With yet another military report that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were mistreated by being intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s lingerie and that one was led around on a leash and forced to perform tricks, an independent review of the treatment of prisoners held there and in Iraq is long overdue.

Recently, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt told the Senate Armed Services Committee that such treatment was part of “approved interrogation techniques.” Gen. Schmidt conducted an investigation of the Cuba detention facility after Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raised concerns in e-mails to their superiors in Washington.

The agents complained that they had seen abusive, possibly illegal behavior by military interrogators. They wrote of detainees forced into uncomfortable positions for up to 24 hours at a time or left to soil themselves. Gen. Schmidt said he could not confirm many of the allegations in the e-mails and that those he was able to confirm, while degrading, did not rise to the level of torture or abuse.

Gen. Schmidt did confirm that Mohamed al-Kahtani, whom the military has said confessed that he was meant to be the 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks, was led around on a leash and forced to perform a series of dog tricks. Mr. Kahtani was segregated from other prisoners for nearly six months and interrogated for up to 20 hours a day. He was also forced to stand naked in front of female soldiers, to wear a bra and thong underwear and to dance with a male interrogator. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores and that he was a homosexual.

Gen. Schmidt told lawmakers that the use of aggressive interrogation techniques “led to breaking Kahtani’s resistance and to solid intelligence gains.”

Still, Gen. Schmidt had recommended that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantanamo prison in 2002 and 2003, be reprimanded for failing to exercise proper supervision over the Kahtani interrogation. But Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the commander of the United States Southern Command, overruled that recommendation. Gen. Craddock told the Senate committee that no U.S. law or policy was violated.

Such assertions rightly troubled some committee members. “They may be al-Qaida, they may be Taliban, they may be the worst people in the world, and I’m sure some of them are. But there are certain rules and international agreements the United States has agreed to, and that we will observe,” Sen. John McCain said.

He’s right and his colleagues should want to assure that American soldiers in Iraq, where prisoners have been killed during interrogations by Americans, are not put at additional risk because of the behavior and decisions of commanding officers in charge of detainees in the war on terrorism.

The only way to do this is through an independent investigation of the upper command structure.