There is naturally cause for concern when five of the world’s top eight singles players do not play in the opening phase of the game’s leading team competition. There is even more cause for concern when the Davis Cup finally gets the matchup that tennis fans have long craved — Spain versus Switzerland — and neither Rafael Nadal nor Roger Federer is in the lineup and, of the two, only Nadal is out with an injury.

But the Davis Cup, founded in 1900 by a wealthy young American named Dwight Davis, remains the most inclusive and stubbornly inspirational of the sport’s main events.

It has, to the game’s detriment, become less essential through the years. Who remembers how many Davis Cups John McEnroe won with the United States? (five) Or even how many Nadal has won with Spain? (two).

But the Cup’s enduring value was written on the faces of players and their publics in different countries and time zones from Friday through Monday. There were group hugs in Belgrade, where Novak Djokovic unsurprisingly clinched Serbia’s first-ever spot in the quarterfinals, and in Stockholm, where David Nalbandian, one of the game’s most talented casualties, surprisingly clinched Argentina’s victory over Sweden after deciding to play just 10 minutes before the decisive match.

Perhaps most important, there was a celebration in a country in great need of a morale boost as Fernando González gave Chile victory over Israel in the modest Chilean port city of Coquimbo.

“We hope that this brought some happiness, however insignificant, for all the people who have been affected by the earthquake,” said González at a news conference after his straight-set victory over Dudi Sela gave Chile an insurmountable 3-1 lead.

The tie finished Monday after starting a day late Saturday. That was because of the difficulties the Israeli team, and some Chilean players, experienced in reaching Chile after the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that rocked the South American country Feb. 27.

The quake and subsequent tsunami caused extensive damage in the south-central zone of Chile, and more than 400 deaths have been confirmed. González, one of the most prominent Chilean athletes, took a circuitous route home. He flew to Mexico City, then to Lima and then to the southern Peruvian city of Tacna before taking a taxi across the border into Chile and a van to the airport in the northern Chilean town of Iquique, where he caught a flight to the capital of Santiago.

Coquimbo, the site of the Davis Cup match, is north of Santiago, away from the hardest-hit earthquake zones. But González returned to Santiago after his victory over Sela and, according to his Web site, plans to skip the event in Indian Wells, California this week to focus on promoting the relief effort in Chile.

His victory already has guaranteed the Chileans the right to be host to the Czech Republic in July quarterfinals. Also in that round, France will be host to Spain, probably on a fast indoor court; Croatia will be host to Serbia; and Russia will be host to Argentina, which remains the strongest tennis nation never to win the Cup.

Perhaps that explains why “La Davis” continues to generate major interest in Argentina and why Nalbandian, who has yet to make a full-blown return to the circuit since hip surgery in May, chose to put his comeback at further risk by playing (and winning) a doubles and singles matches in Stockholm. He was initially not part of the Argentine roster, which was severely weakened by the injury-related withdrawals of United States Open champion Juan Martin del Potro and Juan Monaco.

Nalbandian, once No. 3 in the world but now out of the top 100, played his first tour event in nine months in Buenos Aires last month, only to withdraw after two rounds with a fresh injury: a torn muscle in his leg. He joined the Argentine team on Thursday, the eve of the competition.

Initially, he planned to play doubles only, but with the contest even at 2-all on Sunday, Nalbandian stepped in for Eduardo Schwank in the fifth and final rubber.

The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program’s Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009 — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors.

In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidders, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents.

Somali officials denied that the visa problem was widespread, and officials for the World Food Program said they had not yet seen the report but would investigate its conclusions once it was presented to the Security Council next Tuesday.

The report comes as Somalia’s transitional government is preparing for a major military offensive to retake the capital, Mogadishu, and combat an Islamist insurgency with connections to Al Qaeda.

The United States is providing military aid, as the United Nations tries to roll back two decades of anarchy in the country.

But it may be an uphill battle. According to the report, Somalia’s security forces “remain ineffective, disorganized and corrupt — a composite of independent militias loyal to senior government officials and military officers who profit from the business of war.”

One American official recently conceded that Somalia’s “best hope” was the government’s new military chief, a 60-year-old former artillery officer who, until a few months ago, was assistant manager at a McDonald’s in Germany.

