Yahoo is arguing out of both sides of its Web portal by urging a San Francisco federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit on behalf of Chinese dissidents jailed and allegedly tortured when the Internet concern identified the subversives to Communist authorities.

The Sunnyvale, California conglomeration said in a filing late Monday that the American courts are not the proper venue to challenge the help the Internet company provided the Red government to nail the dissidents.

In short, all Yahoo did was follow Chinese law, according to Yahoo, and has the First Amendment right of speech to deal with the Communists. Therefore, the search engine can't face a lawsuit for financial damages in the United States under a U.S. statute allowing foreign victims of torture to sue for damages in American courts, Yahoo said.

"This is a lawsuit by citizens of China imprisoned for using the Internet in China to express political views in violation of China law. It is a political case challenging the laws and actions of the Chinese government," Yahoo told the court. "It has no place in the American courts."

Yet two years ago, while citing the First Amendment, Yahoo went to the U.S. courts in a bid to prevent it from having to pay millions in fines levied by a French court for allowing French citizens to barter Nazi paraphernalia on its auction site _ a practice against French law.

"This is extremely ironic. They're saying free speech protections apply to Yahoo, but they don't apply to the Yahoo users of the Internet," said Morton Sklar, a lawyer for the World Organization for Human Rights USA who is one of the dissidents' attorneys.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company was not immediately prepared to comment.

In the torture case, Yahoo complied with Communist authorities and turned over documentation concerning Wang Xiaoning, who is doing 10 years for advocating Democracy on the Internet, and journalist Shi Tao, handed the same sentence for publicly disclosing press restrictions in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square.

Yet Yahoo fought the French in U.S. courts to protect its own First Amendment right to allow users of its auction site to trade Nazi goods.

Ahead of a key hearing in the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals two years ago, Yahoo attorney Mary Wirth said in an interview that a Paris court's monetary fines were piling up because of the Nazi memorabilia issue. Yahoo, she said, wanted the American courts to rule on whether Yahoo's free speech rights under U.S. law would protect it from having to pay the $15 million French fine, which was growing daily with interest.

"We need to be able to determine whether or not we have an obligation to comply," Wirth said. "Because if we can't get early word from the court about our compliance obligation, we're in a Catch 22 between choosing censorship or letting fines accrue."

Eventually, the appeals court skirted answering. The court ruled the case was moot because the Paris courts had not moved to claim the multi-million-dollar penalty.

First Amendment or bottom line?