It was good to learn yesterday that the military commander in Iraq has issued definitive rules about how to treat captives in American prison camps. Unfortunately, that was about the only good news in the newest Pentagon report on prisoner abuse, actually a 21-page summary of a larger, classified study by the Navy inspector general of interrogation rules in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Just consider that it took more than a year after the military says it first learned of the nightmare at Abu Ghraib to issue the new rules. And don't ask what they are, because they're classified. The report spoke of the regulations approvingly. But its author, Vice Admiral Albert Church III, now director of the Navy staff, admitted yesterday that, well, he had not actually read them.

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, the Church report concludes that only the lowest-ranking soldiers are to be held accountable, not their commanders or their civilian overseers.

It conveniently ignores President Bush's declaration that terrorists are not covered by the Geneva Conventions and that Iraq is part of the war against terror. Mr. Bush later said the conventions would cover Iraqi military prisoners, but the Church report said military commanders in Iraq had never been given guidance on handling prisoners, a vast majority of whom were not soldiers. Still, the report tossed this off as merely a "missed opportunity." It overlooked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approval of interrogation techniques for Guantánamo that violated the Geneva Conventions. It glossed over the way military lawyers who were drafting later rules were ordered to ignore their own legal opinions and instead follow Justice Department memos on how to make torture seem legal.

The Church report said that "none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater." Admiral Church 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 Church report said assessing the personal responsibility of Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials had been the job of another panel headed by a former defense secretary, James Schlesinger. Well, not exactly. That group, appointed by Mr. Rumsfeld, found "both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for Abu Ghraib. But the panel declined to name names.

Who will? Not the Pentagon, clearly. The Senate Armed Services Committee plans another hearing or two, but that's inadequate. Congressional leaders could open a serious investigation, but have shown no interest, although they are issuing subpoenas on steroid use by baseball players.

We're not holding out much hope that the White House will step into the breach because Mr. Bush has rewarded many of the officials responsible for the prison policies - one of them now serves as attorney general. Still, the only real solution is for Mr. Bush to follow the American Bar Association's advice and appoint an independent, bipartisan commission.