The football stadium in Kabul may no longer be used for public executions, but someone accused of murder can still be tried and sentenced in less than an hour, with no legal representation. Now a group of Western lawyers are hoping to change the nature of Afghan justice with a pioneering system of legal aid for defendants.

The project, Legal Aid Afghanistan, has been organized by the International Legal Foundation, a New York-based group, which had its first experience of trying to create a legal aid system in a postwar environment in Rwanda in 1997. Now they are hoping to help the Afghan criminal justice system codify its existing laws and introduce legal aid defenders throughout the system.

Casey, a criminal law barrister with chambers in Red Lion Court in London, was one of a team of ILF lawyers from the West acting as mentors and advisors to a team of nine Afghan lawyers. “It has to be seen as part of a wider project trying to establish a functioning criminal justice system,” says Casey, who, before he was called to the bar, had jobs in commerce, teaching and music journalism in France, Italy and Britain. “The project sees itself as trying to reestablish the rule of law.”

The organization has already found itself defending three Americans in what would be a bizarre case in any country: two former U.S. servicemen and a New York cameraman accused of kidnapping and violently interrogating eight Afghans in a bid to discover the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. The trio, Jack Idema, Brent Bennett and cameraman Eddie Caraballo, were arrested last July and jailed for between six and eight years after a brief trial. Their lawyers, who included two LAA attorneys, argued that they had not been able to present their cases properly, an argument that will form the basis of their forthcoming appeal.

Idema, a volatile character with a fraud conviction in the United States who dresses in military gear and dark glasses, claimed he was acting with the authority of the Pentagon and angrily presented his case to the media. American officials have distanced themselves from him and have made it clear that they have no intention of intervening in the Afghan justice system. The three men are anxious to get out of jail as soon as possible. Last December, there was a shootout at the Pul-e-Charkhi jail where they are being held in which four inmates and four guards were killed. The three Americans believe they were targets.

Cases involving locals are not quite so spectacular. One defendant had asked a driver to deliver 15 bags of peas to an address in Kabul, but the driver suspected that one bag contained opium and reported it to the police. Another, who was accused of gambling after being found with three sets of dice and two packs of cards during a police raid, claimed he just happened to be in the house by chance. A third was accused of kidnapping boys from a bus stop and taking them over the border into Peshawar in Pakistan.

“Property disputes are often the cause of violence,” says Casey. One of his cases, an attempted murder, resulted from a row over land. He also helped with the defense of a man who shot his wife with a Kalashnikov, and claimed that he had pulled the trigger by mistake.

Legal Aid Afghanistan has its origins in Peshawar back in 2000. The idea was to work with the many Afghan refugees living there so they could adapt their criminal justice system to international standards when they eventually returned home. For many, the return came sooner than expected with the overthrow of the Taliban government in 2001. Now the aim is twofold: to codify the existing legal system and to introduce the concept of defense lawyers into the criminal justice system.

The project is funded mainly by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute, with assistance from the Canadian and German governments and the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. Under the scheme, Western lawyers visit for two months at a time, working free of charge, with their accommodations paid for by the foundation.

“We think that criminal defense is the engine of justice reconstruction,” says Natalie Rea, a New York public defender and founder of the project. There have been few problems recruiting lawyers from the West despite security concerns. “Basically, it seems lawyers in America and Britain are quite bored, so they are ready for an adventure. We get great people, and so we are able to select the best.” One of the fundamental principles, she maintains, is that they must take into account the cultural realities of Afghanistan with its long history of traditional laws.

For Casey, one of the main aims is to promote the notion that an accused should have access to a trained defender. There was an existing defense system, but it consisted mainly of people based outside the courts who were available for hire to write out statements for defendants in what is a largely illiterate country. Barristers in London operated in a similar sort of way 200 years ago, he points out.

The current project is one of two aimed at bringing representation to defendants in Afghanistan. A German group, Medica Mondiale, represents women defendants, including those charged with adultery. While such defendants no longer face public stoning as a punishment, men and women who have sex outside marriage are still liable to prosecution and jail terms. Even unmarried young people having consensual sex can face prosecution.

The Afghan lawyers in the team are all handsomely paid by local standards, so the project attracts the highest-quality lawyers. One is a woman who was a juvenile court judge in Taliban times, while two are former prosecutors. Despite the risks for Western lawyers operating in the country — three U.N. workers were kidnapped at the end of last year — Casey says he would be happy to return to the country.

