The way the Iraq war has been conducted, the Pentagon has been a tough place to be a truth-teller. Just ask Antonio Taguba.

Taguba was the two-star general who in 2004 was asked to investigate the first whistle-blower reports about torture at Abu Ghraib. He did his job well. His report laid bare for Pentagon higher-ups how far things had careened out of control at that overcrowded, understaffed, lawless prison outside Baghdad.

Taguba's report made it clear to anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear that what was going on at Abu Ghraib went beyond abuse to torture - and went far beyond the isolated misdeeds of a couple of twisted reservists.

The abuses were systemic and pervasive, he concluded. He suspected, but was not in position to prove, that responsibility for these violations of human rights, military honor, American ideals and international law went far up the U.S. chain of command.

His dire account was confirmed and buttressed by subsequent military and civilian investigations (e.g., the Fay and Schlesinger reports).

Taguba's report rattled around the Pentagon without much response in early 2004, until the news media broke the Abu Ghraib story in April of that year.

In an interview in this week's New Yorker magazine, Taguba says that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's claims of ignorance about the real scope of the Abu Ghraib crimes struck him as phony then - and still do.

Here is the voice of American military idealism and honor talking:

''From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity and selfless service. And yet when we get to the senior-officer level, we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles, and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.''

That's what Taguba told the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, who has been exposing the shame of Abu Ghraib for three years now, not that much of the nation wants to listen.

Here's what Taguba's reward, by his account to Hersh, was for telling the truth: He was contradicted by Pentagon civilians before Congress. He was shunned by old friends in uniform. He was shunted to a Pentagon desk job, then summarily ordered to retire.

It is, sadly, a familiar sequence by now.

Taguba is not the only, or even the primary, victim of the Bush administration's habit of closing its ears to uncomfortable truths about its actions. This White House's instinct has been to punish truth-tellers as a warning to others who might be so inclined.

The main victims of these habits are in Iraq. These include the many innocent Iraqi citizens (estimates run as high as 70 percent of all Abu Ghraib detainees), who were swept into detention by mistake during the post-invasion chaos fostered by the Pentagon's lack of preparation.

These Iraqis were imprisoned, abused and treated as filth for no reason, in a prison where normal military rules for treating prisoners humanely had been thrown out the window by a Pentagon panicked by the rise of the insurgency.

Instead of stopping the insurgency, the reckless abuses at Abu Ghraib fueled it. How many of those abused innocent detainees do you think became members of the insurgency after their release? How many other Iraqis were moved to oppose the U.S. occupation after they saw how ugly its face had become at Abu Ghraib? In each case, probably quite a few.

This means, of course, that the other key victims of the Pentagon's (and the president's) aversion to facing facts are the nation's brave military personnel.

They have had to endure a long, dangerous, so-far-futile slog to clean up the mess that Rumsfeld and his minions made through their arrogance, ignorance and lawless incompetence. The troops keep struggling to complete their mission, with an honor and elan that shames the Pentagon civilians and the military officers who fostered and tolerated Abu Ghraib.

The systemic violation of human rights and national ideals that went on at that prison was bad enough. What makes it even more infuriating is how it fits into this larger administration pattern of preferring cover-ups and wishful thinking to truth-telling and accountabi- lity.

It's sickening to think how much blood and treasure this habit of seeking to discredit people like Antonio Taguba, instead of heeding them, has cost.

Instead of stopping the insurgency, the reckless abuses at Abu Ghraib fueled it. How many of those abused innocent detainees do you think became members of the insurgency after their release? How many other Iraqis were moved to oppose the U.S. occupation after they saw how ugly its face had become at Abu Ghraib? In each case, probably quite a few.