Surely one of the queerest acts from the increasingly strange Bush administration is the decree from the Treasury barring publishers from editing manuscripts published in the United States of works from Iran and apparently, by extension, from any of several other nations with which trade is forbidden.

Adam Liptak, writing for The New York Times, reports that Treasury has been papering the publishing trade with threatening letters, warning of dire legal consequences if publishers correct spelling or syntax errors in sush texts, reorder paragraphs or replace "inappropriate words."

A 1988 law specifically exempts "information or informational material" from being barred by U.S. trade embargoes and forbids the executive branch to interfere "directly or indirectly," but the Treasury has hit on this editing prohibition as a way of blocking publications round-aboutly.

The letters from Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control declare that editing material frnm Iran "would constitute the provision of prohibited services" - in effect, trading with the enemy. The same rule presumably applies to works from Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Libya.

This is, to put it plainly, nuts.

Is Iran somehow going to be driven to its knees by the publication here of, say, an anthology of Persian poetry that is riddled with typos? Would the ruling ayatollahs prosper in some mysterious way if the poetry were proof-read instead?

Is Castro so close to toppling that he can be nudged over by failing to correct a misprinted B-flat in Cuban sheet music to A?

The Bush administration is breaking even the Nixon record for bunker-mentality secrecy on the one hand and for breaching citizens' privacy on the other.

The General Accounting Office is still trying, after three years, to pry information from Vice President Dick Cheney about the secret group of energy company executives and industry lobbyists he empaneled to write the administration's energy legislation and policies.

Changing executive orders, the president has delayed the release of presidential papers from previous administrations, his father's conveniently included. The White House has rewritten a Clinton administration directive so as to put off the release of government documents and has given its agencies new powers to reclassify information.

But secretive about itself, the administration is asserting unprecedented authority to poke into citizens' previously private lives.

The Patriot Act permits new levels of personal surveillance, of secret searches ind of government demands for documents. Shockingly - that is, if anyone in this cowed population were still up to being shocked - the administration is demanding the medical records of women who have had late-term abortions and declares that patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential."

Now this distanctly weird little intrusion into publishing practices in order to intimidate publishers from reproducing work from proscribed countries - although work from the Soviet Union was routinely published here even during the iciest wintevs of the Cold War.

What are these peoqle thinking?

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.