Judges and prosecutors throughout Afghanistan have been receptive to the scheme. Judges say the presence of defense lawyers helps to establish the credibility of the criminal justice system at a time when parts of the country are still unsafe or subject to the control of warlords.

“On the whole, the judges are fair,” says Casey. “If there is no evidence, they will acquit.” But locals expressed incredulity at the notion of a jury system with people plucked from the general public to pass judgment. “They said, ‘Aren’t you undermining the authority of the judge?’”

The death penalty remains, although it will be employed much less frequently, and jail sentences handed out by the three-judge panel are on a par with those in British cases. Both prosecution and defense can appeal against a trial verdict.

The old public executions are in the past, however. One Kabul hotelier, a professional athlete, recalls having to wait until executions were finished in the national stadium before he could carry on his training. A boxer friend, he said, would run circuits of the stadium undeterred by bodies hanging from the goalposts at each end.

Because of the problems faced by an impoverished country recovering from 25 years of war, trials are rarely straightforward. Without an effective national communications and transport system, it is impossible to line up witnesses for a Western-style trial. “The police will take the statements and the prosecution will read them out,” says Casey. What the new defense lawyers will try to ensure is that defendants have an opportunity to challenge the statements made against them. One of the main issues they face is trying to make sure that hearsay evidence and evidence obtained by illegal searches or following illegal detention are excluded.

The eventual aim of the project is to establish an independent agency of public defenders in Afghanistan. To this end, the ILF has been working with the minister of justice and the Afghan judicial commission. There is one group, however, who will not be able to call on ILF lawyers to plead their case — the many detainees, more than 2,000 in total, who have been held without charge for interrogation by the U.S. authorities at Bagram Air Force Base.

Four men, between 18 and 30, three of them with West Yorkshire addresses and all of them British, met up at Luton station before boarding a Thameslink train to King’s Cross the morning of July 7.

It appears that the four, described by security sources as “cleanskins” — with no convictions or known terrorist involvement — reached their rendezvous via two or three hired cars, one of which was located Tuesday at Luton station. Explosives were found in the car, police revealed Tuesday night.

Police were also examining a second car found at the station. It was taken to a storage facility at Leighton Buzzard.

Closed-circuit television film from around 8:20 a.m. July 7 shows the four young men, all with identical large rucksacks similar to those carried by infantry soldiers on their backs. The four appeared relaxed.

“You would have thought they were going on a hiking holiday,” said the senior security source, who has seen the footage. It is likely to be released Wednesday.

Police were alerted to the existence of one of the four when his distressed family in Leeds called the casualty bureau hotline shortly after 10 p.m. on July 7. Their son had been traveling to London “with his mates” and had not returned. A family liaison officer was dispatched to be with the family, as was the case for all those believed to have lost relatives in the explosions.

In the meantime, police had found personal documents relating to three young men ages 18, 22 and 30, all from West Yorkshire. A driving license and credit cards belonging to the 22-year-old whose parents were concerned about him were found on the bus that blew up in Tavistock Square. The documents of the 30-year-old, whose body was found at Edgware Road station, were discovered both at the scene of that explosion and at the Aldgate bomb scene, where another of the four dead suspects’ remains were found. Police believe that the fourth person’s remains and documents may still be trapped in the rubble below Russell Square and are hoping they may find those Wednesday.

On Monday night came the breakthrough police were waiting for — when the CCTV at King’s Cross showed the four young men setting off in different directions.

Police Tuesday raided three houses in the Beeston and Holbeck areas of Leeds and two in nearby Dewsbury just after 6 a.m. in a coordinated operation involving scores of officers from West Yorkshire and the anti-terrorist branch. They later raided another house in the Burley district after evacuating 500 residents from homes nearby and blasting down the door in a controlled explosion.

People who were evacuated in the Burley area were given temporary accommodation as police continued to search an address at Alexandra Grove where a suspicious substance had been found, according to officers.

In Dewsbury, officers carried out a meticulous search at a modern bungalow in a middle-class area, and forensic teams loaded at least one car onto a covered transporter.

At Colwyn Road in Beeston, as police searched a house belonging to the Tanweer family, a car hire firm arrived to collect an overdue hire car. Staff were immediately interviewed by police.

Family and friends of two young British-born Muslims — whose homes were among the six raided Tuesday — said they had been missing for several days. Hasib Hussain’s parents reported him missing on July 7; his documents were found on the No. 30 bus that exploded at 9:47 a.m. Shehzad Tanweer, 22, of Colwyn Road, has also been missing since last week. His documents, police said, were found in the wreckage of the Aldgate train.

