WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department on Monday released an F.B.I. memorandum dated May 10, 2004, in which departmental lawyers dismissed intelligence obtained by coercive methods used by the military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as "suspect at best."

The existence of the memorandum has been known for months. But when it was first made public by the government, the memorandum was released in heavily edited form, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In February, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, asked the Justice Department to restore the deleted parts of the document after confirmation hearings on Michael Chertoff's nomination to be secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

"The facts related to interrogation practices used against some detainees are slowly being forced to the surface, and we will keep pushing for more," Mr. Levin said in a statement in which he referred to the Department of Defense as D.O.D. "Today we were able to obtain some information that had previously been blacked out in an F.B.I. document critical of D.O.D. interrogation practices. As I suspected, the previously withheld information had nothing to do with protecting intelligence sources or methods, and everything to do with protecting D.O.D. from embarrassment."

Mr. Chertoff said at his confirmation hearing that he did not engage in detailed discussions of interrogation policies and never offered specific advice when he headed the criminal division at the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, when he left the department to take an appointment to a federal appeals court.

But the newly released version of the memorandum identified for the first time four of Mr. Chertoff's top deputies who, according to the document, attended weekly meetings with F.B.I. officials in which the military's interrogation methods were frequently discussed and criticized as ineffective and unproductive.

The four Chertoff aides, whose names were edited from the previous version of the memorandum, were identified in the newly released version as Alice Fisher, David Nahmias, Laura Parsky and Bruce Swartz.

Ms. Fisher was Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff. Mr. Nahmias was his senior counterterrorism adviser and is now the United States attorney in Atlanta.

The author of the memorandum, an F.B.I. employee whose identity is still unknown, wrote that the group often discussed how the military's tactics were not working and might be a problem in its efforts to try Guantánamo prisoners in special tribunals.

"We all agreed D.O.D. tactics were going to be an issue in the military commission cases," the memorandum said.

The author said it was Mr. Swartz who took the group's complaints to the Pentagon's general counsel.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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