NOW, ABOUT THOSE TORTURE TECHNIQUES . . .

This whitewash is typical of the reports issued by the Bush administration on the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners at camps run by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. Like the others, [this] report concludes that only the lowest-ranking soldiers are to be held accountable, not their commanders or their civilian overseers. ...

[It] said that "none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater." [The author] and his investigators must have missed the pictures of prisoners in hoods, forced into stress positions and threatened by dogs. All of those techniques were approved at one time or another by military officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld. Of course, no known Pentagon policy orders the sexual humiliation of prisoners. But that has happened so pervasively that it clearly was not just the perverted antics of one night shift in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib.

The author of the report also must have missed what Douglas Jehl recounts today: "Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail," a front-page news story based on American military documents obtained by Human Rights Watch:

WASHINGTON -- Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative reports that have not yet been made public. ...

John Sifton, a researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said the documents substantiated the group's own investigations showing that beatings and stress positions were widely used, and that "far from a few isolated cases, abuse at sites in Afghanistan was common in 2002, the rule more than the exception."

Whoops. Seems the author of the Pentagon report has seen those documents after all. It's just that the torture (sorry, he termed it "abuse") that killed those two prisoners "was unrelated to approved interrogation techniques" (his words).

But the documents say four military interrogaters assaulted the two prisoners with "kicks to the groin and leg, shoving or slamming ... into walls/table ... painful, contorted body positions during interview and forcing water into [one's] mouth until he could not breathe." When the two died, Jehl also reports, U.S. military officials said their deaths "were from natural causes." The American commander of allied forces in Afghanistan even "denied that prisoners had been chained to the ceiling" or that their lives had been endangered by their treatment. After a Times investigation, however, "the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides."

Everything is A-OK now, though, because of the new rules. The Pentagon says the rules are fine, if secret, and we can take the Pentagon's word for it because this is a democracy.