The report’s investigators, part of the Monitoring Group on Somalia, were originally asked to track violations of the United Nations arms embargo on Somalia, but the mandate was expanded.

Several of the report’s authors have received death threats, and the United Nations recently relocated them from Kenya to New York for safety reasons.

Possible aid obstructions have been a nettlesome topic for Somalia over the past year and have contributed to delays in aid shipments by the American government and recent suspensions of food programs in some areas by United Nations officials.

The report singles out the World Food Program, the largest aid agency in the crisis-racked country, as particularly flawed.

“Some humanitarian resources, notably food aid, have been diverted to military uses,” the report said. “A handful of Somali contractors for aid agencies have formed a cartel and become important power brokers — some of whom channel their profits, or the aid itself, directly to armed opposition groups.”

These allegations of food aid diversions first surfaced last year. The World Food Program has consistently denied finding any proof of malfeasance and said that its own recent internal audit found no widespread abuse.

“We have not yet seen the U.N. Somalia Monitoring Group report,” the World Food Program’s deputy executive director, Amir Abdulla, said Tuesday. “But we will investigate all of the allegations, as we have always done in the past if questions have been raised about our operations.”

The current report’s investigators question how independent that past audit was, and called for a new outside investigation of the United Nations agency.

“We have to tell these folks that you cannot go on like this — we know what you are doing, you can’t fool us anymore, so you better stop,” said President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who was at the United Nations, where his country holds the presidency of the Security Council this month.

The report also charges that Somali officials are selling spots on trips to Europe and that many of the people who are presented as part of an official government entourage are actually pirates or members of militant groups.

The report says that Somali officials use their connections to foreign governments to get visas and travel documents for people who would not otherwise be able to travel abroad and that many of these people then disappear into Europe and do not come back.

“Somali ministers, members of Parliament, diplomats and ‘freelance brokers’ have transformed access to foreign visas into a growth industry, matched possibly only by piracy,” selling visas for $10,000 to $15,000 each, the report said.

The report’s authors estimate that dozens, if not hundreds of Somalis have gained access to Europe or beyond through this under-the-table visa business.

Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya, said: “Maybe there’s been one or two cases that have happened over the years. But these are just rumors. These allegations have been going around for years.”

The report also takes aim at some of Somalia’s richest, most influential businessmen, Somalia’s so-called money lords. One, Abdulkadir M. Nur, known as Eno, is married to a woman who plays a prominent role in a local aid agency that is supposed to verify whether food aid is actually delivered. That “potential loophole” could “offer considerable potential of large-scale diversion,” the report said.

The report accuses Mr. Nur of staging the hijacking of his own trucks and later selling the food.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Nur said he had sent the investigators many documents that “showed very clearly that the gossip and rumors they are investigating are untrue,” including the alleged hijacking or any link to insurgents. He said that his wife merely sat on the board of the local aid agency and that only “a tiny fraction” of the food he transported was designated for that aid agency.

In September, Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, wrote a letter to Secretary General Ban, defending Mr. Nur as a “very conscientious, diligent and hard-working person” and saying that if it were not for the contractors, “many Somalis would have perished.”

The report questions why the World Food Program would steer 80 percent of its transportation contracts for Somalia, worth about $200 million, to three Somali businessmen, especially when they are suspected of connections to Islamist insurgents.

The report says that fraud is pervasive, with about 30 percent of aid skimmed by local partners and local World Food Program personnel, 10 percent by the ground transporters and 5 to 10 percent by the armed group in control of the area. That means as much as half of the food never makes it to the people who desperately need it.

In January, the United States halted tens of millions of dollars of aid shipments to southern Somalia because of fears of such diversions, and American officials believe that some American aid may have fallen into the hands of Al Shabab, the most militant of Somalia’s insurgent groups.

The report also said that the president of Puntland, a semiautonomous region in northern Somalia, had extensive ties to pirates in the area, who then funneled some of the money they made from hijacking ships to authorities.

Puntland authorities could not be reached on Tuesday, but Mr. Aden, the Somali diplomat, dismissed the allegations, saying that the Puntland government had jailed more than 150 pirates and that it had not “received a penny from them.”

