Military abuse

THE COURT-MARTIAL conviction Monday of reservist Lynndie England for her role in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib should fool no one that the Pentagon is taking seriously the mistreatment of Iraqis, especially after the release last Friday of a report on torture by members of the 82d Airborne Division stationed near Fallujah.

A captain in the division approached Congress and Human Rights Watch, which issued the report, after failing to get the Army to act on his allegations of systematic beatings and abuse of prisoners that occurred in 2003 and 2004. The captain said he spent 17 months trying to get the military to follow up on the charges, which were backed up by two sergeants. Last week, a spokesman for the Army said it was investigating. The captain has been identified by The New York Times as Ian Fishback, who has written letters to aides of two Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner and John McCain, outlining some of the allegations. A spokesman for Warner, John Ullyot, said yesterday that the senator found the charges ''serious" and expected the Army to determine whether they are credible.

If the allegations are found credible, they further demolish the contention by officials that the abuse first reported at Abu Ghraib in 2004 was an isolated case of a few bad apples. Pentagon brass also tried to explain away the activities of England's unit as the actions of relatively untrained reservists. It is less easy to dismiss as a fluke such abuse when it occurs at the hands of the 82d Airborne, a thoroughly trained and highly decorated division.

The new charges, along with other accusations of abuse that have emerged since Abu Ghraib, including 28 suspicious detainee deaths, provide strong evidence that both reservist and active duty troops throughout Iraq were confused about their responsibility to treat detainees as prisoners of war under the terms of the Geneva Conventions, in part because the Bush administration had unwisely denied Afghan detainees POW status. Congress should have long since created a special commission, as proposed in a bill by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, to investigate the issue of prisoner abuse.

The only non-military inquiry was done by the panel led by former defense secretary James Schlesinger. All four of its members served on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. A truly independent inquiry, along the lines of the one done by the 9/11 commission, could trace accountability for prisoner abuse through statements and policies by ranking civilian and military officials in the Bush administration. Accountability for the shame of prisoner torture and abuse should not stop with Lynndie England and her cohort.