At the center of it all is Pastor John Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. While Hagee has long prophesized about the end times, he ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book's publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which, as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he said would cause "a political earthquake."

At CUFI's kick-off banquet at the Washington Hilton, attended by over 3,500 members, Republican support for both Hagee's effort and his drumbeat for war with Iran were on full view. Republican National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman told the group that "no regime is more central to the global jihad" than Iran. Just two days before, Newt Gingrich and John McCain made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows to sound the same message, leading Benny Elon, a member of the Israeli Knesset, to comment to the Jerusalem Post that their remarks originated with Hagee. Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback also addressed the group, and Bush sent words of support to the gathering. Republicans, and even some Democrats, spoke at CUFI events to show their "support for Israel." But while public and media attention was on the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, Hagee's focus continued to be on Iran.

While the crisis at the Israel-Lebanon border drew more mainstream media attention to CUFI's activities, Hagee's supporters have long known that leading Republicans are listening. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a prominent Jewish ally of the evangelical right (and friend of Jack Abramoff) has said that Hagee "without question, yes, absolutely" has the ear of the White House. Hagee's annual Night to Honor Israel at his church has drawn prominent Republicans, including Tom DeLay, who was the keynote speaker in 2002.

Although Republicans would never admit it -- they claim their support for Christian Zionists like Hagee is based on their own support for Israel -- it is clear that they know they need the votes of this constituency to win. In the same way that Karl Rove courted conservative evangelicals in 2004 by appealing to their homophobia, Republican campaign rhetoric for 2006 and 2008 has already shown signs of playing to voters who have been hearing hype for a war with Iran for months -- at church.

While Washington insiders wonder what it means when Republicans like Mehlman and presidential aspirants Gingrich and McCain finger Iran as the central player in an epic clash of civilizations, Hagee already has spent months mobilizing the shock troops in support of another war. As diplomats, experts and pundits debate how many years Iran will need to develop a viable nuclear weapon, Hagee says the mullahs already possess the means to destroy Israel and America. And although Bush insists that diplomatic options are still on the table, Hagee has dismissed pussyfooting diplomacy and primed his followers for a conflagration.

Hagee wields "a very large megaphone" that reaches "a very large group of people," said Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee, who has studied the Christian right for 30 years. With CUFI, the pastor has exponentially expanded the reach of his megaphone beyond his television audience. Thanks to the viral marketing made possible by the hundreds of evangelical leaders who have signed on to his new organization, his warmongering has rippled through megachurches across America for months. Hagee calls pastors "the spiritual generals of America," an appropriate phrase given his reliance on them to rally their troops behind his message.

The CUFI board of directors includes the Rev. Jerry Falwell, former Republican presidential candidate and religious right activist Gary Bauer, and George Morrison, pastor of the 8,000-member Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colo., and chairman of the board of Promise Keepers. Rod Parsley, the Ohio televangelist who is rapidly becoming a major political player in the Christian right, signed on to be a regional director.

For Hagee's new project, his influence in Washington is probably less important than his influence over his audience. With the clout of his listeners, he can serve Bush administration hawks by firing up grassroots support for a military strike against Iran. Over 700,000 people purchased his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," and countless more have heard him promote it on Christian radio and television programming. Dramatic, doomsday advertising has been heard by listeners of Christian media as well as on Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly's radio programs. The pages of "Jerusalem Countdown" provide a peculiar mix of biblical prophecy, purported inside information from Israeli government officials and a mixed-up, pared-down lesson in nuclear physics.

"I wrote this book in April 2005, and when people read it, they will think I wrote it late last night after the FOX News report," says the author without a trace of irony. "It's that close to where we are and beyond."

Hagee speaks simultaneously to two audiences about Iran's nuclear capabilities: one that fears a terrorist attack by Iran and another that embraces a biblically mandated apocalypse. To impress the fearful, he mimics Bush's deceptions about Iraq's capacity to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction, Condoleezza Rice's warnings of mushroom clouds, and Dick Cheney's dissembling about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler, Hagee argues that Iran's development of nuclear weapons must be stopped to protect America and Israel from a nuclear attack. Preying on legitimate worries about terrorism, and invoking 9/11, he vividly describes a supposed Iranian-led plan to simultaneously explode nuclear suitcase bombs in seven American cities, or to use an electromagnetic pulse device to create "an American Hiroshima."