“It’s unfortunate that this monitoring group thinks they can stick everything on the Somalis,” he said.

But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group, which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.

“There’s something truly bizarre about this,” said Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor and a revered figure among many members of the society. “Liz Cheney is a former student of mine — I don’t know what moves her on this thing,” he said.

On Sunday, the Brookings Institution issued a letter criticizing the “shameful series of attacks” on government lawyers, which it said were “unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.”

The letter was signed by a Who’s Who of former Republican administration officials and conservative legal figures, including Kenneth W. Starr, the former special prosecutor, and Charles D. Stimson, who resigned from the second Bush administration after suggesting that businesses might think twice before hiring law firms that had represented detainees. Other Bush administration figures who signed include Peter D. Keisler, a former acting attorney general, and Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general.

The letter cited “the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients,” including the defense by John Adams of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre, and noted that some detainee advocates, who worked pro bono, have made arguments that swayed the Supreme Court.

Ms. Cheney’s video referred to the lawyers as the “Al Qaeda Seven,” and accused the Justice Department of concealing their names, which were later revealed by Fox News.

David B. Rivkin Jr., the co-chairman of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism in Washington, is a member of the Federalist Society and signed the Brookings letter; he said the attack was unfortunate.

“I appreciate the partisan advantage to be gained here,” Mr. Rivkin said, but “it’s not the right way to proceed.” He said he preferred “principled ways for debating where this administration is wrong — there’s no reason to resort to ad hominem attacks.”

John C. Yoo, the former Justice official whose memorandums on torture and presidential power were used to justify some of the most controversial policies of the Bush administration, said he had not seen the material from Ms. Cheney’s group. But Professor Yoo, who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is active in the Federalist Society, said the debate about lawyers who once represented detainees at the American prison in Guantánamo Bay serving in the Justice Department was overheated.

“What’s the big whoop?” he asked. “The Constitution makes the president the chief law enforcement officer. We had an election. President Obama has softer policies on terror than his predecessor.” He said, “He can and should put people into office who share his views.” Once the American people know who the policy makers are, he said, “they can decide whether they agree with him or not.”

Professor Epstein, however, said he found it “appalling” to see people equating work on detainee cases with a dearth of patriotism. He was a co-author of a brief in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case argued by Neal Katyal, now the principal deputy solicitor general and a lawyer under scrutiny from Ms. Cheney’s group. The court ruled that the Bush administration’s initial plans for military commissions to try detainees violated the law.

“You don’t want to give the impression that because you oppose the government on this thing, that means you’re just one of those lefties — which I am not,” he said.

For David M. McIntosh, a former member of Congress and a founder of the Federalist Society, the split among conservatives is not necessarily ideological, but may have to do with experience in the day-to-day world of legal practice. Those in the profession, Mr. McIntosh said, are more likely to argue that a lawyer should not be judged by his clients, though he said it was legitimate to examine the agenda of the lawyers.

“Was the person acting merely as an attorney doing their best to represent a client’s case,” he asked, “or did they seek out the opportunity to represent them or write an amicus brief because they have a political or personal agenda that made them more interested in participating in those cases?” If the commitment to the cases is ideological, he said, it is reasonable to ask, “Is that the best attorney for the Justice Department?”

Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said accusations that the administration had been secretive or had dragged its feet in responding to the inquiry were untrue. But Mr. Miller said the department would not participate “in an attempt to drag people’s names through the mud for political purposes.”

In a letter sent to Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, the Justice Department said in February that the lawyers understood that they had to take different positions while working for the United States than they did as private lawyers, and that in any case they would recuse themselves from matters in which they had participated earlier.

A Keep America Safe spokesman responded to a request for comment by passing along links to essays by supporters like Marc A. Thiessen, a columnist for The Washington Post, who wrote on Monday that the detainees did not deserve the same level of representation as criminal defendants.

The lawyers, Mr. Thiessen wrote, “were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants.” He said, “They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military’s ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.”

David Remes, a lawyer who represents 18 detainees, said in a telephone interview from Guantánamo that the deeper point of the attack on the lawyers was political.

The goal, Mr. Remes suggested, “was to make the Obama administration and the Justice Department even more gun-shy than they are on Guantánamo issues.”