'We owe our soldiers better than this. Give them a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation."

The "clear standard" concerns the treatment of detainees in Iraq, and the plea comes not from a human rights organization or a political opponent of the Bush administration, but from Army Capt. Ian Fishback. The West Point graduate is on a personal mission to change military behavior so that it once again comports with our national ideals.

To do that, though, he'll need help from civilians. Fortunately, Sen. John McCain is among those who have volunteered.

Fishback's campaign follows a tour of duty in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division during which he and two sergeants witnessed the severe beating and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at a base near Fallujah between September 2003 and April 2004. Besides being beaten, prisoners had chemical irritants applied to their eyes and were forced into stress positions, subjected to sleep deprivation and stacked into human pyramids.

What's different about this report of prisoner abuse is that the witnesses trace the misconduct to the mixed messages received from higher-ups. Officers made it clear they expected interrogations of prisoners to produce information, Fishback says, without making clear what limits they placed on the techniques used to extract that information. That opened the door to mistreatment of detainees.

When he questioned his superiors in Iraq, he said, they believed they were not expected to follow the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the abuse of prisoners. When Fishback later heard Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testify to Congress that the Geneva Conventions were being applied to detention practices in Iraq, he again questioned his superiors and concluded that no one had received clear guidance on what was and wasn't acceptable during interrogations.

"Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees,"he wrote in a letter to McCain. "I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses, including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment."

The lack of clarity Fishback discovered among his uniformed superiors mirrors the contradictory signals given by civilian leadership. At various times, administration officials have said that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to people detained as part of the war on terror, that the "spirit" of the Geneva Conventions applies to detention practices and, most recently, that the Geneva Conventions do apply.

Fishback said that Army investigators launched a criminal investigation of his charges, but only after he felt compelled to seek the intervention of McCain and Human Rights Watch, an international organization.

McCain, who was himself tortured when held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, believes the administration still hasn't clarified its policy on detainee treatment. To eliminate the confusion, he and two other Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee have proposed an amendment to a defense bill that would require the military to abide by the Geneva Conventions.

That would be a welcome affirmation of what Fishback calls our bedrock principles. The scary aspect, though, is that it's not entirely clear that such a measure would pass Congress. It, too, has been influenced by the administration's murky statements about whether this nation is obliged to comply with international norms on human rights.

We hope Congress heeds the unambiguous message from Fishback: "If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession."