HOW MANY SHOES WILL DROP?

All eyes are on "The Gray Zone," Seymour Hersh's story, posted Saturday by The New Yorker, charging that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal" can be traced to Rummy boy's decision to apply "a highly secret operation" that dealt with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan "to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq."

The Afghanistan connection to Abu Ghraib is supported in part by an earlier CNN report, posted Wednesday, that an Afghan police officer claimed he was "stripped naked, photographed, kicked and subjected to sexual taunting while being held by coalition forces in August." These are now familiar interrogation methods to anyone  who has seen the Abu Ghraib photos. The officer's allegation is currently being investigated by the U.S. military.

And today a report in The Washington Post by R. Jeffrey Smith, "Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher," also supports Hersh's story -- which is being denied by the Pentagon -- that a few low-level Army reservists with "criminal inclinations" are being scapegoated to cover up for military leaders who knew what was happening.

Smith writes that the top U.S. commander in Iraq was alerted last November of a plan to use an interrogation method dubbed "fear up harsh" on a Syrian jihadist held at Abu Ghraib:

According to the plan, interrogators needed the assistance of military police supervising his detention at the prison, who ordinarily play no role in interrogations under Army regulations. First, the interrogators were to throw chairs and tables in the man's presence at the prison and "invade his personal space."

Then the police were to put a hood on his head and take him to an isolated cell through a gantlet of barking guard dogs; there, the police were to strip-search him and interrupt his sleep for three days with interrogations, barking and loud music, according to Army documents. The plan was sent to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

(For further explanation of "techniques to make prisoners crack," see "The Wink-Wink Rules of Interrogation.")

How long will it take, if ever, for Rummy boy to accept the responsibility he has so loudly proclaimed for himself? We're waiting for him to fire those at the top who knew what was going on and then, because the nitwit in the White House won't do it, to fire himself.

Postscript: This evening Newsweek chimed in with a report that "Bush, along with Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door" to torture and provided a rationale for the U.S. "to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions."