The New York Times examines the case of John Boland, a military reserve officer from Cincinnati charge with abusing prisoners at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. First, the charged facts:

The report also said that Sergeant Boland shackled an Afghan named Dilawar, chaining his hands above his shoulders, and denied medical care to the man, a 22-year-old taxi driver, whose family said he had never spent a night away from his mother and father before being taken to the American air base at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul. The two detainees died there within a week of each other in December 2002.

Now, 21 months later, the Army has charged Sergeant Boland with assault and other crimes and investigators are recommending that two dozen other American soldiers face criminal charges, including negligent homicide, or other punishments for abuses that occurred more than a year before the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Who authorized these methods of interrogation? And why did the military first say the two detainees died of natural causes? And who authorized the CIA to keep their names off the prisoner roster to shield them from the Red Cross?