Oh. My. God.

My last several posts have been snarky and flip. But I was knocked right out of that mood when I read the article in the New York Times on prisoner abuse in Afghanistan.

The article is too long and full of truly horrible details for me to excerpt at length here. Suffice it to say that it details, sometimes blow-by-blow, purely sadistic behavior by our troops, resulting in the death of the Afghan prisoners. Sadly, it also reveals that the Defense Department hasn't always been completely straight with us about what has happened.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

The report describes use of "common peroneal strikes" which are an extraordinarily painful blow to the common peroneal nerve that runs just above the knee.

When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.

"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."

Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

This prisoner later died in custody.

This article is long, and hard to get through, but it's important. Read it for yourself.