While there was satisfaction within the police and intelligence services that they appeared to have identified a bombing team so swiftly, there were also fears on two fronts: that the finding of more explosives in Leeds indicates that this was not a one-off; and that there could be attacks by far-right groups against ethnic minority communities as it became clear that these were not foreign militants entering the country but homegrown bombers.

Assistant commissioner Andy Hayman of the Met’s special operations branch and deputy assistant commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the anti-terrorist branch, announced news of the breakthrough Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday night searches were continuing and police were questioning a relative of one of the four men who had been driven to London.

Now the search will concentrate on the “plotters and planners” who would normally brief and equip a team of suicide volunteers. The normal procedure for such operations, if they involved al-Qaida or one of its related groups, would be for the chief planner to have left the country before the operations took place. There is a possibility that those who planned it are still in Britain. Police are now checking flight records for suspicious passengers.

Clarke said: “I would like at this stage to thank the public for all the support and assistance they have already provided. It is invaluable.”

Hayman described those who had perpetrated the attack as “extremist criminals” and added: “It’s at times like these that communities bind together … No one should smear or stigmatize any community with these acts.”

There are as yet no indications that any of the four left behind any message about their intentions.

The police are going through 2,500 tapes and evaluating more than 2,000 calls from the public. They have more than 100 witness statements. They stressed Tuesday night that they were at the start rather than at the end of their investigation.

Nearly 400 cables and memos sent or received by Negroponte, who was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the U.N. before being nominated for his new intelligence position, indicate that he tried to undermine peace efforts, promoted the war against the Sandinistas — which he referred to as “our special project” — and gave tips to the State Department on how to cover up the U.S. role.

There is no indication of any concern for the Honduran regime’s human rights abuses, or the disappearances of left-wingers at the time, despite much contemporary evidence of atrocities committed by the Honduran military. The documents were released by the national security archive in Washington.

In a cable to the State Department in October 1983, Negroponte expressed alarm that peace might be agreed through negotiations taking place through the offices of the Contadora Group of Latin American governments, which was seeking an end to the conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. “The Contadora process does indeed appear to be headed in directions inimical to our interests,” he cabled. “This raises specter of an imposed ‘peace.’”

He also expressed his concern about the possibility of a peace agreement in a cable in which he said of the initiative that “such an approach could eventually lead to de facto acceptance of old French/Mexican proposal, ie control of borders and effectively shutting down our special project.”

A cable received from his U.S. diplomatic counterpart in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, in May 1983, showed that Negroponte was planning to entertain at dinner Adolfo Calero, the head of the rebel FDN (Nicaraguan Democratic Force). “Your hospitality is legendary and Calero’s charm is irresistible, but I have my doubts about a dinner at the residence for a man who is in the business of overthrowing a neighboring government,” wrote Anthony Quainton, the U.S. envoy to Nicaragua.

The release of the documents dominated Negroponte’s Senate hearing Tuesday.

Ron Wyden, a Democrat, accused him of “ducking the facts” and asked whether in his new position he would continue to tell the administration what it wanted to hear.

“It looks like you saw things through an administration-colored lens then,” Wyden said. “And what you need to do over the course of today is convince me that when you brief the president, you have this extraordinarily important duty, you’re going to make sure the facts get out there.”

Negroponte rejected the charge that he had covered up human rights abuses. He said the issue had been investigated in 1989 when he was named ambassador to Mexico, and again in 2001. “I think both instances have found that I had not carried out any improper behavior,” he said. “My comportment was always in an absolutely legal and entirely professional manner.”

“We came to Spain from Ecuador because my son was a very bright student and we wanted him to have a better education,” said Rita, who remembers the day she arrived in the country with Jose Luis — April 4, 2000 — to join her engineer husband, Luis, who had come a year earlier.

“He was a very special person. He wanted to work in films as a scriptwriter. He was very interested in documentaries but he liked all kinds of films — action films with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Latin American films, Spanish films by Pedro Almodóvar — and he was interested in animation, too, because he liked to draw.” His sketchbook is full of copies of film stills and stars.

“We haven’t touched his room at all,” said Luis, gesturing at the walls with their posters of Kylie Minogue and Angelina Jolie, “The Matrix” and “Spider-man” and a Bart Simpson replica propped up against the pillow. “Since we heard that he had not arrived at college that day, it has been one long nightmare.”

