate for open society.

Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.

More than a year later, it exists only on paper.

Foot-dragging, debate over its budget and powers, and concern over the qualifications of some of its members — one was treasurer of Bush’s first campaign for Texas governor — has kept the board from doing a single day of work.

On Thursday, after months of delay, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a first step toward standing up the fledgling watchdog, approving the two lawyers Bush nominated to lead the panel. But it may take months before the board is up and running and doing much serious work.

Critics say the inaction shows the administration is just going through the motions when it comes to civil liberties.

“They have stalled in giving the board adequate funding. They have stalled in making appointments,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.). “It is apparent they are not taking this seriously.”

The Sept. 11 commission also has expressed reservations about the commitment to the liberties panel.

“We felt it was absolutely vital,” said Thomas H. Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey who led the commission. “We had certainly hoped it would have been up and running a long time ago.”

The inaction is especially noteworthy in light of recent events. Some Republicans joined Democrats to delay renewal of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act because of civil liberties concerns. And the disclosure in December that Bush approved surveillance of certain U.S. residents’ international communications without a court order has caused bipartisan dismay in Congress.

“Obviously, civil liberties issues are critically important, and they have been to this president, especially after 9/11,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, adding that the White House had moved expeditiously to establish the board. “We do not formally nominate until we are through the background investigation and the full vetting. It takes time to present those nominations to the Senate. But now that they have been confirmed, that is a good thing.”

The board chairwoman is Carol E. Dinkins, a Houston lawyer who was a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. A longtime friend of the Bush family, she was the treasurer of George W. Bush’s first campaign for governor of Texas, in 1994, and co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney, which recruited Republican lawyers to handle legal battles after the November 2004 election.

Dinkins, a longtime partner in the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, where Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales once was a partner, has specialized in defending oil and gas companies in environmental lawsuits.

Foremost among her credentials, she told Senate Judiciary Committee members in a response to their questions, was the two years she spent as deputy attorney general in President Reagan’s Justice Department. There, she said, she had to weigh civil liberties concerns while overseeing domestic surveillance and counter-intelligence cases.

The board vice chairman is Alan Charles Raul, a Washington lawyer who first suggested the concept of a civil liberties panel in an opinion article in the Los Angeles Times in December 2001. Raul, a former Agriculture Department general counsel currently in private practice, has published a book on privacy and the digital age and is the only panel member with apparent expertise in civil liberties issues.

The panel’s lone Democrat, Lanny J. Davis, has known Bush since the two were undergraduates at Yale. Civil liberties groups regard the Washington lawyer, who worked in the Clinton White House, as likely to be a progressive voice on the panel.

The board also includes a conservative Republican legal icon, Washington lawyer and former Bush Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, died in the Sept. 11 attacks. The fifth member is Francis X. Taylor, a retired Air Force general and former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator, who is chief security officer at General Electric Co.

The board members declined to comment for this article. Three referred calls to Dinkins, who referred calls to the White House.

The idea of such a watchdog agency was broached almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, as conservatives and liberals alike saw a need for the government to consider the implications of new and growing anti-terrorism measures.

The idea was to have professionals ask hard questions about whether the government was going too far in collecting and disseminating information about suspected terrorists, and to have those professionals make their views known in regular reports to the president.

The board was given a broad mandate to review the civil liberties effects of proposed regulations and executive branch policies related to the war on terrorism. It will report to Bush.

The law gives the panel access to classified information under certain circumstances, but not the power to subpoena documents. The board, which is within the Executive Office of the president, operates at the behest of the administration.

Civil liberties groups saw it as a promising first step.

“The board has the potential to be an important force in protecting civil liberties if the White House gives the board a role in the policymaking process, as Congress intended,” the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington advocacy group, wrote at the time the law was passed.

So far, that potential has not been realized.

The Bush administration waited nine months to send the nominations of Dinkins and Raul to the Senate for approval. The three other members of the board did not require Senate confirmation, but they could not function without a chairman.

Doubts about funding also developed. The administration proposed an initial budget of $750,000, which lawmakers doubled. But critics consider that far from adequate. A similar board in the Homeland Security Department was initially proposed to have a $13-million budget.

Some members of Congress are concerned that the administration may still be trying to shortchange the board.

The fiscal 2007 budget that the administration released this month includes no express mention of any funding for it. That triggered a letter of protest from Maloney and Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) to the Office of Management and Budget.

A spokesman for the office, Scott Milburn, said in an interview that money was being requested for the board, but he declined to say how much.

Congress, which championed the idea of the board, also dragged its heels. Dinkins and Raul were officially nominated in September, when the Senate Judiciary Committee was busy with a Supreme Court nomination. The panel held a confirmation hearing in November, but only two of the 18 members showed up.

The committee finally approved Dinkins and Raul on Thursday without discussion. Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said his panel moved as quickly as possible considering its other duties, such as Supreme Court nominations, and considering the time the White House took in sending the nominations to the panel.

The top Judiciary Committee Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said in an interview: “They seem to be good people. They have done good things in their lives. But they certainly don’t bring any special expertise to what I consider to be an extremely challenging position.”

But Durbin said he believed the board could still be a valuable addition to the debate over security and liberty as concern over the growing power of government after Sept. 11 cuts across ideological lines.

Dinkins asserted in her written responses to the Senate committee that the board would not be a pushover for the administration.

“The president will be best served if the board offers unvarnished and candid advice concerning whether counter-terrorism policies are developed with adequate consideration of privacy and civil liberties,” she wrote. “It is critical that … the board get up and running as quickly as possible.”

Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.

More than a year later, it exists only on paper.

Foot-dragging, debate over its budget and powers, and concern over the qualifications of some of its members — one was treasurer of Bush's first campaign for Texas governor — has kept the board from doing a single day of work.

On Thursday, after months of delay, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a first step toward standing up the fledgling watchdog, approving the two lawyers Bush nominated to lead the panel. But it may take months before the board is up and running and doing much serious work.

Critics say the inaction shows the administration is just going through the motions when it comes to civil liberties.

"They have stalled in giving the board adequate funding. They have stalled in making appointments," said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.). "It is apparent they are not taking this seriously."

The Sept. 11 commission also has expressed reservations about the commitment to the liberties panel.

"We felt it was absolutely vital," said Thomas H. Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey who led the commission. "We had certainly hoped it would have been up and running a long time ago."

The inaction is especially noteworthy in light of recent events. Some Republicans joined Democrats to delay renewal of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act because of civil liberties concerns. And the disclosure in December that Bush approved surveillance of certain U.S. residents' international communications without a court order has caused bipartisan dismay in Congress.

"Obviously, civil liberties issues are critically important, and they have been to this president, especially after 9/11," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, adding that the White House had moved expeditiously to establish the board. "We do not formally nominate until we are through the background investigation and the full vetting. It takes time to present those nominations to the Senate. But now that they have been confirmed, that is a good thing."

The board chairwoman is Carol E. Dinkins, a Houston lawyer who was a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. A longtime friend of the Bush family, she was the treasurer of George W. Bush's first campaign for governor of Texas, in 1994, and co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney, which recruited Republican lawyers to handle legal battles after the November 2004 election.

Dinkins, a longtime partner in the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, where Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales once was a partner, has specialized in defending oil and gas companies in environmental lawsuits.

Foremost among her credentials, she told Senate Judiciary Committee members in a response to their questions, was the two years she spent as deputy attorney general in President Reagan's Justice Department. There, she said, she had to weigh civil liberties concerns while overseeing domestic surveillance and counter-intelligence cases.

The board vice chairman is Alan Charles Raul, a Washington lawyer who first suggested the concept of a civil liberties panel in an opinion article in the Los Angeles Times in December 2001. Raul, a former Agriculture Department general counsel currently in private practice, has published a book on privacy and the digital age and is the only panel member with apparent expertise in civil liberties issues.

The panel's lone Democrat, Lanny J. Davis, has known Bush since the two were undergraduates at Yale. Civil liberties groups regard the Washington lawyer, who worked in the Clinton White House, as likely to be a progressive voice on the panel.

The board also includes a conservative Republican legal icon, Washington lawyer and former Bush Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, died in the Sept. 11 attacks. The fifth member is Francis X. Taylor, a retired Air Force general and former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator, who is chief security officer at General Electric Co.

The board members declined to comment for this article. Three referred calls to Dinkins, who referred calls to the White House.

The idea of such a watchdog agency was broached almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, as conservatives and liberals alike saw a need for the government to consider the implications of new and growing anti-terrorism measures.

The administration opened negotiations with Congress last week, but it is far from clear whether Bush can get the votes he will need.

The latest Republican to join the growing chorus of those seeking oversight is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

In an interview Sunday on Fox News, Graham, a former military prosecutor whose opinion on national security matters commands respect in the Senate, said he believed there was now a "bipartisan consensus" to have broader congressional oversight of the program and judicial review.

"I do believe we can provide oversight in a meaningful way without compromising the program," he said, "and I am adamant that the courts have some role when it comes to warrants. If you're going to follow an American citizen around for an extended period of time believing they're collaborating with the enemy, at some point in time, you need to get some judicial review, because mistakes can be made."

Four other leading Senate Republicans, including the heads of three committees - Judiciary, Homeland Security and Intelligence - have said they would prefer some degree of judicial oversight.

Their positions, if they hold, could complicate the negotiations, which the White House is hoping will lead to legislation to approve the program retroactively, much as Congress eventually approved Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.

Bush expanded on his defense of the program in Tampa, Florida, on Friday, saying he believed that he had to take extraordinary steps in a time of war.

"Unfortunately, we're having this discussion," he said of the debate over wiretapping. "It's too bad, because guess who listens to the discussion: the enemy."

He added: "The enemy is adjusting. But I'm going to tell you something. I'm doing the right thing. Washington is a town that says, you didn't connect the dots, and then when you do connect the dots, they say you're wrong."

But two days before Bush spoke, the White House opened the door to talks in the hope of avoiding a full-scale congressional investigation. A series of senior officials, including Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, and Andrew Card Jr., the chief of staff, began contacting crucial members of the Senate to determine what it would take to derail the investigation.

The White House has refused to discuss those talks. Trent Duffy, a deputy press secretary, said the administration "does not want to negotiate in the media." But some lawmakers have given glimpses of the conversations, including Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, a Republican member of the intelligence panel who was prepared to vote with Democrats on Thursday to open an inquiry until the White House agreed to negotiate.

Snowe, who favors some kind of judicial review, characterized the talks as a "fundamental shift" in the debate. "I think there has been a quantum leap," she said in an interview, adding that senators were now "really trying to wrestle the best way to craft a measured bill."

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, has said he would prefer to see the program brought under the authority of the court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Roberts also says he is concerned that in an era of fast-paced electronic surveillance, the court may not be able to issue warrants quickly enough to meet the needs of the program. Without offering specifics, Roberts talked of "streamlining FISA" and said the National Security Agency would have to be involved in those talks.

A British student secretly released after more than two years in America's notorious Guantanamo Bay terror suspect prison told last night how he had been barred from returning to the UK.

And, as Jamal "Tony" Kiyemba spoke of the systematic torture he suffered at the hands of his captors, The Mail on Sunday has learned that Home Secretary Charles Clarke personally intervened to keep him out of Britain on "national security grounds".

The 25-year-old Londoner has been returned to his country of birth, Uganda, where he is now in custody. Kiyemba was freed without warning last week as international pressure mounted on America to close the detention camp after a highly critical UN report on the treatment of prisoners there.

Last night his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who specialises in human rights cases, handed this newspaper a dossier detailing the abuses his client alleges he suffered.

Kiyemba claims the Americans forced him, under torture, to confess to terrorist activities, and that MI5 interrogated him repeatedly, quizzing him about British terror suspects and the jailed clerics Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada.

The Government is refusing to reveal why Kiyemba, a Leicester University pharmacy student who grew up in London and whose mother, four brothers and sister all live in Britain, has been excluded from the country. But his lawyer believes something he was tortured into saying may hold the clue.

Kiyemba was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK when he left Uganda following the death of his father in 1993. He didn't apply for British citizenship and this meant that at Guantanamo Bay he was not entitled to representation by the Foreign Office nor, on his release, to automatic rights to return to his family.

"I may not be British according to some bit of paper but in reality I am a Brit and always will be," he told his lawyer. "My doctor, my local mosque, my teens, my education, employment, friends, taxes, home and above all else my family - it is all in Britain."

Kiyemba was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. He had gone there, he claims, to study Arabic and the Koran because it was "very cheap". He says he was held there for two months, beaten by Pakistani intelligence officers, threatened with torture and, finally, blindfolded and gagged, put on an American plane and flown to the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan.

There, he claims, he was subjected to systematic torture. He told his lawyer that he would be "hung on the door for two hours and then allowed to sit for half an hour but never allowed to sleep. This would go on for 48 hours in a row".

After this, he claims, he would be taken for interrogation for two hours at a time. "I had to kneel on the cold concrete throughout the interrogations with my cuffed hands above my head," he said. "The only way out, I was told, was to confess. I heard and saw other torture - banging, screaming, cries, barking dogs and a dead guy who had tried to escape. One of the MPs [military police] said: 'Who's next?' So I confessed to be left alone."

Kiyemba's lawyer says his client was then interviewed by MI5 officers. 'They showed him many pictures of supposed terrorists in the UK and told him that he could only get them to help if he helped them.

"But he did not know any of them - he recognised Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada from television but had never seen them in person."

In October 2002 Kiyemba was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. He recalls how on the journey he was forced to wear "the tightest cuffs to date, with chains, taped goggles, ear muffs, nose masks and taped gloves to prevent finger movement". He added: "Any movement meant you got hit by the nearest soldier."

At Guantanamo, Kiyemba says he had three more visits from MI5 who asked him if he wished to make any changes to his previous statements. He says when he said no, "they left in what seemed like an angry mood".

He added: "The American interrogators did not believe my story. Soon they had me standing up for sleep deprivation. They swore that if I did not admit to having planned jihad in Afghanistan, then what lay ahead for me would be far worse.

"The Americans promised to send me to "our Egyptian friends who are renowned for torturing and they will do the dirty work for us". In the end I just gave up resisting and told them what they wanted to hear so that they would leave me alone."

But, he says, the torture did not let up. On one occasion Kiyemba claims he was forced to the ground by guards, bound and soaked with pepper spray.

"They then sprayed it on a towel until it was soaked and rubbed the towel in his eyes," his lawyer noted. "He did not know what to do about the pain. He asked a medic, who told him to wash his eyes out with cold water - this made it worse."

A letter from a senior Foreign Office staffer was the first official word Kiyemba's family got of his release. It said: "You should be aware that the Home Secretary has personally directed that he should be excluded from the UK on grounds of national security."

Last night Mr Stafford Smith, director of the human rights group Reprieve, called on the Home Secretary to reconsider his client's plight.

He said: "Jamal Kiyemba has lived his whole life in Britain since he was a boy. His mother and family all live here. Charles Clarke refused to lift a finger to help him when he was being abused in Guantanamo Bay. Now he has barred him from his home and his mother based on allegations he won't reveal but which were almost certainly based on what Jamal said under torture."

Legal theories granting the president the right to authorize abuse in spite of the Geneva Conventions were unlawful, dangerous and erroneous, Alberto J. Mora advised officials in a secret memo. The 22-page document was obtained by The New Yorker for a story in its Feb. 27 issue.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said Sunday she had not read the magazine story.

The memo from July 7, 2004, recounted Mora's 2 1/2-year effort to halt a policy that he feared would authorize cruelty toward suspected terrorists.

It also indicates that some lawyers in the Justice and Defense departments objected to the legal course the administration undertook, according to the report.

Mora said Navy intelligence officers reported in 2002 that military-intelligence interrogators at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were engaging in escalating levels of physical and psychological abuse rumored to have been authorized at a high level in Washington.

"I was appalled by the whole thing," Mora told the magazine. "It was clearly abusive and it was clearly contrary to everything we were ever taught about American values."

Mora said he thought his concerns were being addressed by a special group set up by the Pentagon. But he discovered in January 2003 that a Justice Department opinion had negated his arguments with what he described as "an extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the president's commander in chief authority."

When the first pictures from the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib appeared in the press in spring 2004, Mora said, he felt stunned and dismayed that what he had warned against had taken place, and in a different setting than Guantanamo.

Mora retired this year and now is a general counsel for Wal-Mart.

A U.N. report issued last week called for the U.S. to close its prison at Guantanamo Bay. In response, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld rejected accusations of torture or abuse and said the detention facility is well-run.

According to the Public Relations Department of Defense Ministry, the minister made the remarks in the first nationwide gathering on the goals of the Defense Ministry, IRNA reported.

It is among the wonders of the 21st century that the US administration with its black record of activities claim leadership of the world towards democracy and human rights, he said.

The US disgrace due to its crimes in Abu Ghraib prison indicates that the US administration has no respect for the most basic principles of human rights, adding that the US through such shameful acts has been completely isolated and hated in the world.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the defense minister said that sustainable development should be based on strategic, financial and qualitative planning.

Expansion of defense industries would lead to more national strength, reduction of foreign threats, acquisition of new technological know-how and

increase in the number of creative managers, said the minister.

Highlighting the current political and security status in the region and the world, he said taking into power of Afghan Muslim mujahedin in

Afghanistan, victory of big coalition in Iraq, great victory of Hamas in Palestine's legislative election, the massive turnout of Iranian people in

nationwide rallies marking the 27th anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution and worldwide protests by Muslims against publication of

sacrilegious cartoons by Western media, have sealed the doom of US policies in the Middle East and the world.

"Despite all these barbaric methods ... the mujahideen are strengthening and increasing by the grace of Allah," he said.

The tape, whose authenticity could not be verified, was posted on the internet by the al Qaeda media group al-Sahab.

In January, the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television aired parts of the tape, in which bin Laden said al Qaeda was preparing further attacks in the United States.

US intelligence analysts then authenticated the tape as a message from bin Laden. It was the first bin Laden tape since 2004.

In the audio released on Monday, bin Laden said the insurgency in Iraq was gaining strength despite "barbaric and oppressive steps taken by the American army and its agents to the extent that there is no longer any mentionable difference between this criminality and the criminality of Saddam."

The tape was first broadcast by Al Jazeera before new images surfaced of Iraqi prisoner abuse by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison in a 2004 scandal. The images showed sexual humiliation of prisoners and physical abuse.

US officials have often accused Saddam of links to al Qaeda, one of the reasons of the US-led war on Iraq which was chiefly based on allegations Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Bin Laden's remarks appeared to disassociate his group from Saddam's regime.

He said Washington was trying to muffle any media outlet that reports the truth about the losses of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Commenting on British newspaper report in a November that US President George W. Bush had mulled bombing Al Jazeera's head office, the Saudi-born militant called Bush the "butcher of freedom" and criticised the prominent Arab television and the leaders of its host country, Qatar.

"Recently it has surfaced in documents that the butcher of freedom in the world had resolved to bomb the head offices of Al Jazeera satellite channel in Qatar after he had bombed its offices in Kabul and Baghdad although it, as it stands, is the instrument of your (Americans) servants there (in Qatar)."

In 2001, the station's Kabul office was hit by US bombs and in 2003 Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US strike on its Baghdad office. The United States has denied deliberately targeting the station.

But on Monday in Neu-Ulm near Munich, the police and prosecutors opened an investigation into whether Germany served as a silent partner of the United States in the abduction of the man, Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Arab descent who was arrested Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia before being flown to the Kabul prison.

The action came after a two-and-a-half-hour meeting at police headquarters in which Mr. Masri told the police that he was "90 percent" certain that a senior German police official was the interrogator who had visited him three times inside the prison in Kabul but had identified himself only as "Sam." The German prosecutors said Monday that they were also investigating whether the German Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, had been notified about Mr. Masri's kidnapping within days of his capture there, but then had done nothing to try to help him.

Mr. Masri's case has come to symbolize the C.I.A. practice known as extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are sent to be interrogated in other countries where torture is commonly used. In broadening its criminal inquiry into the abduction of Mr. Masri to the activities of its own government, German prosecutors are trying to determine whether the German government worked secretly with the United States in the practice.

"I feel deceived and betrayed by my own country," Mr. Masri, a 42-year-old unemployed car salesman from Neu-Ulm, said in an interview.

The German police official identified as "Sam" denied that he had visited Mr. Masri in Afghanistan and said he was "on holiday" at the time in Germany, but that he could not remember exactly where. The man was present on Monday at the police station, where Mr. Masri picked him out of a 10-person lineup. After speaking with him, Mr. Masri said that his voice was similar but that his hair style was different.

Martin Hofmann, a prosecutor in Munich, said Monday that his office would not "assume that this man is Sam" but would "go forward with our investigation."

A senior German official familiar with the case said that Mr. Masri was "at best mistaken" and that the police official "cannot be Sam."

