There's quite a debate going back and forth between Mark Levin, the former Reagan-era Justice Department chief of staff, and Andrew Sullivan over the extent and implications of U.S. military torture.

Writes Levin:

The contemptible acts committed by a handful of soldiers at Abu Ghraib resulted in their prosecution and punishment. It resulted in career-ending reassignments of senior military personnel. But the prisoners were not unlawful enemy combatants, they were not detainees of the sort we're debating, they were not interrogated for intelligence information, and the acts were not torture as understood under existing U.S. policy. Sullivan needs to follow the debate, U.S. policy, and U.S. law a little more carefully. Part of his problem is the sloppy use of terms and misdirection.

Sullivan, one of the leading voices against alleged widespread torture by the U.S. military and intelligence services, points Levin and readers to a series of news reports and investigations that, he suggests, bolster his argument that widespread, institutional torture is a big concern.

But they don't help make that case. If anything, Sullivan bolsters Levin's general argument: There hasn't been any presentation of serious evidence of officially sanctioned, widespread torture by the U.S. in the war on terror.

Sullivan directs readers to The Schmidt Report. In his post, though, Sullivan doesn't actually link to the report. If he did, readers would be a click away from this information:

Detention and interrogation operations at Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) cover a three-year period and over 24,000 interrogations. This AR 15-6 investigation found only three interrogation acts in violation of interrogation techniques authorized by Army Field Manual 34-52 and DoD guidance.

Sullivan also points to the Taguba Report on abuses at Abu Ghraib. But he never seems to mention Gen. Antonio Taguba's statement to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in which he explains an important conclusion:

We did not find any evidence of a policy or a direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what they did. I believe that they did it on their own volition and I believe that they collaborated with several MI [military intelligence] interrogators at the lower level.

And in a separate post, Sullivan points readers to the Schlesinger Report. He doesn't give a link to the report. If he did, readers would be a click away from this information:

Since the beginning of hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military and security operations have apprehended about 50,000 individuals. From this number, about 300 allegations of abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo have arisen. As of mid-August 2004, 155 investigations into the allegations have been completed, resulting in 66 substantiated cases. Approximately one-third of these cases occurred at the point of capture or tactical collection point, frequently under uncertain, dangerous and violent circumstances.

Not insignificantly, the Schlesinger Report concluded: "No approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuses that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."

Sullivan's blog has turned into a de-facto, all-day, every day drumbeat of indictment - if not conviction - of the Bush Administration, CIA and Justice Department for widescale torture of innocents. And no doubt abuse and torture have occurred and have been reprehensible. But every major report Sullivan cites has investigated the potential of official U.S. sanctioning of torture, and every one of them has found that not to be the case.

In fact, in many ways these reports are even less damning than, say, the Mollen Commission Report on corruption and brutality in the NYPD during the 1980s and 1990s. And even there, bad cops were a mere fraction of the overall army of NYPD that fought a 2,000-a-year homicide wave of violence when David Dinkins was mayor. A reading of the Mollen Commission report will show that brutality and torture in a zone of daily violence - by a few out of many - isn't new as of the Iraq War, the Bush Administration or this generation.

And if the few are dealt with swiftly, severely and without indicting the many, those institutions get better.

Democracies need voices like Sullivan's. Nobody wants American institutions to favor torture. But the evidence today is that, in spite of some bad cops, they don't.