Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger

What's being investigated: Department of Defense operations at Abu Ghraib. Review ordered by the Pentagon. Conducted by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger.

What has been released: A 126-page report completed in August 2004, the same month as the Fay-Jones Report.

Sources: Only investigation to interview top military and Pentagon officials.

Findings: Army Field Manual 34-52, which permitted none of the abuses that took place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, remained the Army's official policy for interrogation tactics. But "stronger" interrogation techniques were approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, used from the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo, and later "circulated" to Iraq. That reportedly occurred when Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantanamo from late 2002 until spring 2004, visited Sanchez and gave him the policy that Rumsfeld had approved.

Sanchez relied on the "reasoning" of the directive to write his Sept. 14, 2003 memo. In addition, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion began using unapproved techniques in Afghanistan and wrote them into a "Standard Operating Procedure" used for interrogations there. When members of the 519th were transferred to Abu Ghraib in summer 2003, they wrote up a nearly identical document. The Schlesinger Report also faults the Pentagon for failing to use the military's lawyersthe Judge Advocate General corps and the general counsel"to their full potential" in developing policies on the limits of detention and interrogation.

Context: One of Gen. Miller's tactics was to use military police to "set the conditions" for interrogation, a mode of cooperation often blamed for the abuses at Abu Ghraib that were captured on film. A draft of the Army's new field manual, which was posted and then removed by the Pentagon in April, rejects that approach. It states that an "MP shall not be involved in the interrogation process nor set conditions for interrogations."

Photograph of James Schlesinger by Alex Wong/Getty Images.