When addressing audiences receptive to Scriptural prophecy, however, Hagee welcomes the coming confrontation. He argues that a strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russia's leadership, as outlined in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an "inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon." In Hagee's telling, Israel has no choice but to strike at Iran's nuclear facilities, with or without America's help. The strike will provoke Russia -- which wants Persian Gulf oil -- to lead an army of Arab nations against Israel. Then God will wipe out all but one-sixth of the Russian-led army, as the world watches "with shock and awe," he says, lending either a divine quality to the Bush administration phrase or a Bush-like quality to God's wrath.

But Hagee doesn't stop there. He adds that Ezekiel predicts fire "upon those who live in security in the coastlands." From this sentence, he concludes that there will be judgment upon all who stood by while the Russian-led force invaded Israel, and issues a stark warning to the United States to intervene: "Could it be that America, who refuses to defend Israel from the Russian invasion, will experience nuclear warfare on our east and west coasts?" He says yes, citing Genesis 12:3, in which God said to Israel: "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you."

To fill the power vacuum left by God's decimation of the Russian army, the Antichrist -- the head of the EU -- will rule "a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion" for three and a half years. (Hagee adds that "one need only be a casual observer of current events to see that all three of these things are coming into reality." The "demonic world leader" will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China, at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo in Israel. As they prepare for the final battle, Jesus will return on a white horse and cast both villains -- and presumably any nonbelievers -- into a "lake of fire burning with brimstone," thus marking the beginning of his millennial reign.

Hagee doesn't fear a nuclear conflagration, but rather God's wrath for standing by as Iran executes its supposed plot to destroy Israel. A nuclear confrontation between America and Iran, which he says is foretold in the Book of Jeremiah, will not lead to the end of the world, but rather to God's renewal of the Garden of Eden. But Hagee is ultimately less concerned with the fate of Israel or the Jews than with a theocratic Christian right agenda. When Jesus returns for his millennial reign, he tells his television audience, "the righteous are going to rule the nations of the earth When Jesus Christ comes back, he's not going to ask the ACLU if it's all right to pray, he's not going to ask the churches if they can ordain pedophile bishops and priests, he's not going to ask if it's all right to put the Ten Commandments in the statehouses. He's not going to endorse abortion, he's going to run the world by the word of God The world will never end. It's going to become a Garden of Eden, and Christ is going to rule it."

Sarah Posner is a former attorney who most recently practiced at Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. She is a contributing writer for The Gadflyer.

Ethnic and religious tensions have been casus belli since time out of mind, to be sure. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War ruptured a framework that held for almost fifty years, bringing about a series of conflicts that are understandable in hindsight.

There is a simpler answer, however, one that lands right in our back yard here in America. Why so much war? Because war is a profitable enterprise. George W. Bush and his people can hold forth about the wonders of democracy and peace, and can condemn worldwide violence in solemn tones. Until the United States stops being the world's largest arms dealer, these words from our government absolutely reek of hypocrisy.

Mr. Bush and his people did not invent this phenomenon, of course. The United States has been selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to the world for decades. In the aftermath of September 11, however, American arms dealing kicked into an even higher gear. The Bush administration, in 2003, delivered arms to 18 of 25 nations now engaged in active conflicts. 13 of those nations have been defined as "undemocratic" by the State Department, but still received $2.7 billion in American weaponry.

One example is Uzbekistan, a nation with an astonishingly deplorable record of human rights violations. Thousands of people have been imprisoned and tortured for purely political reasons, and hundreds more have been killed. Still, that nation received $37 million in weapons from the United States between 2001 and 2003.

In 2002, the United States sold almost $50 million in missile technologies to Bahrain. In the same year, the United States sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of missile technology, rocket launchers, tank ammunition, fighter jets and attack helicopters to Egypt. The United States has sold millions of dollars worth of weapons to both India and Pakistan, two nations that have been on the brink of war for years. This list goes on and on.

Analyze the list of the top twenty companies that profit most from global arms sales, and you will see American companies taking up thirteen of those spots, including the top three: Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. These arms dealers act in concert with the Department of Defense; they exist as a sixth ring of the Pentagon.

The Associated Press reported last week that business for the arms industry is, to make a bad pun, booming. "Northrop Grumman, the world's largest shipbuilder and America's third-largest military contractor," reported the AP, "said second-quarter earnings rose 17 per cent, as operating profit at its systems and information technology units overcame a decline at the company's ships division. Raytheon Co., the fifth-largest defense contractor, reported second-quarter net income jumped 54 per cent, buoyed by strong military equipment sales."

