It took the Pentagon more than two weeks to appoint a replacement for Maj. Gen. George Fay, who had to be relieved of the task of investigating the military intelligence units at Abu Ghraib because he was not senior enough to question Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq. The process underscored the inability of the military to investigate itself at this level. The Pentagon named someone of high enough rank — just barely. That officer is a three-star general, as is General Sanchez. He will have to get up to speed before questioning General Sanchez, and the Pentagon will undoubtedly stall again when the new investigating general, inevitably, needs to go yet higher.

The Pentagon has also not turned over to the Senate the full report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who conducted the Army's biggest investigation so far into abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Pentagon has still not accounted for the 2,000 pages missing from his 6,000-page file when it was given to the Senate Armed Services Committee more than a month ago; the missing pages include draft documents on interrogation techniques for Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld's handling of another issue, the Red Cross reports on Iraq, is the most outrageous example of the administration's bad faith on the prison scandal. The Bush administration has cited Red Cross confidentiality policies to explain its failure to give up the reports. The trouble is, the Red Cross has repeatedly told the administration to go ahead and share the agency's findings with Congress, as long as steps are taken to prevent leaks.

On May 7, the Senate armed services panel asked Mr. Rumsfeld for these reports on widespread abuse in the military prisons in Iraq; one of the reports had already appeared on the Internet. Mr. Rumsfeld assured the committee that he would turn them over, if the Red Cross agreed. Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides have not handed over the reports — 40 in all, including 24 from Iraq. Over the weeks, the Pentagon has assured increasingly angry senators that it was negotiating with the Red Cross, and then offered the rather absurd claim that it was still "collecting" the documents.

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