The New York Times is withholding the official's name at the request of Germany's intelligence services because he often does undercover intelligence work. He frequently gets "sensitive" assignments and helps clean up "dirty work" for the German foreign intelligence service, said one of his longtime colleagues, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A senior Macedonian government official who was directly involved in Mr. Masri's detention told The Times that not long after Mr. Masri's capture, Macedonian officials notified the German Embassy in Skopje. C.I.A. officers in Macedonia conducted the interrogation of Mr. Masri, according to Macedonian officials.

August Stern, the Munich-based federal prosecutor who is leading Germany's criminal investigation of Mr. Masri's kidnapping, said his investigators were trying to determine whether the German Embassy had been told about Mr. Masri's capture, and then sent a German agent to the American prison in Kabul to talk with him. Mr. Stern and other senior police officers and prosecutors said they would try to interview the officials in the embassy in Skopje in coming weeks.

August Hanning, secretary of state for the Ministry of the Interior, denied in an interview that any member of Germany's secret services had visited Mr. Masri while he was held captive. "He has never been to Afghanistan," Mr. Hanning said of the German police official.

Two senior German officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the case's sensitive nature, denied that Germany's Embassy had been told about Mr. Masri's capture. "The German Embassy in Skopje was not informed by Macedonian authorities while German citizen el-Masri was in custody in Macedonia," a Foreign Office spokesman said. Another official said Germany did not learn about Mr. Masri's detention until May 31, 2004, when the American ambassador to Germany at the time, Daniel Coats, informed German officials about Mr. Masri's capture and eventual release.

"According to our investigation, I am convinced that German officials did not have any knowledge before his release," the official said.

Later this week, the German government is expected to turn over a report to Parliament about Mr. Masri's case.

Meanwhile, investigators at the Council of Europe, led by Dick Marty, a Swiss lawmaker, are looking into whether there was quiet cooperation between the C.I.A. and its counterparts in European countries, including Germany, Italy and Sweden, where suspected terrorists were kidnapped and sent to third countries for interrogation.

In Italy, the authorities in June charged 23 C.I.A. agents with the abduction of a terrorism suspect from the streets of Milan. Italian officials insist that they did not know about the procedure, but some elected officials in Italy said the Americans must have tipped off their counterparts in the Italian intelligence agency.

European officials have been sharply critical of the C.I.A.'s rendition program. In particular, German officials have rebuked the United States for playing a role in the abduction of one of their citizens and then transporting him to Afghanistan on a chartered C.I.A. plane.

"I have no explanation for the whole case," a senior German official said. "To bring such a man like el-Masri from Europe to Afghanistan and to ask him some questions and six months later, the explanation is that it's a terrible error is not very convincing. To me there are still a lot of questions."

Manfred R. Gnjidic, Mr. Masri's lawyer, said he is convinced that Germany "stood by like a little school boy, watching what was going on with my client and doing nothing."

After more than five months in captivity, the United States released Mr. Masri without filing charges. His case was first disclosed in The Times in January 2005.

At the meeting last December in Berlin between the German chancellor and Ms. Rice, the kidnapping of Mr. Masri was discussed privately, but the two leaders seemed to disagree about the substance of that conversation afterward.

Ms. Merkel said the Bush administration had admitted that it had mistakenly abducted Mr. Masri. But Ms. Rice declined to discuss with reporters anything about the case. She said only that she had pledged to Ms. Merkel, "When and if mistakes are made, we work very hard and as quickly as possible to rectify them."

In Washington, a senior State Department official said Monday that the department would not comment on Mr. Masri's case, noting that it was a matter of litigation in both Germany and the United States. In late 2003, Mr. Masri left his family in Ulm for a trip to Macedonia. Macedonian and German officials said he was arrested at a border checkpoint on Dec. 31, 2003, because his name was on an Interpol terror watch list. But they said the name referred to another Khaled el-Masri.

Mr. Masri was then held in a hotel in Macedonia for several weeks, where he was questioned by the C.I.A., according to senior Macedonian and American officials. A senior Macedonian official said the German Embassy was notified about Mr. Masri within days of his capture. "Unofficially, they knew," the official said of the Germans.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

Two senior Macedonian officials said the Americans had asked to have Mr. Masri detained in Macedonia for 23 days. "We consider the Americans as our partners," a senior Macedonian official said. "We cannot refuse them."

