What does this mean? Well, apart from everything else, it means that many of the unspeakably brutal prison guards in Afghanistan — and yes, there were many — became sadists as a direct consequence of the Bush administration's failure of leadership. And this failure can be linked, directly, to the president's own public renunciation of basic principles of decency: specifically those outlined by the Third Geneva Convention, which governs the treatment of prisoners of war.

Tim Golden in the New York Times reported at length (May 20, 2005) on the torture which was daily fare at the US detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. If you can read this article without experiencing palpable nausea, then I suspect you would be very much at home in the ranks of those prison guards.

The details are appalling. They make Abu Ghraib seem a minor infraction by comparison.

The taxi driver's was the second death by torture in December 2002. It was distinguished, however, by the fact that the victim, known by the single name Dilawar, was widely assumed by his torturers to be innocent. Dilawar was 5' 9". He weighed 122 pounds. To take this man to the extremes of excruciating pain, it was hardly necessary to bring in Specialist Damien M. Corsetti - a tall guard known generally as "Monster," and affectionately referred to, by his superior officer, as "the King of Torture." It's a reasonable bet that even the sadistic woman assigned to interrogate Dilawar weighed more than her victim. He was described as "shy" and "unadventurous." His family had bought him a used Toyota sedan only a few weeks before, which he was driving as a taxi. He made the fatal error of driving three passengers past an American base which had been targeted by a rocket earlier that day.

Even though there was scant reason to believe that he or his passengers had anything whatsoever to do with that assault, the three fares were shipped to Guantánamo, where they spent over a year before it was decided that they would not be charged; and Dilawar was tortured to death.

The favorite technique at Bagram seems to have been the "common peroneal strike." This common practice - clearly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions (which were deemed not to apply) involved striking a prisoner on the side of the leg, in a particular place above the knee. Golden reports: "The M.P.'s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because they would 'tear up' a prisoner's legs." Surely they must have got some sense of this, however, when Dilawar's orange prison pants repeatedly fell down while he was chained: one guard noticed, for instance, that the bruise on his leg was "the size of a fist."