GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- When U.S. law groups announced in April that they were hiring the nation's top criminal defense lawyers to defend alleged al Qaeda terrorists at the war court here, one executive called the lawyers ``The A Team.''

Now, they're the No-Pay Team.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged arch-terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury Department over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to this remote U.S. Navy base from as far as Boise, Idaho.

The Treasury division, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, is the same unit that polices American citizens' travel to Cuba. Its authority to license defense costs at the war courts here, called military commissions, comes from anti-terror legislation.

Tuesday, ACLU director Anthony Romero accused the Bush administration of foot-dragging, noting civilian defense lawyers were slow to receive security clearances to meet accused terrorists held for years without access to attorneys.

'Now the government is stonewalling again by not allowing Americans' private dollars to be paid to American lawyers to defend civil liberties,'' he said.

He called the slow licensing an ''obstruction of justice'' at a time when ``the Bush administration insists on moving ahead with the prosecutions.''

At the Treasury Department, spokesman John Rankin declined to comment on the showdown with the ACLU, citing privacy policies.

But he said the licensing division ``is treating this request with the seriousness it deserves and strives to process license applications as expeditiously as possible.''

The program is called the John Adams Project, sponsored by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Under it, attorneys will be paid for travel, expenses, research and copying as well as $250 an hour to defend men described by President Bush as ''the worst of the worst'' now facing death penalty prosecutions at the war court.

Top criminal defense lawyers typically charge at least $550 an hour.

At its inception, the legal team got prestigious endorsements from such wide-ranging lawyers as former Attorney General Janet Reno and former FBI Director William Webster. Romero boasted he was assembling the A Team, the cream of American criminal defense attorneys who had earlier helped alleged terrorists, foreign and domestic.

Participants include Boise lawyers David Nevin and Scott McKay, who are Pentagon defense consultants to alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 43; Seattle attorneys Jeff Robinson and Amanda Lee, defending Mohammed's nephew, Ammar al Baluchi, 30, who noted at his June 5 arraignment that he is a Microsoft certified computer engineer; and Chicago lawyer Tom Durkin, defending Ramzi bin al Shibh, accused of organizing some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Nevin declared himself surprised at the standoff, especially since the ACLU had long been ``in the business of defending people's rights.''

He added: ``Obviously, everyone is going to do whatever is required to be done. But, intuitively, it seems odd to me that anyone's permission is necessary.''

Pentagon prosecutors accuse the five captives of conspiring to carry out the Sept.11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,987 people and are seeking to execute them if convicted.

The ACLU and NACDL unveiled the program in early April amid protests by U.S. military defense lawyers that the Pentagon had not provided their offices with sufficient resources.

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