Until the prison abuse scandal erupted two weeks ago, the Pentagon had refused to say who was being held, where, for how long or on what charges, if any. Defense officials had mostly barred reporters, lawyers and human rights groups from entering America's growing network of foreign detention camps and prisons. The International Committee of the Red Cross, however, did visit.

Faced with the uproar, Army Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder told a Senate hearing this month that the military has investigated 25 deaths in custody over the last 18 months. He attributed 12 deaths to natural causes, such as heart attack or illness, or to undetermined factors because relatives had removed the bodies for burial. Ryder said investigations into 10 other deaths were ongoing, and three more deaths — including two in Iraq and one involving civilian contractors — had been classified as homicides.

But that's not the total number. Some deaths have been publicly unaccounted for:

Amnesty International and other human rights groups insist that the military's list is incomplete. At a minimum, they say, the three homicides cited by Ryder do not include an Afghan named Mullah Habibullah and a taxi driver named Dilawar who died after they were interrogated at the Bagram air base and detention camp north of Kabul, the Afghan capital, in December 2002.

Army pathologists ruled both cases homicides due to "blunt force injuries" to the legs, military spokesmen said previously. Amnesty International alleged that both men were abused in a second-floor interrogation area of the Bagram detention facility. So far, no one has been publicly charged or reprimanded, and a Pentagon spokesman said Friday that both cases are being investigated. "There's been no public accounting of these two cases," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "That sends the signal that the Bush administration is not terribly serious about upholding international law."

We wrote about alleged torture in Afghanistan back in December, 2002 here. Jonathan Turley wrote an op-ed about torture at Bagram AFB that we quoted from extensively here. We wrote about the torturous techniques used by the U.S. in interrogating captives abroad here, including this description by CIA officials of how the U.S. treated one prisoner:

What is known is that the questioning was prolonged, extending day and night for weeks. It is likely, experts say, that the proceedings followed a pattern, with Mr. Faruq left naked most of the time, his hands and feet bound. While international law requires prisoners to be allowed eight hours' sleep a day, interrogators do not necessarily let them sleep for eight consecutive hours.

Mr. Faruq may also have been hooked up to sensors, then asked questions to which interrogators knew the answers, so they could gauge his truthfulness, officials said. The Western intelligence official described Mr. Faruq's interrogation as "not quite torture, but about as close as you can get." The official said that over a three-month period, the suspect was fed very little, while being subjected to sleep and light deprivation, prolonged isolation and room temperatures that varied from 100 degrees to 10 degrees. In the end he began to cooperate.

Back in March, 2003, these released Afghan prisoners claimed torture by their U.S. captors.

To be continued.....