Mr. Masri said he had pleaded with his captors to let him go. "Call the German Embassy," Mr. Masri said he had repeatedly told them. "I'm a German citizen. Please tell them I am here!"

"They don't want to talk to you," he said one of his captors had replied.

In a recent interview, Mr. Masri said: "I thought it was strange that they kept telling me the Germans didn't care about me. Now I know why they said that — because it was true."

At the hotel, Mr. Masri said he had been asked whether he was a member of Al Qaeda. But he was struck by the many questions he was asked about his time in Germany. He said the questions had led him to suspect that the Germans were cooperating with the Macedonians.

A German official disputed that assertion, saying Germany often shared information with their American counterparts about suspected terrorists. But the official acknowledged that the German police had not considered Mr. Masri to be an "important" suspect.

Publicly, Macedonia has denied that Mr. Masri was held illegally. "There is nothing the ministry has done illegally," Hari Kostiv, the minister of interior at the time and later the prime minister, said in an interview. "The man is alive and back home with his family. Somebody made a mistake. That somebody is not Macedonia."

By late January 2004, Mr. Masri was sent to Afghanistan, where he said he was held and beaten over the next five months.

For Mr. Masri, one of the biggest mysteries was the identity of the interrogator who identified himself as Sam, and who spoke fluent German. He visited three times during Mr. Masri's final month at the Kabul jail.

During the first meeting, Mr. Masri said he had asked the man if he was from Germany, but the man declined to answer. Mr. Masri said he had asked him, "Do the Germans know I'm here?"

"He said he did not want to answer," Mr. Masri said. "I asked him if my wife knew I was there. Sam said she doesn't know. He then said, I shouldn't ask questions, I should only answer them."

During their second meeting, the man was no longer belligerent, Mr. Masri said, bringing him cookies, chocolates and a copy of the German newsmagazine Focus. The man also asked if Mr. Masri wanted "anything from Germany."

"I said, 'Nothing, thank you,' " Mr. Masri said.

In their last meeting, a week before Mr. Masri's release, the man told him that he would be returning home soon. The last time Mr. Masri saw Sam, the interrogator was speaking with a man who he believed was an American. Soon afterward, Mr. Masri was released.

On Dec. 12, 2005, Mr. Gnjidic, the lawyer for Mr. Masri, received an e-mail message from a German journalist named Frank Kruger, who suggested that Sam might be a German police official. Earlier this month, Mr. Gnjidic said he had obtained a videotape of the police official that convinced Mr. Masri that he was Sam. On Monday, after meeting the man at police headquarters, Mr. Masri said he was 90 percent certain that the police official was Sam.

"The man was very nervous, and he could not look at me into my eyes," Mr. Masri said. "The hair is different, but the voice sounded very similar."

"For me, it is very important that we know who this man was," he said.

Mr. Gnjidic said he found it hard to believe that other than the prosecutors in Munich, no one in the German government has sought Mr. Masri's testimony about his ordeal. "The scandal for me is that the Germans did nothing when they heard a German had been captured," he said. "They should have protested very hard and tried to stop this."

Called the COIN Academy -- using military shorthand for "counterinsurgency" -- the newest educational institution in the U.S. military establishment seeks, as a course summary puts it, to "stress the need for U.S. forces to shift from a conventional warfare mindset" to one that understands how to win in a guerrilla-style conflict. Or, as a sign on the wall of one administrator's office here put it less politely: "Insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting a different outcome."

The purpose of the school north of Baghdad is to try to bring about a different outcome than the U.S. military achieved in 2003-04, when Army commanders committed mistakes typical of a conventional military facing an insurgency. "When the insurgency started, we came in very conventional," said Col. Chris Short, the District native and recent Manassas resident who is the new school's commandant.

Back then, U.S. forces rounded up tens of thousands of Iraqis, mixing innocent people in detention with hard-core Islamic extremists. Commanders permitted troops to shoot at anything mildly threatening. And they failed to give their troops the basic conceptual and cultural tools needed to operate in the complex environment of Iraq, from how to deal with a sheik to understanding why killing insurgents usually is the least desirable outcome in dealing with them. (It is more effective, they are now taught, to persuade them either to desert or to join the political process.)