On a shelf beside bound encyclopedias that may never be opened again, and between a model of the Incredible Hulk and a tiny picture of Jesus, are Jose Luis’ ashes in a small satchel that Luis touches as he talks. They had only moved into their small apartment in the modest working-class suburb of Torrejon Ardoz 10 days before the bombs exploded.

Rita’s family are still in Quito in Ecuador, and Luis is from the Ecuador-Peru border. Had they thought of returning? “My son is here, so we are staying here,” he said.

The picture they paint of Jose Luis is of a studious young man, fascinated by the history of Spain and Madrid, who liked to visit the Prado, listen to U2 and hang out with a small group of friends, avoiding the big crowds because, as a nonsmoker, uninterested in football and intrigued by yoga and spirituality, he preferred a quieter life of reading and studying film, and making giant jigsaws. One is of the New York skyline with the Twin Towers still standing, which his parents have framed and hung on the wall.

One year on, the pain for his parents is as raw as ever. “For my part, I do not feel bitterness,” said Rita. “There are some people who would like to see them [the bombers] dead, but I am not one of them. I see it as a problem of education. As for my son — his dream was that everyone should be equal and that nothing like this should ever happen.”

They are critical of the media for constantly showing the pictures of the aftermath of the bombs, and they have found the psychological help offered to be of little comfort. “The only people who understand what we feel are the other families,” said Luis.

They meet a group of around 20 others who have lost someone every Tuesday night in Madrid, and a Bulgarian couple whose son was killed lives nearby.

As with the Sept. 11 attacks, many of those who died were immigrants. They had come to Spain from almost every Latin American country and from eastern Europe in search of a better life; 16 Romanians were among the dead.

In recognition of this, and with public support, the Spanish government granted permanent residency to those injured or bereaved, but some are still facing bureaucratic hurdles because of a lack of papers, the Bulgarian friends of Luis and Rita among them. “We are OK,” said Luis, “but the government has not done everything they said they would do for them.”

Pilar Manjon, the spokeswoman for the victims, whose 20-year-old son was killed, has berated the politicians for trying to score points rather than investigate how the attack might have been prevented. Last December, dressed in black, she poured scorn over the Spanish Parliament, accusing the politicians of “playground politics” and of shirking responsibility. “You are here to find out the truth; don’t use our pain for political gain,” said Manjon, a union leader.

The row over former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s original suggestion that ETA (the Basque separatist movement) was responsible rumbles on, with current Premier Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero accusing Aznar of wiping computer records about the bombings to perpetrate a “massive deceit.” He also claims the police had failed to track the growth of Islamist extremism in the months before the attack, presumed to be prompted by Spain’s support for the war in Iraq. Zapatero withdrew the troops after taking office.

Manjon has been seeking a fresh commission without any politicians attached and has called for the imposition of the maximum penalty of 40 years without remission for those convicted. “The victims are being given a lot of help,” said Luis Portero of the Association of Victims of Terrorism. “Does that mean they can get their loved ones back? No — but it does mean that things have changed in attitudes to victims in this country from the days when people were killed by ETA and no one wanted to talk about it.

“The pain is going to remain, but the pain can also make you take a new perspective on life; it can make you more sensitive to others and convert your suffering into a gift for others. The victims of the Holocaust and the Second World War did not get the sort of help that is being made available now, so in a way we are the lucky ones.”

Although the scale of the casualties was different from Sept. 11, there were similarities in the detailed planning and in the aim to kill as many as possible.

By chance, Puerto Rican writer and academic Lisa Paravisini was present for both events. “The mood and the media coverage here were less cataclysmic,” she said. “In New York, everything was paralyzed; they went into high paranoia that the whole country was under attack like a Hollywood disaster movie. Here the aim was to get back to normal as quickly as possible.”

There is a memorial at the Atocha train station in central Madrid where people can leave a computerized handprint and type in a message. There are 58,000 such handprints and messages now. Some say simply, “No words are enough.” Others are angry: “200 people died for an absurd religion and a God who doesn’t exist.” Some of those who leave messages knew the victims; for others it is almost a tourist attraction as they pose beside video images next to platforms where passengers now face airport-style security.

Part of the memorial consists of six hanging white pillar-shaped objects on which are written thousands of messages from loved ones and sympathizers. A teacher, Macarena Sarrion, from Alicante, said she had come out of solidarity with the victims but was upset at the way events had been handled. “I think the politicians are making use of the suffering of the victims for their own ends.” Handwritten expressions of loss and regret spiral around the pillars. None sadder, perhaps, than one tiny scrawl that reads: “04-12-2004. Irene. Te amo. Diego.”

Two very different cases but each involving journalists who said that they were reporting what they saw in the best way that they could and who ended up behind bars. So where does journalism end and participation begin? According to Caraballo’s brother, Richard, Ed was working on a film about Jack Idema, the extremely volatile former Special Forces soldier and bounty hunter, who had decided that he and his team would track down bin Laden and claim a $25 million reward. To this end, he rounded up potential sources of information, locked them up and, if they did not cooperate, subjected them to interrogation. Depending on whom you believe, this involved either “standard” techniques (Idema’s version) or the detainees being hung upside down by their feet, scalded and beaten (the prosecution case). Idema and another American bounty hunter were jailed for 10 years for torture and kidnapping, Caraballo for eight.

“I am sure if he had known all the angles to this thing he would have run for the door in a New York minute,” says Richard Caraballo, who has been trying to get attention for the case on the grounds that this is an issue of press freedom. He says his brother had to stay close to Idema: “Due to the extremely precarious security situation within Afghanistan for foreigners, it was agreed that Ed, a civilian with no military expertise, would need to remain in the secure presence of Idema’s team.” He says that his brother, who has been involved in five Emmy-winning U.S. documentaries, was merely hoping to complete a film about Idema that had taken more than two years.

The Afghan court took the view that Caraballo was part of the Idema team and could not plead any journalistic defense. Richard Caraballo is trying to persuade journalists’ bodies around the world to take up his brother’s case.

The Committee for the Protection of Journalists in New York is monitoring the case and describes it as “a very gray area.” Its spokesperson for the region, Abi Wright, says that while it was clear that Caraballo had worked as a professional cameraman in the past, with the facts they had available, “we did not see his [current] situation resulting from journalism.” The “gray area” here arises partly because Caraballo was not working for a specific network or company but was doing the film in cooperation with, and encouraged by, Idema. His brother says that he did not have a commission to make the film but believed he would able to sell it when he returned to the U.S.

Jasiewicz’s case is very different. Having embarked on a career in journalism five years ago, she was working for a news agency when she became disillusioned with the job and its lack of connection to her life as a political activist. “I quit and made my way to Palestine to do something of more practical value to people,” she writes in the Journalist this month. She has since filed stories from Israel and Iraq: “I would never have got close to people in Palestine or the oil workers’ union in Iraq if writing had been my only goal,” she writes. “Activist journalists work with their ‘subjects,’ see them as comrades and take the risks and make the sacrifices necessary to serve and support them.” She fell foul of the Israeli authorities, who suggested that her Palestinian contacts were violent people and thus she could not be allowed into the occupied territories. Now in London, she says that she still hopes to return.

“I’m not motivated by journalism, I’m motivated by international human rights,” she says. “I don’t really believe in objectivity; I don’t believe it’s possible.” She believes there there is a growing acceptance of “advocacy journalism” as exemplified by Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein, “who speak on behalf of people who are marginalized and don’t have a voice.”

So is her position and that of Caraballo different from that of journalists who are embedded with the armed forces and who also have to “take the risks and make the sacrifices necessary,” or have they crossed a line that means that they cannot ask for special treatment as journalists?

There are risks, implicit or explicit, involved in any form of embedding. Reporters are no more immune to warming to people they hang out with than other human beings. If you eat with people, see their problems at close hand, experience their dangers and learn about their lives, you will inevitably be more sympathetic to their story than if you were dealing with a spokesman, whether the group you are embedded with consists of soldiers or bounty hunters. The problem is that, in a world where violence is increasingly the currency of political debate, journalists who are embedded — officially or unofficially — are more likely than ever to find themselves seen as indistinguishable from those with whom they are embedded and thus increasingly likely to have to face the consequences.

Tala Dowlatshahi of Reporters Without Borders in New York says that her organization recognizes the difficulties journalists face and has drawn up a code of ethics in conjunction with UNESCO that spells out how to behave in complex situations. She adds that conflict situations had thrown up a number of new ethical issues in how a journalist should behave. The cases of Caraballo and Jasiewicz will not be the last to throw up such dilemmas.

The debate over Prescott Bush’s behavior has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been steady Internet chatter about the “Bush-Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion-dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject, are threatening to make Prescott Bush’s business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson George W. as he seeks reelection.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman, acted as a U.S. base for German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corp., which represented Thyssen’s U.S. interests, and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler’s efforts to rearm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen’s international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalizing are Bush’s links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Co., based in mineral-rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labor from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the U.S. National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen’s American assets were seized in 1942. Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush’s involvement.

All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient U.S. archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, is contained in vesting order No. 248, which records the seizure of company assets. What these files show is that on Oct. 20, 1942, the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corp. and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. By November, the Silesian-American Co., another of Prescott Bush’s ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, is contained in the files on IG Farben, which was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that “since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country’s war effort.”

Prescott Bush, a 6-foot-4 charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate. Like his son George and grandson George W., he went to Yale, where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the First World War and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.

In 1924, Prescott’s father-in-law, a well-known St. Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E.H. Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank, and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125. The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush’s father-in-law to provide a U.S. bank for the Thyssens, Germany’s most powerful industrial family. August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty, had been a major contributor to Germany’s First World War effort, and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany’s economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerized by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, “I Paid Hitler,” when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: In 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world’s largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and U.S. Treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s buildup to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8 million worth of gold, of which $3 million was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2 million to BBH accounts, and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3 million, dropping to $1 million only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler, but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s, and many of America’s best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights in continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941, as the U.S. was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30, 1942, when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article titled “Hitler’s Angel Has $3m in U.S. Bank.” UBC’s huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a “secret nest egg” hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission launched an investigation.

There is no dispute over the fact that the U.S. government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH — including UBC and Silesian-American Co. — in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attaché and officer for the department of investigation in the Alien Property Commission, was assigned to look into UBC’s business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn’t actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC’s president.

May wrote in his report of Aug. 16, 1941: “Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr. Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest.”

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel traveled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman H.J. Kouwenhoven — who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC — had several other jobs: In addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen’s Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen’s steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the Alien Property Commission investigation and research division, sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the U.S. government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush, and wrote: “Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC,” according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5 million — a huge amount of money at the time — but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler’s rise to power.

The most tantalizing part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Co. and Auschwitz.

Thyssen’s partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick’s plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labor from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published on March 18, 1934, Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while “American interests” held the rest.

The U.S. National Archive documents show that BBH’s involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush’s friend and fellow “bonesman” Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalize the plant. “The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected,” wrote Knight. “After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors.”

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the U.S. government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

“SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939,” says Eva Schweitzer, a journalist and author whose book, “America and the Holocaust,” is to be published next month.

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully, as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the U.S. to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

The two Holocaust survivors suing the U.S. government and the Bush family for a total of $40 billion in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labor during the Second World War. Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of “state sovereignty.”

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: “President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton’s signature from the treaty [that founded the International Criminal Court] not only to protect Americans but also to protect himself and his family.” Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.

In their claims, Goldstein and Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-Fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.

The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month. The petition to The Hague states: “From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented.”

The case is built around a Jan. 22, 1944, executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.

Lissmann said: “If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [President] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation.”

The U.S. government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Schweitzer’s book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush’s business history. John Loftus, the author of the second book, to be published next year, is a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the ’70s. Now living in St. Petersburg, Fla., and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC Radio, Loftus is working on a novel that uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

“You can’t blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did — bought Nazi stocks — but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?” he said.

“This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power; this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich’s defense industry was rearmed; this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners; this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted,” said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.

“The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen,” said Loftus. “At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn’t until the Nazis took over Holland that they realized that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company — and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American Treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely belie that; it’s absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were.

“There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted, but they did get away with it,” said Loftus. “As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law [George Walker] and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany.”

Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. “My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses; they didn’t care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks.”

What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in “the banking and intelligence communities” and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5 million out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.

The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline “Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush’s Grandfather Traded With the Nazis — Even After Pearl Harbor.” He expands on this in his book to be published next month, “Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.”

In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, asserted that “the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes.”

Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as “traitors to the truth.” Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated-stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicize his findings. The charges were dropped last month. Buchanan said he regretted his behavior had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.

The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.

The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush titled “Duty, Honor, Country” by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would “deal honestly with Prescott Bush’s alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations.” In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that “a person of less established ethics would have panicked … Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was ‘an unpaid courtesy for a client’ … Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill.”

The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically. However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American, and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman’s “performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends.”

The Anti-Defamation League in the U.S. is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year it said that “rumors about the alleged Nazi ‘ties’ of the late Prescott Bush … have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated … Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer.” However, one of the country’s oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny — but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.