The current Pentagon whitewash seeking to recast prisoner abuse into a simple case of wayward soldiers should come as no surprise.

A year after America’s terrorism war suffered a huge setback, with the revelation of Abu Ghraib abuses via pictures showing Iraqi prisoners naked, hooded, handcuffed, leashed, forced to pose in sexual positions and threatened by unmuzzled dogs, the military has rendered its comprehensive verdicts:

•No one is guilty except for a relative handful of the lowest-level soldiers and reservists.

•Contrary to all of the evidence, there was no “migration” of abusive interrogation techniques.

•Commanders’ lack of oversight and later-rescinded orders loosening interrogation techniques to allow snarling dogs, sleep deprivation, extreme hot and cold environments and stress positions that violate most international torture laws had nothing to do with it.

From the very start of the terrorism war, Justice Department lawyers and Pentagon top guns were on the hunt for ways to dump the laws of war and turn prisoners into ready fonts of intelligence information divorced not just from home and family but from all international norms and protections.

Those efforts began at the top, and persisted at the top.

When President Bush in February 2002 thumbed his nose at the Geneva conventions, declaring that all prisoners from Afghanistan were exempt from prisoner-of-war protections that America had embraced for a hundred years, he set a precedent for treating prisoners illegally, as mere guinea pigs for intelligence mining.

The president ruled these prisoners “unlawful combatants.” That meant, according to Pentagon interpretations, they could be held incommunicado indefinitely, at the discretion of the White House.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so enthusiastic about using prisoner torment to aid interrogators that he scrawled a postscript under his December 2002 signature that permitted hooding, stressed positions “like standing” for a maximum of four hours and the use of dogs.

“However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

The new methods caused an outcry, and Rumsfeld rescinded his order in January 2003. Yet the signals had been sent.

Documented abuse cases weren’t limited to victims of ill-trained and poorly supervised reservists on the Abu Ghraib night shift. They also included CIA “ghost detainees” whose fates remain mysterious and at least some of the 26 prisoners who died in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, according to The New York Times.

At Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, shocked FBI employees e-mailed their bosses about interrogation techniques they witnessed that included sleep deprivation, growling dogs and an inmate subjected to so much discomfort through temperature extremes, loud music and shackling that he had pulled out much of his hair overnight.

Last August, a panel chaired by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger found widespread failures reflecting “both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels.” Last week, the Army’s inspector general ruled to whom that responsibility reached: essentially, no one.

Virtually every implicated officer got a “get out of jail free” card, apart from a reserve brigadier general whose sloppy command style allowed the Abu Ghraib abuses to intensify – but who did not herself promote any torture or interrogation techniques, unlike her boss, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. ground commander in Iraq.

Admittedly, Sanchez had other problems as the insurgency started. He lacked the luxury to focus on the prisoner problem. Nor was he responsible for the planning mistakes that led to severe understaffing at Abu Ghraib, a confused chain of command and a risky overlay of CIA and other nonmilitary personnel at the prison pursuing terrorism leads.

Rumsfeld was the ultimate pace-setter, who bears the bulk of responsibility but now carries none of the blame.

Yet the decision to punish no general officer apart from a female reservist is just one more signal of disdain.

It tells the world that as far as America is concerned, we do what we want. We ignore the Geneva conventions when it suits us, and abuse prisoners when it’s convenient, and only those so foolish as to let their snapshots leak into the public domain will suffer.