Last year, an internal study by Army experts of U.S. commanders here found that some understood the principles of counterinsurgency and applied them well, while others faltered. "If the commander had it, the unit had it, but if the commander got it halfway, then the unit got it halfway," Casey said in a recent interview. The new school is designed to ensure that all the commanders get it.

Even now, some conventional unit commanders balk at the idea of leaving their troops for the five-day course, which covers subjects from counterinsurgency theory and interrogations to detainee operations and how to dine with a sheik. When told that he had to leave his battalion of Marines in Fallujah to come here, recalled Lt. Col. Patrick Looney, his reaction was disbelief.

"I didn't want to come," concurred Lt. Col. David Furness, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, now operating between Baghdad and Fallujah. "But I'm glad I came."

Casey, the school's builder, found an easy way to make them come: He made attendance compulsory for any officer heading to a combat command in Iraq. He also meets with each class, offering the captains and lieutenant colonels a rare chance to quiz a four-star general.

Some members of the faculty, which draws heavily on Special Forces officers, were not eager to teach U.S. infantry, artillery, aviation and armor officers. Short recalled that some said: "That's not our mission. We don't teach U.S. forces." Such qualms have been eliminated, he said with a chuckle.

Again and again, the intense immersion course, which 30 to 50 officers attend at a time, emphasizes that the right answer is probably the counterintuitive one, rather than something that the Army has taught officers in their 10 or 20 years of service. The school's textbook, a huge binder, offers the example of a mission that busts into a house and captures someone who mortared a U.S. base.

"On the surface, a raid that captures a known insurgent or terrorist may seem like a sure victory for the coalition," it observes in red block letters. It continues, "The potential second- and third-order effects, however, can turn it into a long-term defeat if our actions humiliate the family, needlessly destroy property, or alienate the local population from our goals."

At points, the school's leaders seem to go out of their way to challenge current U.S. military practices here. Short said in an interview Friday inside his sandbagged headquarters that he has issues with "this big-base mentality" that keeps tens of thousands of troops inside facilities called forwarding operating bases, or FOBs, which they leave for patrols and raids. Classic counterinsurgency theory holds that troops should live out among the people as much as possible, to develop a sense of how the society works and to gather intelligence.

As Apache attack helicopters clattered overhead, Short also offered an unconventional view of Iraq's December elections, which many U.S. officials have portrayed as a great victory. "You can ask just about every Iraqi, 'What about the elections?' " he said. "They'll say" -- Short shrugged his shoulders -- " 'Well, we voted five times, and nothing's happening out here.' "

Recent attendees at the school came away impressed. "I think it's an incredibly insightful course," said Army Maj. Sheldon Horsfall, an adviser to the Iraqi military in Baghdad. "One of the things that was brought home to us, again and again, was the importance of cultural awareness."

"The course opened my eyes to some of the bigger picture," said Lt. Col. Nathan Nastase, the operations officer for the 5th Marine Regiment, based near Fallujah. He said he especially liked hearing about the role of Special Operations Forces in Iraq, as well as learning about the tactics being used by successful commanders.

The school's greatest effect seems to be on younger officers. "My initial impression of it was it was a waste of time," said Capt. Klaudius Robinson, commander of a cavalry troop in the 4th Infantry Division. "But after going through it, it really changed my thinking about how to fight this insurgency. I came to realize that the center of gravity is the people, and you have to drive a wedge between the insurgents and the people."

Before the course, he said, he expected to spend his time here combating insurgents, but instead he is focused on training and operating with Iraqi troops. "We're never going to catch every bad guy," he tells his troops. "That's not a ticket home. But what I can do is help Iraqi security forces and get them to take the lead."

"One of the things I picked up at the COIN Academy is, we don't need to be hard on people all the time," said Capt. Bret Lindberg, commander of another 4th Infantry cavalry troop.

The major criticism offered by students is that it would have been better to have the education six months earlier, when they were training their troops to deploy to Iraq, not after the units have arrived. Short had a tart response: It's not a bad idea, he said, but the Army back home wasn't stepping up to the job. "They didn't do it for three years" -- the length of the war so far, he noted. "That's why the boss said, 'Screw it, I'm doing it here.' "

At any rate, the school isn't just about operating in Iraq, Short said, but about preparing officers for the rest of their careers. "I think we're going to be in more of these wars," he said.