Beyond the missiles and the tanks and the warplanes, there is the small-arms industry. This is, comprehensively, far more deadly than the large-arms sales being made. A report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences describes the deadly situation:

Since the end of the cold war, from the Balkans to East Timor and throughout Africa, the world has witnessed an outbreak of ethnic, religious and sectarian conflict characterized by routine massacre of civilians. More than 100 conflicts have erupted since 1990, about twice the number for previous decades. These wars have killed more than five million people, devastated entire geographic regions, and left tens of millions of refugees and orphans. Little of the destruction was inflicted by the tanks, artillery or aircraft usually associated with modern warfare; rather most was carried out with pistols, machine guns and grenades. However beneficial the end of the cold war has been in other respects, it has let loose a global deluge of surplus weapons into a setting in which the risk of local conflict appears to have grown markedly.

The Federation of American Scientists prepared a report some years ago detailing the vast amounts of small arms delivered to the world by the United States. "In addition to sales of newly-manufactured weapons," read the report, "the Pentagon gives away or sells at deep discount the vast oversupply of small/light weapons that it has in its post cold-war inventory. Most of this surplus is dispensed through the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program. Originally only the southern-tier members of NATO were cleared to receive EDA, but following the 1991 Gulf war, many Middle Eastern and North African states were added; anti-narcotics aid provisions expanded EDA eligibility to include South American and Caribbean countries; and the "Partnership for Peace" program made most Central and Eastern European governments eligible for free surplus arms."

"Around 1995," continued the report, "large-scale grants and sales of small/light arms began occurring. In the past few years (1995 - early 1998), over 300,000 rifles, pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers have been offered up, including: 158,000 M16A1 assault rifles (principally to Bosnia, Israel, Philippines); 124,815 M14 rifles (principally to the Baltics and Taiwan); 26,780 pistols (principally to Philippines, Morocco, Chile, Bahrain; 1,740 machine guns (principally to Morocco, Bosnia); and 10,570 grenade launchers (principally to Bahrain, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Morocco)."

We hear so often that this is a dangerous world. It is arguable that the world might be significantly less dangerous if the United States chose to stop lathering the planet with weapons. Much has been made, especially recently, about the billions of dollars in weapons sales offered to Israel by America. This is but the tip of the iceberg.

It is, at bottom, all about profit. We sell the weapons, which create warfare, which justifies our incredibly expensive war-making capabilities when we have to go in and fight against the people who bought our weapons or procured them from a third party. This does not make the world safer, but only reinforces the permanent state of peril we find ourselves in. Meanwhile, a few people get paid handsomely.

In the end, it is worthwhile to remember that whenever you see George W. Bush talking about winning the "War on Terror," you are looking at the largest arms dealer on the planet. We can pursue cease-fire agreements, we can topple violent regimes, but until we stop loading up the planet with the means to kill, only the dead will see the end of war.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

The draft proposed legislation, set to be discussed at two Senate hearings today, is controversial inside and outside the administration because defendants would be denied many protections guaranteed by the civilian and traditional military criminal justice systems.

Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors.

Detainees would also not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.

An early draft of the new measure prepared by civilian political appointees and leaked to the media last week has been modified in response to criticism from uniformed military lawyers. But the provisions allowing a future expansion of the courts to cover new crimes and more prisoners were retained, according to government officials familiar with the deliberations.

The military lawyers received the draft after the rest of the government had agreed on it. They have argued in recent days for retaining some routine protections for defendants that the political appointees sought to jettison, an administration official said.

They objected in particular to the provision allowing defendants to be tried in absentia, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the deliberations. Another source in contact with top military lawyers said, "Their initial impression is that the draft was unacceptable and sloppy." The source added that "it did not have enough due-process rights" and could further tarnish America's image.

The military lawyers nonetheless supported extending the jurisdiction of the commissions to cover those accused of joining or associating with terrorist groups engaged in anti-U.S. hostilities, and of committing or aiding hostile acts by such groups, whether or not they are part of al-Qaeda, two U.S. officials said.

That language gives the commissions broader reach than anticipated in a November 2001 executive order from President Bush that focused only on members of al-Qaeda, those who commit international terrorist acts and those who harbor such individuals.

Some independent experts say the new procedures diverge inappropriately from existing criminal procedures and provide no more protections than the ones struck down by the Supreme Court as inadequate. John D. Hutson, the Navy's top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said the rules would evidently allow the government to tell a prisoner: "We know you're guilty. We can't tell you why, but there's a guy, we can't tell you who, who told us something. We can't tell you what, but you're guilty."

Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration, said after reviewing the leaked draft that "the theme of the government seems to be 'They are guilty anyway, and therefore due process can be slighted.' " With these procedures, Fein said, "there is a real danger of getting a wrong verdict" that would let a lower-echelon detainee "rot for 30 years" at Guantanamo Bay because of evidence contrived by personal enemies.

But Kris Kobach, a senior Justice Department lawyer in Bush's first term who now teaches at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, said he believes that the draft strikes an appropriate balance between "a fundamentally fair trial" and "the ability to protect the effectiveness of U.S. military and intelligence assets."

Administration officials have said that the exceptional trial procedures are warranted because the fight against terrorism requires heavy reliance on classified information or on evidence obtained from a defendant's collaborators, which cannot be shared with the accused. The draft legislation cites the goal of ensuring fair treatment without unduly diverting military personnel from wartime assignments to present evidence in trials.

The provisions are closely modeled on earlier plans for military commissions, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal two months ago in a case brought by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni imprisoned in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "It is not evident why the danger posed by international terrorism, considerable though it is, should require, in the case of Hamdan, any variance from the courts-martial rules," the court's majority decision held.

No one at Guantanamo has been tried to date, though some prisoners have been there since early 2002.

John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft the earlier plan, said Bush administration officials essentially "took DOD regulations" for the trials "and turned them into a statute for Congress to pass." He said the drafters were obviously "trying to return the law to where it was before Hamdan " by writing language into the draft that challenges key aspects of the court's decision.

"Basically, this is trying to overrule the Hamdan case," said Neal K. Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who was Hamdan's lead attorney.

The plan calls for commissions of five military officers appointed by the defense secretary to try defendants for any of 25 listed crimes. It gives the secretary the unilateral right to "specify other violations of the laws of war that may be tried by military commission." The secretary would be empowered to prescribe detailed procedures for carrying out the trials, including "modes of proof" and the use of hearsay evidence.

Unlike the international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the commissions could rely on hearsay as the basis for a conviction. Unlike routine military courts-martial, in which prosecutors must overcome several hurdles to use such evidence, the draft legislation would put the burden on the defense team to block its use.

The admission of hearsay is a serious problem, said Tom Malinowski, director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, because defendants might not know if it was gained through torture and would have difficulty challenging it on that basis. Nothing in the draft law prohibits using evidence obtained through cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that falls short of torture, Malinowski said.

The U.S. official countered that a military judge "would look hard" at the origins of such evidence and that defendants would have to count on "the trustworthiness of the system."

To secure a death penalty under the draft legislation, at least five jurors must agree, two fewer than under the administration's earlier plan. Courts-martial and federal civilian trials require that 12 jurors agree.

In response to this order, the above request was made to Hoover by FBI SAC Richard W. Held on 27th April 1970. Hoover granted permission for Held to plant the story in the Los Angeles Times, from where it was syndicated across the US. Many believe the subsequent backlash of the right-wing press so traumatised Jean Seberg, who was seven months pregnant at the time, that it significantly contributed to her miscarriage in May 1970. Although at the time Seberg gave as good as she got, totally humilating the rumour mongers when she presented the press with the body of her dead white child, no one could be in any doubt that the episode took a toll on her emotional well being. Eventually Jean Seberg paid with her life, and the world paid with her loss.

The above documents, made public in 1982, together with the testimony of her friends, and ultimately the actions of Seberg herself at that fateful press conference, provide a wealth of damaging evidence against the FBI's counter intelligence operation, as well as providing further proof, as if any were needed, that western civilisation is only "free" as long as the powers that be say so. The name which was deleted from the above memo, during an investigation by the FBI's office of Internal Affairs, is thought by many to have been Raymond Hewit, a Black Panther leader. The FBI had also typed up a letter on official FBI stationary identifying Hewit as an informant and planted it where other Black Panthers would find it, in the hopes that Hewit would then be killed.

Richard W. Held, the architect of this outrageous bastardisation of the word "democracy" was, of course, only obeying orders.

Held later became SAC in San Francisco, and was also incriminated in the bombing of the Earth First activist Judith Bari, by Ward Churchill and James Vander Wall, authors of "The Cointel Papers", from which the above memo was sourced. He subsequently retired from the FBI to become Head of Security for Visa International. [...]

WAS JEAN SEBERG ASSASSINATED?

