Although the majority of soldiers are decent individuals, these disclosures suggest that cases of abuse aren't as isolated as the administration suggests, but reflect an institutional failure to assure that soldiers understand that Iraqi civilians are not their enemy, as well as a failure to adequately supervise interrogations of detainees and encounters between the troops and Iraq's civilian population.

Also troubling is the administration's failure to fully disclose the results of the investigations. An anonymous Army official says that assault accusations have "led to at least 14 courts-martial and seven nonjudicial punishments," but the details of those prosecutions haven't been disclosed.

The Army has been slow to make these details public despite requests from Congress and news organizations for more specifics about all the investigations, whether completed or ongoing. The lack of detail about many of the cases has made it difficult to assess the full significance of the reported misconduct. But the few specifics that have emerged about some of the death cases point to the involvement of an assortment of Army units and to abusive behavior that stretches over a long period of time, from late 2002 to spring 2004.