There is nothing so liberating as a resignation.

Ann Wright is now free to say what few dare: That no young military reservist could possibly have concocted the strategy of interrogating Muslim men by using religious humiliation and tactics of sexual degradation worthy of the Marquis de Sade.

"It came from the minds of some of the senior interrogators who are very well-versed in Arab cultures," Wright told me. "Those types of things would be very well discussed."

She has no proof, nor does anyone. We are officially told that the abuse of detainees in American custody - who were stripped naked and beaten, forced to simulate sexual acts, their beards shaved, leered at by women interrogators who rubbed their breasts against them, or smeared them with fake menstrual blood, or grabbed and sometimes kicked their genitals - is the handiwork of a few rogues who are duly punished when caught. To accept this as true we must also believe that these average kids from average American towns are experts on Islam, so well-versed in its strictures about sex that they dreamed up these methods all by themselves.

This makes no sense to Ann Wright.

She was among the first U.S. diplomats to arrive in Kabul at that hopeful time in late 2001 when the United States re-opened its embassy in Afghanistan. Wright had joined the diplomatic corps after nearly three decades in the Army and reserves, where she'd reached the rank of colonel.

She served in those unglamorous places where the United States is not necessarily loved but is necessary nonetheless: Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Grenada, Nicaragua, Somalia. She won the State Department's award for heroism in 1997 for her actions during the evacuation of 2,500 people from the civil war in Sierra Leone.

Wright served Democratic and Republican administrations through wars hot and cold, through natural disasters and international crises. Then in March 2003, while serving as deputy mission chief in Mongolia, she resigned in protest of the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Now Wright speaks for herself.

At Arlington National Cemetery last week she addressed a conference of military women. Her talk was supposed to be about how it could come to pass that so many women figure so prominently in the military-prison abuse scandals. But it turned into a deeper lamentation about our new failure to connect the dots - the dots that could lead us to understand how and why the United States committed grave human rights violations.

Being a former military woman herself, Wright knows a thing or two about giving orders, and about following them. "Either many supervisors did not supervise those in their chain of command or they condoned the abuse in the first place," she says.

Wright has what she calls "curious questions." Questions like, what happened to the additional photos of the scandalous behavior at Abu Ghraib, some of which the Pentagon showed to members of Congress a year ago? If we could see these pictures, would the face of the scandal still be female - or would men star more equally? An Army spokesman says the photos are being withheld under privacy laws, but a lawsuit over their release is pending.

Wright's stint in Afghanistan coincided with the establishment of a detainment system for those swept up in the war on terror. "We knew the military had set up prisons throughout Afghanistan," Wright says. State Department officials were assured "everything's OK." Still, they were denied access to the jails, she says.

Everything was most assuredly not OK. The Bagram detention center would become the site of two murders in 2002 when guards tortured prisoners to death. Former detainees who passed through holding centers in Afghanistan on their way to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have said that Afghanistan is where they were first subjected to physical and mental abuse.

Wright says official investigations that stop low on the chain of command don't ask the right questions or provide full answers. How do we ever get them? "You don't. You don't," she replies. "It's people on the inside who have to spill the beans."