Most sources close to Jean believe that she took her own life. She had suffered deblitating bouts of depression for some nine years by that point. Rumour mongers and conspiracy theorists may still like to suggest otherwise, but in truth Jean Seberg's suicide was sadly not unexpected by those who knew what she had been through. She had seemed quite determined to do it. Although there was some talk of her return to acting at the time of her death, this is by no means any more than speculation. She had turned down offers of roles from both Truffaut and Donald Cammell in the months preceding her death, although she was apparently enthusiastic about a possible but then unconfirmed role that would have reunited her with her "Bonjour Tristesse" co-star David Niven. The film, "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square", was made in 1980, with Elke Sommer assuming the role that Jean had been set to play. It was to be David Niven's last movie.

"Jean Seberg died by her own hand. I've never thought otherwise. Others certainly contributed to her breakdown, but by the time it happened the Jean we knew and loved was already gone. I miss her terribly, but she made up her own mind in the end. She was the most willfull girl. She turned her determination against herself, and against those that thought they could help her. No one could help her in the end. The rest is academic."

-David Keller

The matter would seem to be pretty straightforward: Under the Constitution, Congress passes bills and the president approves or disapproves, by exercising his veto power or signing a bill into law. Presidents as far back as James Monroe have used bill-signings to elaborate on their views about the law at hand. But no president has been quite as contentious about signing statements as Mr. Bush.

A study by The Boston Globe published in April revealed that he has used the statements to assert his right to disobey more than 750 laws since he assumed office, taking issue with anti-torture protection for detainees, whistle-blower protections for federal employees and certain provisions of the Patriot Act, among other things. And a recent American Bar Association report also put his penchant for disputing legislation in context by noting that Mr. Bush's predecessors collectively challenged about 600 legislative provisions, while he has far surpassed that total in less than six years.

Mr. Bush may have a point that Congress doesn't make it easy to reject one or two offensive provisions when bills are loaded with often-extraneous parts. But that's no excuse. The ABA report and Mr. Specter would seem to have the better argument: that challenging legislation through presidential signing statements strains the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Perhaps the courts will have to convince Mr. Bush that when he wants to dispute Congress' judgment, he should exercise his constitutional veto power - which he used for the first time last month - more often.

After the war ended, Cronin returned home to become a commercial pilot for American Airlines -- and a deep believer in the laws of war. He came to see the Geneva Conventions, which bar torture and "humiliating and degrading treatment," as a bedrock of the international military code. He was amazed to discover that as late as the 1990s, there was no law enabling U.S. courts to try violators of the Geneva Conventions. "I was shocked," he said. "I just thought that was wrong."

So Cronin changed the legal landscape. Thanks to his persistent lobbying, Congress passed the War Crimes Act of 1996 with overwhelming bipartisan support. For the first time, U.S. courts were granted authority to convict any foreigner who commits a war crime against an American, or any American who commits a war crime at all. At the time, nobody could have predicted that a decade later a U.S. administration, with the explicit consent of the president and the attorney general, would be accused of systematic war crimes.

But that is precisely the accusation that President George Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now face. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Bush administration wrongly denied Geneva Convention protections to prisoners suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban, a policy that allowed for harsh and possibly illegal interrogation methods to be used against them. As a result, U.S. personnel, given their treatment of these prisoners, could become subject to prosecution under the law that Cronin, a former prisoner of war, lobbied to pass.

In fact, from the early days of the war on terror, the Bush administration was concerned about the War Crimes Act. Publicly released memos show that as far back as Jan. 25, 2002, Gonzales, then the White House counsel, worried that the president's policies could trigger prosecution under the act. That led the White House to declare, over the objection of the State Department, that al-Qaida was not protected by the conventions. In the memo, Gonzales argued that the president could create "a solid defense against any future prosecution" by declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply.

But with the Supreme Court ruling, that defense no longer stands, leaving the administration in a legally vulnerable position. At a recent congressional hearing, Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, the Air Force judge advocate, testified that "some techniques that have been authorized" violated the Geneva Conventions. To preempt any prosecution, administration officials are now quietly circulating legislation to change the statutory interpretation of the War Crimes Act of 1996. In short, the legislation would make it difficult to prosecute U.S. personnel for the harsh interrogation methods authorized by President Bush and the Justice Department.

Cronin, an active Republican, sees the proposed changes, which have not yet been spelled out publicly, as an attempt by the civilian leadership to cover its tracks. "These guys are talking about trying to protect soldiers in the field. I think they are lying through their teeth," Cronin said. "They are talking about trying to protect themselves."

Cronin is not alone. Some Democrats have promised to push back against the proposed changes and have focused their initial ire on Gonzales. "The highest law enforcement officer in the country is leading an effort to undercut the rule of law," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, on the Senate floor last week. "We cannot credibly ask others to meet standards we are unwilling to meet ourselves." On Wednesday, the committee is scheduled to discuss the issue of war crimes prosecution.

Because the War Crimes Act is a criminal statute that requires a federal prosecutor, it is unlikely that any charges against the American civilian leadership will be filed in the next two years. But charges could be filed by the next administration or by appointment of a special prosecutor, say legal experts.

"What the administration is afraid of is that someday, presumably in a Hillary Clinton administration, Justice Department investigators will go back to 2002 and 2003, when the CIA was interrogating senior leaders of al-Qaida with guidelines from the Justice Department and the White House," said Tom Malinowski, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. He said the effort to change the interpretation of the War Crimes Act is focused on protecting those outside the military chain of command who may have committed war crimes or ordered war crimes to be committed. "If I were in the armed forces," Malinowski said, "I would be worried that the administration is selling out the armed forces for the CIA."

At first glance, Cronin appears to be an unlikely critic of the Bush administration. He identifies firmly with the military. He served nearly two years in Vietnam, flying A-4 Skyhawks off aircraft carriers over North Vietnam. He was shot down in January 1967, just before the end of his tour of duty. A registered Republican, Cronin voted for President Bush in each of the past two elections. In 2004, he even joined other prisoners of war in supporting Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the partisan nonprofit group that attacked the Vietnam service and antiwar activities of Democratic candidate John Kerry. One of his closest friends, a fellow American Airlines pilot, was in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

But today, Cronin says he is no longer certain he can support Bush. As he put it, "I have had some doubts about the wisdom of this administration."

The story of the War Crimes Act began by accident. In the 1990s, worried that his job as a commercial pilot might not be secure, Cronin enrolled at Georgetown Law School, studying nights while continuing his full-time job as a pilot. At Georgetown, he discovered that Congress had never enacted a law to enforce the Geneva Conventions, even though the conventions were ratified shortly after World War II. After graduating, he was asked by the Allied Pilots Association, his union, to help represent his colleagues on Capitol Hill. He made it a point to lobby members of Congress about the lack of war crimes enforcement as well. "I made it my hobby to discuss the issue with senators and congressmen," Cronin said. "I hit a brick wall. There was no interest until I met Congressman Jones."

In 1995, Rep. Walter Jones was a newly elected Republican from North Carolina who represented a military district that includes Camp Lejeune, a major Marine base. Jones took an immediate interest in Cronin and made the War Crimes Act his first legislative initiative. "This whole issue came to me by accident," Jones said. "It was my third month in Congress."

At the time, war crimes focused on acts by foreign adversaries, like the North Vietnamese, who had tortured Cronin. But when the bill passed into law, it applied equally to Americans. It passed the House by a voice vote, earned unanimous support in the Senate and was promptly signed by President Bill Clinton. Even right-wing conservatives supported it. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., said the bill would "close a major gap in our federal law." Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said the bill was "something that should have been done some 40 years ago."

In practice, the law made little difference for enlisted soldiers and officers, who were already subject to military law, which prohibits the abuse of prisoners. But for the first time, the War Crimes Act provided a way to prosecute U.S. civilians, including intelligence officers, contractors and government officials who order war crimes.

In the current proposals, which have been reported by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the administration is seeking to make Geneva Convention enforcement in the United States subject to domestic interpretation, not international standards. The slight technical change could have a huge practical impact. Legal experts say this would give some flexibility to the Justice Department to define certain interrogation techniques as legal in U.S. courts, even if the rest of the world considers them violations of the conventions.

"They want retroactive immunity," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor of international law at Notre Dame, who has been critical of the Bush administration's detention policies. "Have you known of any other time in our history when we have tried to immunize public officials against crimes after they have committed the crimes?"

The Bush administration, Cronin said, is simply unaware of the realities of war. "The vast majority of them never served a day in the military, even though almost all of them were of military age at the time of the Vietnam War," Cronin said. "The opposition to the administration's policy of detainment has come, to their great credit, entirely from the professional military."

Cronin, on the other hand, has been there. He is a victim of war crimes. And, as it stands, he no longer believes that the president and his aides have the nation's best interests at heart. "From day one," he said, "the total motivation of these people seems to have been, How can we protect ourselves?"